Sacrifice

No time to taste the sacrifice and stumble in the reeling dance tonight. But how I'd love to roast meat over the beach's bonfires or simply drink in the seaside woodsmoke.

I've dreamt enough the past few nights: that powerful but useless love from long ago . . . It was in strangeness that we met again, but it seemed natural to be affectionate; that had always been so easy. Oh -- house on legs in Florida! The second time Florida was ever beautiful. I read my first Patricia Highsmith book then and smoked Dunhills on the porch. One was frequently intimate in those days, and as Dorothy says, We named it. At any rate, we looked it square in the eye. But our relationship was already dead: there was awkwardness in the car. We had broken up many times. On the way home he took delight in a recording of A Handmaid's Tale but fell asleep. (Ah, the skin's constellations! Changing now, I suppose, like my own.)

And then another love, more recent, and I was a traveler: At first I was in a foreign land on a corner much like that of Sixteenth and Potrero, across from Safeway, and there was a beautiful blond-haired young man hawking T-shirts in a profound-sounding Dutch. I frantically tried to text my American friends that "Tadziu is selling T-shirts!" but dream logic wouldn't let me. (I was also afraid about international charges.)

And then I was at the airport in Amsterdam (as I once was in real life), insisting that C. was wrong when he said that the airport was right downtown and I should have strolled out and lived it up a bit instead of spending the night sleeping in a plastic chair. Even so I had left the airport, traveled down a short road lined with worn volcanic rock (borrowed from my trip to Maui), and ended up at a mall where, according to Google maps on my iPhone, there was a gay bar. It was about seven levels up and reachable only by Donkey-Kong-style moves. I saw J. (whom I just ran into tonight with his beautiful boyfriend, the fuckers! though I must be happy for J. and extremely happy for the lucky guy who's snagged him) and M., who naturally were living it up, and we did our hugs and things and I explained I was about to go in. Finally made it to level seven and saw the bouncer judging the gays trying to get in . . . Decided it wasn't worth it. (No doubt the beautiful Belgian Sylvain Daelemans and his suspiciously divine friends would be allowed, if they weren't in fact running the bar and my dreams in the first place.)

But then I suppose it was time for my flight, and I was in Turkey visiting C. It was not clear why he was there, though he was teaching a bit. He lived with a Turkish family, the son of whom had a curious patch of hair on the bridge of his nose. Istanbul was splendid -- bridges and underpasses of marble, grape vines growing on distant hills. We were not intimate; he loved another. His mother cried and confided to me:

"I don't know what to do!"

Was there something wrong with the new love? (Did she want me?)

"When they are together . . . it consumes them!"

* * *

But let us come back to Earth. When I'm dead I will say to my compatriots, "Every night I watched an episode of this television show called 'Golden Girls.'"

9:30 pm it is

9:30 pm. I should probably continue copyediting or learning music for next week, but it's been a long day and it's time to . . .

wrap myself in the blanket of my childhood and walk down to the beach and . . .

dig with my fingers until there is only sand to breathe
lie down in the surf and let the cold creep up and take me away
offer myself as a sacrifice and burn on one of the beach's many bonfires

Remember: The ocean told me to burn the evidences of tristesse. I have burned them time and time again, but only recently have the ashes remained scattered. In the absence of evidence there can be no tristesse. Indeed, the ocean may even think me happy. And in many ways it may be correct: the lungs and liver it sees are much improved, and the casing has gone from sea lion to seal.

But there is a real danger: I feel unhinged from the lives around me. If I am living as if I've been given six months to live, then I may have only six months to live. The happy perceivers are living for the moment, but the unhappy perceivers are expecting the end.

Ah, well. This is what backyards are for. This is why we are covered in hair and growl at the raccoons. This is why we eat dirt and rub grass on our faces.

Ginger pianos

We now bring you an excerpt from an unfinished post:

Ironically, perhaps, I'm more conscious of the dangers of blogging now that I am actually free from a regular job full of evil supervisors and high-profile governmental clients. . . . Where I used to write freely about the musical creatures that either inspire (Isabel Leonard in Don Giovanni at Chicago Opera Theatre) or terrify (Jane Eaglen, Jill Grove) me, I now have to be careful because I'm trying to move deeper into the musical world -- and, in truth, I'm beginning to understand how difficult an opera singer's life is. So I can't even talk about the various local/regional singers I love, because it means I don't love the ones I don't mention. Nor do I want people I work with regularly to fear that I might write about them (not that my readership surpasses six people on a good day).

But today, in vague terms, I sightread the first movement of the Saint-Saens' bassoon sonata, then rehearsed the . . . [Transmission seems to end here.]

I tried out my set of three Chopin etudes (Op 10 No 8, Op 10 No 6, and Op 25 No 11 "Winter Wind") in a little recital today. They went well. Sure, I might wish my performances might be as confident and smooth as a concert pianist's or a piano-performance major's at least, but perhaps that's hoping for too much right now. I must remember that I could barely imagine memorizing a piece of music a year and a half ago. So, 10-8 had a significant memory burple that I'll have to look into tomorrow; I was so shocked to have jumped off the track at some point that never caused me a problem before that I skipped back a good ways to have another go. 10-6 felt quite good -- just a few moments of panic that I barreled through, which is fine given how chromatic the accompaniment pattern is and the fact that it's in e-flat minor. And since I didn't melt into a quivering blob, 25-11 must have gone pretty smoothly. I have no idea what it sounds like on the outside, but a few of my teacher's students thought it was strong. I can live with that.

But I mean, how boring can you be?

It's true though, what that previous Paul wrote. But I'm blog-shy also because certain parts of my future matter more than they used to. It's easy to say I don't give a fuck if some manager at NCLBCo finds my blog and thinks its inappropriate for me to blog about trying on my outfits for a business trip. But I do possibly give a fuck if a great singer is frightened away. I shouldn't -- because no singer or instrumentalist can be too great without an appropriate sense of compassion and forgiveness.

That said, let's talk about gingers. There was a ginger by the grace of goddess at Ocean Beach yesterday: a divine redhead in mustard-yellow pants, accompanied by a redhead of indiscriminate gender. Imagine! Double redheads! One androgynous! And today there was a redhead on the bus in front of me. He made me think of Isabelle Huppert, whose freckles are vast as the cosmos itself. His hair unique: "fine strawberries mixed with oranges (albeit slightly balding)," as I texted my sister dragonfish earlier.

I'm lonely, just so you know. I'm 33 years old. Mating . . . The happy couples I know have been lucky. Think about your favorite couples: they are compromising but also not compromising. You know why they are together. You could love either one of them. I have not found that. (One begins to think, with a roster of exes like mine, that perhaps I've made a mistake, overlooked a true love with one or another -- lord knows I've redated most of them -- but then one realizes: No, he is not right.)

Or is he? Or is he? Out of the parentheses, new paragraph. It's only one small part of the package that makes one or the other wrong . . . Perhaps conversation is right with one and romance impossible, or romance with one and conversation impossible.

But I can't reignite a passion of the heart. (How did the heart get associated with love? And in what alternate universe of geometric organs was the heart symbol born?) Someone is hiding out there. Someone new. My dear friend Morrissey says:

My love, wherever you are --

whatever you are --

don't lose faith.

I know it's gonna happen

someday to you.

Please wait. Please wait.

Don't lose faith.

You say that the day

just never arrives,

and it's never seemed

so far away.

Still I know it's gonna happen

someday to you.

Please wait.

Don't lose faith.

Living

My dears. Oh. This is what it's all about. I promised you drunken ramblings, but you get hungover reflections instead.

At 33 I am not so old that I cannot be moved like a teenager. Sure, in my old body: my eyes still can't focus, my throat is raw with whispering sweet somethings over a crowded bar, my stomach is churning with disorientation, and my limbs must think about each move. This is the gift of six rums and Coke in the space of an evening.

And how do I cope with this new day, aside from coffee and croissant? With my hoodie raised and my favorite moments from Strauss DVDs (currently "Diese Liebe, plötzlich geboren," Flamand's love for the countess Madeleine, as I translated here).

And, sadly, sober thoughts of the new day battle with the happy and fantastical memories. But "I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch" -- let me hold to that! Let me hold it today and tomorrow at least.

What I'm talking about is (of course) the stranger. And as I'm saying this I'm also cursing my future: for how many times can a person go out and be moved? How many strangers before they all achieve a pattern? When one can no longer trust one's fluttering emotions, one makes a more concrete, sexual, goal. I am not there yet.

I curse also the present, as J. warned: Do not write about them now. It is true: words are scary. I write to capture and to understand -- little wonder that the captured and defined find their ways of escape, leaving me only the words. If I did not trap, I might find myself surrounded.

Do you want me to get on with it? Do you want me to say what I have to say?

What -- some kind of narrative?

Bar. Great friends. Drink. Dinner. Great friend. Drink. Bar. Drink. A darkly handsome but not attractive old-looking late-30-something fetches us to amuse his daddy, who molests my friend more aggressively than he does me. We say we have to go. We move to an opposite corner of the bar. My friend alerted me to a stranger propping the wall. Something -- my drinks, my promise to be social, his face -- impelled me to move: "Are you here alone?" or some such.

Narrative destroys! And I have only a few more minutes before today's sun dries yesterday's tears of tomorrow's loss. Before today's loss becomes real -- yesterday, ah yesterday!

It is tenderness. It is ego as well, and infancy. Sure, it is a yearning for mommy-love and for the approving smiles of both parents.

We bored into some dark corners and came out brighter. True, my body reacted: lips and teeth and hair and eyes, the mommy-love and puppy-love. I became tentatively affectionate: testing (drunkenly, not always consciously), a hand on a back, fingers poking a belly.

The change -- can I find that point in my memory? I can't. Only that at some point fingers sought my own.

Blanche DuBois sings (and these are not beautiful words, but direct), "Real? Who wants real? I know I don't want it. I want magic! Magic, yes -- that's what I want. That's what I try to give to people . . . I do misrepresent things; I don't tell the truth. But I tell what ought to be the truth -- what it ought to be. Yes, magic's what I try to give to people. If that is such a sin, then let me be damned for it . . . Don't turn on that light. It all looks so ugly in that light. Why not see it by candlelight, or moonlight, or by starlight? They are bright enough to see by -- sometimes too bright."

Meanwhile: I can no longer avoid the new day. Those other parts of me -- there is music to learn, a rehearsal of four-piano music. A conservatory awaits.

Oh wonder and dread -- a phone call as well.

Musical reckoning

And it's time for another reckoning.

On April 7 I celebrated my one-year anniversary with my new piano teacher. In that time, he and I have accomplished the following:

Bach Concerto for four keyboards (BWV 1065)

Beethoven
Sonata No. 7 in D major (Op. 10 No. 3)
Sonata No. 18 in A-flat major (Op. 31 No. 3)

Chopin
Etude in F major (Op. 10 No. 8)
Etude in a minor ("Winter Wind"; Op. 25 No. 11)

Feldman, Morton Piece for four pianos

Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major (K. 595)

Poulenc Three Novelettes

Rachmaninoff
Prelude in D major (Op. 23 No. 4)
Prelude in A-flat major (Op. 23 No. 8)
Prelude in g# minor (Op. 32 No. 12)

Ravel Sonatine

Stevens, Halsey Sonata for trumpet and piano

All in all, it's been a pretty good year. Certainly I wouldn't have guessed a year ago that I'd leave a job that was doing more harm than good and that I'd be living a life so much closer to that difficult ideal: What would you be doing if you had only a month to live?

Next time: semi-drunken ramblings.

Some updates

1. Come to the San Francisco Conservatory (50 Oak Street at Van Ness and Market) at 5 pm this Saturday, March 28, to hear lots of great music by students in my piano teacher's studio. I'll be performing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 and pieces for four keyboards by Bach and Morton Feldman. The concert is on the lower level in the Osher Salon.

2. I was slowly, slowly inching up some tempos on Chopin this morning. I had just played a page successfully, so I notched up the metronome and took a swig of coffee. Suddenly, a great cough came upon me. I don't think my body had time to realize my mouth was full. Chopin was covered. Coffee of lesser velocity landed on my keyboard.

3. For the first time ever, I bought and ate my own avocado. What an amazing substance. They seem so magical when other people prepare them that I just couldn't imagine being responsible for bringing such deliciousness into the world by myself. But I did today. I picked out a dark squishy one, brought it home, cut it open, and spooned out that amazing butter. I scooped out the pit and licked it clean. Then I nested the two leathery halves of avocado peel and put the pit inside. I squeezed the pit through the peels a couple times. Then I went about the rest of my day.

Cecilia!

Let me take a few moments to write about the days, lest I forget.

Yesterday I saw Cecilia Bartoli. I was trying to decide in talking to S. if she was in fact the one singer I most wanted to see. Given that Callas is dead and Joan is . . . retired, and I've already seen Kiri, Cecilia is The One. She did not disappoint. I was in the front row, in the farthest left seat, so the experience was quite personal. I had a perfect view of her profile (that beautiful face, that incredible hair, and ample bosoms -- it must be said) and of the back of her commedia dell'arte pianist.

Why is Cecilia the greatest singer in the world? Many reasons. She sang twenty of my least favorite songs -- those light Italian songs of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini with plain accompaniments and none of the drama of Mahler and Strauss. And I loved every one. And even if Cecilia is limited, and even if she does not possess the calm body and relaxed vocal technique I love to see (as Susan Graham once displayed at point-blank range in Nuits d'été), her music (and with it her expression and gestures) comes from some central part of her that understands song. Like my ideal singer, she seems to understand that the breath is all. She loves breath and invests her own with all the joy and sorrow of we who breathe.

Ay, she's fantastic.

In other news, I spent a full workday accompanying flutists today. I'm playing for twenty-four flutists in recital on Sunday. On Saturday I'm playing an opera rehearsal for which I'll need to know all of Cosi fan tutte. I've worked out many parts already, but it's a daunting task to learn three hours of music well enough to keep my eye on both the conductor's baton and the vocal lines to shout out the occasional forgotten Italian. Must wake up early tomorrow to work on flute music for rehearsals the next two days, and then Thursday and Friday are devoted entirely to Mozart.

Want to get your own Cosi on? Come see it!