Elysium

Elysa was out of breath. She had run down Fifth Avenue and now paused beneath the Washington Square Arch. At the right angles the arch could frame Fifth Avenue looking north and uptown, and Freedom Tower looking south. She remembered a day more than a decade ago when the arch framed the destruction of the World Trade Center, smoke billowing just before the towers collapsed.

It was the last days of August and the park seemed amazingly fresh and full of energy. As she regained her breath, Elysa walked through the Arch and headed toward the fountain. She loved the fountain and all that it seemed to inspire of everyone nearby. The sound of running water was so soothing. She had been inspired to create site specific work in the context of the arch and fountain, which had been warmly received.

But she couldn't afford to linger. She was late for an appointment. She glanced at her smartphone. There were a number of messages, but Elysa needed to hurry on. She was annoyed by the seemingly endless intrusion of her smartphone on the continuity of her day. She glanced around and noticed so many people sitting on the park benches, lying on the grass, tapping away on their phones, almost oblivious to the splendor around them.

Then a text from her colleague and friend popped on the screen. "I'm sorry," his text declared, " I won't be able to meet you today at Dante's." Elysa was furious. She had been running to make this appointment, and at the last minute he calls it off? She angrily hit the face of her phone, hoping her gesture would be translated at his end.

Gestures had been on her mind a lot recently. She had begun to notice that human gesture seemed to be disappearing into the mysterious space inside the smartphones. As a dancer, the relevance of gesture to her craft seemed obvious. She often watched people in the park. Her body would capture and translate the gestures into a vocabulary she would eventually choreograph. Everything, everyone seemed relevant.

But Elysa had increasingly become disenchanted with her life. Everything seemed to be conspiring to distract her from her creative work, which was what she really cared about. Her world seemed to be accelerating out of control, dictating and shaping her life in directions that she did not want to pursue. And yet, she seemed trapped.

She noticed an interesting woman walking past the fountain with a book in her hand. She thought it odd, because she seldom saw people carrying books anymore. The woman was Asian, and she had a quiet intensity that was intriguing. She was also carrying a smartphone and somehow was managing to take images of the park, even though both hands were full.

Everything about the park was idyllic.  It seemed to her to be the epitome of Elysium, an enchanted oasis in the middle of Manhattan. She realized that this alluring woman must be attracted by the calming magic of the afternoon.

Then she noticed a man who appeared to following the woman, cautiously keeping his distance. But there wasn't anything sinister about his demeanor. He seemed somewhat in awe, and was clearly interested in pursuing her. Then she heard some musicians playing and he was momentarily distracted, watching them and listening to their music. He turned to watch.

Elysa was also distracted and when she looked back, the woman had disappeared.

When the man turned and saw that the woman had vanished, he seemed to panic. Elysa watched him as he ran back and forth, trying to catch a glimpse of her, hoping to find some clue.  He turned away and held his face in his hands in despair.

All the gestures of anguish and headache flooded her mind. Elysa surveyed the surroundings. A misterial majesty enveloped the moment.  Then from nowhere the woman appeared. Elysa watched as she commanded an errant butterfly to suspend its flight and settle on her book. The butterfly submitted to her gesture and landed quietly.

Elysa could see that the man was captivated by this enchanted spectacle. He was deeply moved, but also stunned and paralyzed.  It was almost as though an incantation had transported this moment to an enchanted world, an Elysium, a Shangri La where miracles really do exist.

Elysa turned to see if the woman had noticed the ardent despair of her admirer, but she had vanished without a trace.

Why George Couldn't Do It

George walked by Fiorello LaGuardia's statue in front of Citibank. The statue always cheered him up because the long past mayor of New York City seemed larger than life, and it made George feel that maybe he was too. But today he was somewhat distracted. He had noticed someone who seemed so interesting he tried to pursue her, but she was walking so fast. He was afraid that if he ran up to her, he would scare the daylight out of her. So he kept his distance.

There was such an air of mystery about her, a kind of regal demeanor, and foreign... That was it! She seemed like someone he might run into in Burma or Rangoon... or even Shangri La. George had a thing about the Orient. Oh, he knew that Orient was not politically correct... but his fantasies carried him on the Orient Express where he lost himself in countless Agatha Christie-like adventures of intrigue.

Always there was the dame, the one with the long cigarette holder who always asked him for a light. All of his romances, his loves, were at a distance... and even now, he followed this mysterious foreigner past the trees, past NYU's library. He watched her enter the park. All he knew was that she was carrying a book,  and he thought maybe he could get close enough to see the title, and that could be his angle. She also was taking some pics with her phone as she walked.

She crossed the street to Washington Square Park and glanced back. Oh no! He thought maybe she had seen him following her, but she continued crossing, seemingly unaware of his pursuit.

It was a splendid summer day, he thought. This is a great day to meet someone new. Even though it was August, the air was fresh and sweet. The girl with the book seemed somehow approachable. He tried to imagine what he should say.  Maybe, "What are you reading?" Oh migod! he thought, that's so lame!

Over by the fountain, two saxophone players were playing riffs back and forth. Actually, he noticed they were pretty good. They didn't drop a beat as they tossed phrases back and forth. Two or three people wandered by and put some money in a hat the musicians had put on the walkway. The fountain was punctuating the musical dialogue with a music all its own... gleaming in the bright summer sun. George fancied himself a composer, but no one had ever heard his music. Maybe his songs were the same kind of illusions as his adventure fantasies.

Damn! He had gotten distracted. Now he had lost his mysterious stranger! Where did she go? Frantically he started running the direction he had last seen her. How had she vanished so quickly, he wondered. But she was nowhere to be found. George began to doubt if he had really seen her. Maybe she didn't exist, he thought. He knew he was prone to fantasies. But he believed she was real. She had to be somewhere.

He searched the park and began to feel depressed and discouraged. She was so perfect, he thought. She looked like someone he could talk to. Talking to strangers was not easy for him. But he had lost her, and this made him feel sad. He closed his eyes. He could still see her in his mind's eye, her walk, her mysterious, foreign, regal presence.

He opened his eyes, and suddenly there she was... sitting beneath a beautifully green elm tree a little west of the fountain. She was taking some pics and held the book in her lap... he thought he might run up and strike a pose for her to take his pic... ohmigod, how stupid can I be?  Yet, even though she was distant, his gaze closed the gap. It's easy. I'll just walk up and say hi. He started toward her. But then he froze.

The girl raised the book toward the sun like an offering and somehow wondrously, a splendid butterfly with black and red wings appeared above her. It fluttered around her and appeared to notice her presence. The girl lowered the book to her lap and the butterfly hovered tentatively as though to flee, but then in a moment of magical trust, the butterfly settled comfortably on the book. The girl and the butterfly communed in the silence of that summer moment.

George stood mesmerized. He had never seen anything so bewitching. He wanted to say something, but he was speechless. He struggled to regain his senses. He watched the butterfly soar high above him into the vividly green elm tree, a vanishing mirage.... and when he looked back down, the enigmatic girl of his dreams had faded away into a memory.

He knew the girl would never know all that had happened in this tiny Shangri-La-like moment, but he could never forget, and he would try to find her again, somehow.

The Girl, The Book, and the Butterfly

It was a late summer day when Washington Square Park was shimmering like a fairytale. For August, the day was surprisingly cool with a hint of September in the air. The water spraying in the fountain was glistening in the sun as the streams arched over the pool and shattered into glistening beads plummeting to the basin. The water churning in the basin was an obstinato punctuating the sounds of birds, conversations, and strands of music permeating the most remote places. Washington Square Arch stood like a radiant entrance to a land of dreams.

For Sylvia, the park was an inspiring terrain where she could wander at will and find adventures unfolding among the day's population,  animated and engaged in playing music, dancing, performing, or lying about the the lush green lawns in the sun or sitting on shaded benches. Washington Square was Sylvia's retreat where she could become anyone or remain anonymous.

With her smartphone, Sylvia took many images in the park often posting them on FaceBook or sharing with her friends on the Internet. She had an eye for noticing things that often went neglected or remained obscure. One would think of her as an artist had they spent time with her, but she was content to masquerade as a different person everyday, blending in with the panorama that was the daily menu of a park populated by people who came from all over the world to celebrate life in that tiny patch of land in the heart of Greenwich Village.

Sylvia understood Washington Square, and although her life was often in a hurry, she disciplined herself to slow down and enjoy the moment. Washington Square was a haven that she sought out whenever she visited New York. She had lived in NewYork City adopting it as her second homeland when she was an international student. In those days she had been too busy to interrupt her almost frantic pace.

So even though Sylvia pursued a crowded schedule, she found time for the park. She loved to go there with a book and immerse herself in the fading summer splendor.  All too soon the days were growing short, and soon she would leave New York to return to a different life, a different pace. She was reluctant to leave because there was something different about her place in the world, her place in the city, but she was looking for some clue to understanding a new feeling that had emerged during her visit.

Years earlier some negative experiences had taken her out of herself and out of her trajectory. Even though she thought she had made peace with that part of her life, she realized she had returned because she knew she had left something behind. She didn't know what, but she felt drawn to its mystery.

For Sylvia, books were a different way to noticing the world through other eyes and ears, through other tastes and boundaries. Books were a haven just as much as the park. Today she went with a book she had known before, but wanted to revisit. This book was comfortable and a loving description of a way of life about music and how we inhabit the world. She found a spot beneath a tree and lifted the book for a moment as though to christen it to its new surroundings. She raised it toward the sun.

Suddenly a butterfly appeared, almost as though it had materialized from her imagination. It flew above her and then circled around, lowering toward the book and then fluttering upwards in an elusive maneuver.

Sylvia was transfixed. Somehow this beautiful creature was sharing her personal journey. She watched the path of the butterfly almost as though there was some hidden code in its trajectory that defined her presence in the world. True to her experience of documenting her being in the world, she captured an image of her companion as it seemingly found the trust to settle comfortably on the book in her lap. Later she would discover that this butterfly was a Red Admiral, looking very regal as it briefly shared her time and space.

Sylvia realized her life was filled with chance encounters that as she looked back were maybe not so much by chance, but a series of discoveries in which noticing the smallest moments created a tapestry that shaped meaningful times in her life. It was as though all the negative energy of the past was drained away on this idyllic summer day... with a butterfly reminding her that beauty was always at hand in trusting and living in the immediacy of the moment.

Fantasy # 1

He couldn't remember what had diverted his path and taken him to a different destination. But suddenly he found himself in a new place and wondering why he was there. There, in a crowd of strangers, he sensed someone was there for him. This was no ordinary moment. He felt a sense of strong anticipation... something was about to happen.

He stood silently waiting, connected to an energy he had known before, but that often eluded him, especially in recent times. Everyone in the room was engaged in conversation or activity. He scanned each person. Most were facing away from him, intent on their reasons for being in that space. He couldn't figure out what was going on, or why he was there.

It had something to do with the date. It was August first. August had always been an ending for him and a new beginning. But recently it seemed he had been asleep for decades. He couldn't seem to wake up to his life. He had thought many times of the Hemingway solution. It was always an option. He thought determining an exit strategy from life might be an noble, existential act, a measure of personal control in a world of dimensions that inexorably shaped every moment. His friends had remarked that such a choice seemed rather selfish and arrogant.

Then he caught a glimpse of someone he had seen before, enigmatic, a dark and mysterious presence. Even so there was a radiance, an ambience defining an energy he sensed as eminant.  She rose and turned to leave, an aura surrounded her face, everything was surreal... ...Ingrid Bergman and her first appearance in Casablanca... the enchanted stranger across a crowded room... stunning...

She passed by him, and he managed to say he would like to see her. She seemed surprised, agreed they might meet... and as he watched her disappear, he stood there stunned. He mused that perhaps he overused stunning in his fantasies. Her aura lingered.

He stood silent and speechless and alone.

Renaissance?

In The Fantastics The Narrator muses "You wonder how these things begin..." because each occurrence appears seamless, a chain connecting moments so intimately that experience is uninterrupted until the tyranny of mechanical time creates the illusion of minutes and seconds, ripping the flow of being into millions of little bits of time as though they were the true measure of who we are.

And yet, something does occur, often monumental, and we are never the same, we are changed in the flow of being. The something might be a person, people, happenings, cataclysms... all articulating Time, Being, and Experience. We write millions of words, probably billions, trying to understand these occurrences, with great titles like Being and Time, Flow, As Time Goes By, and so on. Time is relentless, but it flows and ripples, and there are deep eddies, rapid currents, and still waters. It is much more complex than the mechanical measurement of intervals. Time is Space, and Space is Time. Flowing.

Some days ago, I encountered a moment that transformed my awareness... and now I write in an attempt to pursue languaging as inquiry, as a tool of discovery, attempting to understand the moment. Even as I write, this moment measures time and becomes a fixture in reality.

Words falling on the page... Time captured as inquiry... trying to penetrate the mystery...noticing Now, but remembering, retrieving the fragments, trying to penetrate the essence. The moment is red hot in my mind, erupting like a quasar... enigmatic...something happening, an interaction... sparks fly, and consciousness attempts to attend the moment, to notice intensely, and to save the essence so that meaning might be extracted. In a moment I feel a sea change. I struggle to find the meaning...as though understanding somehow might make the past tangible. The past has tentacles to the present... entanglement connects eternity, reaches across the infinite stretch of time/space, and I know that somehow I am changed.

Here as I write, I am searching for words, for gestures that might help me understand the how an apparently simple diversion can account for such seismic change in the direction of my life. Having lived many years, I have experienced several such changes. I regarded such changes as renaissances, but I had concluded I would not be called again to such a rebirth.

How many renaissances . . .
How many times
Will the silence invite me
To the feast?
I toast to festivals of years. . .
Here's to the painful isolation,
Here's to the innocence
Now lost. . .
Here's to the quiet wonder
Here's to the mystery of awe
To chaos on the edge of order . . .
Too soon
The days of opportunity dissolve,
The inward possibilities remain inert,
And all that might be and might have been
Is gone.

MAKING A MULTIMEDIA SONG CYCLE

Photo by Dr. Youngmi Ha

If Time Remembers exists only as a song cycle because of Rick Hartung. He even suggested the title, which was a solo piano piece composed about 30 years ago for our current Chair, Dr. Ron Sadoff, when he joined the faculty as Director of Piano Studies.  He played its premiere at Merkin Hall. It was based on my experiences of growing up during World War II and the songs that inhabited those years, especially one that has always been a favorite, As Time Goes By.  We had thought we might use the piece as an overture, to this cycle, but it is much too long to serve such a purpose.

The songs of this cycle came into being as a private journal in which I wrote the lyrics and then improvised the song. They were never intended for an audience and I seldom performed them exactly the same way twice. It was a way of reflecting upon my experiences. There are three exceptions. The Way They Ought To Be and I Never Knew are from a musical I composed years ago and that had several incarnations. I was fortunate to find Rick Hartung who played the leading role based on Don Quixote. Whatever Happened to Might Have Been is from a musical The Marvelous Multicolored Maze that received a stunning performance at Texas Tech University as commissioned by the Texas State Council on the Arts.  It never had another production, perhaps deservedly so as it was ephemeral and fleetingly embedded in the 70s.

The other journal songs existed as lyrics on a page, which lived only when I sang them while improvising at the piano. The songs in this cycle are selected from songs spanning more than thirty years.  Must You Go? was composed for my jazz quartet in college. I remember when I finished the song in the practice room, the lead tenor came in and listened. He was so excited, and said we needed to get the “other guys” and try it out.  We sang the song over and over in a car, driving around Lubbock, Texas until about 5 a.m., where we went in to a Toddle House for pancakes, and started remembering portions and saying to each other that although we had stopped singing, it was still sounding in our heads, and we were still drunk from the music. The Four Freshman heard the song and wanted to buy it, but I was young and foolish and the deal never happened. It wasn’t until about 20 years later that I thought it would make a good solo piece, and I began improvising it as a journal song. I discovered that this song was not just about losing a girlfriend, but it was about my family and my close friends. Inevitably we are on a journey where we lose all of our loved ones. The haunting phrase of “must you go” affected me profoundly, and as a solo, the work ends with an E-flat augmented triad. Leaving the answer open, but inevitably we are always saying goodbye to those we love.

The final song of the cycle, Where is the Music? was composed or “resurrected” two weeks ago. In 1998, I suffered a stroke in which many of my journal songs were lost from my memory. I slowly began to recover that song and the form that is in the cycle is still emerging and growing, but was especially created for this cycle.

The journey between dissonance and resolution underlies all the songs. And in the final song Where is the Music?, the cycle comes to a close with a struggle for resolution between E-flat and A-Flat Augmented triads.  It ends not really resolved, but possibly intent on some future quest, “somewhere”.

My life has always been a quest for beauty, spontaneity, and excellence. Affecting the video stream of the Poet is the Italian film, The Great Beauty.  I call the main character of the cycle, the poet.  This name was derived from a madrigal cycle I published in 1969 called The Loves of a Poet.  I never published another thing, and my life has always been creating and moving on to the next thing… and noticing. For me one of my purposes in living is to notice and have reverence for all I notice. That is why I love to teach, because I strive to notice the sheer beauty and potential of all those that I am lucky enough to encounter. Noticing becomes a way of creating spontaneity, but also a way of documenting our experience of our world.

The Great Beauty is about a writer who publishes one of the greatest books of Italian literature when he was twenty-five and never published again.  Always the question from everyone he met was “Why did you never publish again?” He couldn’t find the answer. But in the film, one sees his quest for beauty, always inspired by his muse who was also his first love. The film is about the quest for beauty and excellence. He never had an answer to the question. But after a profound series of events, all about the essence of beauty and excellence, he discovers his answer in remembering his muse. 

In this performance, the left screen is the Poet’s stream of conscious and the right screen is the stream of consciousness of the The Woman. The center screen is the live action that has the power to enter into the streams of consciousness. This is determined by an artist at the technology console making decisions that interact with the stage action.

In starting an opera project several years ago called A Song for Second Avenue, I developed, through dialoging with friends, a concept of the MoviOp.  The MoviOp involved the creation of streams of consciousness of characters in prepared videos and projected with the live action on the stage, coordinated, but not meant to connect directly to the live action. In addition, live video is captured in the moment on action on the stage, and such action can be manipulated and invade the streams of consciousness. This meant to be a live and improvised experience

I abandoned A Song for Second Avenue two years ago. It seems as though I am veering on returning to the libretto and resuming a revision of the text and writing the music. For me the question is slightly different than that of the writer in The Great Beauty. I have wondered if I can go into the isolation required to do such a work. I enjoy the act of noticing being in the moment with those I know and encounter.
On the other hand, I always have admired Rossini. The great composer was a friend with Balzac and both had become addicted to coffee. In those days coffee was considered a drug and both Rossini and Balzac had become addicts. Balzac wrote:

Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." 

Without Rick’s encouragement and friendship this song cycle would not exist. Working on it has opened the door to completing the opera. I’m no Rossini, so the idea of finishing A Song for Second Avenue in about 20 days is an inspiring challenge. If I could do it, I could get back to noticing the beauty around me much sooner.

It's a Secret: An Excursion into Time Transformed

An extraordinary experiment set sail on Columbus Day at NYU Silver Room 220. The creators describe the event: http://www.itsasecretperformance.com/

“It’s a Secret” is an experimental music theater production. The work is an hour-long composition for 2 singers (soprano and baritone), 4 instrumentalists (flute, violin, trombone and bass clarinet), and live electronics. It is currently in workshop at New York University.
The project deals with our increasing confusion over the relationship between public and private identities. At what point should the private become public? And to what or whose end? This dilemma is presented through a series of encounters within an immersive theater space. Performers and audience members alike inhabit a semi-public, ambiguous space of reflected memories and dreams…
Two narratives run through the show. One witnesses the Alice James, real-life sister to William and Henry, of Susan Sontag’s last play: Alice in Bed, in her painful, mute rejection of her famous family’s public life. Here, enframed, Alice appears and stands forth, casting her gaze like that of a portrait out upon the viewer. Alice fades in and out. As she withdraws, the 19th century bourgeois public sphere begins to crackle with energy of digital technology. The second narrative traces the imprint of technology upon our thoughts and utterances. Private thought now dances along electric circuits like the digital effervescence of memory.

What follows is my own mapping of the performance. Mapping was intensive, a number of members of the company were capturing the moments as multiple video  recordings in constantly shifting points of view as well as still image. We were warned that any imaging or recording we did would become the property of the performing company, so I chose to map the experience by moving constantly and chaining my point of view and mentally recording my experience of the hour as it unfolded.

An excursion...
An experiment...
An indulgence...
Mapping a shared experience
As music theatre
Challenges awareness
On several levels:
Shrouded in the mystery
Of disguised space
Where Time is a capsule
Of the Past,
Performers ring the space
Situated like constellations...
No audience.
Merely onlookers and sharers
Conscious awareness
In a parallel universe,
Watching and avoiding collisions...
A full complement of independent musicians
All performers in a mapped event
Containing calculated spontaneity...
Moments of precision
Captured by multiple cameras
Choreographed by targets and intuition...
We are caught in the deliberate diffusion
Of moments
informing by innuendo...
Collaborating with sounds
And Anguish...
Time suspended~
The past trapped
In agony and despair:
Daughter and Father
Sublimely isolated
In a circumstance of doom and despair.
This is no wonderland...
Alice and her Brothers,
Alice and her Father,
Are trapped in cataclysms
Of the mind...
A creative spirit
Whose inner adventure
Was known early to her
Until decades after her early death.
Her diary revealed an inquiring
And relentless mind,
Resigned to an inner sanctuary
Of imagination,
She vividly recorded
The world she knew.
Alice James reminds us
To remember, revere, and revive
The substance of our interior existence.
What took place on October 12
Was an inward voyage
Setting sail across a vast interior sea
Unknown and unexplored...
Setting sail as a work in progress
Drawing upon past structures
To create an ongoing performance:
A constellation orbiting a galaxy
Recording each changing moment
In constant calibration...
So each rotation is not repetition
But breaking new ground into the unknown...
Cameras documenting their angles,
Their luminosity,
Form part of a new emerging reality.
Actors breaking from rehearsals
Into moments of astonishment.

Nothing watched remains the same.
There is no detachment,
Only entanglement.

Images from:  http://www.itsasecretperformance.com/?page_id=51

Setting Sail

I seem to be starting over
But with less time
Without memory of how
I arrived at this moment...
Poised to cross an Atlantic
Without maps...
Only the stars to guide me.
I have forgotten
How to see stars...
But I suspect in some way
They still see me
Even though they have vanished.
Even now,
I am like stars vanishing...
Absent from myself
In small degrees

Piano Sings from Silent Decades of Neglect (Part III)

 (Readers are encouraged to begin with Part I: 
http://wyzardways.blogspot.com/2014/01/piano-sings-from-silence-of-twenty.html

Months passed.

Subsequent tunings would align strings that had strayed slightly. This went on for several weeks as the piano tuning had be be done slowly when restoring to concert pitch and to also even out the strings that had been abandoned for so long.

When I  improvised at the keyboard, I found myself struggling with the inertia of my own neglect.  And somehow I my guilt and ineptness struck out at the piano for not performing as it had twenty years ago... it seemed slow and sluggish (or was that me?)

But as I searched to find my way over the keys beneath my fingers, the piano seemed to be replying "Where were you all this time? What you are asking me to do is unfair...  I haven't struck these hammers to the keys in so many years... do you think I can be instantly repaired as though those silent years never happened?"

It has not been an easy road to recovery for this wonderful piano that was such a wonderful friend and source of inspiration through its inimitable sonorities.

But the journey back may have been even more tortuous for myself. My encounters have been fitful with slight instances of breakthroughs when  truly new ideas erupt in a multitude of accidents that somehow assumed shape and substance. But do these musical ideas stick in the mind? In the past this was simply a process of sitting down with my friend, fingers poised on the keys... and the adventure resumed often from the previous endpoint.  Now I seem to be trying to rebuild pathways to the continuous improvisation and discovery.  In the past there was never a thought that this musicing would lead to anything outside itself.

Some have suggested I should record these transient episodes with this piano, as though that would serve to replace musical ideas when memory fails me. But this is a more organic process and such recording would never replace the texture and substance of thought and physical connection with my Steinway friend. We both have enormous chasms to bridge within ourselves. It may be true that the reconstruction required may beyond my reach and the rich of my friend who exists only to map the sonorities in exquisite detail in the expectancy of Time unfolding.

And yet there have been such wonderful moments of sonority that touches and resonates somewhere is the deep recesses of consciousness, lingering on the brink of that vast inner domain we call the unconscious.  But the unconscious mind is just a construction, an invention to explain the ineffable domain that we are constantly surfing and mining.

But my Steinway seems to be forgiving me... its resonances coaxing me in new directions. It is a new process and new era.

Piano Sings from Silent Decades of Neglect (Part II)

After meeting with the synthesist who was also now a piano technician, I was alone with the piano in the apartment. It was the first time I had really acknowledged its presence as a piano in years. I wasn't sure if it still had a voice. I also wasn't sure of my feelings... I knew my skills had disappeared and I had some need for spiritual and physical repair.

But there were all kinds of materials on top of the piano, a sculpture called the "Trio" that my mother had given me when I first moved into the apartment, some books, some piles of unopened mail, a pitch pipe, some posters of Dinu Ghezzo, and a candle. I realized I needed to make preparations, so I found a permanent new home for the sculpture and removed all the other paraphernalia.

And I waited...

The tuner came at the agreed time. He put his coat on the couch and looked at the piano, acknowledging his perception of an important instrument that commanded respect. He went to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover and played some notes... hopelessly out of tune. He winced. He tried to lift the piano lid to get at the strings, but it was a missing a pin for the hinge, so we had to use a nail to hold the lid in position.

The tuner used his tuning fork and started to work from the bottom register. I left the room. I knew the tuner needed some space, and I knew that the sounds coming from the piano were painful stretchings... raw and occasional tonal groans that seemed to come from a crippled deformity of sound...

I was gone for some time... and when I came into the room, he looked at me and smiled... "last note." He sat down and started to play a few excerpts... the piano responded, and at times began to ring...

"The tuning is already slipping a little." he said.

I asked about the action.

"Yes, it is a little stiff. But some of that will work out as you play it."

This statement stunned me a bit. It never occurred to me I would have to play the piano. I just had envisioned he would restore the piano and it would be there then for guests and visitors to play. I didn't think that I would be involved.

"I will be back to do another tuning., " he assured me. Next time I will take the action out and explore what we need to do to." He then left.

I was alone with the piano.  The piano stood there, lid raised, waiting...

(to be continued)  See Part I in earlier posting

Piano Sings from Silent Decades of Neglect (Part I)

For now, suspend your disbelief. Suspend your judgment. Suspend your insistence to understand the reason for excessive neglect of such a sensitive persona that had been a life-long companion in several incarnations and was discarded twenty years in response to a different necessity and condition for existence. Two decades ago in a fit of despair, this brilliant instrument of imagination that had served without fail for generations, seeing me through from boyhood to maturity was abused by rejection and neglect---not as a deliberate callous act, but due to circumstances that could have no other outcome.
I was caught in a vortex of contradictions, and as conditions changed when this instrument could be embraced and nurtured, I was was too battered and traumatized to make any gesture of reconciliation.

You wonder how these things begin. How does breaking away from relationships reach such an impasse that there is no way back, no way to repair the damage? Time passes and you forget. You forget all of the tiny pleasures that created such a bond with another...moments creating memories, and memories becoming the substance of who we are and who we are becoming.

And yet I can see vividly how this perfect storm of events that led to conditions of reconcialiation literally exploded in my life on a Saturday afternoon. It was monumental. I arranged to meet a dear friend I had not seen for six months who was under siege in all aspects of health and spirit ... She came into Zuni, radiant, like light filling the dark corners of despair that grew out of the abrupt schism of my life.... And we had such a great inquiry into what could be possible trajectories for future work... And then we connected through a suddenness of need with another friend from whom she had been estranged ...  A few hours later, fresh from this reconciliation, I saw one of the greatest films of my life... Le Grande Bellezza... As though it had been created to reconcile me to life at this precise moment as I recover from a damaged perception... A lost soul wandering empty... alienated from those who had once sustained and nourished me.

I was transformed, renewed and reborn.... And then I stopped at the Mercer Street Bookstore and was drawn directly to a book of poems by Lucas Hunt,  Light on the Concrete, an edition that was signed by the poet... With poems that spoke directly to me ... I might have written them...the first poem was about reconciliation:

          Together at Last
We see the world with shadows all around
and rage to be more alive in the light
of love, thus our hearts, as nimble as  deer,
Pause before leaping the highest fence.

The next morning I had brunch with a former student who is a craftsman and whose passion is making music with analog synthesizers.... I had not seen him for six years, but he came tumbling into my life almost unexpectedly and I could feel the magnetism that aligned us at this particular time.

He was a person that worked with meticulous precision with his synthesizers, at one time having an enormous collection of electronic instruments. Recently he had turned his artistic craftsman skills to piano tuning with an aim not only to tune but to restore.... and as we talked I suddenly knew that I had found someone I could trust to reconcile me with a past that had bruised my sensibility and awareness and cut me off from my expressive companion.

He described how years of tuning oscillators had sharpened his ear so that tuning the piano strings fell into place. As we finished brunch, I told him that I had a piano sitting in my apartment that had not been touched for 20 years. I tried to explain why the piano had been so neglected... but the story is so personal and painful, I could only explain that circumstances in my life and situation conspired in such a way that the piano was blocked from my consciousness. The piano had been my constant connection to the exploration of sound and ideas.  My obsession on the keyboard was to improvise for hours at a time... and the sonority of this piano gave so much feedback to me that original ideas erupted abundantly expressive, powerful, a spontaneous communion as a musical interrogation, uncovering such exquisite constellations of musical ideas.

"I have no idea what you will find," I said, "if you were to take on the project of nursing this instrument back to performance... I am sure it may take four or five tunings, if the pin board will hold. The action will need detailed attention. It is an instrument that was once so proud and now through this neglect is a mere shadow of itself."

I paused.

"Is this something you would be interested in?  Would you like to come and at least take a look and assess the challenge?" I sensed in him a compassion and commitment to quality, the kind of quality manifest in Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In fact I discerned in him the kind of artist mechanic that would be needed for an adventure like this. If he was focused and sincere, he could begin the process of reconciliation that I so desperately needed.

These events led to my increasing awareness of the healing energy that was forming the essence of this new experience, of renewal of friendships, of renewal of commitments, of a creative renaissance flowing from these interactions. I began to see how connecting again with my friends, the experience of the film, the discovery of the poem, and the serendipitous background leading to new skills in this gifted young synthesist had converged into a pivotal moment that  could change my life.

He agreed to give it a try and made an appointment to come visit the piano the next day.

A Broken Thread: Long Live the Gate Keeper

David  W. Ecker, Artist,  Philosopher,  Educator

The last day of 2013 was the passing of an era, almost unnoticed, as all the players have moved on in spite of our indebtedness to our mentor and pioneer in the quality of life: David W. Ecker. And yet this quiet giant of phenomenological inquiry who taught us all how to see, how to listen, how to write, how to teach, how to be... has passed from this earth, a true broken thread  to the past.  Even though I had a doctoral degree and was newly arrived at New York University, my colleague David Ecker began my real education about art as experience and the basis for understanding our experience of life. He has always been my mentor and my catalyst.

I was mystified that since his passing on December 31, more than two weeks ago, almost no one was honoring his presence and his passing through any public sharing. PLEXUS, an International community-based art experience over which Ecker had significant influence and experience, appeared not to have noticed he's missing among us. I was hoping to read some tribute from PLEXUS since Dr. Sandro Dernini, who is the heart and spirit of PLEXUS, was one of Dr. Ecker's greatest allies and collaborators. I am delighted that now the PLEXUS FaceBook site is posting images and celebrating the work of this man who was both an elegant scholar and an articulate maker of art and events.

And the website ISALTA that sprung from the genius of his ideas and conception has become so dormant that there is no memorial tribute... as though everyone believed the dream died long ago. In fact, the web address ISALTA has become the index page to the activity and interests of Dr. Carleton Palmer who was David Ecker's protégé . Admittedly, ISALTA as a website exists only through the efforts and perseverance of Dr. Palmer. But it has been a source of concern that when I give the ISALTA web address to friends and colleagues who have been excited about the philosophy underlying ISALTA, there is nothing of ISALTA at that address.

I am encouraged by some communication from Dr. Dernini in which there are plans to dedicate future projects to David Ecker, and I anticipate his passing becomes the opportunity to honor him in the process of text, and the creation of works that his leadership has encouraged and inspired.

I call David Ecker the Gate Keeper because it was the vigilance of his vivid consciousness that kept our efforts true and honest to the integrity of pure inquiry as the nature of experience. He was such a splendid advocate for phenomenology, because it was central to all that guided his actions and interactions. When people first met David, they expected him to explain "Phenomenology".  He always refused, but not directly. He would just smile and proceed to have us learn through engaging in inquiry and description of specific encounters with works of art. He taught by example much more than by lecture. Sitting in on his "experiments" was always such a revealing process because he helped us uncover our direct perceptions, edit out the garbage, and emerge with a deeper sense of our experience.

Breaching the Abyss

You broke your long silence just as I  found myself in the trenches of the Abyss. The Abyss is fundamental to human experience. In some ways the Abyss exists as our terror of nothingness.

I have passed through an autumn of despair always on the brink of the Abyss ... celebrated the full moon at Autumn Solstice, and I did look at that beautiful moon and thought of all my friends around the world... I thought of you and wondered how your transition to a new life was going. I thought of those beautiful souls that brought this celebration into my life...and how this solstice moon changed my perception of the world,

My Abyss is filled with the cacophony of silence...  a troubling rift  in the soundscape, filled with the energy of the sounding presence about to happen... a silence that spins sound into being....

I have passed through a really difficult time that I will never understand and now find myself in a world that somehow seems strangely alien. 

What sense can I make of this stage of my experience... everything that had started four years ago suddenly tumbled down and out of my life...

So I am in a new place...  now going through radical changes in my consciousness... I step into new terrain where I don't recognize things that should be familiar...

I know there are intense energies changing the universe and penetrating my reality, and I am watching with a certain wonder and hoping that somehow I will find the language that will reveal some meaning of the riddle of the Abyss that has always haunted me...

The opera I had started for Second Avenue broke apart like brittle clay, but there were lovely clusters of music resonating as though somehow they might assemble into something even more poignant and compelling...  for it has always been the music that has sustained and inspired me, no matter what the faces and the spirits that surround me and invade my soul...

And the occasion of breaking your silence has reached across the world and awakened a moment in me, igniting a passion that clings to life and living, to beauty, truth, and wonder... you are such a splendid catalyst...

I suddenly wish I could bring us all together to celebrate the magnificent splendor of who we are... connected, but unconnected, in a universe that shimmers like the solstice moon disappearing over the rim of a hill... breaching the Abyss in the recognition that what we have created together endures and continues to resonate.

Tales from the Abyss

It's difficult to pinpoint this process of awareness that comes in like ocean tides, waves sweeping in and covering me and then receding and leaving me exposed and raw as I understand that for a moment I couldn't breathe, and I was gasping for air. Then suddenly there is a flash of consciousness, and I become aware of thoughts and ideas that were uncovered as though the sand of the beach was swept away and what was left was a kernel of truth.

It is even harder to understand that this is a fundamental flashback to points of discovery and to moments when I committed myself to believing in impossible dreams. I was also embedded in despair of a world I thought was dissolving out from under me, and there was no more reason to continue in any direction because everything was quicksand.

So into this abyss came the Trio, or perhaps my invention of the Trio was my hope that such vision for beauty and truth could be shared and become the reality of its potential. So when I asked my friends if we might adventure together for a time, it was an innocent and naive assumption that such a fusion of purpose was possible and desirable.

What followed was indeed adventure and deception. 

The Year That Was....

I am not sure what should be written in this space as I know I am entering a time of existence that is not shared by everyone. I know that I have been through the worst of years and in some ways, I am passing through the best of years.

2013 has been a a bewilderment. It has had my best moments, and it contains my greatest disappointment and despair.  I have come to appreciate how we define each other, and how the relationships we pursue transcend the ways that we survive the day to day challenges that create the continuity of our awareness. Perhaps our greatest focus is the one that forms our survival through the creation of partnerships through which we create families and populate the world. For most of us that is the ultimate focus, but I suspect there is a new time ahead in the adventure of cosmic awareness. We are on the verge of discovering ways of being that extend far beyond the notion of survival.

I am sensing a different level of exchange among those I have been fortunate enough to meet and follow their adventures.

It is true that we never really repeat anything. But we often miss the immediacy of what is happening, and the moments that pass endure as a reality we cannot really grasp because we are not equipped to enjoy the scale that forever requires.

I find that my love for all who occupy my world has deepened, and my perception of the meaning each has brought to me continues to expand to connect the past with the relentless surge of Now.

Such feeling is too intense... Too combustible, too demanding... And so I must retreat... Or be consumed by the very passion that inspires us to be the best that we can be.

This passion is the life force of us all... Until now I have been reluctant to acknowledge its power in my life and have hesitated to embrace its manifestation. I have allowed illusions to distract me, and fear to paralyze me from the true freedom of being. So as I try to understand this extraordinary balance of past, present, and future, I know that I am on the verge of creating many new ideas and works that have been brewing for decades...

This was the year that was astonishing as it surprised me through dismantling all that I thought was fixed and established, and revealed that my greatest challenges are waiting somewhere ahead...

I actually don't know if I will survive the provocations exploding all around me. I don't know if I can endure such profound beauty of awareness.

A Story That Could Be Short...

How strange,  as I approach what is described as my golden years, that I should be shook to the foundations of my feelings and emotions… As though I were a teenager overcome by emotions and fainting on the stairs.

Feeling closer to so many people... More than at any other time of my life... Feeling the joy of knowing them and being witness to the greatness that resides in each and everyone of them...

And in such deep and deftly etched feelings,  I face a dilemma that is unsolvable and also simple... So vividly simple...  in the midst of such turmoil, I touch the fabric of such joy... The joy of having known and shared so deeply --- without the slightest caution or reserve... Only to find the appearances of illusions that mock the simplicity of trust and all that was created… Yet I would not give one moment back to gain peace of mind… I am brimming over with ideas… all stemming from the inspiration begun within the majesty of such devastating beauty that comes from the source of being… of who we really are… it was not a mirage of mental fabrication… we were tangible… we were real… we were the elegance of pure connection… we were friends...

We were the innocence of trust. But maybe such innocence was my diversion. Yet, something came from  nothing... something emerged in the world that had not been there before...  it is still there, illuminated and pure, but distant, as though I have somehow wandered to new and foreign regions.

I love all that has been these final years... My awakening... My renaissance... The new work ... The incredible surge of energy that illuminates these moments....and those who have inspired and sustained me, and those friends that bonded in a moment of time... ah, but Time is so fragile... The only time machine is memory, and memories fade...

Now I feel the simultaneous loss and gain that Time brings to this moment... Yes, it is all over... Yes, it is all beginning...

It all began when the afternoon sunlight of Spring poured through the window and left me dazzled...

Embodying The World

Since I was about nine years old I have regarded consciousness as a medium for being the world and connecting to beingness and timelessness through imagination which then presences the world as emerging reality… but reality is not just isness, it is the continual becomingness…

Sorry to enlarge the words… but being and time have become so value laden that I was trying to imbue them with an urgency of NOW, but not doing it very well…

We often think of ourselves as being in the world, enveloped by the awesomeness of the planet we inhabit as well as the universe that earth inhabits. But perhaps the reality is that this is all consciousness,and it is more inside us than we are inside of anything.

Embodiment has been my way of integrating technology and the human form... my creative experiences all have sought this integration. My creative work has been about embodying technology for discovery and extending our expressive range. Through this awareness of embodiment,  the things we do take on sharper meaning, and the reason for connecting and creating becomes more focused and more purposeful.

Embodiment has been my experience since my earliest days of sports and dancing... the presencing of ourselves as the embodiment of being the world is central to understanding what the world is to us. The world inhabits us, we embody the world, and give shape, purpose, and continual unfolding of moments which is more like the flow and expansion of air that the ticking of a clock.

Consciousness is not something that exists inside a brain, it is the process of our being, creating from nothingness and evolving and changing reality. Consciousness is us embodying the world. It is not somewhere. It is everywhere, but not static and stationary... dynamic and the essence of creating and creation.

That is why everything about us is always about change.

A TEXTING MOMENT

The texting below was an exchange that took place just before midnight... Earlier I had been texting to another person and it started to go bad because the ideas were very complicated and misunderstandings started to erupt. So we decided to stop. Such negative Texting can be a source of tension and miscommunication. This can also happen in email exchanges. Having suffered through the extreme misunderstandings that can occur through cybertext, I know that such discrepancies are not trivial. Some have changed my life in ways that I wish I could take back. Once text has become an object occupying space and no longer an expression in time like conversation that vanishes into fleeting moments passing by, it can become a destructive force that gathers momentum.

But the text offered here was a spontaneous exchange. The imagery that was created in the moment will serve as a road map to the planned experience in the Greenwich Village restaurant known as Choga. LN is a noted and accomplished choreographer, multimedia artist, and educator.


Wizard: I was advised to take it slow in making changes...
This struck me as spectacularly wise.
Did I ever give you the book Science and Technology in the Arts 

LN: No.

Wizard: That big book in guest room...

LN: I looked through the book when I was there and wondered if I could get a copy.
Our legacy is in that book!

Wizard: But "taking it slow" seemed good because I thought I would be surrendering a property I have been working on for more than 50 years.
My Credo was multimedia...

LN: Yes, give yourself some time.

Wizard: Stewart Kranz was impressed and that was why I was in the book...
If you look, the images are like pictures from IMPACT...

LN: Yes! I want to teach a course and use that book!

Wizard: When I got to NYU, I had chance to implement ideas as curriculums and productions
That's why I'm Having so
Much fun with the new EXPANDED MUSIC

LN: Great! Wish we had planned for your course and mine to connect!

Wizard: NOW EXPANDING MUSIC INCLUDES THE SENSE OF TASTE AND IMPROV AT CHOGA
Let's see about next semester. I'm
Offering it again...  Will have so many students for Spring
I have a great cellist in my class.
He is from Turkey.
His mother makes cellos.

LN: Wow!!!

Wizard: He is playing her instrument...
He is so sensitive and musical

LN: Does be compose?

Wizard: We have terrific violinist ...
Cellist seems afraid to improvise and we are
Taking all of us there tomorrow on video.
We are officially having class in Choga.

LN: This is unbelievable. I just came from a meeting
with a very important person and I suggested we use a
music composition with violin, cello and flute!

Wizard: They now have multimedia.
Choga has three screens and good sound system

LN: You never cease to amaze me !

Wizard: We are linking movement to notation
Our dancer will be our notation...
We will play her as she moves...
We will use both physical and emotional space as the score.
LN: Are you actually going to notate (symbols on a page)?

Wizard: I wish I had that Korean Artist... But yes... we will ask some students to map it.
Thanks for reminding me to take materials!
The strategy of getting musicians aware of embodiment  has really worked...
Last week everyone choreographed each other...
Conceptually this has been growing with me
and that IMPACT student Connie who was interested in embodiment

LN: One of the basic techniques is learning how to open to using space

Wizard: Not sure what you mean
How to open using space

LN: If you take you arm out to the side, it has a certain extension.
But if you take your arm out with the intention of expanding to the length of the room
You fill more space
You take in an idea

Wizard: Interesting... We use similar analogy with the voice

LN: Let the body open to dimension

Awareness is everything

You can do all kinds of movement awareness exercises.  I make them up. Try this one :

Bring your chin to your chest
Now left your chin with no particular intention
Now bring your chin to chest again

This time think about throat opening
Revealing throat
Do you feel your throat more?

Wizard: Yes

LN: I'm not sure that came across

Wizard: And I could see or hear filling the open throat with sound

LN: If you bend your elbow,
Now think of opening at the joint
To straighten your arm,

Wizard: I forgot to mention that Choga has this big open
Space in front of bar... So it is like a stage... a place for embodiment...

LN: Embodiment is about intention

Wizard: Yes, I agree
But it is also about Beingness

LN: And Nothingness ..

Wizard: And Heidegger

LN: Sartre

Wizard:  I'm going to take this text and turn it into my blog

Languaging and the Worlding of the World

Yes, writing takes time... And we have to take the time or time disappears, evaporates without any words to mark its passing.

Now that I feel the end of my time passing faster and faster, I regret all the poems unwritten, all the songs still inside, all the music left in the silence... The books unwritten...

Wait! Just one more moment!  Ah... Now the saying "time waits for no one" tolls like an ostinato across the emptiness of mind...

Howl is such a great movie. It has just been released for the home market. As good as the poem is, the movie may be better... Howl is about language... The essence of words and the eloquence of their sounds that transcend meaning...

I seem to have lost power like a car running out of gas or a blackout that suddenly descends upon a city... Not without warning... But with an impersonal  indifference ...

This text is empty... Just clicks across the screen... Taps of the true digital wasteland of fingers and thumbs eking out letters and words...

I am a romantic. I do believe in forever, even though I know I will soon disappear as everyone has before me and as will those who follow.  Yet for me,  forever persists as a premonition of a deeper truth. It flies in the face of the reality of the universe. Newtonian Physics describes a universe that  disperses energy so that eventually existence as we know it comes to a close, the law of Entropy.

Believing in forever is like believing in fairy tales. But it is the stuff that drives us to great achievements. The stuff that dreams are made of.

My friend says compose something, create something to pull you through nights of despair. But nothing comes... except I find myself echoing the Cole Porter song In the Still of the Night  because I recently had an epiphany that Cole Porter was summing up the existential question:

Do you love me, as I love you
Are you my life to be, my dream come true
Or will this dream of mine fade out of sight
Like the moon growing dim, on the rim of the hill
In the chill, still, of the night

This is sung to the night, to the universe... wondering if the love we feel in being alive will be returned by the world, the life we love. Or is our place in existence just a dream that fades out of sight like the moon growing dim....

In the chill,

Still,

of the night.

The hoped-for return of the world loving us is an illusion fading out of sight, like the moon that will be lost to the earth as it escapes its orbit... we see our hope growing dim on the rim of the hill until it is gone.  And all that we thought was as enduring as the universe is just illusion...

There is this shimmering moment in time that I think is forever...It is in the fire of imagination and the inspiration of those that inhabit my experience and my world...

Creating new work is more than refuting despair, it is making the world and creating ourselves in the emerging moments... evidence that we here and we are enduring... it is the worlding of the world.

Enjoying Daylight Savings Time

In these dwindling hours before the change to Daylight Savings Time, I'm still contemplating my options for the future and the Hemingway Solution.

I saw Running from Crazy  which is Mariel Hemingway's look at her family and the tragedies that plagued her... But no insight... not really... In the end it was just about her...

There were wonderful glimpses of her grandfather. But those came more from Margeaux Hemingway and her unfinished quest to retrace and relive the path of her grandfather... She took her own life at 40.

There are these moments that confront us where the prongs of possibilities enable us to map acceptable pathways. But I suppose as we grow older, those options become less profuse, more limited, and then, perhaps, none at all.

I'm about to make decision which will change things forever for me. It is the only decision to be made for what is right and just, and yet, deep down there is something not quite right... It is political and controlled by much that has gone wrong in this modern age of human relations.

Yet, from my perspective, I have had four years of extended discovery that was unexpected and changed the direction of my life. There was a touching reaching into the emptiness of my despair. This touching launched my renaissance, my quest, my inspiration to create something new and meaningful... to create something worthwhile that might have lasting impact.

Such was the transformation stemming from four years ago when my hope was renewed. A close friend once remarked that without hope there is no reason for living.

It is difficult to make sense of the wilderness where I have wandered since stumbling so abruptly a few months ago. The world that seem so clear was suddenly clouded by the impediments of my own personal maya, my illusions and deep misunderstandings. So experience has been at a deeper level for me than the past encounters of despair and dilemma. I am joyful-sad, grateful-sorry,  inspired-empty...  I am at that great divide where I look at the terrain that defines the journey...

But it will be great to have the extra hour... I wish that hour could be the doorway to infinity. There is so much I would do... So much I would launch... Bring so much to closure... Discover new beauty which is always the truth about being... Start new projects never meant to come to closure, but just to be in the ecstasy of perpetual becoming...

I have this extra hour to reflect on knowing those who have touched my life and opened the wonder of who each of us is to each other... All incredibly connected...

But also sadly caught in the web of illusion where we seem alone and trapped by our own reflections and delusions...

If this extra hour could only bring us all together in the simple wonder of our beautiful beingness.... Wouldn't that be a moment of awareness worth celebrating forever?

Wasn't that what Fellini was saying in 8½ ? Come down out of that intellectual scaffolding and simply enjoy each other....

I do believe in forever ---despite all the dismal predictions of entropy and the so called dissipation of spiritual awareness.

Yes... Let's enjoy... EN-JOY.  Enjoy is to put joy into all that we experience.

I am putting all my joy into this extra hour... the joy of all those who touch my life and continue to sustain me through the vanishing moments of Time Remembered and Time Forgotten...

None

Crossroads...

New era, but no new me. 

How many renaissances can come in one lifetime?

How many loves come and go 
and still have that one muse that moves to miracles?
 
How many thoughts remain beneath the surface, waiting to erupt?

How many inspirations beyond the horizon?

How many sadnesses can one endure, how many disappointments?

How much longing goes unrequited and endures?

REMEMBERING LINDA

Linda first popped into my life when I had an office on the 6th floor of the Education Building and had just finished my stint as Chair of Music and Performing Arts and assumed directorship of the music education program. She struck me as buoyant and youthful, and reminded me of a bobbysoxer from the days of my past. She was a charming southern belle, and she was passionate about music. She had visited the musicology department in Arts and Sciences but did not feel at home there, so she decided to seek out the School of Education which is now called The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.

Right from the start I felt a rapport with Linda. I could sense her passion for music and her determination to continue to grow. She said little about her family life, except to say that her husband Greg was undergoing a crisis in his health and that she was devoted to caring for him and his well being. But she had a sense that music was calling her to explore new possibilities for herself. She wanted to know if NYU music education would provide her the freedom and support to do serious research. She pointed out she was a teacher, but she was also an organist with an enthusiasm for scholarly excellence. "Your experience will be what you make it,'' I said, "and you will find strong support and room to be original." She began her study as a part-time student with a true love for learning. She was an explorer and was constantly researching, writing, working for causes, and engaging her students in her personal and musical discoveries.

Her presence with her colleagues was uplifting, sustaining, and refreshing. She was constantly reassuring her fellow doctoral cohorts. She was critical but constructive, engaged in dialectical exchange, and most of all, a source of inspiration and encouragement. In everything she touched, there was a thirst for excellence and quality.

Her NYU odyssey began about seven years ago, and it has been a joy to be a witness to her inquiry and to help shape its direction. As she was entering the final stages of her research we made plans to meet in October, but then she sent a message that it was determined she was fighting cancer. I was optimistic that she would recover. As Christmas was approaching, she encouraged me to finish putting music to a Christmas poem I was writing. On November 24, she asked "How is the song coming?" Actually, I was so discouraged by her illness that I was struggling.

In replying to how the song was going, I wrote "Slowly... Trying to be traditional with a twist... Know what I need to do, but doesn't jell. Waiting in Favela Cubana for brunch with a friend ... Nice cold day with the promise of winter in the air..."

Linda wrote back: "Yeah, even looked like snow earlier.  Maybe that could be in the song, too.  I love it that you are such a Romantic, in addition, of course, to being a profound creator of new music!"

And so these lyrics came so fast:

"Maybe it is snowing
Christmas from above
Maybe winds are blowing
New Year hopes of love."

And these lines came as I thought of Linda and the extraordinary adventure we shared in music and her research and the ordeal she was facing:

"Fears disappear
And all that's here
Is all the Love of every year..
We see the truth of who we are
As bright as any Christmas star."

It was with great joy for me to learn that the music therapist at Sloan Kettering sang the song for her while Linda was able to follow the score with Greg's help.

Sadly, we lost Linda. Her husband Greg sent a message: "Following 2 weeks of Hospice care in our home, Linda died on Monday afternoon, January 28th.  Our daughter and I were with her, and our son joined us soon afterward. "

Her research was on the Third Chorale Prelude of Cesar Franck, his final composition which was not finished. Although fully notated, on the day he intended to put in the registration and interpretative markings he passed away, thus leaving a mystery concerning his intentions for the work. Linda's research is original, inquisitive, and inspiring. Almost in symmetry to her musical inspiration Franck, Linda had completed her research, transcribed the materials and needed only to add the finishing touches to her dissertation when she left us.

She was just beginning as a professor at NYU, mentoring M.A. students with their thesis requirements. I see her touches in the department everywhere. She continued to attend Proposal Seminar long after she had finished coursework to listen to our critiques and comments about the ongoing research. Her presence was such a source of inspiration. I see her still, sitting in the seminar, still inspiring students, still looking to me like a bobbysoxer in her pale blue sweater, wonderful smile, and buoyant optimism.

Discovering Digital Awareness

Sunday morning,
Sitting for breakfast
With world-wide strangers...
Across from me,
A young man connected
To the ethereal digital world
Scrolls among his multimedia:
His laptop, tablet, and smart phone...
Occasionally tapping keys
And smiling sardonically,
Reveling in revelations
Echoing across synthetic synapses
Of some emerging global awareness
Manifest in a solitary compression
Of infinite possibility.

Maybe There's A Christmas

Maybe it is snowing
Christmas from above
Maybe winds are blowing
New Year hopes of love.
Maybe there's a Christmas
Just for you and me.
Maybe we can make it
All it's meant to be...
More than gifts and deck the halls
More than trees and shopping malls
Fears disappear
And all that's here
Is all the Love of every year..
We see the truth of who we are
As bright as any Christmas star.
All the years keep passing,
Falling flakes of snow.
Each of them is different,
How sad to see them go.
Maybe there's a christmas
Deep inside our hearts
Maybe peace is coming
Maybe now it starts.
So it keeps on snowing
And the winds keep blowing,
And the year is going
Fading fast away
Maybe here's the Christmas
Everyone can see
Maybe we're the miracles
Always meant to be.
Maybe it is Christmas.
Surely this is Christmas,
Yes, it must be Christmas today.

Copyright December, 2012 
John Gilbert
All Rights Reserved

Still Singing

Two years ago I wrote about a poem from my Poet's Passage that was a challenge to myself: "I Still Have Songs to Sing." I have continued to sing, and now resume a project that is more challenging yet, but perhaps possessing some potential to create and bring something new into the world. Actually as I am writing this, I am listening to Lost Works, a short tone poem that was part of a series. As I listen to it, I find it totally new... hearing things I didn't know were there. When one visits the website of Poet's Passage, it plays automatically.

Time has passed, and I am a different poet now. I read the words of the past and listen to past inventions with a new ear. Time has dissolved my ties to past works. I hold no secrets to their emergence. I listen to Lost Works and wonder why I didn't do more works like this. The orchestration of new instruments is rich, and the textures are sometimes profound. I listen with wonder. "Did I do that..." I ask myself, words falling silent in an empty room.

In the emptiness of this chamber, I hear new sounds... my fingers wander over the keys as though guided by some inner force. I recognize some fragments, but they grow in different directions than the past, they find new pathways and diversions.

I realize I never knew who I was or even now who I am. I stand outside myself hearing the collective sounds that now define my identity, realizing that the filter of my mind transforms them into some mysterious substance of myself. Then I understand that we share this filtering. Each of us filters infinite possibilities into discrete realities that define us and define each other.

My voice is different now and yet the same. I am still searching and stumbling across neglected terrain and finding new miracles. But I am confronted by the hastening of Time. I see the constellations of my existence racing away from each other faster than the speed of light. I am confronted by sense of loss of the past and the lost presence of those who were fellow explorers who supported and inspired me. They have gone on to other feasts, and I still stumble in the accelerated debris rendezvousing at destinations yet unknown.

Too much distracted, I must remember to sing.

Final Hours

This is the final post for a difficult year, a year filled with extremes, with challenges and stellar accomplishments, with gains and losses. Posts to this Blog this year have been infrequent, but they have been serious journeys of inquiry.

Perhaps the greatest gain has been the discovery that the only we gift we really have is time and that whatever time might be, it becomes transformed when we create something which indelibly stamps the moment with a tangible and palpable presence that carries its beingness into the present and into the continuing ongoingness of Time.  We are creating the fabric of meaning that is inextricably the texture of Time itself.  This transformative act is intertwined as the process and product of humankind enriched by the depth and multiplicity of consciousness that erupts into singular awareness.

Time is the essence of creation.  It is original burst of awareness that created the texture of becoming. We can literally look at the past, since we exist in the context of the speed of light, which we use to measure the presencing of now and to peer backward through Time perceived as Space. With more powerful instruments we can look ever further back into the "beginning" of Time, in search of that moment of ignition that launched the flow from nothingness into somethingness.

My last post, until now was on my birthday, that marked the beginning of Time's gift to me of itself. I didn't post again because I thought that maybe that was my last post, and that I was in my final days. But then I realized that we are all in our final days. All of us confront each moment just as each moment confronts us to extract meaning, to experience and savor the essence unfolding as conscious awareness of the present, of Now.

Central to the creation of Now is the understanding of its finite properties.  Nothing is forever, and even as we create to savor and deepen our awareness of being, the knowledge that our possession of Time is limited, is finite, is hurtling to the edge of a singularity.  The singularity of the Black Hole remains a metaphor and mystery... there is a sense that Time itself stops and a dimension unknown to our understanding redefines reality, perhaps dissolves into another parallel reality. Perhaps the universe itself is simply the conscious awareness of the evolving isness.

The Mayans are said to understand that the year 2012 would be the final days of the universe, observing that the universe will end on 12/21/2012.  Yet, I celebrate this new year knowing that the hours unfolding hold the promise of fulfillment, of extraordinary creation and wondrous discovery.  Our experience of Time is not arbitrary.  Our connection with Time unfolding is the only reality we witness... it is an energy exploding, illuminating consciousness as dynamic awareness. Each possession of Now is unique and singular and in this incandescent aliveness we embrace the possibilities on the leading edge of Time as our gift of choice and creating.

In these final days of 2011 I have written new text, poetry, and music... each instance as a connection of time and celebrating the discovery of what each moment contained...   I think I look back on those moments of creation, but actually those moments are contained in my awareness of now, which is pulse of Infinite Awareness. I can see that everything is the yin and the yang, but there is that infinite pause of silence where opposites meet... some call it the silence, the emptiness... and from that comes the substance of our creating. In these final moments I am punctuating time with text in our electronic consciousness. For me it is an act of creating meaning for these final moments, not as what is being said, but as something that is in the act of becoming.

So for this planet at this time, we end an old year and begin a new one. It belongs only to us, but is infinitely replicated. It is our celebration of Time itself. This is the one true religion that unites us all in spite of ourselves.

The Integrity of Conscious Awareness

I am passing through uncharted waters at the point where conventional practice is to note the moment of coming into the world and to celebrate it.  So I have friends who click me as is the custom in these modern days, and one or two have sent electronic cards full of the right words and images to call attention that today is passing by, and I'm still here. These waters are uncharted as each day that carves out a place in Time is always new.  It is the newness of things that attracts us, but looking back at these days, as they enter memory and gradually crumble into fragments of remembrance, becomes more complex as you reach that point when the days grow short.  And indeed they do,  "the days grow short when you reach September."  Would that I were really at September of my years, but I know the year is late and "I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."

In the incandescence of intense awareness I embrace those who continue to define my existence, who have nourished me through their response and their dialogic challenge to my conscious awareness.  Thought is the one dimension that moves faster than light, and I have entered parallel universes with such astonishing speed that I see our notions of reality are so primitive and uninformed. We have such richness and depth in our experiences that we could spend lifetimes trying to decode them, and we do. Isn't this what authors do all the time in their exploring and constructing new realities? 

It has been observed that nothing in the known universe contradicts Newton's law of entropy where energy (and matter) dissipates until finally all order disappears. The ordered universe is rushing headlong into disorder.  But there is one problem with Newton's observation: it doesn't include life, or the emergence of thinking, and finally consciousness. Life indeed does evolve toward greater order. Newton's universe is a machine, running like clockwork, but running down.  We are not in that universe, but standing somewhere observing it.

What has energized my thinking and action has been conscious awareness which is more than just consciousness.  This awareness is powerful and faster than the speed of light. It can leap to new realities and new awareness in an instant of insight and understanding. Some might describe this as a spiritual dimension, seeking some way of accounting for experience that is outside of our physical world bound by Newton's laws.

So now as I receive the best wishes in passing from friends and acquaintances, I appreciate that they are celebrating an event I had no control over. I do have prebirth memories, and I do note the days of birth and immediately following.  I still can see my father's blue eyes and his smile as he held me on a pillow in his lap and smiled down at me. I had an instance of insight that I had been particularized, and there was no way out, and what followed was an journey of learning how to survive, how to overcome each day, how to follow some path whose destiny was yet to be revealed.

I understand Hemingway's observations and the comments of existentialists who posit that while we have no control over how we come into this world, we do have a choice as to when and how we leave it.  From the standpoint of existentialism, life is meaningless.  We have the choice to create meaning, and our integrity stems from creating meaning and to understand that death is inevitable, but meaningless. Hemingway had reached a point where he believed  he could no longer create meaning with his life. The one remaining act was the deliberate choice to decide when and how to die. I do perceive we each must make meaning through our acts and choices. Creating meaning is our means for overcoming existential angst.

I just finished reading Yukio Mishima, a Japanese author who took his life in 1970.  He wrote an astonishingly lucid book about a Japanese officer and his wife who chose to end their lives as a final act of giving meaning to their life. Their deaths were an act of honor and bravery. The wife witnessed his death to celebrate his courage and a life of commitment to his country. She cherished her role as witness and followed him in death. Their final shared moments served to climax a life of constructed meaning. Their awareness of life and each other was never so vivid as in their final moments.

All of this now leaps out in vivid clarity in these unfolding days of September. Where once I looked for the meaning of life, I know that there is no answer to that question except the palpable destiny of my journey that constructs significance in an ever unfolding context.   At this juncture of my 75th year, I have more ideas, creative energy, and concrete projects than in years past, and I attribute this to new connections with others at a deeper level of conscious awareness.  There are those in my life that infuse me with a deeper sense of commitment to pursuing a universe of consciousness where life actually transcends and moves in the opposite direction of entropy. This maintains an integrity of conscious awareness at a level I have not experienced until now. But the most exciting prospect is that it is continuing to evolve.