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Arbitrary but Fixed

It seems better to start an ambitious project with the first of the month, or the Solstice, or a birthday, right? Though by the time I post this, it will be tomorrow. July 2 doesn’t have the same ring to it, ambition-wise.

Maybe time started 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Maybe it will stretch out as long as long. Maybe matter will evaporate and space will stretch out as far as far. Maybe when I die it will still be near the beginning of time, and, relatively speaking, near the end of matter, and maybe any starting date I choose will vanish from the weight of insignificance. Most likely.

But still, I like to pick a Good Time to start. Like they say in math, it will be (more or less) arbitrary but fixed. It will be today.

Today I will start blogging again. I blogged back when I had only one house, and a husband, and what seemed like an arbitrary and certainly not fixed number of sheep, cats, children, and sycophants. Then I stopped. Blogging.

Now I have another house but haven’t given up on the first one. There are goats instead of sheep and dogs instead of cats and lots and lots of bird feeders with hourly rackets of wings and alarm calls and weekly projects to coax the woodpecker babies out of the house again.

Living with my arbitrary but fixed mind(s) is like living with a magpie. It (they) bothers everyone around it and picks up shiny objects to hoard or fight over or to eat. I probably will forget a category or two, but mainly what it goes for is sustainability/resilience, history/politics, elementary school teaching, art practice, fiddling, and philosophy/religion/psychology. This leaves out big fat areas of life. No sports, no movie stars, and very little ... well, I was going to say fashion, but that’s not true. Or cooking, that’s not true either. Anyway, trying to balance my sentence with charming lists will lead me astray and so suffice it to say that the above list is good, for now. One thing I didn’t do last time I blogged, but will try to be better at, is to include tags. Surely I’ll be able to identify the subject of the day, no matter how many side tracks I wander down.

Today the subject, arbitrary but fixed, is fiddle practice.

So, the thing is, that I am a kinesthetic learner, mostly. I can’t think without drawing a picture, or going over to the place where the thing manifests, or, I hope, writing–inviting both right and left hands to fiddle around on the keyboard to shape the thing into something I can understand.

My dad was tone deaf, and my mom was in a polyphonic choir for her seven years of being a refugee in Bavaria after World War II. When I was eight, she gave me a wooden recorder, a kind of whistle used in the Middle Ages and still used today to teach music with. I loved that thing! I played and played, teaching myself with the Trapp Family Singer’s instruction book.

When I was twelve, around puberty, something shifted in my brain and I realized that all those sharps and flats? You were supposed to play them! I’d ignored them as useless fluff. If you know anything about music, you know that basically, unless you are in the key of C, you CANNOT ignore the sharps or flats that go with the key signature. The music limps.

It took me four years to develop my ear enough to notice. My mother, who had said nothing, was a saint.

Since then, I’ve sampled a squillion instruments, from the flute to the piano to the banjo, working through the first lesson book and then ... dropping it, though I do often cycle back to things again. Most notably the piano and recorder.

Now, after having fiddled at the fiddle for many years, I’ve started to take lessons. It’s not just that being self taught leads to repetitive motion injuries, but that I am well aware that I still sound pretty dumb at it. A real live teacher is helping me with how to hold my body, and is getting irritated at things I do that I hadn’t even noticed.

I don’t have a natural talent, and probably actually have an anti-talent?

Well, daily practice, of course. But that’s only going to get me so far. I don’t have enough lifespan to rely on being listenable with just that. So, recently I decided to take it a bit further, in addition to taking lessons.

Firstly, I got the app TE Tuner for my phone. It tells me whether I’m playing sharp or flat (and it’s always one of those!). I spend a few minutes daily trying to get the intonations of the notes right. Progress is slow but not zero.

Secondly, I’m trying to move from what I know, which is how to play from written music, to what I struggle with, which is playing from memory. Who knows, some day I might add playing by ear to this scheme, but for now, I’m focusing on memory.

This probably sounds unbearably primitive to you musicians, but for me it is super difficult. I think the main barrier right now is that fiddle tunes have eight bars in each section, and I can’t count up to eight while playing. I drop half-bars, or add them. I’ve tried a few ideas like moving my body in a pattern adding up to eight to keep myself in rhythm, but all the systems I try seem like they are more trouble than actually spending the time to memorize the particular tune. I’m still working on figuring this one out. Anyway, it would be an improvement if I could tell whether I’d dropped or added a phrase while playing from memory.

The final thing I’m working on now is bowing. Fiddling is a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy. The left hand determines the intonation, and the right, bowing hand the rest of it. Volume. Timbre. Rhythm. Lightness or gravitas.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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The Milky Way and Me

6jun18 Today JP showed me a model of the galaxy based on NASA data. It was just short of a religious experience. Something that fits on my palm! But is bigger than hubris, or grief, or fear, or basically anything I do or feel or think!

The experience of being alive is loud and relentless yet curiously resistant to description. For me it’s like sitting under an alder tree in summer, with the leaves rustling like crazy and sunlight dancing around and birds singing their heads off and insects crawling through the hairs on my cheek and all of it quite clearly bigger and stranger than what I think it is like.

When I’ve been alone for a long time, immediate experiences often fall away and I feel the pulse and beat of the earth beneath me, and the giddy wheeling of my home galaxy around its neighbors, the endless falling away into deep space and time and entropy. Sometimes it comes with violin music. Maybe I’ll transcribe some of that music for you.

Anyway, today I was gathering twigs for the wood stove, since it was a clammy morning and I wanted to do finicky work and it was too damp feeling to wash dishes, which is how I usually warm up my hands. So I lit a fire instead. But as I was gathering the twigs, I once again felt how much on the bare crusty surface of the earth we are. How vast and heavy and basso the earth beneath is, and how the continents float on a deep sea of magma, just rocky foam, and on top of that foam is the barest smudge of algae, rats, corals, nematodes, lawyers, and blooming hawthorns. And me and almost everything I love, too, of course.

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Meds

As I age, I am re-discovering that mind and body are inextricably linked. I’ve got very high blood pressure, and am currently taking a daily pill for it that makes my extremities tingle and my heart flutter. That’s fine, more or less. I think it also gives me extra ADHD, over and above what I usually have. That’s not fine. I keep forgetting to test this out by taking the pill at different times of day, or by scheduling an appointment with my nurse practitioner. Thoughts and plans slip my mind, skittering and giggling as they go. 

My students used to joke about how I had a mind like a steel trap. Today the teeth are bent and the steel is rusty, possibly due to that one teeny little white pill. Possibly not, of course, but I chose to believe that there is an easy fix.

And then I look at the many crazy-ass people out there who surely don’t think before they act, or who seem to have have a deeply flawed set of tactics. Maybe for them too, it’s physiology instead of education or morality.

It’d be nice to be able to run diagnostics on people the way they do on my Honda. Plug in, get something like P1300 Random Misfire, and then slot in the replacement parts and done.

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Solar Eclipse

The eclipse today was lovely.  At the office, we made pinholes in pieces of paper, pressed them against the window, and looked at the eraser-sized circles of light that were projected through the hole onto another sheet of paper. Eventually, the eclipse happened, and the small circles turned into crescents. Later, they turned back into circles. 

It was a little like seeing whales. You are in a boat, and then somebody gasps, "Whales!" You crowd to that end of the boat, and in the distance you see a few black marks in the water, maybe a wobbling line that is the male's six-foot high dorsal fin, or maybe a small smudge that is the female's. Then the marks disappear. You have seen whales!

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sumptuous

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