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[27 Nov 2009|01:19am] |
The past week has been a shock. Whopper's condition has deteriorated so rapidly since last Thursday. It was then, and not earlier, that he stopped eating his meals, trotting on walks, and rising during the night for water breaks.
Sunday night, on his way to the backdoor prior to "going potty", Whopper collided with the drop-leaf table in the living room and collapsed, panting heavily, his heart racing. When he saw the vet the next morning, x-rays indicated that he had cancer everywhere. There were two visible tumors: one between the trachea and heart, and the other surrounding his liver. Before this, we knew his kidneys were failing and got him some dog-food with lower protein content. Now we know why they were failing.
On Sunday night, my eyes welled up and I was afraid for him. Now, I can't mourn and I can't love. Whopper is serene, exhausted, isolated, strange. His collar is old, his fur is woolly, he has a paunch and a shaved groin, his back legs are unsteady, he no longer greets visitors at the door, and he no longer dreams in his sleep. He still follows us with the whites of his eyes as we walk around the house. Other people who know him seem to have taken on their respective attitudes of resignation at his dying. I am still waiting, praying, for mine.
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| the spider's nest |
[21 Nov 2009|02:27am] |
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music |
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Cigánské melodie Op. 55: Dvorak/Bernarda Fink |
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Nature may be indifferent. One could just as easily say "Nature looks over her past with a feeling of deep regret and misgiving." At those times I may be referring to a sparrow in the bare bushes, or my dog staring blankly into an empty room, perhaps half-aware of his rapidly advancing senility, and maybe even his death. Through these windows, Nature can reveal itself. Perhaps even in our own thoughts, our own scanning of dog eyes and sparrows, we can discover something that has happened to the world, a second history, something that means a singularity of mind or consciousness in living matter.
Sometimes I wonder whether a sparrow can be dimly aware of beauty through any of our media, whether there is a visionary cave of a sparrow's mind that for no good reason reveals to it in a sudden, incoherent, rare and isolated shudder, what it is, what its mate and offspring are, what the tree and the weather are, what everything is. However, it seems that only we have the actual capacity to doubt and fear our fates. Given that capacity, one becomes acutely conscious of a terrible and wild absence of fear throughout Nature. That revelation may be the beginning of religion, or the beginning of man's communion with God.
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| da capo, con espressione |
[16 Nov 2009|03:04am] |
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music |
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Beethoven: Piano Trio No. 4, Op. 11 (Casals/Istomin/Schneider) |
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This past month I've devoted at least ten minutes of practice time per day for improvisation work. What that basically means is the spontaneous variation of themes. I'll choose a theme and do arpeggio and scale work, diatonic and chromatic, over it several times, then fiddle around by transposing it into the parallel minor or the scale based off the dominant. I've found that this sort of rote practice has made the composition of variations a much simpler and more organic process (although my harmonies are not always as lean and muscular as I might wish). Improvisational ability goes hand in hand with composition. Without the first, composition markedly falters.
I had several hours this afternoon to work through my notebook: give myself two or three rhythmic cells to work with for a twelve bar phrase. The sexton never hears silence in there while I'm practicing, so he poked his head in at me as I was sitting in the dark in silence (broken every other minute by short, single plucks from the keyboard) and asked if I was okay. I immediately put the book away and started on my scales.
I ordered a book on Jazz Piano last week; it should arrive soon, and maybe today. Jazz improvisation is something I know nothing about- thus the purchase. (It depresses me when I remember that I was involved in several jazz bands through middle school and high school and they never taught or even encouraged students to improvise on the material. Our high school music programs - I apologize for stating the obvious - stressed technical proficiency at the expense of developing an authentic, fundamental musical understanding. No one learned even the rudiments of theory or composition unless they studied privately. It was all very sad and pointless.)
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| Heiliger Dankgesang |
[14 Nov 2009|03:14am] |
In the great meditations of some of his late-period compositions, and notably in the Dankgesang from this quartet -- where themes are tightened and propelled by nervous, refined harmonies -- he reaches back to the baroque era (in feeling if not in form). Busoni wrote of Bach's C-sharp minor prelude from WTC I: Through the chaste melancholy of these tones there sounds a note of suppressed pain, bursting forth only at rare intervals,--a Passion-like strain for whose expression a truly devotional mood, and an earnest conception of the full depth and grandeur of Bach's style, can alone suffice.
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| I see them crowd on crowd they walk the earth |
[10 Nov 2009|03:17am] |
I see them crowd on crowd they walk the earth
Dry, leafless trees no Autumn wind laid bare;
And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,
And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare;
No sap doth through their clattering branches flow,
Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear;
Their hearts the living God have ceased to know,
Who gives the spring time to th'expectant year;
They mimic life, as if from him to steal
His glow of health to paint the livid cheek;
They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel,
That with a seeming heart their tongue may speak;
And in their show of life more dead they live
Than those that to the earth with many tears they give.
-Jones Very
The last two lines remind one faintly of the passage in Matthew 8: "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." "Follow me. Let the dead bury their dead."
It is a powerful poem, and I think my favorite sonnet of his so far. I read it for the first time tonight, and it was the only poem that sent me into that charmed state of attention, as though you just found yourself at the top of a very high tree and were on your way down, scanning every knob of every branch on the way down. All things glow with a new and imperative significance. It is a joyful shock to find myself at the top of that tree. Still, all poetry, perhaps everything in this world, is imitative. Its pretense of utility, its ghosts, its echoes, are not lives in themselves. The dream stops, the stars emerge out of the lake, the microcosm shifts into the cosmos. Then the distance between the dead and the living is a visible distance.
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| echoes |
[10 Nov 2009|03:04am] |
There was a great hurry in the streets, of people speeding away to get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a footstep was there.
"A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!" said Darnay, when they had listened for awhile.
"Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?" asked Lucie. "Sometimes, I have sat here of an evening, until I have fancied -- but even the shade of a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night, when all is so black and solemn ---"
"Let us shudder too. We may know what it is."
"It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-by into our lives."
"There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so," Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.
The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some, as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in the distant streets, and not one within sight.
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| tonight |
[28 Oct 2009|03:30am] |
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music |
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Scheidemann: Galliarda in D minor |
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Stepped out into the rain tonight with an umbrella and peanut butter sandwich. I let my mind wander and amuse itself, and pausing after about ten minutes by the construction job near the band shell, started to think about death. I posed a thought to myself. (It was more poetic than philosophical, as my mind tends toward poetic than philosophical thoughts.) What if I had bought my death? Then the time I have here is stolen, borrowed, bestowed, a privilege rather than a right. Smugness and self-righteousness are attitudes, whatever their objects, that treat privileges as rights. Once a person has bought his death, she forgoes glory, prestige, fame, enterprise, family, friends, suicide, everything. Life must not be treasured or preserved; it must be utilized, wrung dry, spent to the final moment and funneled complete into cold brook-water. After we have sold our right to live and bought our right to die, it becomes clear that we are moral agents.
I can fathom my death, but I cannot fathom the years I have lived and have not yet lived. I do not pretend to claim ownership of my life, my body or soul: I could no more reasonably claim ownership of the air outside. It is because of this mystery, this privilege of living a life in a body I sense and remember but cannot understand, that a moral life becomes possible and necessary. I know that I possess my death, that it's present with me at all times, thatched and bound in my flesh: it's my right, the only thing I am sure about. But if I don't possess my life, then I cannot choose to be moral: I can't answer the "how" of my life. Who can be indifferent with life after a twenty minute walk like that through the rain, under an umbrella, eating a peanut butter sandwich? I feel wonderful tonight.
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| lemures and sharks |
[25 Oct 2009|03:50am] |
Whenever I pass south through Essex, Middlesex, and Mercer counties, I feel like I'm going home. The sky seems cloudier, the air murkier, the streets narrower, the trees a kind of weary, sodden green. The region is special. North-central Jersey is where I "found the world" or spent the first third of my life, and Bergen is where I experienced it. Thus all the loyalty and love goes to Verona and not to Ridgewood, a town I dislike, don't care for, perhaps resent.
We drove down to visit Eric this past afternoon/evening at TCNJ. The day probably would have been one of the final draws if the gods had a schoolyard pick, so in that sense I sort of identified with it and came to appreciate it. The rain stopped for several hours during the afternoon, and the sounds of conversation and rainwater whishing through the tires really calmed my mind. I felt pleased with it, sort of stupid and blissful, playing the first movement of the "Tempest" Sonata through my mind, aware of the all-too-appropriate tackiness invading my mind-space and pleased with that too. I felt reconciled with the weather, felt like the day was mine and the region was mine, like I was going home and would be only a half-hour drive from the Pinelands, Trenton, Philadelphia, the heartwood of the nation to boot.
Our restaurant choice was terrible, catastrophic. It was a place called "Joe's Crab Shack" along the highway, a noisy, gimmicky grease-pit. A giant, daemonic plaster shark overhanging the entrance, a strong smell of cheap beer and vinegar permeating the air, 80s rock and the Village People blaring so loudly through the speakers our eyes started to film over, and food so slick and spicy I felt like I had a river of slime in my throat for the next hour, it was a nightmare. For about two minutes while we were waiting for our meal they put the "YMCA" chant on -I don't know why; it could have been a birthday, a whim, I have no idea and don't care - but the music reached a level I've never experienced before in a restaurant setting. For the first 15 seconds I was just stunned and glued to my seat. Then I threw dignity out the window and decided to suffer less, so the hands went over the ears. The folks at the table next to us laughed at me, but at a certain volume bad music ceases to be music and merges with all the other generally muddy, catfishy barbarisms and becomes destructive. At that point I expected the plaster shark to beam some devilish paranormal light from its mouth or stomach and open up a new gateway to hell. It will probably be Applebee's next time.
On the way back the sky pulled out all the stops. It rained and it rained. I slept, no music, no lights, no thoughts.
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| Die mit Tränen säen |
[07 Oct 2009|04:10am] |
A sublime motet. And for some inexcusable reason I've neglected to listen to Schütz's music. That will change.
I've heard very little of the pre-Bach (i.e. 17th century) German composers, of whom Schütz, taught in the Venice of Monteverdi and Gabrieli, seems to have been the acknowledged leader.
Die mit Tränen säen, werden mit Freuden ernten. (They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.)
Sie gehen hin und weinen und tragen edlen Samen, (They go and weep and bear good seed,)
und kommen mit Freuden und bringen ihre Garben. (and come with joy and bring their sheaves.)
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| Spain |
[26 Sep 2009|05:09am] |
Love to travel to Spain sometime soon:
( music )
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| digression |
[26 Sep 2009|04:04am] |
Dad's cousin is in the states for the UN assembly, and will be staying with us (in my youngest brother's room) from Sunday until Tuesday. Although I've known her my entire life, I still find myself uncomfortable talking with her.
Admittedly it isn't only her I'm speechless around--I'm socially handicapped with the overwhelming majority of humanity. Sibling conversation has only recently risen to a comfortable level, up from that of "dry sponges left out during a drizzle" during adolescence. It has always been a challenge for me to act sociable, much less be that way. Once or twice during my life I've met someone whose brand of mind and smile seemed to match mine perfectly, and both times I've been terribly disappointed.
There is always the possibility that I do have Asperger's, and if that's the case, I should probably find myself a therapist again. If I'm not, I may still need a therapist. It is perhaps not unusual that I'm thinking this way. I'm thinking more composedly and clearly than I ever have due to routine music playing and general studying, theological and classical. I am determined, in a variant of that heroic and faintly postmillennial American cliche, to make something of myself.
There is a particular American myth one sees repeated throughout literature and movies: of the self-reliant man who favors pure Nature and the Frontier over women and society, rugged and courteous, canny but not intellectual, resourceful and fearless. It is still absolutely credible. Why else would the superhero films be so popular? The best American writers have transcended that myth, and the majority have written more or less armies of Natty Bumppos. (When I remember that Schubert, on his death-bed, did nothing but read Cooper novels, I can't help smiling.)
Now, I, and most Americans, are much closer to the myth of Nixon than of Teddy. We all harbor a strange affinity with Nixon and willingly forgive him his crimes and insecurities. He was a man who should have been somewhere else but who held the presidency as the South held the wolf Slavery by the ears, in the words of Jefferson, and "could not hold him nor safely let him go."
Our capitalism (as opposed to our politics) symbolizes, and in many ways equates to, "the Frontier" of American myth. Thus many Americans instinctively reason that to eliminate capitalism is to flood our temple of space, that abstract horizon.
It's late. I'm rambling.
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| worries |
[16 Sep 2009|03:38am] |
I am a nervous person. I worry that I've reached the end, that there is nothing left to say, and that my voice will depend on the day, merely. One's mind slicks over with frost. How long will it be encased there? How long before it thaws out? It takes patience. It would be easier to bear if I could start "the book" now and not several years from now; my hope is a kind of jealousy. The work feels necessary; it must be done. My fear is that it will be necessary for me to wait three more years. One of the reasons I'm dodging graduate school is to secure that clearance. Still, I've gone through dry times before (once for nearly two years), and murmurs have always found their way in, waves lapping at sandy walls.
Still searching for a job; still paying $400 a month in bills. Found two private schools in the area that offer positions for Latin teachers. One in Summit, and one in the city. I'll apply to both tomorrow and see what results. Same with the unpaid internship at the Newark Museum. Should know by the end of the week at the latest. I hope it will be a busy season. Likewise, I hope that my invention, or at least my desire for inventing things, will start to produce.
Started running again and stopped drinking coffee. My resting heart rate has fallen from 90(!) two weeks ago to 75 today. I go running at Maple field at 1 in the morning, 5 nights a week. Cool and beautiful, eh? Also, I'm embarrassed yet to run in the daylight. My trumpet practice is paying off. Got the double-tonguing down again on Sunday. Bought some new exercise books and some late Haydn sonatas. My quest to learn all of Beethoven's sonatas is the poker to my cold embers these days.
Remembered this dream today, and found it very amusing.
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| remembering baseball |
[03 Sep 2009|03:43am] |
Sandy Koufax
There is no sport that promises and delivers more enjoyment to spectator and player than baseball. The spring and summer rain and sunshine, the crack of the bat and thud of the ball in the mitt, the pace of the game, and the strange significance in the ties between fan and player combine to make it, in my opinion, the best sport out there. I am a lifelong Yankees fan and have detested the Red Sox for as long as I've been following the sport, but have from time to time rooted against the Yanks: once after I played for our town's little league A's, and more recently as I've watched their payroll balloon to become (as of their '09 season) the highest in both leagues and top the Mets (second-highest) by over 50 million.
There is a problem with baseball, and perhaps it's an ethical problem. There is no salary cap. This means that the teams with the highest revenue (2009: NYY, NYM, Chicago Cubs, Boston, and Detroit) can pretty much have their pick of the most talented free agents on the market. All they have to do is pay a sort of luxury tax proportionate to their payroll; the tax is spread broadly, but some of it goes to the less fortunate teams (the teams with much lower attendance rates). Not all teams with high payrolls win or make it to the World Series -- witness the Tampa Bay Rays who won the AL Pennant last year before losing to the Phillies in the WS -- but they pretty much always make the playoffs.
The Rays are at the bottom of the pond in terms of overall payroll, but they have a thriving farm system with some of the best young prospects and a strong cadre of 1st and 2nd year players starting to get their feet wet in the majors. I don't understand why their attendance is still hovering around 15,000 a game. There really isn't a team more likeable and rootable in the majors these days. Joe Maddon has done astonishing things with this club in the last three years. If they don't shred the Red Sox to pieces tomorrow and next week in Fenway to make the Wild Card, I, for one, will be extremely disappointed.
The trouble for teams like the Rays in the coming years, if they don't boost attendance and revenue, will be in retaining these marquee players for their franchise, and keeping them away from the wealthier clubs once they become free agents. If they don't continue to win, year after year, and brickwall their fan-base, they'll end up like the '97 Marlins or '01 Diamondbacks, who spent everything on everyone to win a title for one year, hoping they'd attract fans as a result, but finished where they began, poorer and stripped of their roster when attendance remained unchanged the following year. When the smaller franchises can be this hopeless, it really stirs one - as a fan of the game itself and not of a single team as an absolute liquidating force within the game - to push against the big owners and implement that salary cap. Who cares if they strike for a couple years? Who cares if the swine-faced Scott Borases of the world have something to say about it? I don't. Fuck them. Go Rays and go Yankees. But go past that. Go baseball.
Satchel Paige
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| idolaters |
[31 Aug 2009|03:30am] |
When I greeted her upon the rainy shore, I at first doubted myself, and could not uncover my theme. I sought an oak tree with my eyes, as one of the judges before battle, and the stars flickered and swished past her feet into the sea-foam. When I lifted my eyes to begin, I saw she had left me. Rather, she had vanished. Compassing my position, the sea reached for miles parallel with my left arm stretching forward, and sand and grass, the remains of the storm-shredded house-frames upon my right.
The rain left off and I carried my soaked and disheveled frame inland. This gut-sack of mine hugged me tightly. I ran my fingers through my hair and came home.
The raspberries sag and brush the garden sod. Earwigs, slugs, and slim, whitish, cricket-like insects mount the ripe fruits. Several bees poke themselves among the buds. A black fungus creeps like a shadow where the stalks make contact with the ground.
Her soul, I fancied, might be mine presently. Namely, a black fungus-spread raspberry soaked with dew beside a white cricket. How silent the mill had been; I could not hear any family within. I saw no lights. So the rain picked up again.
They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted - twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.
Jude 12b-13
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| saints |
[28 Aug 2009|02:58am] |
It was sunrise. Bikes rested against trees, and men smoked cigarettes quietly. They looked at the blue sky, and saw it was grey now, consumed with a sort of ashy film or spray. The silence spread to choke the wind and sounds of the forest. Sweetly, softly, and then growing with great violence, a grief recognized itself in the men's hearts. They looked with pity upon themselves, and could not remember the names of their parents or hometowns, or even where they were working. Everything had departed in this one, solemn grief. Recognition did not diffuse the comedy latent somewhere within this grief. It was a sorrow without horror, shapeless and serene. This particular sunrise was not unusual- one exactly like it had happened about twenty years previous, but none of them at the moment had the dimmest recollection of that sunrise. It was this sky that glinted like a steel harness and then disappeared.
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| sanctification and the education of the soul |
[24 Aug 2009|01:24am] |
I hear that the body and mind can be developed, and it is clear to me that bodies can be trained and conditioned to perform certain deeds "on a higher level" (as the sports phrase goes). And the same applies to one's intellectual education.
But when the topic changes to the soul, to the subjective experience of phenomena, it is the fashion to call everything "relative". Music, art, and poetry cannot be good in themselves, but they are good or bad depending on the person who observes them. There are no such things as elevated or degraded tastes; it all depends on whether the thing is worthwhile as entertainment. It is almost universally denied that one can speak of an education of the soul in the same way as there is one of the mind and body. The religious equivalent to the development of soul and taste (taste is the application of the education of the soul) is sanctification.
Sanctification is the natural outgrowth of faith, and is the process by which the recipient of God's grace exercises and proves his devotion and love through good works. Sanctification is the continuous war of one's will against the impulses of sin within the flesh (Romans 7). The wound of sin is not healed until death; yet the capacity to resist sin with strength, love, and courage is conferred through faith in Christ Jesus. Grace is the beginning of that willful and strenuous resistance. Thus sanctification.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that sanctification has largely disappeared from most American Christian conversation in recent years. It is said that faith cannot be developed and that one faith cannot be better or stronger than another faith in God's eyes. Faith is now viewed as the result of the influence of the Holy Spirit sweeping rapturously and suddenly upon the violent (though very prayerful) worshiper. Faith comes NOW. One is accepted without pause, without inhibition or doubt, and without the slightest thought or meditation on the part of the enthusiast. What meaning does trial have after this kind of faith? Can faith be proven? Historically, trial was a necessity; the life of Christians is, as Jesus remarks many times, weighted toward suffering and hardship. The suffering of Christians must be of such weight that one cannot overcome it without the gift of grace. I've experienced this enthusiastic faith. It is not only improbable; it is impossible. One zips away like a bee to honey the first time in solitude (for God never sees us in our solitude!), as though we were sanctioned to do the wrong that was easy for us rather than the right we could not previously do.
The soul has an education. If I would like to base my life on Vergil and the poems of George Herbert, is that better than (to sneeze over some pollen in the air) basing it upon supermarket novels and a lot of television and bad music and other debilitating things? Yes, it fucking well is. If there's any doubt in my mind that an analogue to Christian sanctification can occur in the world, and that the two often intersect (in that good culture is necessary for and reflects a good Christian), I am a miserable insect in the history of mankind. I am a filthy hoarder in my soul, a worthless, short-breathed, masturbating, belly-pleasing, maggoty-hearted slave. Not a man. It is that important, I think, to watch one's soul, and see at all times whether it is true and good for God and men, and if not, to see that it be made better.
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| Scarlatti and then Beethoven |
[22 Aug 2009|02:42pm] |
It's odd. I love this Beethoven minuet so much because, excepting the wind-lashed trio, it sounds like a tribute to Scarlatti. So it should be played like Scarlatti is played. Barenboim, as much as I love him inside and outside of music, doesn't play it that way here (he's too emphatic and heavy-handed by half). Kempff's interpretation is actually much closer to that ideal. The contrast between the main and trio themes should be unspeakably disarming. Kempff captures some of that unworldly, searching and brooding spirit in the trio because he plays the minuet more like Scarlatti.
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| Vacation |
[16 Aug 2009|11:46pm] |
I enjoy my time in Vermont, lodging for a quiet week at the lake, and forgetting for that short time my Jersey habits and refitting myself in the country spirit or mood, so far as I can realistically imagine it. I do not lie to or deceive myself that I'm tasting a rustic lifestyle or sampling the experience of life without certain conveniences like computers or dishwashers; by admitting my relief and their intrusiveness in my idyllic woodland experiences, I admit my dependence upon them. Vacation should not be exceptional, but enriching, our well-watered annex to the end of the summer. All friends and gadgets are welcome. We ask only that they be clean, listen to good music, and have good manners most of the time.
the riverbed/former road behind the mountain
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