Carnaval faces

Carnaval was all around us this weekend. We went for coffee Sunday morning and then strolled along the street where the floats for the parade were lining up. It was nice to be able to take pictures of people. I generally feel too shy or invasive, but here was a crowd that was only too happy to pose, though I preferred to take pictures of people who were posing for other cameras.

I was still shy as I caught one woman smiling for someone else (not the woman pictured here). As I was turning away I saw the big man standing next to her point at me, and I felt like I had been caught. But then she giggled and smiled her best Carnaval smile for me, posing the way she wanted to be seen.

The best pictures are faces.

On the face are the innocents we were and the ghosts we will become.

The woman pictured here is beautiful, as are most of us if you look closely enough.

The last "Why Me?" music essay

A college professor whom I love and respect, and who is dead now, encouraged me to align my academic interests and pursuits with the current job market. A ridiculous suggestion, especially when you compare the blink of this life with the eternity of regret. But he also introduced me to the concept of zerdenken, or "thinking-to-death" or "thinking-to-pieces." The following words/thoughts will never disappear, so I cast them out.

Why do I play the piano? When I play the piano I create something that was not there before, and it is something that no one else can create in exactly the same way. What is good about it? What distinguishes it from a mechanical time passing?

I think it's that exactly: the fact that something has been created. And it may be that you like it or value it, or you don't. Its mechanical elements can be likened to the visual artist who works in mosaic or collage. Repetitive actions make up the whole.

Maybe the parallels are closer to sports, but I do not relate because I so seldom see athletes or athletic movements as beautiful. (Even classical ballet is so far removed from my sense of reality that it doesn't really fit.) Like music, ballet is distilled, arbitrary, built up into something absurd through the erroneous passage of information over centuries.

But sports are also ridiculous abstractions. The difference is that they are so much more resistant to doubt or interpretation. They are based around ultimate scales of judgment: this team wins or loses; this woman can or cannot jump, run, swim farther than this one. You know how silly ice skating is. It is between art and sport, and its announcers become buffoons in the gray area between the ambiguity of the arts and the quantifiable analysis of athletic movement. How much sense it makes, then, that we're really all just waiting to see if he'll fall on his ass—because that is an obvious and qualitative measure of failure.

Are sports and arts beautiful in similar ways? Why are sports so much more popular, so much more accessible, so much more exciting? And what makes the arts something that cannot be conceived outside of a stuffy, centuries-long framework? Will Beethoven always be more famous than Babe Ruth? Were there athletics before baseball, soccer, football? Since Athens, when was the first excitement of the game?

Why will I continue to play the piano? Because I can, and as I grow older it seems special that I can play the piano, even if it's at a relatively amateurish level. Or is it, in fact, uncommon and far from amateurish? How many people right now—what percentage—are working on Beethoven right now? Is it not actually a specializing, individualizing characteristic—a pursuit of personal complexity (despite the odds: this general mess of a world we live in) that helps to make me, each day, who I am?

Just the news

Much is going on lately, and most of it good. I'm enjoying my new job—there's something comforting about the world of em dashes, word blocks, and bad breaks, not to mention misspellings and other general breaches of standards.

I'm also enjoying my new freedom with classical music—having left it, come back, left it, come back (or, perhaps, having been sent away, called back, sent away, called back), we are now good old friends, happy to rock on the porch together and never demanding too much of each other.

By chance I discovered that there is a Community Music Center just five blocks from my apartment. I walked through sunny Sunday streets to its spring student recital and wrote this after hearing a Bach violin concerto, which a young girl played to the breezes just outside the vast open doorway of the small hall:

"This moment reaches back to the beginning of my life. I am sad because I know it will pass."

If we do not hide the words well enough (as in poetry), they are trite and cliché. Alas. I have not yet had a chance to distill my emotions.

And I am also enjoying writing, although I often wonder where the next story or poem will come from (and whether it will). Writing is a very new friend: we eye each other warily from our rocking chairs and get along best at night.

Nonetheless, a few folks lately have decided to push our chairs closer together: my story "Now We Shan't Never Be Parted" will appear in Alyson's Best Gay Love Stories, 2006, due out early next year. Also, I'm very excited that two of my poems will appear in mid-June in Lodestar Quarterly, one of my favorite online magazines.

Most of the greatest happiness of my life has come only in the last year.

Sixth grade machinations, 1987

October 21, 1987
Today Bobby Harris acted very strange. I don't mean the normal strange, I mean big-time strange! First off, at the start of the day he said that he couldn't be my or Rusty's friend anymore. He was not acting merry like he usually does.

Later in the day, he said he was mistaken. He could be our friends.

But, even later in the day, he went back to stage 1.

I don't know what the problem is. Do you? [Here the teacher has written: No, but I agree that he definitely acts different.]

October 22, 1987
Today was a great day. Mr. Davis' classes were so fun. He was really jolly in math. In social studies, he gave me a 'Lolly Pop' for following instructions fast. I like Mr. Davis. [Teacher's note: I do too!]

Bobby was able to be Rusty and I's friend. It happened in reading. In reading we did Haikus. Here is one I wrote:

'What light through yonder
window break', who the heck knows
probably fluorescent!

This day leaves me with a question or two. And here they are. (You don't have to answer.)

Did the trio of teachers tell Bobby that he shouldn't sit with Rusty and I? [Teacher's note: Certainly not! You and Rusty would be a good influence on him!]

If so, he probably wouldn't be our friends so he wouldn't sit by us which prevents him from talking. (too much)

And thus ends an inquisitive day in the life of PG McCurdy.

April 18, 1988
Today was a fine day. I had to stay after school for drama club. It was fun! Are you going to the show? If so, what day?

I don't know what happened to Rusty, but he changed a while ago. He is just the meanest person in the continental USA. (Just an expression) Have you noticed anything? [Teacher's note: Maybe a little]

The Poet's Latest Work

A sudden illness kept me from attending the recent public reading, but my friend the poet granted me a special private audience with her latest work. The poem rested on an ivory pedestal in her study and was an intricate thing of silk and wire.

Pyramidal and a glowing green, it might have struck the uninitiated as a holiday evergreen. From a distance it even seemed bestarred with shimmering ornamental baubles. Of moon-silver thread spun by breath of night, perhaps? Or beaded gems rounded by water's kiss on virgin beaches?

I drew closer. I had to see how this masterpiece was constructed. What sharp eyes and tools the poet must possess! I gently opened my hands toward the mystical artifact—

"Don't!" the poet cried. "The work is fragile!"

My opened hands closed to fists.

"I am not some brute of a man that my fingers will crush a dainty poem!" I roared.

I retreated, leaving the poem on its shrine. I have not spoken to the poet since, but I hear that she has continued to astound the world.

Rituals in My Old House

I had recently come to realize that I was master of an enormous old house. It was built of dark, wet wood, from the outside imposing, yet also repulsive as organic decay often is. The many rooms inside the house seemed to yield to swamp and forest and back to house again.

Having forgotten the house, I had also neglected it. The brown syrup of guilt mixed with my blood, and my arms and hands grew heavy.

The next-door neighbor, a middle-aged woman with a head of thick auburn hair, met me on the porch and opened wide the front door. It was a ceremony of my irresponsibility: none of the doors fit properly against their jambs, so locks and keys were useless.

A damp paper of dark paisleys, or possibly large paramecia, covered the walls of the foyer. I coughed, and a rhythmic banging pulsed behind the undulating wallpaper. My neighbor stood still a moment, then sighed and beat the wall several times with the base of her palm until the sound ceased.

"The pipes," she explained, as if I were a child. "You have to knock them back or they will burst."

My neighbor led me around the house, opening doors, tying back curtains, shaking dusty moisture off the cloths covering the deciduous furniture. I assumed she was to thank that the house hadn't fallen down entirely. I felt her awaiting my gratitude. But I wanted so much to be alone, and I knew that my room on the top floor would be empty—though never safe, no, never apart from the rest of the house—and there were certain rituals I wished to perform.

She opened another door.

"Your sons," she gestured. "And your Busters," she continued, for I had not one son but two, and not one dog but two. My sons were dancing together in the parlor. How had I forgotten them? I nearly knelt to offer my hand to Buster, who approached cautiously, but the Buster that sat looking at me from under the grand piano made me step back.

"They have also missed you," my neighbor said, her gray teeth smiling behind clumpy pink lipstick.

"I will . . . ," I sputtered, "just give me . . . Just let me—" and I fled up the stairs, which were slippery beneath my feet. I passed dozens of people on the landings and in the hallway of the top floor, and these all had something or the other to say, but I simply had to be alone. Alone with my rituals.

It was not right, it was not good, but I reached my room and closed the door. It did not close all they way but it would have to do. There were fancy European cigarettes, and I lit one. Would I begin the ritual? I looked out the window. Down below, wet woods pressed a throng of people against the house.

The Anger of Young Men

I am now the age at which people tell others they are too young yet, they do not understand. I am now the age at which people tell themselves they are grown up. I am now the age at which people stand in the foyer of the American Dream. Our new families whiz around our new suburbs in our new suburbans. Quarters and dimes are put into accounts. The tender leaves of IRAs unfold.

I want to be comfortable in my old age. Working is for young people. We old people, who cannot work as well, should be given our rocking chairs and rolling houses. The money we have saved shall be our pudding. And when we die we shall sit at Bingo.

What will we tell our friends? What will we tell our friends?

We tell ourselves that we love what we do, or we do it to achieve certain ends: our highlighted hair chases our smooth faces down the ocean highway; we pull into the driveway of the monumental box where we hide our farts; we mash the peas and carrots for our genetics.

But what will we say at Heavenly Bingo? What will we see from that vantage?

* * *

I have said that the things of this world are straw. What use grab here? Grab there? What use? It all is illusion of shadow of straw. I have said it is in my person to feel I must find out who I am and why—that there is some deep untouched core, a pure existence. To find it I must renounce, go inside, must not be tempted by the things of this world. Is it a pianist I am? What a silly thing is a piano. What silly things are tones. Is it a writer I am? What a silly thing is a pen. What silly things are words.

And so I have staunched all ambition as something that takes me away from myself. These things . . . are a grasping at straws.

* * *

I was wrong, and not completely honest. (I do, in fact, clutch a brittle straw of love to remain afloat in this cold ocean.) But I realize now that I was right about some things. I learned that many of my questions were invalidated. When I renounced Christianity in the form of a high school essay, my brother referred to my "angry young man phrase," my grandmother sent me a letter admitting that her first impulse was to grab me by the shoulders and shake me, and my mother stood crying outside my bedroom door until I agreed to go with her to church.

At twenty-nine, I am still young, but I am no longer a son and schoolboy. I am not yet a grumpy old man, but there is shit in the world. There is Shinola. But there is also shit.

* * *

I find now that many things should not make us angry. Working in a video store, you might get frustrated that people repeatedly ask for As Good as It Gets when they actually want Something's Gotta Give. You roll your eyes and say, "You mean the one with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton? Or do you actually want the one with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt?" And you also might go crazy because people repeatedly ask, "What's new and good?" You might wonder, every day you hear that, whether a question could be any more vague or indicative of a lack of self-generated intelligence.

But then you realize that they can't all be wrong or stupid or evil. You realize that there is a greater truth underneath, that there is something about the video store that makes people ask what's new and good. And there is something about two movies with Jack Nicholson that makes them confusable. Underlying things.

There are reasons why we gravitate to things: schools, careers, weddings, political parties, children, SUVs, mortgages, retirement plans. It is something we do. And when something we do is done enough, it becomes something that is. And at that point of existence, it is beautiful. And above scorn. Perhaps even above the anger of young men.

I am a little young yet and a little angry yet. There is a utopia, but I'm not sure we want to be there. There is a utopia of creation. There is a place where everyone asks,

Is this what I do?
Is this what I am?
Is this what is?

* * *

If I write like this each day,
and each day discover another thing that is not true,
another thing that was true yesterday but is not today,
and another thing that is true today but will not be tomorrow,
will I have gotten any closer?

Good Dreams Bad Dreams (Overview)

I shall celebrate some places of my dreams and exorcise some others.

Let me remember the ivory pavilion up the marble steps. It was a favorite place, which I would forget until some happy chance brought visitors to my dreams. And I would take them there, and they would see the silver town glittering below them.

Let me forget the elevators on strings, the passageways too narrow, and the stairs that lead to dead ends.

If the trip is not too frequent, I may revisit that swamp where, arcade-like, I must jump from bank to bank, and where snakes and toads croak and hiss. But let me forget the room where I cannot touch the floor and must jump from cabinet to countertop.

Also, from time to time, if need be, I might drive the narrow snowy road up the mountain, past the scenic motel and its icy parking lot, to that too-steep snowy side where people lay as on a beach and sometimes slide down and off.

The Last Piano Lesson (for a while)

"I'm going to be honest with you," she said. "You can play for fun, but you're never going to get much better at this."

"Better how?" I asked.

"Oh, sure," she continued, "you can study it academically, and learn how Beethoven and Mozart did their two-note slurs. And you can play in a church and teach lessons in Podunk . . ."

"What are you saying?"

She pushed her glasses back up her nose. "How much do you practice?"

"Each day? Three hours," I said, "sometimes up to six on the weekends."

She exhaled loudly.

"Then why," she began very softly, "why is it, do you think—" She began to wave her arms around. "Why is it," she asked, her voice rising, "why can't you play a god-damned E-major scale in sixteenth notes at quarter note equals one-sixty-eight?" Here she threw all ten of her long fingers up over her head.

My fingers, resting on the keys, twittered.

"Andy can do it," she continued. "Lexie can do it. Peter can do it. Wren can do it. What's your problem?"

"But I mean, if I keep practicing . . .?"

She reached up, pulled her glasses off her nose, and began cleaning them with the handkerchief she kept in her sleeve.

"Presto!" she yelled as something came hurling toward me. It was a lozenge, also something she sequestered in her sleeves. I reached up with both hands outstretched, but the candy sailed past and clicked against the floor behind me.

She never looked up as she spoke:

"Look, John. Remember when you were a kid and you played ball with your brothers or schoolmates? Remember how you would flinch when they threw the ball toward you? Remember standing at bat, the coach telling you to keep your eye on the ball? You did, didn't you, but you never hit it, did you? It's called hand-eye coordination, John, and you don't have it. Your heart may be in it, John, but your fingers aren't."

My fingers were sweating on the keys.

"But what about practice? What about 'Perfect Practice Makes Perfect'?" I tittered.

She had finished wiping her glasses and put them back on. She rubbed her lips together and looked out the window.

"Practice hitting a ball, John," she said. "Practice hitting a ball, and when you can hit a home run, then come back to me."

Not just Ariadne but Richard Strauss!

I know that I won't always be so obsessed with Richard Strauss, but I must wonder now what took me so long to get to him. In college I had watched filmed versions of Ariadne auf Naxos, Salome, and Elektra. Was the music then too strange? Now I see that Strauss is Mahler possessed.

I'm sure Der Rosenkavalier would have had little effect on me; it is too vast and slowly sprawling. But Cappricio, which I just picked up yesterday from the library, would have spoken to my anxieties regarding the world of music.

In Cappricio a poet and a composer each compete for the love of the Countess Madeleine (played in my recording by Kiri Te Kanawa, who was lovely in my childhood and is even more lovely now for her obvious theatrical intelligence and pure vibrato). They each consider their own art superior and point out the shortcomings of the other, and the Countess's final declaration of love will decide which of their arts (and which of them) is most worthy.

Like me, Richard Strauss hates the melodies he loves. They are arbitrary, esoteric, ridiculous. Overcome after a moment of earthy human connection with the low-yet-lovely Zerbinetta, the Composer in Ariadne tries to define his place in the world, and in this moment is both ridiculous and beautiful:

Composer. The depths of existence are immeasurable! My dear friend! There is much in this world that cannot be expressed. The poets can set down great words, yes, really great—and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet!—I am filled with courage, my friend!—The world is lovely and cannot frighten the courageous. What, then, is music? Music is a holy art, to bring together all kinds of courage like cherubs around a shining throne, and that's why music is the holiest of the arts! O holy music!

Love in San Francisco

I love people who are in love.

W.E.W.: 7. Final Operatic Thoughts

Oh happy day! May is here and brings with it the end of Writing Exercise Week. Now that wasn't so bad, was it?

I've been watching operas this weekend. I finished the Rosenkavalier that I picked up from the Movie Groove on Friday. It remains pretty inaccessible: terribly long with lots of meandering lines and lost comedy, and very little that sticks out other than the Trio. When the character of Sophie Faninal appeared, I felt like I was seeing an old friend, but a little Internet research revealed that I'd probably never seen her before. She was sung by Janet Perry, and she was nearly more beautiful and frightening in that white wig than Janet Leigh in Vertigo. She sang light and lovely, too. We'll see if it grows on me like Ariadne has.

I also bought the DVD of Salome with Maria Ewing. She and Teresa Stratas will always be my crazy darlings, but here Maria was almost comic. No, I take it back. Any opera singer who will get completely naked onstage and then sing for fifteen minutes to the head of John the Baptist is above reproach.

I don't really have much to say. I'm just filling space. It's the end of Writing Exercise Week. I'm free! I'm free!