all tuned now

I’ve figured out that my least favourite time of day is when I come home.

Specifically:

The moment when I sag is when I get out of the stairwell and turn the corner into the hallway leading to my apartment.  I get my key ready, I look down at my feet walking on the carpet, and I inwardly sigh.

It is partially the fault of the time of year, I think.  For one thing, we’re having ridiculously hot weather, and my apartment is on the sunset side, so all afternoon the sun has been beating on my living room walls.  Even when I turn on the fan, it’s hellish.  For another, it’s June, and this means: year-end recitals to accompany (loads of new music to learn quickly), and plans for the summer needing completion (music history plans to be roughly sketched at least, handouts prepared, etc.).

But really it’s the solitude.  I hate to admit it.  I love my life, never more so than this past year, but it gets harder and harder to go prepare my little meals for one.

—–

It’s better when I have a good book waiting for me once I’m done the meal, done the night’s work (lesson plannings, phone calls to return, whathaveyou), and almost ready for bed.  My godmother (henceforth: Godmomma) recently gave me a book she has been enthusing about to everyone.  Originally written in French, it was translated last year into English as "The Elegance of the Hedgehog."

I finished it this morning (in the STAGGERING heat, still lying about undressed under the fan).  I should have been practicing the music for tonight’s cello recital, but sometimes I am compelled to do something that seems important, though I couldn’t explain to anyone why it was so important for me to finish this book today.  Near the end I was sobbing, and it was one of those few moments (I could almost categorize them if they weren’t so huge) in a life when you explode out of your skin and become something new.  (Just as an example, the first time I put on the soundtrack to Immortal Beloved, alone in my room, and listened to the slow movement of Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto – that was one moment that cracked Time open.  I think I was fourteen? sixteen?  Another moment: the theory lesson when I looked up and got lost in U’s eyes.)  When I got to the end of this book, I was dissatisfied.  Well, I had mixed feelings, actually, because in one sense the most important thing had happened.  No spoilers – suffice it to say, the best relationships had been set up.  But I was so frustrated, because (again, no spoilers) the book ended with a bang, and I had been so excited to see where those relationships would go, now that they were all "tuned" so to speak.  Yes, that was it: the whole book was the instrument being perfectly tuned, and then just when the fifths were all perfect and the harmonics were tried and found to match, – the book was over.

"Coward!" was my first thought towards the author.  I decided that she had had to end quickly to avoid the monumental task of meeting the expectations generated …

… but then I thought better of it, and decided, Perhaps this was the most realistic way.  How many of us have seen something (a child, a friendship, a plant) reach a level of perfection that bodes well for the fruit it will produce, only to have it cut short?

This isn’t spoiling anything, so I feel free to say that the main character, Renee Michel, was so like me in some ways, that it was almost frightening.  Everything from loving The Hunt for Red October (the film) to the way she describes Dido’s Lament (the aria from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell).

The reason I started to sob was because I wanted to believe that what could happen to Renee could happen to me.

It brings back to mind something Fr. M. told me last summer.  He observed once that I seemed to have a talent for befriending "weak" men who needed help, and that what I really needed was for a strong man (or abbess or someone) to "save" me.  This made all kinds of preconditioned red flags to flail wildly, all the while belying the quiet "Yes, please" inside myself.

It isn’t as though Fr. M. thinks I’m a damsel in distress who can’t manage anything alone.  It isn’t a feminist issue.  It’s just that Music Shivers has made a career out of being the strong one, the rock, even when she does her not-sure-of-herself shtick …

Anyway, what Kakuro Ozu does for Renee is this: He lets her BE.  He recognizes her essence, honours it, and complements it in true communion.

I do think the author is a little naive in suggesting that having read the same books and gobbled up the same art, her two main characters are naturally compatible.  If Kakuro had not been kind and wise as well as erudite, the whole thing would have been impossible.

I kept thinking of Mr. Cosmic Clarinet and the Friar: two men who *knew* me better than perhaps anyone else I have ever met.  Or, I should say, recognized me best.  Mr. CC even more so than the Friar (though the Friar was wiser and more kind – but even he [as he acknowledges himself] turned coward and fled).

I haven’t hoped (for a long time now) for anyone to "get" me the way Kakuro "gets" Renee.  I have been steeling myself for the time when I might have to take an opportunity to marry and have kids that will be not exactly the ideal I had in mind.  I don’t think there’s anything horrible about this.  Someone having read all the same books as me is not a guarantee for domestic joy.  But what really struck me as I read about Kakuro was the realization that for some time now, not only have I given up hoping to be understood, I have started to forget the parts of me that aren’t understandable by most people.  Clear as mud?  – in fact: I have been associating, partly through work, partly through church, with a group of people to whom I would never be able to show my Renee side, and I was starting to forget about it.  The ridiculously unnameable Orthodox guy is not a bad sort, but I occasionally find myself contorting to adapt to him.  When I realize this, I fight back.  Just the other day I was walking down a street with him and another friend, and I broke into song, and RUOG was actually, literally embarrassed to be walking beside me.  I pooh-poohed him and said he cared way too much about image, but I did stop singing.  The worst thing is when I comment on something beautiful, and he responds sarcastically.  One time I actually got very angry with him.  I had pointed out the light shining through the leaves as we drove through a foresty place, and he went: "Pfeh."  I shot back, "Pfeh?  Pfeh?  I say something is beautiful and you have to shoot it down with Pfeh?  Why would you do that?"  After an awkward pause, I turned the conversation to other matters, and then he said, "I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.  It was beautiful," – which was nice, but he is consistently sarcastic, which I find exhau

sting and A WASTE OF LIFE.

——-

So I finished the book, had a tepid shower (sobs subsiding somewhat), was nice to my face (that’s one part of my daily ritual I never leave out – mmm rose-scented lotion … ), and set out to teach and perform.  I was a little worried because I had read that book instead of practicing.  But one thing about that book: It made me even more aware than usual.  I’d say I’m a fairly alert person, walking to work and noting that the ducklings are already almost at the teenager stage, smiling at the thought of falling off the bridge and having my fall broken by dozens of glorious yellow irises, imagining how I would draw the fleeting image of a black bird with a big red stripe on its wing if I had paper with me … But today was hyperaware.  I had a little narrative going on all the time, as if the book was continuing in me, because I couldn’t bear for it to be finished.  (Gee, I haven’t felt this way about a new book in a long time.)  This is why I’m writing an OpenDiary entry tonight, by the way.  I decided it on my way to work.

So I had four students to teach before I could practice that new cello piece I knew was going to be tricky.  Each lesson went well.  This has been a very Zen year: I make little sketches of how I think lessons ought to go the next day, and then in the moment itself, with the sketch in my head, I may find myself veering beautifully off course in the service of the present need.  And it really is as if I am observing this happening.  I literally have almost no idea what a lesson will really be like: I just have the sketch in my head, along with the freedom to chuck it out when necessary.

Finally I had an hour to learn that new piece.  (All the pieces on the program were easy or very familiar to me, except this one.)  I looked at it, laughed, had a tiny panic attack (realizing I had one hour till a rehearsal with the cellist, two hours till the actual recital), then played it again.  The second time, it was great.

Some days, it is almost as easy as flipping a switch.  Oh, oops, the brilliant Music Shivers isn’t on?  Flick.

Went downstairs, had some coffee, attended to some business in the office.

Went upstairs, had a great rehearsal with the cellist.

Went downstairs, got ready for the recital.  The cello teacher is one I particularly admire.  She is very Zen herself; I have never seen her anything but calm and utterly respectful of all human beings, even when having to assert her authority when some boys get hyper in her group class.  I also have a soft spot for her because she was my brother P2’s cello teacher when he was a painfully shy little boy.  I think he couldn’t have had a better or more understanding teacher, given his mode of being, even though she still feels bad that she wasn’t able to do more for him to help him out of his anxiety.

The recital began, and right at the beginning I felt it: At the risk of sounding corny – the Magic.  I could almost call it Love.  Today I knew my fingers and they knew themselves and the keys saluted them and the hammers passed on to the strings the good news that all was well.  Yeah, it was a sense of well-being, right away, from the moment I set my hands lightly on the keys and did a quick pedal-check with my right foot.  Most of the kids hadn’t even had one run-through with me, so my antannae were extended extra-sensitively, and I caught each faltering rhythm, matched every expressive line given to me full of intent.  It was all over too soon.

Walked home in the still almost staggering heat (though today there was a wind, thank God!).  A far-off haziness predicted rain.  Great: the hedgehog book had all these significant RAIN moments and now I’ll get one, and probably sob all the way through it.

———–

So the hardest part of the day has been coming home.  Because I don’t get to share all these little vignettes that I have been keeping to myself for too long.

Hello, Open Diary ….. we meet again …………..