Our son, sleeping

He had made Margaret cry as well. The last time had been Saturday night. She hadn’t understood. “Why don’t you just do something?” she had wailed, her tears welling from her own helplessness as much as from her compassion for his frustration.

“How can I?” he had answered. “This world is against me,” he had sighed. She had thrown up her hands, waved them about.

“Look,” she had said. “Look at this house, look at the teacup at your hand, look at me, for God’s sake.” She had pointed down the hall. “Our son, sleeping, just thirteen, so young—so much to experience.” She had buried her face in her hands. “We have so much,” she said, wringing her face in her wet fingers.

He had pushed his chair back, pulled himself up. He had wanted to stand behind his wife, place his hands on her shoulder, feel her melt against his warmth, then take her up in his arms. But he could not. They would only repeat the scene again and again, making love with heavy hearts and sadness in their throats—only to wake in the morning and stroke each other’s hair, smiling and staring into each other’s eyes and pretending to see the hope that he, at least, knew was a sham.

So instead he had walked outside, leaned against the rough wood of the doorsill, and tried to lose himself in the dark. He had waited until he heard Margaret put the teacups in the sink, waited for her to click off the small light over the stove, and then waited. He had closed his eyes until he felt sleep coming to him, until he caught his head bobbing as he stood there. And then he had gone back inside, felt his way into the living room, and curled up, exhausted, on the couch.

Pink triangle on the hill

Happy gay pride to everyone!

Sadness and Milton candy

I am working on an essay about Death in Venice and have discovered that it has penetrated me deeper than I had suspected. Rummaging through my journals to trace my obsession, I came across the following, torn out and tucked into a notebook from 1999. Apparently I was sad and in a course on Milton. The professor was a bad man. I'm sure my petite crusade had little effect.

The natural and easy way is depression. Happiness and the very thought of it are cultural inventions, something developed to make life worth living when culture supplanted the biological necessity of life. However, happiness has its merits and is like the sugar added to food that makes it less biologically effective yet somehow more attractive. Though there may be something real to sugar and its pleasures, such as a true interaction with the senses, while any extrasensory perception of happiness is a conception and construction.

There is an extreme of happiness,
which most assuredly is delusion.
Depression is not delusion gone opposite,
but the absence of delusion
and of everything altogether.

Yet let us extend sugar. On the senses we can construct a happiness—a sugar that appeals, say, to all the five biological sensors. Any one object can appeal to all five, but the best perhaps is that which has the same five: another human. It can look good, smell good, sound good, feel good, and even taste good.

Whatever. The point is that I want to be happy.

* * *

And happy I can be. And maybe in me there is a stubborn tendency toward bitterness, which more than my own ideas drove me yesterday to violent interruption of class—easily defended, since Dr Freer little allows the meek to speak. But I am not without redemption.

In reading Paradise Lost I want to be taken in by the glory of creation, but it is to me not a poem of praise but one of calculated intellectual defensiveness. How much greater is his glory if we are not beaten over the head with his omnipotence!

(What need we praise omnipotence, anyway, when it is so singular and unfathomable? Why not praise his unbounded benevolence—which we can profitably seek to emulate and which is so much more remarkable?)

I want to see the good in Eve, as much as it is taken for granted in the figures of Lycidas and the Lady in Comus, but Milton and Freer alike show her onlyweak and sinful.

This from God's first female. Buffoon.

The Height of His Art

Once upon a time there was a great musician. The maestro woke each morning with the sun and sat at the piano. Through two meals he ran his scales and arpeggios, lovingly but firmly training each of his fingers to resurrect the voices of the Great Masters. When the sun began to fade, he lit the candles and sat at the great oak desk in his study to work on his own masterpieces. He composed with a heavenly mathematics, working sometimes for weeks on a phrase until it mirrored the very proportions of perfection—until the vibrations of his melodies would send shivers through the bright feathers of the angels' wings far above.

Over the years dust settled in the lines of his face. The strings of the piano shrugged their shoulders at his bidding and deposited their soil upon the soundboard. His chambers grew dark as dirt covered the settling panes. Candles flickered with the fiery deaths of motes. All was dusty. All was dusty but his hands: they glowed at the ends of his withering arms like the innocent hands of clean children. They were spry as boys playing in the woods, graceful as little girls in their first dance.

One day—it was the day toward which he had been drawing closer his entire life—he was to premiere his first piano concerto. He had been working on it steadily since his tongue and lips were first able to pronounce the sacred syllables of solfège. Now that the magnum opus was finally completed, he could see that every other note he had ever composed was trifling cosmic dust in the face of this one great star. This was his creation—the perfect music—for which the Great Composer above had created him.

The concert hall had never been so full. The eyes of the world were on him. From the piano bench he gestured to the orchestra, and the instrumentalists all moved respectfully to his beck. The ears of the world opened as if for the first time. He played the Allegro brillante. A stunned and appreciative silence gathered like a fine mist before the sweet, ghostly Andante espressivo. A peaceful, ethereal silence seemed to soak up the lingering strains. The Scherzo shimmered beneath his fingers, and the orchestra followed him point for contrapuntal point.

Finally, the finale. He led the orchestra through the elusive Adagio pesante to the Presto con fuoco. His octaves thundered, his arpeggios swept ever more passionately. And then he came to rest on the soft treble trill, that thin silver wire where the world, for now, lay in balance. This was the calm before the final storm, the apocalypse of the concerto. The audience little knew of the musical fireworks to come. The orchestra waited. The maestro leaned into the trill, and away, letting it crescendo and decrescendo, wax and wane. He risked a glance out to the audience. Were the masses lulled? Were they at the point of least expecting the devilish coda? He looked, and—

—Behold! His eyes met the eyes of the beloved! Was ever a face so perfect? It was more perfect than a thousand such concertos. An old fool I am! Has this face always been waiting, while I have dabbled away at these crude arts, dedicating my life to a wasting away before this pointless artifice . . . ?

The orchestra had taken the change in the maestro's demeanor as its cue and was racing toward the climax. Never taking his eyes off of the beloved, the maestro felt his fingers dance to the devilish tune, faster, faster toward the climax—with a cry, he threw his hands into the air and brought them down upon the final chord. The force pushed him off the bench and he toppled beside the piano, clutching his ten broken fingers to his heart, which only now began to beat.

He did not mind. In moments he found himself cradled in the arms of the beloved, who had understood and had come for him.

Reading, writing, and discovering plays

I've loved the William Friedkin movie for some time now, but I finally got around to reading the script of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band. I've been thinking a lot about plays lately. I've noticed that I feel comfortable when I'm writing dialogue: I write freely and am not overwhelmed with doubts and questions: Where is this going? Why am I writing? What if I write myself into a hole and can't get out?

It seems like I wouldn't have any particular talent or leaning toward dialogue. In fact, I have enormous trouble remembering exact words whenever I try to reenact a conversation I had. I find myself saying, "Well, he must have said something like this because I remember responding with something like this."

It is true: conversation often seems to follow a fairly rigorous cause and effect. Humor appears when we break these rules, when the unexpected is said. One of my favorites, a now-(internally)-legendary exchange from the Movie Groove:

Customer: Oh, what are those?
Clerk: The bobble-heads? The Osbournes. That's Ozzy. And here's Sharon.
Customer: How cute!
Clerk: They're pens. See, they come apart.
Customer (laughs): Where did you get them?
Clerk: Costco, I think.
Boss (yelling from the back): Actually, Sally brought them.
Clerk: Oh. Actually one of my coworkers got them from somewhere else.
Customer: Oh. Well . . . what did you get from Costco?

One of the few things I wrote in college was a play. The inspiration was a series of disturbing events that occurred mostly as phone calls in what I would call the year that I embraced depression. I sat down on a cement wall outside the student center between classes, and before I knew it I had written ten or so pages of a little play. I was flabbergasted. I'd never written anything so easily or so lengthy.

(I later decided it was trash. After all, it ended with the line, "Behold, they have betrayed Judith!" Apparently the drama developed into some allegory of the story of Holofernes, but to this day I've never read the Book of Judith.)

(It also occurs to me that there are several voices I cannot silence when I think back to earlier experiments in writing: "This will be worth the work it will take on meter," from a high school English teacher; and "A nice beginning to a whatever-it-is," from a college professor to whom I showed a short story I had considered complete.)

A strange concurrence: Julie Taymor's staging of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex was recently released on DVD. I picked it up yesterday and watched it, and he was reminded of a play he had written about ten years ago. He handed me a composition book filled with dancing letters, and I began reading.

It was strange to watch this whole town and group of people harden into reality through their dialogue—like there was a whole world just sitting there in our storage closet . . . Ryot, Mitchell, Luz, and the others going through their cycles of life and death, while I went about my own life, obliviously padding from the living room to the kitchen to the office and back . . .

In truth I know there are many such worlds hidden in that storage space.

I didn't say, "Can I have this?" but I nearly did. I began typing up the old manuscript. My intention was to bring the words back to life, to make them active again, and to give him a clean transcription of his work, in thanks. And to give myself this world to play around in. It's not mine, but I am one of its first explorers. Oh, I might change some words, but not the world itself. And I will tinker and see if I might bring it out to this dimension.

Summer of Beethoven

I'll be accompanying my new violinist friend in the first of a series of casual summer recitals:

June 26, 2005
A Casual Sunday Afternoon Recital
of Beethoven
4 p.m.
Berkeley, California

Sonata No. 8 for violin and piano, op. 30, no. 3

Sonata No. 5 for violin and piano ("Spring"), op 24


I remember a time before compact discs, and I remember my first ones. It was the eighties, and I wore braces. My orthodontist rewarded me for bearing his pain by giving me gift tokens to Turtles, which I think by capitalist evolution has become Wherehouse Music. (You might still find a tarnished turtle-embossed coin in the corner of a junk drawer in my childhood home.)

I was sucked toward that shiny display of slender CD cases at the front of the store. Although I was tempted by the latest Hooked on Classics LP, I had to have those new things: sixty minutes of music, digital quality. "I'm getting a CD player for my birthday anyway, right?" I asked my mom. "And look, only $3.99? 'Best of Bach.' 'Best of Mozart.' 'Best of Tchaikovsky.'"

Not long after that I came across a CD of two Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin. I loved the violin—especially the opening theme to the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series that I watched each week on PBS—and I soon fell in love with these two pieces. "Spring" was so melodic, so lovely; "Kreutzer" was passionate, devilish. I toyed with the idea of writing a thank-you letter to to the performers: Aaron Rosand on violin and Eileen Flissler at the piano.

Yep, it's Louie's.

Him: Why you gotta be so tall?
Her: What'd you just say?
Him: I said, how'd you get to be so tall?
Her: From eatin' shrimp like you. Now scram.
Him: Why you gotta be so harsh?
Her: Why are you even still standing here?
Him: Hey, you Louie? Something sweet for the lady here.
Her: Louie, who is this clown?
Louie: Don't know 'im. Never seen 'im. Want me to get rid of 'im?
Her: No. Just make 'im stop buzzin'.
Him: Buzz is what it's all about, baby!
Louie: Listen to the lady, shrimp. You wanna stay, you shut it.

This place and the piano

What is this place?

Is this my secret diary?

Is it my own printing press?

Is it a public probing ground?

Is it a public proving ground?

Am I alone?

The stress of being a creative person is beginning to wear me down. It's easy to believe that I am nothing if I am not creating.

It's possible that playing the piano is a different and easier kind of creativity. It's possible that I veered away from the more challenging arts. I had a decision to make in my teens: continue copyediting my school newspaper, editing the school literary magazine, and sitting down to write stories (about the prince, my true love, who came to me only in dreams), essays (about my last, bitter Holy Communion), and poems (about the sun, which in epic conflagration rose); or continue accompanying the school chorus, teaching kids and my friends to play the piano, and studying Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy with a harsh old woman who knew her stuff.

I found I was playing the piano. Swaying over maudlin songs. The occasional fast piece always beyond my reach: a concerto performed sloppily, maniacally, and barely memorized. Sheer luck that I lived to rise from the bench.

I eventually abandoned music. The universe could have been tweaked in a few places, and I would be a professional musician today. If I had chosen clarinet that fateful day in fifth grade, instead of trombone, I might have an orchestral appointment and a studio full of talented high schoolers. If I had studied with a teacher who asked, "Why is it that you simply can't play fast?" and sought to address the problem of velocity through relaxation, rather than through slow, heavy typing exercises, then I might be effervescing Mozart sonatas in a recital hall near you. If there had been a way to understand music as a language, with its very own grammar and style, so that I too might compose... Perhaps my flaw lay in wanting more from music than the joy my favorite teacher found...

The American Apartment

THE AMERICAN APARTMENT
an opera in one scene by
PAUL G. MCCURDY

PAUL (tenor), a boy in love
JOLENE (soprano), the mail carrier

The setting is San Francisco, present day. PAUL sits writing at a desk on a scaffold some ten feet above the stage. A rickety ladder leads down to an open door frame.

PAUL. For two long years have I toiled
here in the land of California.
I have sweated upon the peninsula,
but now, now, I am in the city
and am in love.

Jolene enters, presses a button on the door frame.

Oh! I hear a buzzing!

JOLENE. It is I, the mail carrier!

PAUL (climbing down the ladder). Oh, Jolene!

JOLENE. I have an important letter for you.

[PAUL. For me? For me?
JOLENE. For you. For you.]

JOLENE. From Fresno, California.

PAUL. Fresno? I have heard it is warm
this time of year in Fresno. But Jolene—

JOLENE. I am here.

PAUL. Read on. Read on, Jolene,
read on from Fresno.

[JOLENE. Oh! I am opening the letter.
PAUL. See how you open the letter. Ah!]

[JOLENE. It is, alas, a tragedy. (waving the letter)
PAUL. A tragedy? Alas! Give it here.]

PAUL (reading the letter). It is from the government!
It appears to say . . . It reads . . . I read
"Tax . . . tax . . . self-employed . . . FICA . . .
Athens Book and Press . . . IRS calculations . . .
Difference . . . Owed . . .
Two . . . Thousand . . . Dollars!"

JOLENE. Alas! What can this mean?
What else does the letter contain?

PAUL (exhausted, leaning against the door frame). It means,
it seems to say,
I think the letter says I made,
in one year,
seventeen thousand dollars.

JOLENE (weakly, aside). Only seventeen thousand dollars?
Only? In one whole year?

PAUL (continuing). And, it seems that now,
of that seventeen thousand,
they'd like two thousand back!

JOLENE (aside). Two thousand back? (to PAUL) What will you do?

PAUL (moving out from the door frame, resolved).
I will do what I have always done.
I will toil here in the land of California.
I will sweat here in the city
and in love!

[JOLENE. He will sweat here in the city and in love!
PAUL. Here in the city and in love!]

From a previous June

I begin just beyond your fingers, just under those five warm points on my cool back. I begin there, just beyond your lips. You can taste the faintest trace of me there under your warm lips on my cool neck. Deep within is the blue flame of my engine, which flickers in the cold wind of the world. You can feel it when you are there, miles deep, miles deep.

I want my organs to radiate. I want my skin to burn red. I want to be the fire where you sit, your hands outstretched for my heat, your face reflecting my yellow light. I want to be the fire of your martyrdom, where you burn in your becoming. I want my flame to lick at your dust and consume it, so that you are pure Angel.

But my flame is so small, too small, and it flickers, and I fear it may go out. And I will be covered in world dust, and world dust will gather on my brows. It will clot nose and mouth, and I will gasp for one last breath and then be as dead.

Also to come in June:
The American Apartment: An Opera in One Scene
and
My Deaths in Venice,
as well as the usual assortment of Strauss and sadness.