music: The Be Good Tanyas- Chinatown
Dead of winter in New England. Boston hunkers down for the onslaught of cold white, spends a week paralyzed, and slowly re-emerges from underneath the piles and piles and piles and piles of now filthy snow. It warms a little, some melts, and piles of opaque liquid fill crevices and potholes citywide. Weather reports indicate a fresh dose of celestial solvents tonight, due to grace our cobblestone and concrete for the next two days…
The past couple of weeks have allowed me a lot of head time and have elucidated some incredible challenges, neither of which have made me too happy. I can fully expect to dip into a dark mood for a week or two every year at some point, and I think that this past stretch of time was it for me. I think I’m coming out from under the covers, or starting to at least, or am just sufficiently distracted by work again to not think too much about the state of things in my own three pounds of gyri and sulci. This time around the normal morose mood was accompanied by a fairly healthy existential crisis recalled from years past: I remember being very young, five or six maybe, and lying in bed staring at the shadows my night light cast on the opposite wall which looked remarkably like E.T. and fully realizing what my mortality means. I remember sobbing uncontrolably back then until i passed into sleep, knowing that I was going to die one day, depart from this universe forever, for-ever, and there was nothing I could do about it. For some reason that incredible dread popped back up these past few weeks in fairly acute spurts. It didn’t quite reduce me to tears this time around, but it did in some ways paralyze me, forced me to call into question exactly what I am doing with the short time given to me in this universe.
We humans don’t function on this level of perspective most of the time. We can’t; it’s too overwhelming, nothing would ever happen if we did. It makes us too insignificant and unimportant and we all would like to believe that we count for something in this universe. So we end up distracting ourselves for the majority of our lives: getting educated, studying something outside ourselves (except for those precious few who wear black and smoke cigarettes and probably speak French and study this exact thread of thought), taking up hobbies, observing the world around us and marveling at how cool that thing over there is, experiencing things, creating things, consuming things. Anything to bring us to that human scale of perspective. Anything to keep our minds on the journey and off the destination, concentration on our feet and off the horizon. Anything to make the traveling as positive as possible. But traveling might not be easy with so many stops along the way. Because when you stop, when you catch your breath, you take in how much you’ve done and how much you have to go, you gain some larger perspective of the landscape and if you’re lucky some clarity, and you re-orient in hopes of improving your journey. You remove yourself form your human scale of perspective and glimpse upon the universe itself, far to vast for you to ever have a hope in understanding it, let alone making a scratch in it.
I’ve struggled with this sort of perspective, on-and-off, for the past couple of weeks. I’ve felt a sense of urgency to make something out of the immediate time given to me and was generally unsatisfied with how I spent it. My creative output was lacked quality. My daily energies were directed towards inconsequential and meaningless things. I would indulge in distractions and just grow frustrated that I was doing so, Despite my efforts to organize the tea cabinet, straighten out the common room, put all my dirty clothes in the laundry bag, eat regular healthy meals, and get on a decent sleep schedule, entropy is gaining the upper hand.
It doesn’t help that work has been especially rough these past two weeks. I gave my midterm exam and pounded out semester grades for my students and things are not looking good. On top of that I’ve had to play more security guard, therapist, and corrections officer than educator this week which siphons the life out of me and into these newer, fresher, more damaged vessels that can’t seem to fill up with anything no matter what they do. Here’s the existential dilemma again, this time once-removed: never mind my own existence, I am now playing a part in shaping sixty-three precious and brief lives with all the potential in the world and not nearly enough resources or personal perspctive to see it through. I can almost comfort myself in the fact that they are, for the most part, distracted by the cotton-candy nuances of modern living, but that may just crush my soul even more. I’m seeing some of these souls slip into conditions that will all but ensure hardship and suffering for the rest of their mortal existences and there’s not much I can do about it. And to make matters worse, I realize that I might be inadvertently contributing to it. Shudder, wretch. This week was a painful reminder of how much I’m up against, and as I stated in the final days of my training for this life of service, I can’t possibly hope to accomplish everything I want to accomplish.
My perspective is off. Reality is quite overwhelming. I’m not making good use of the time that’s given to me. I’ve realized that yes, This Is It, and from there seeds begin to germinate, but also in that realization I’ve grown very disappointed with where I find myself in the more immediate sense. I have a week of vacation from work coming up at the end of the month and I’m determined to use it as an opportunity to recalibrate. It will hopefully involve some degree of social interaction that don’t involve alcohol, some plan to readjust to more global priorities with my students, some degree of musical output, and some time spent with the natural world. I’m also thinking about doing a fast to clear out and reset. Time is the secret weapon, but ultimately, time is also the enemy. What actually transpires remains to be seen. Know that your travels might not go as planned.
I took to restringing my guitar last night, switching to Ernie Ball .10’s from the D’Addario flatwound .11’s just to see how things sounded under a different winding. the new strings went on fine, but when it came time to tune things were not agreeing with one another. The intonation was off and i couldn’t seem to make the thing play a major chord cleanly no matter where I fretted. I spent a while with screwdriver and bridge trying to bring things into harmony but the Gibson wasn’t having it. The tension is different now with the new gague strings, as is the string scale after all the tinkering. Whatever the reason, the sounds evoked clashed. Frequencies grated against one another, things didn’t click into synch. This wonderful tool of expression I own wasn’t able to resonate cleanly. After about half an hour I got frustrated, gave up, put the guitar away, and thought with mortal resignation, with understanding as clear as a blanket of new snow, “exactly.”
Posted by davidtaus at February 9, 2005 11:36 PM