“I’ve always understood singing as an act of self-abnegation, the creation of beauty through the annihilation of one’s own ego.”
…
“Humility is the smart bet. I’ve watched singer after singer and academic after academic take themselves too seriously. In doing so they shut the most valuable things out and fail to fulfill their potential. And so I’ve come to respect the quiet ones, the still small voices who spend their lives keeping the rest of us in tune.”
…
“I have no desire to sing alone.”
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“Musicianship to me means phrasing, emotion, intonation. A musician is someone who feels the music in the people around him. Not someone with an arbitrary genetic fluke who shows it off.”
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“My teacher encourages her students to imagine a world full of objects whose job is to help them. The piano, the mirror, the tuning fork – all objects which exist to serve the purpose of their own self-improvement: “The mirror is the singer’s best friend.” But the more I take up this task, the more seriously I feel my own misgivings. Where the eager soloists see a world composed of objects that seek to glorify them, I see furnishings that point out how far I have to go, materials that push me back into the arms of the ensemble, which insist that what little beauty I have to give to the world can be won only through my own elision. The soloists think the mirror is their best friend, but I see only a world where the mirror feeds off of its prey, where the soloists shuffle eagerly up to the mirror’s horizon that they might, through their own narcissism, be engulfed by it. Perhaps it is the singer that is the mirror’s best friend.”
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“Attempting to navigate these narrows is my task now – to find the ways in which I can harness an urge to self-improvement to the ethical requirements of beauty. The way I can justify my own self-absorption by reference to the music that will, hopefully, be created as a result.”
I have recently returned from the annual Gulf Islands Celtic Music Festival, which can only be described as “a musician’s festival.” There is very little there to interest a non-musical member of the public save perhaps the Saturday evening concert, but even that is something of an in joke full of sly references and subtle quotes and moves within tune sets that perhaps echo some of the fun of the days sessions.
Indeed most of the festival consists of musicians sitting in circles and playing tunes with one another, usually starting at 11:00am and going straight through to 1 or 2 in the morning, with only the briefest of breaks for food.
After playing like this all weekend, my body feels as if it has just played three full games of hockey. I am tired and sore, but incredibly uplifted and that is because I have spent three days in what Alex Golub calls the annihilation of the ego.
I must strongly echo Alex’s sentiments about making music in and ensemble. In fact, as far as my practice of Irish flute goes I would consider myself a session musician in that my best form and more pleasurable activity is playing in sessions with others. When called upon to perform, I can and do (as I did Saturday night) but I am not comfortable there and, with the exception of a performance in front of 600 people at Folklife in Seattle several years ago, I am never at my best on a stage. It’s not that I am uncomfortable, it’s that I’m not able to completely fuse my ego with the entire group of people in room because only some of us are playing.
In another place I sing choral music in an evensong chorale which is a very spiritual service. I sing with a small group of six or seven other voices and what we do is not so much performance as facilitate a spiritual experience for the handful of people who come to hear us. These are deeply transcendent experiences for me because i am not only making music with friends but we are participating in a larger project, which includes the “listeners” in designing a spiritual experience together.
There is much to learn from this, including the fact that in acts of performance or communication (including reading and writing) we can choose to operate at the level that recognizes that there is a reader and a writer or we can look beyond that and see that what the reader and the writer are doing is jointly contributing to something bigger. Something people might call culture, something others might call spirit.
Inviting the reader to be a writer and the writer to read is like inviting the singer to become a listener and the listener, by holding space for and consenting to be silent, to become a conspirator with the singer. A true conspirator, one who breathes with another.
I have been thinking about Jonathon Delacour and his recent play in the fields of meaning. And this quote triggered something:
“How do you interpret a thing? Don’t treat it indirectly or symbolically – look directly at it and choose spontaneously that aspect of it which is most immediately striking – the striking flash in consciousness or awareness, the most vivid, what sticks out in your mind.”
— John Welwood, Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path
This is what is going on: noticing the vivid internal responses to external things. Gazing upon their surfaces and trying to bore deeply into their cores. When we apprehend something – a photograph, a quote, a snippet of poetry, a story — we see only the surface that the creator is presenting. The interpretation is about us. The inward journey we take to the centre of the thing is really a dive into our own souls, our own worlds, enfolded in our own hearts. The rush of awareness — Welwood’s “striking flash” — is our own physiological response to the depth we have apprehended. It comes from nowhere else.
We are deep resevoirs of wisdom, I think. All of our realities and our fictions blur in the cauldron of our interior lives. When we experience dissonance and alarm when this line is transcended, we are experiencing our own realities collapsing, the shaky uncertainty of worlds colliding.
Quote via whiskey river
Lola Ridge (1873-1941) was an Irish born American poet who wrote about the immigrant communities in early 20th century America. She wrote both as an outsider (writing about other ethnicities) and as one who shared the experience of being displaced and shifted. This poem is from The Ghetto and Other Poems, published around 1920.
THE FIDDLER
In a little Hungarian cafe
Men and women are drinking
Yellow wine in tall goblets.Through the milky haze of the smoke,
The fiddler, under-sized, blond,
Leans to his violin
As to the breast of a woman.
Red hair kindles to fire
On the black of his coat-sleeve,
Where his white thin hand
Trembles and dives,
Like a sliver of moonlight,
When wind has broken the water.
Amazing. She describes a medicine wheel, a holistic rendering in a tiny picture of passion. Yellow wine, red hair, black sleeve, white hand. Men and women drinking together. This fiddler working for all his worth, scraping out gypsy music, melodies and rhythms that tremble and dive like his hand, like the surface of a lake at night, the unity of human creation and nature, both emerging out of motion, the bow across the strings, the wind on the water.
Beauty arises out of subtle motion, scattering notes and light everywhere.
Oh, lay my ashes on the wind
That blows across the sea.
And I shall meet a fisherman
Out of Capri,And he will say, seeing me,
“What a Strange Thing!
Like a fish’s scale or a
Butterfly’s wing.”
A couple of weeks ago, in my little rant about leaving the war to the warbloggers I mentioned something about wanting to pursue to purposeful exploration of beauty as my gesture of peace in the world. Since then, I have really been looking for some kind of manifesto to hang a renewed blog practice on, and today I found it, serendipitously, as always.
In this article in today’s Globe and Mail [link rot warning], the architects Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind visit the University of Toronto to provide advice to graduate students.
In dispensing advice, the sages held nothing back, and in their comments sometimes sounded like Buddhist abbots reprimanding monks:
The student who attempted to present a yoga and mental wellness centre as the exoskeleton of an insect faced harsh words from Mr. Gehry: “Your premise is precarious from the beginning. An insect is infinitely more beautiful than anything you can produce — so where can you go with this? ”
Indeed. Where can I go with this?
Why the hell am I keeping this blog anyway, except perhaps to notice and propagate small things of beauty and peace, be they auroras or poems, conversations with my son or cabinets. In fact, I came to the realization today, reading this article that in fact this weblog could choose as it’s mission an exploration of the architecture of beauty. Daniel Libeskind:
Mr. Libeskind’s design studio at U of T began with a red book. He gathered 140 ideas, one for each day of the spring session. The book was assembled with studio assistant Robert Claiborne and bound in Berlin. It includes musings by W. S. Burroughs, images of the Milky Way spiral by Charles and Ray Eames, a falling cat from Scientific American and a map of Treasure Island. Handed copies of the little book at the beginning of the term, the students were asked to choose an image or quote that would allow them to enter what Mr. Libeskind calls “their worlds of architecture.”
This interests me greatly. The idea of compiling a source book on the architecture of beauty, a commonplace book of inspiration. And so I am thinking that this might be the new direction for this blog. This is in some ways the purpose I have been trying to find.
I have an innate compulsion to write in this space, but I have rejected out of hand the chimerical identities of the metabloggers, the a-list types, the warbloggers, and the design gurus. Instead I am drawn to those blogs which I consider my inspiration, like The Obvious, wood s lot, riley dog and, more recently, In A Dark Time (where, coincidentally, Loren is wondering similar things), Caterina and This Public Address. And what those blogs do for me is offer something and give me a way into it, although ironically wood s lot and riley dog have a minimum of interpretation. So much of what they suggest is in the context of how it is presented.
I don’t claim any authority to discern beauty or even to provide interpretations that are earth shatteringly astute. But things catch my eye, and then they catch my breath, and that sensation is something to treasure and reflect upon. Because in a world like this, one which comes streaming through phone lines and cables to whirl turbidly on my desktop, a little clear vision is always a welcome thing.
I don’t pretend that this shift in parking lot’s mission will be discernable instantly. There will be no design tinkering, and no shift in basic approach. There may be a little more of me here, and a little more room for you.
Frank Gehry has some advice for me:
For another student, Mr. Gehry suggested there were brave beginnings but: “You lost the fantasy. You got scared. Admit it.”
At Mr. Gehry’s request, the student removed part of a football-shaped building from his model and positioned it on the floor.
“Hey, it’s all there,” Mr. Gehry said. “Throw all this stuff out and start again.”
Interested in joining me?