Thursday, July 23, 2015

#204

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA133&dq=Henry+weak+at+keyboard+music,+leaned+on&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAGoVChMI-tPl6MfxxgIVx5UNCh017A_P#v=onepage&q=Henry%20weak%20at%20keyboard%20music%2C%20leaned%20on&f=false

 There is an antique piano in our house, an 1878 Steinway square grand. Cincinnati—still a grand old river city, in spite of some inexcusable, violent and dim-brained architectural mayhem that began in the 60s—is so stuffed full of old pianos that you can’t give one away. Genuine ivory and ebony keys, cabinets of rosewood or mahogany, intricate hand-painted details inside where no one will ever see them. I bought ours for $200, paid $200 to move it home, and spent another $200 to have it tuned and have the mechanism of a couple broken keys fixed. When eventually we have it restrung and refinished, it’ll be worth something, but it’s not for sale. I’ve decided to learn to play it. I followed my first online lesson just yesterday. When it comes to the piano, I’m a toddler in a footie jumpsuit who just took his first step. I’ll obviously never be a great piano player at this point, but I’ll learn to play. It’s an exciting thing to take on though, because one thing I know about music, like with the other great art forms: Amazing, inexplicable things can rise from it, emergent forms that take shape from the notes like the organization of a tornado from the chaos of a cloud. This is what B. is talking about when he says the rules don’t matter. Emergence is a level above mere rules. A biological enzyme is a linear protein, a mile-long freight-train of amino acid boxcars, flat cars and tankers, logically organized and bound by a formal set of comprehensible rules. But the activity of the enzyme is not dependent on the chemistry of it or the order of its constituent parts. There are ligatures that fold the linear progression of the protein into a 3D tangle, a ball of fuzz, and it’s upon the topography of the lint-ball’s surface where the biological activity takes place. It can’t be predicted from the structure: Enzymatic activity is an emergent property. It’s the same with a poem: It begins with the prose-like progression of words in a straight line, but the ligatures—line breaks, rhymes, assonance, all the techniques at the poet’s disposal—fold the linear structure onto itself so that it takes on a 3D form, like a sculpture. It’s the sculptural form of the poem that we respond to as much as to what it says. That’s why it takes so much space and wordage to explicate a poem—there is so much meaningful, wordless structure in place, and mere prose is an unwieldy tool that isn’t well-suited to teasing it apart. It’s like untangling the snarl of fishing line off a reel with a wooden spoon. But it’s the only other available way of understanding what has been created. The point is this: Emergence. Rules don’t predict it. It’s magical.

Henry is at his piano, and while not a strong keyboard player, here come the goblins anyway, metaphors for the emergent emotions and astonishing forms that the any great art form can unleash. It is an amazing thing, really, but we’re so habituated to magic as an obvious aspect of the human condition that we don’t often enough stop to marvel at it. What if it scares us? What if we scream? Well: Same old crap…What’s his problem? No one listens. Yet, in the evocative last stanza of this totally cool, exciting Dream Song, we’re reminded of what all is out there, waiting to emerge:

            Tides bring the bodies back sometimes, & not.
            The bodies of the self-drowned out there wait,
            wait, & the widows wait,
            my gramophone is the most powerful in the country,
            I am trying, trying, to solve the andante
            but the ghost is off before me. 

You can’t solve the andante! What it throws at you is unpredictable, unforeseeable, emergent, the haunting of a ghost: Art. Go ahead, scream.

When the confessionality of a person resolves into a persona through an artistic interpretation, you don’t always have control over what emerges. Sometimes—often—it’s dangerous. There are bodies involved in that ocean, that may or may not wash back at you on the tides. This art business has resolved into disaster before. B. is using music as a metaphor, and he does it slickly. The andante is a metaphor for his poetry. To understand it, to understand what he’s doing, he uses his rational, rule-dependent brain, but it’s a clumsy tool, inadequate to the intricacy of the task. It will never understand this emergent, dangerous magic. It’s no wonder he screams, because who knows where this all came from? This shit is frightening.

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