the still point

It's hard to describe my love affair with my piano. Yesterday I thanked Mom for not getting rid of it; I'm the only person who plays it, and it does take up a good chunk of the dining room. Coming back to it was like...like taking a walk along an old path in a patch of woods bordering a town you haven't visited in years, and just as you stop on the pine-needled trail to look down at the creek pouring through the gorge a remnant of a poem you used to recite from memory just at that spot seizes your brain and you lose track of time completely trying to summon to your consciousness the entire piece. Or seeing an old friend for the first time in many years and watching the past collide with the present, the half-forgotten expressions, the sound of your friend's laughter, the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, and swimming in the wash of what used to be, what still is, and what has changed.

There's a trick to triggering memory. Once again, my technique at the piano was never masterful, and I didn't advance to hugely intricate compositions (more's the pity; I'd love to take lessons again); but I loved expression, and while I went off on a Jim Brickman spree toward the end of my lessons my senior year in high school (my gosh, it's been almost ten years), now as I leaf through the old books and sit down to old music, I find that I still love best the classical pieces. Nonetheless, I started out with Jim Brickman a few weeks ago, for the excuse of playing Christmas music too early, and found that, in his case, the trick is to fudge it. His pieces are fluffy and pretty and easy to listen to, full of eighth and sixteenth notes and tons of syncopation, and having once gone to great pains to place each note just so, metronomically, it's just a matter of getting back into that mindset to gloss over the playing, glancing at a string of notes and seeing the chord they piece together and making of it what you will.

Unfortunately I didn't find that very interesting; fluffy and pretty and easy to listen to don't present a strong compulsion to the player. (Sorry, Jim.) So then it was Grieg for a couple of weeks, and then a lovely simple little piece, "To a Wild Rose," by Edward MacDowell; and finally, tremblingly, this week I returned to my oldest and most passionate love, Claude Debussy.

I love Debussy for so many reasons. As the only Impressionist composer during the Impressionist period of the arts, he wrote his pieces expressly for expression. If you play his compositions in technical, metronomic perfection, you've lost the soul of the music; and finding the soul of the music is what I've always loved best. Kerry selected Debussy for me for that reason, as a way to rescue me from my miserable and terrified method of playing grilled into me by my first teacher. I believe one of the things he told me, opening my book to "La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin," was, "Don't worry so much about rhythm with Debussy. Be expressive."

So in this composer I found a measure of salvation from my own private Reign of Terror by the woman who forced me to play Sonatinas erased of emotion. Debusssy paints portraits in notes and chords as rich, textured and vivid as anything Monet did with paint. I loved "La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin" ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair") because the notes and chords spun in my mind a scene: a young woman with long, unbound yellow hair walking through a blowing green hilltop field on a late spring day, barefoot, with dandelions and sunshine in her hair, and then sitting on a rock to look over the landscape with her hair moving around her in the wind.

I memorized that piece for a recital, and when I sat down to it this week, I was surprised and thrilled to find that some of the notes, in some of the more difficult spots, hadn't left me; my fingers knew exactly where to go. I couldn't play it perfectly, of course; in some places I had to stop and pick my way through; but on the whole it still sounded pretty. Encouraged, I finally turned back ten pages to my everlasting favorite, "Clair de Lune."

I started it holding my breath. I'd memorized this one, too, and had kept it memorized long after I stopped taking lessons, and I loved this piece with my whole lonely beauty-stricken heart, and I was terrified that I would butcher it, that it had left me, that I had forgotten.

But there's a trick to Debussy too -- at least, in my case, to the songs I'd once memorized and now through which I found myself trying to wade through memory as I sight-read: Let go. I don't know how the physiology would look; but it feels like I stop using my frontal lobe and somewhere in the back of my head -- the part of the brain they say is wired for prayer, the part of the brain that seems to expand when I read good poetry -- I lose the boundaries of myself, step over them, and become a conduit, a radiant filament blazing with the music pouring through my body, and my arms, my hands, my fingers go, not where I tell them, but where the music directs. I vanish. There is only the heart and the soul of the music.

Flawless playing, for me, depends almost entirely on that loss of self. When I think, about the music or about anything, when I become aware of me, aware of the notes on the page, of my uncertainties of getting it right, I fall out of that perfect state of grace and my fingers are my fingers, my hands my hands, and they slip and stumble and then it's just me attempting to play a song. The moment I notice that I have lost myself in the music, I lose the expansiveness and return to this "beating heart...in the walking bones," these boundaries of me.

Usually I can only soar in the arresting of space and time, that still dance, that whirling center for a few seconds; and I can only exist there with pieces I know, or once knew, well. It's an amusingly choppy experience at the moment -- a measure that gave me trouble the last time I played it suddenly blossoms under my fingers in perfection; the next measure, which seemed to reach its perfect embodiment through my playing the last time through suddenly becomes as though I've never played it at all. Which necessitates careful, conscious practice of the whole thing -- frustrating because the moments of remembrance come and go, like being suspended in the ocean and caught between wave and wave: One moment I'm borne along by something much stronger than I am; the next I'm floundering; and then I'm caught up again.

So it's sort of muddy at the moment. But the times when my consciousness doesn't betray me are perfect. I feel vibrantly, gloriously alive; and, because I'm caught in an eternal kind of now, I don't realize how alive I feel until later, like a scrap of poetry I wrote years back (you can tell) to describe the experience of reading, which bears itself out similarly to playing music:

When I read
I am in a bare room

where dust motes drift
over rough pine boards

and a braided rug
draws sunlight into color,
warm on my feet

and where the rockers of my chair
ruminate upon the stillness.

In the light heat
kindled by the twigs of letters
I glow like coals,
so intense
that I do not even know
I am perfectly happy.

My favorite part of "Clair de Lune" is actually the last run of notes, converging in a deep, widely ranging chord, held together by the damper pedal. When that last high A flat drops its ethereal ring into the air, the deeper notes suddenly reverberate beneath it, the middle notes thread throughout, and they all waver, pulse, breathe for a few perfect seconds, and the beauty makes it hard to draw air into the lungs. Something in the pit of my stomach comes untied, and then the pedal and the fingers lift, the notes fall away with a "dying fall," and in the silence something echoes that shivers along the lines of time; and the chest expands, the clock ticks, and everything is ordinary, and at peace.