Monday, March 9, 2009

Playing Cage in Missouri

I’m flying back from Missouri State University, where Laurel and I played Two2 and (with Barry and Peter) Four6. Laurel and I have played this piece almost every year since 1993, and something very unusual happened to me while playing this time around. My usual performance attitude is one of extreme concentration and emotional engagement with the music I’m performing. This time, I would not say I was concentrating as much as I usually do, but neither was I apathetic, going through the motions. And I felt emotions too. The feeling I had, perhaps, comes closest to the feeling I have when I’m practicing or playing for myself—no one around, no one to play to, no reason to be nervous or tense. And I got to thinking about the Zen mindset of nonattachment, of allowing feelings to arise and then depart as quickly; since we’ve played this piece so often, and since we hope to play it at least once a year for the foreseeable future, have these performances become everyday life? It’s very difficult to express exactly what this experience felt like for me, and I’m trying to distance it from some sort of otherworldly experience just as I’m trying to differentiate it from something banal and uninteresting.

And then after the talk I gave today before leaving for the airport, I was talking to Peter and a couple of his MSU colleagues and I told them it occurred to me that when I say something like, “I know something about Zen” or “I know a lot about Zen,” what can that possibly mean?

Thursday, March 5, 2009

The Lord of the Rings again

I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings again—this is probably the fourth time through. (Thanks to Paul Harris for introducing me to the book when I was in high school.) It’s lost none of its narrative power and excitement; in fact, I sometimes have to make myself slow down to savor Tolkien’s detailed descriptions of the landscapes and the poems and bits of historical lore that he adds in. Over the years, I’ve occasionally read other fantasy fiction—very occasionally. Lynn Draper recommended Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara and I remember liking it; Vanessa Davis keeps recommending something with a Greek-like name . . . Acropolis? Hellespont? I don’t know if I’ll get to it.

I also don’t think I’d like Brooks if I had the chance to re-read it; his world didn’t stay with me. But Tolkien excels precisely because of the detail of his world, its history, its languages—even if he hadn’t filled out the rest of this history in The Silmarillion and all the other manuscripts that Christopher Tolkien has published as The History of Middle-earth, the tantalizing glimpses of the past that he gives us in The Lord of the Rings is enough to make Tolkien’s world apparent in all its breadth.

And I love the tone of the prose in The Lord of the Rings. In The Hobbit, Tolkien told a tale for children; the narrator’s voice betrays an awkward self-consciousness:
This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained – well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
Compare that to this passage, from The Two Towers—Gollum returns to Frodo and Sam and sees them sleeping peacefully together:
Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee – but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
What an amazing passage! Even as Gollum covets the ring, he also loves Frodo and longs for the closeness that Sam and Frodo share. Tragically, the corruption of the Ring has foreclosed the possibility of love to Gollum forever. Still, he’s not simply an evil character; he carries with him the remnants of the being he once was—SmeĆ”gol—and the tortured recollections of love and kindness which he cannot experience again. Could a child really sense the full import of such loneliness? I’m very glad that Tolkien seemed not to bother worrying about that.

There are few books I have time to read more than once, but I enjoy making time to re-read The Lord of the Rings. And while I’m glad that I was able to see Peter Jackson’s magnificent filmed adaptation of Tolkien’s novel, I know it can’t begin to compare with the depth, pacing, and profound drama of the original. One day, I’ll detail all of the film’s shortcomings as a way to goad people into reading (or re-reading) the novel for themselves.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Thoughts on the “25 Things about Me”

The “25 Things about Me” Facebook craze, sad to say, seems to have died down, no doubt because some wag-journalists and computer-culture experts have offered their learned opinions on how stupid it is in order to shame people into silence. Again.

Claire Suddath’s withering, mean-spirited critique in Time struck me as typical, but I imagine I could find others more artfully written and more insightful. Among other things, she estimates that 800,000 hours of worktime productivity have been lost as a result of “this recent bout of viral narcissism.” (Well, Mr. Scrooge, I guess it’s time to fire all these layabouts on the job so we can improve the world economy.) And Claire laments that most people wrote only trivial, unfunny lists that were far too personal; I’m sure everyone feels awful about wasting Claire’s valuable time.

I loved doing this list. I found out about it because I’d been tagged by my wonderful friend Chris Mandra, a fine composer and artist and an endlessly fascinating raconteur. And so I wrote my list, in part, knowing that it should be interesting (and funny) enough for Chris. After I finished (below), Chris and I had the best conversation we had had in years; that alone was worth the 10 or 15 minutes that it took me to write it.
  1. I was fascinated by dinosaurs growing up; I knew the names of all the different ones.
  2. Once I tried to write a book about the Civil War, but I realized what I knew filled only half a page.
  3. I make technology work for me.
  4. I love chicken tikka masala; I also love peanut butter.
  5. If I had to pick one book that summed up the way I feel about life, it would be The World According to Garp.
  6. My (somewhat dubious) gift: making complicated ideas understandable with a few pithy remarks.
  7. I transcribed a Scarlatti sonata by ear when I was 14.
  8. I often have dreams in installments, like a TV miniseries; I once had a dream with credits.
  9. I generally find composers the most interesting people.
  10. I sometimes think I should have been a psychologist.
  11. I have 25 bow ties; if anyone’s ever stuck on a gift to buy me, I suggest a bow tie.
  12. I think that courtesy is probably the most important thing in a civilized society.
  13. It’s often foggy outside my house; it makes me imagine I’m on the moors.
  14. I think that everything could (and should) be done more artistically.
  15. I would like to meet Peter Tork.
  16. I watched The Shining 24 times. At least.
  17. I find people with OCD charming.
  18. I thought the world was going to end before 1998.
  19. I believe in reincarnation.
  20. I learned most of what I believe about morality from watching Dark Shadows.
  21. I think William Schuman wrote the greatest American symphony.
  22. I hate humidity.
  23. I love the sound of wind.
  24. I enjoy eating in restaurants when there are only a few people in them.
  25. I’d like to be a cat, but only if someone like me was my owner.
After I posted it, several old friends commented on their favorites—some of them, like David Kase, I haven’t seen in years, might not see again. But for that brief moment, we had a chance to be together again. And it seems to me that whether or not the occasion of bringing people together leads to the exalted or the ridiculous, a little more community is better than none at all.

I heard a computer-culture expert talking about the phenomenon on NPR—can’t remember the name of the show now so I can’t locate it online. This expert made the logical point that older authors indulge their sense of nostalgia and history in their lists, while younger ones—who lack the same amount of life experience—tend toward the spontaneous and, perhaps, idiotic. So what? Let them write another “25 Things” in 5 years, or 10 or 25; taken together, the lists could make for a very poetic form of autobiography.