Act VII

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to become a butterfly.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

 

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Reflets dans l'eau

“Performance is dead,” he said. And I crumple. Performance is something I believe in. To perform music—on the piano, accordion, toy piano, or with voice—is to advocate for being alive. To perform is to take the stance that “liveness” matters, more so than recordings, film, or videos; paintings, sculptures, or edited text. Simply put, performing—or rather, playing piano—is me at my best. I would not consider myself a great pianist, nor can I claim any achievements derived from playing. But, I was my best as a pianist, a performing pianist.

Playing piano, as I did for ballet classes or church services or, once, in a chic gallery in New York City, requires complete presence. Admittedly, there are moments in between—when the dance instructor gives the combinations or when the priest gives the homily—where my mind might wander or I might idly munch some trail mix. But while playing, the world shrinks, and there is only being in the presence of performing. There is not thinking, and there are not feelings. There’s only playing. Maybe I make the pianist (myself) sound like an automaton, and yet, I declare this is me at my best. An automaton that produces audible ephemeral beauty.

As a kid, I just loved piano. As an adult, it was harder to dodge the question “why do it?” Being a performing musician doesn’t seem all that altruistic. How is playing piano an act of kindness? I played piano professionally for fifteen years, but trying to sort out those innumerable performances and experiences as virtuous, selfless, or sacrificial? Again, I crumple.

But then I remind myself: There I was, in my 20s and 30s, every Saturday evening and every Sunday morning in a church. I never missed a weekend. I didn’t go to parties. I didn’t go out of or out on the town. No. I was there. I was present. And during the Christmas holidays, when I’d played through all three verses of “Silent Night” yet the line of parishioners waiting to receive communion extended, still, to the back of the church, I’d keep going, turning “Silent Night” on its head, inside and out, in endless variations, until the last person was seated back in their pew. Then, swiveling on the piano bench to face the congregation, I’d sometimes catch a few heartfelt glances. The “Silent Night” marathon had made a difference.

Or, similarly, at the end of ballet class, sometimes a dancer would step over to the piano to add, “thank you.” I often recoiled. I was confused or shocked that the music might have brought joy or ease or a sense of beauty to this other person. Playing music (and especially, practicing music) feels incredibly solipsistic, but in hindsight, maybe it could be–maybe it was–a gift.

When I think of the years I spent running around the San Francisco Bay Area playing piano, I tend to remember it as a peak creative period of my life. It was the last extended period of time when I felt “engaged” for what seemed like a majority of the hours in a day. And though never my intent, I may have even helped others to engage—with their music making, their movement making, or their spiritual practice.

The rosy colored memories are stronger than the stressful recollections about never being able to make ends meet, financially, or never knowing how much work I would be able to scrap together, from one season to another. So, the emotions are twofold: Now there is regret and now there is discovery. Performance was a “gift” I never deliberately intended to offer. Is any paradox more alive than that?

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Rodin

We’re kissing, but only because I initiated it. And is—is he cringing?

Beneath the hardening wax stamp of our lips, he confesses, “I don’t like kissing. It’s the only reason I hadn’t … sooner.”

We’re frozen in eternal slow motion, and he also tells me he prefers double time. “Double speed?” I ask, without yielding any flesh. “Isn’t that unintelligible?”

He reassures me that listening presto to others dissecting the lives of others dissecting the lives of others is an insurance policy against dementia in forty years. “Anything to forge new pathways in the neural network.”

I focus on the kiss at hand, but wonder at what point did we slip from the two of us, exchanging cells, to others dissecting the lives of others dissecting the lives of others. I think I feel him pulling away.

“It’s Saturday,” I say, catching him with my elbow. “Let’s try triple speed and keep a spreadsheet of the new pathways as they’re forged.” He sighs with reverence and willingly becomes stone in my embouchure’s embrace, while the rest of the world hurtles centuries onward.

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Impressionable

She and I are friends, but we meet to share all the things we dislike about ourselves.

We sit at the edge of the field watching the tall grass sway back and forth. “A thing I dislike,” I say. “How I bend to the wind, like this grass.”

She agrees, “Not knowing what I want and letting the breeze crush me, exposing the brown soil at the seam. Yes.”

We watch the grasses yield to the wind. The ones closest to us are turning to straw, but on the other side of the deep blue scar between fields, the reeds stand triumphant and green and the willows moan low and gray.

“A thing I dislike,” I say. “How people call me Technicolor when this is my reality palette.”

As I sweep my hand in front of me, the straw grasses bow down, the scar sings, and the willows throw some shade.

“We are the colors of nature,” she agrees. “Yes.”

We clasp forearms and help each other rise, but then change our minds, brushing the dirt from our clothes and scattering our souls to the wind.

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Ma Valise

At the end of their relationship, she packed a small blue suitcase, scolded her cat for biting the handle, and left Los Angeles for the convent.

In the crook of her arm, she carried his brain in a jar.

Ball jar.
Rubber ring seal.
The pickled eternal he always wanted to be.

Together they took up residence in a small room on the second floor above the cheese cave. Every day smelled like a new age of cheese. She placed the jar on the corner of the desk where it could sunbathe from three to four each afternoon. After the sun passed, she pressed her ear against the glass, curious if he was still thinking. She swore she heard him whisper, “This is why I’m not a monk. I like cheese better than Chartreuse.”

She swept the convent’s kitchen floor, missed her cat, and spent time in the library before going to bed. There, she read about the French monks and their secret recipe for a peculiar green drink. Chartreuse.

Back in her room, she unfolded the pajamas from the small blue suitcase, snapped it shut, and, from her knees on the floor, whispered to the feathers in the pillow, “This is why I’m not a monk.”

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Spell for Reclamation

Get in the car and bring him back from the bottom of the world.
Knit a sweater, but not while driving.
When you arrive, that’s the time for knitting–
Real-time knitting, around and around his protesting form.

Close the door before he attempts to head out for a hike.
But, oh.
You hold the yarn; you’ll know where to find him.

On the trail where together you once saw rabbits,
On the trail where together you witnessed the fog strangle the sunset,
And you agreed, “Don’t tell anyone.”

Keep knitting the collar, high, higher, up to his chin, over his mouth.
Now he’ll never tell.
Finish the knit and fold him neatly into the passenger seat.
Then get in the car and drive back to the surface of the world.

Send rosemary with no return address to the witch you stole him back from.

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Empty Things

She fills her house with empty things. Old birdcages found at Saturday yard sales. A wrought-wire townhome for someday finches, an expansive manse for two former lovebirds (they could not quench their thirst, though separate glasses had been provided). And a souvenir from Vietnam, in whose crisscrossed bamboo shoots, she riddles herself to sleep.

She fills her house with empty things. Vintage perfume bottles arranged on a tray on her dresser. Frosted bodies in pink and blue, curvaceous “squeeze me” atomizers whose misshapen forms hardened long ago (she denies any likeness to her heart). And straight away, she dabs herself with one of the cut and polished stoppers smugly gossiping about how to withstand aging.

She fills her house with empty things until she no longer needs reminders. Such as the day she takes eight glass jars from the spice rack and replenishes the contents. A rosary for peppercorns, matchsticks instead of cinnamon. Safety pins, a bird whistle, a set of keys that wished they might be used again (someday they would be thrown into the sea). Allspice, oregano, basil.

She fills a few voids, but it’s never enough. There is always the surreptitious listening for a knock on the door or ring of the bell. And, hello, a peddler selling birds, a mystic offering perfume (the offer of secondhand emptiness, filled, too hard to resist). Or maybe a neighbor seeking to borrow a cup of sugar, to fill the empty things in the soul of their own cluttered house.

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