a short note on inspiration

Every time I finish one post, it seems impossible that I will ever write another. But inevitably I watch a movie or a documentary or I come across a significant paragraph in a novel or, in this case, read Zadie Smith’s article in the December 17^th issue of The New Yorker called “Some Notes on Attunement.” First, I am plastered to the couch, overwhelmed that something so true, so personally applicable, exists in my hands. Then comes the jealousy which goes something like, God, I wish I was cool enough to write something so authentic and smart. And finally, I remember that this is what inspiration feels like. That this is why I am a voracious reader, constantly searching for affirmation, comfort, truth, the thing that makes me say yes, makes me rush to my computer or my cello, to try and make sense of it.

First of all, read Smith’s piece. Its layers astound. But the main thing I want to address is not how to write a nice essay based on the brilliance of Zadie Smith (I would pale miserably in comparison), but rather, how to find inspiration in this life.  All the great artists and writers say that you cannot wait for it to strike. You must sit your butt in your chair every day at the same time and write down all your bad ideas. I hate this.  In all honesty, I am not usually inspired. And it is so easy to blame its shortfall, to say Bummer, Inspiration did not visit me today, I’ll just have to read The New Yorker instead.

In which case, one of two things usually happens:

1) Right after Talk of the Town, you peel yourself off the couch, remembering the awful truth about your butt in a chair, and you trudge to your desk or piano and play the first chord that comes through your fingers.

OR

2) BAM! you open the New Yorker and there is a brilliant piece by Zadie Smith that then inspires you to write a blog post.

It is both these options that keep us creating.  In light of last Friday’s tragedy in Newtown, it has become even clearer to me that art is what we turn to again and again to make sense of life. There is comfort in words, art and music, comfort that can only be found there.  And this is why we must discipline ourselves every day, forgive ourselves if we forget to and, as e.e. cummings says, open the eyes of our eyes. 

despair's antidote

Recently I watched Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris for the second time. One scene that has stuck in my mind is the part when, after reading Gil’s manuscript, Gertrude Stein returns it to him and tells him not to write such depressing things. “The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence,” she says.

I’ve been thinking about this for weeks now. Lately, there is much to despair about.  We are at the brink of a terrifying election. We are entering a new (warmer) climate in Earth’s history, one that we as a race have instigated. It’s almost December 2012, (but don’t worry, lovely readers, I don’t believe in that). The list continues.

When I look at the facts, I don’t feel hopeful, but I do think fictional Gertrude Stein has a point.  As Bread & Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto so aptly puts it: “Art is food. You can’t eat it, but it feeds you.” The question is, how do we as artists acknowledge the despair, write about it, sing about it and make images about it without succumbing to it, and better yet, how do we find the antidote? Mary Oliver offers these words:

“Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

It is as simple and as complicated as that.  Isn’t creating art, by its very nature, an act of speaking up? Getting out of bed every morning, sitting down at your desk or your piano with your manuscript paper is an act of defiance. Today, you say, I will write just one new measure. I will not give up. Most likely that puny new measure has been informed by the astonishing things you have seen and heard somewhere in your life. Even though you may be alone in your room, you are now telling about those things. Even though you are racked by self-defeating thoughts, somewhere in your deepest insides, you know that some day, someone else will hear your completed piece and feel as though they have been fed.

And this is why I think Gertrude is right. Even though Romney could win the election, even though my future children may never build a snow fort, I still plan on writing at least one measure a day, wild and defiant, because the mere act of creating, in whatever form, is what keeps us standing, what propels us forward and forces us to have a voice. Despair is real, but so is beauty. We can be present to the emptiness of existence while simultaneously finding its balm.

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graceland

Among other things, I spent the month of August teaching at fiddle camps, practicing George Crumb’s sonata for solo cello and underlining nearly every other page from Madeleine L’engle’s A Circle of Quiet. Her book is so inspired and honest, crowded with creative insight, that I felt confident I would base my next post on her writing. I tried numerous drafts until I finally realized that the best I can do is recommend you read her book.

And then, last night, I began watching Under African Skies, the 25^th anniversary documentary of Paul Simon’s Graceland.  Maybe it’s because I don’t get out enough, but it is rare that I find myself in a moment of undiluted, aching beauty; when my heart surges for a brief and breathtaking fifteen seconds with awe at what music can do.  This is precisely how I felt during original 1985 in-studio footage of “I Know What I Know” in which the background singers are wearing matching outfits and dancing like they’re onstage and the guitarist and bassist are twisting in crouched circles around their instruments, left legs over their fingerboards.  Not only are the women wearing matching outfits, they have choreographed their moves.  Simon’s shoulders are humming.  One drummer says that they didn’t know when they were rolling or when they weren’t, they just played and played and, at the end of the day, listening back, thought, we just did that?

One night, when Mia and I were in the last stages of mixing Unruly Heart, we had finally arrived at a good mix for Track 3. It was late. We were exhausted and starving and we had to listen to the whole track one last time. As we did this, something in the stale studio air shifted and we began to spin each other, a contra dance swing, unhinged and wild, this unexpected delight rising from the embers of a tune.

All I’m saying is I wonder what would happen if we danced a little more. Not alone in our rooms, no.  But out, out in the world, colorfully, loudly. This is, after all, why Graceland is on so many of our top 5 lists, right? It’s not just Paul Simon’s brilliant songwriting; not just the talented musicians and their incomparable South African grooves.

It’s the dancing. 

It’s that we can hear them dancing.

full & empty

This week, I am in the green mountains of Vermont’s northeast kingdom where the nights are so cold I have to shut all the windows and sleep in my long PJs.  This is very different from Boston’s humidity where the noise in my head mixes with the road-rage and reggae of drivers in the street below my window. There, my summer is a shroud of shoulds.  I should be writing a new song; I should be practicing, promoting, or at least on a day hike.

Here, away from the hectic city sounds, I can hear the clamor in my head, and the miracle is that I can remember how to turn it off. Well, not necessarily how to turn it off, but that there exists somewhere a possibility to turn it off.

This all makes me think about how busy I am, how busy we all are, all the time. Is it because we have to be? As The ‘Busy’ Trap, a recent New York Times article, says, “Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted.”  Unlike these people (and like so many others), I practice self-imposed busyness because it makes me feel worthwhile and important.  I’m terrified of the constantly nagging emptiness that will emerge if I let down my guard for one tiny second, so I perpetually scan my mind for what needs to be done, what I should be worrying about, the things that need fixing.

To keep vigil this way is strenuous and useless. What happens if I just sit here and enjoy the sounds of my mother playing jazz standards at the grand piano? I am trying to make the very difficult shift from I Should Learn That One to Isn’t That Beautiful? There is something transformative about those last three words.  When the voices of competition and ego and anxiety come to tell me that I am not accomplishing enough, I am going to drown them out by listening to the low thrum of the hummingbirds as they flit around the feeder. When my chest tightens because I remember I haven’t written any usable new material for our fall tours, I will watch the pink sun as it falls towards the lake or, back home, I will notice the particular shades of city blue as I bike home from the grocery store.

Mostly, this is just a little something that I would like to try. A soft reminder, each day, that self-imposed chaos is both a privilege and a curse, that the gaping chasm I try to outrun will no doubt one day catch up with me.  Perhaps I’d better make peace with it sooner than later.  Perhaps I should confront it — this wide emptiness — befriend it even, adorn it with rows of colorful flowers, strings of popcorn, moss and candlelight, so I can step back, pause, breathe, and say, Isn’t That Beautiful?

two mini musings

1) Tomorrow marks the first day of the first fiddle camp of the summer. This makes me want to learn more about learning and teaching, how to be curious and how to inspire curiosity. Luckily, I think this video explains it all.

2) I have a constant rotation of books on my nightstand, comprised of the main book I'm reading plus various books of poetry which, currently, are collections by e.e. cummings and Charles Bukowski.  I think it is worth noting that my longest running nightstand book is not so much a collection of poetry, but a book of spiritual cartoons and prayers of gratitude.  It has officially been on my nightstand for one year, ever since I got home from Australia, where my friends Holly and Chris introduced me to the brilliant work of Michael Leunig. In honor of this record nightstand length, and of the anniversary of my trip to Australia, I want to share my favorite image and my favorite prayer from the book, Short Notes From the Long History of Happiness.

God give us rain when we expect sun.

Give us music when we expect trouble.

Give us tears when we expect breakfast.

Give us dreams when we expect a storm.

Give us a stray dog when we expect congratulations.

God play with us, turn us sideways and around.

on practicing

Here is the thing: no one ever got famous by trying. For instance, Charles Ives was just an insurance salesman who came home in the evenings to compose because he could not live without it. Apparently Woody Allen wrote tons of screenplays, more than were ever published, because there they were inside him and they had to come out, no matter whether or not they landed in the laps of high-praising critics.  Artists who are deep thinkers and seekers — these people must create. It is in their very blood stream and it is not a choice.

A few weeks ago I went to see a play called “Maestro: Leonard Bernstein,” a one-man show by pianist and actor Hershey Felder.  My mother said it would be life changing and I was unwilling to believe her, but as with many things, she was right. Since graduating NEC, I’ve been struggling with questions like: in which genre should I write, how should I write it, what instrument(s) should I write for, or should I really just be practicing instead?  By the end of the Bernstein play I had a realization that was so obvious, it felt as though I had stepped into my own skin, like I had just cleaned a little more rust off my pipes; I should compose.  Not just songs, but pieces that develop, that are not necessarily limited by genre and “shoulds.” For me, the word “compose” implies Scheherezade, The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg, Three Places in New England, the 8-movement Gematria-based song cycle my sister recently composed, Gershwin. To compose is to allow. To make space for. To get out of ones own way.

The magic of this realization lasted about twelve hours, and when I woke up the day after the play, I remembered that composing is actually hard. At this point I decided to give up altogether, succumb to the desire to spend my days reading the New Yorker and knitting.  Maybe I would listen to music on good days, when I’m not too depressed to see that other people can successfully write inspiring works.

But then I remembered that the composers I admire did not get famous in a day, nor did they write a symphony in a week. (I’m ignoring you if you are mentioning Mozart right now).  I am a far cry from any Charles Ives or Woody Allen, but it turns out that creativity is in my blood stream too and I do not have the option to ignore it. Trudging through the sludge of neurosis and judgment is indispensible to the creative process. This act of searching, searching, finding, losing the way, searching again — this is how art is made.  

The only fly in the ointment is, though I know all of this, it is nearly impossible to believe when the voices of doom are saying that if I do not sit down and crank out some kind of masterpiece in the next hour, I am a failure. So, I ask myself three questions:

1) Were you always able to play concertos, improvise and walk bass lines on the cello? I answer no.

2) Were you always able to touch your toes? I say, no, but due to a regular yoga practice of five years, now I can.

3) What is the common denominator?

And then I remember.

I practiced.

As Alan Watts said in a quote recently emailed to me by my mom, “The point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” It’s true that practicing gets you places. But it is trusting that it will get you places, every day for the rest of your life, that must keep you going, that must keep you in this precious moment that will, quite literally, never come again.

If I happen across fame or money along my way, then won’t that be nice? Until then, I’ll just keep attempting to clean the rust off my little old pipes.

rain

Today it is raining in Boston. It’s the kind of weather where, in a perfect world, I would be sprawled out on the carpet with a book of Calvin and Hobbes, drinking earl grey tea next to my fat cat, Sophie.  In a way, I am doing some version of this: happily sitting on my grey couch after arriving home from a rehearsal and an hour of traffic-sitting. The rain has placed a gentle spell on my evening.

For me, rainy days are one of the only times when the wildness in my mind becomes more like a murmur, when the battle-cry of Stop and Slow Down is finally allowed to be heard.  This does not mean I always listen, but it’s certainly easier to feel its presence, this quietness just outside my peripheral vision. Today it means that, instead of transitioning from traffic jam to practice space, I came home and wrote this post. There is something so deeply less at stake when I write words than when I write music. To devote years of time and energy to one artistic outlet comes with the weight of ego, attachment, and equating oneself with the value of this work.  When the opportunity arises to be creative in a different way — prose and poetry in my case — there is less judgment. There is less need for perfection and therefore there is stillness and space where there was no stillness or space before.

As Adrienne Rich says in her poem, Stepping Backward, “We must at last renounce that ultimate blue / And take a walk in other kinds of weather.” We are a willful group of humans and rain is often considered a setback; we can’t take our daily run in the sunshine, or bike to the laundromat or even be happy at all.  I may be an anomaly when I casually mention that snow and rain are my favorite.  But I think Adrienne is talking about more than just weather.  She is talking about the incessant need to better ourselves, something that is so deeply a part of the human condition, in fact I think it is the human condition.  According to a book in which I am currently enthralled, this need began at the dawn of humanity when we first began knowing that we know. Conscious of time, we began to struggle with the future and thereby struggle with the self which, “while somehow unchanging, continually comes into existence.” Our awareness of time makes us entirely unable to be at peace with ourselves.

So while we are all in constant search of that ultimate blue, a day that would be the very epitome of e.e. cummings’ “leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky,” why don’t we take a walk in other kinds of weather?  It’s probably too late to re-program our prehistoric genes to stop seeking out new heights of knowledge and success, but maybe we can take a walk, a short one, perhaps. Just up the hill and back. The smallest change of scenery, one where the rain still comes from a dream of sky, where even the brownest of winter’s trees are still leaping.

begin it

My grandfather’s favorite acronym was D.I.N.  Do It Now.  While this has always been second nature to me, it has come with a cost.  I answer emails and make phone calls promptly, not because I want to be responsible, but because the thought of having to do them later is more than I can bear.  The problem is that this cycle does not end.  There will always be emails to write, bills to pay, phone calls to make.  D.I.N. turns into D.I.A.T.M (Do It All The Time). And thanks to my iPhone, these days I check email more frequently than I am willing to admit.

I think there is a balance that can be found here, but the point is that my grandfather actually did know what he was talking about.  And it wasn’t necessarily about life’s endless errands.

Recently I was teaching a cello lesson in which my student was expressing frustration. She wanted to be improving faster, but due to her frustration she was not slowing down to practice details, to delight in her instrument, or to find peace in the journey of learning. She told me that, within the last year or so, she and her partner had taken up beekeeping and that she felt a similarity between learning cello and learning how to keep bees; both are enshrouded in mystery, she said, until you begin to experience them. The more you approach the hives, the more you sit down with your instrument, the easier they get, the more sense they make, the more nuance you are capable of achieving. Then she made a beautiful analogy: Let’s say you wanted to be a botanist but you had not yet learned anything about plants.  If you noticed a tree of interest, you might go up to it, study its bark and its leaves, then look it up in an encyclopedia.  But once you delve into the learning process and botany becomes a part of your life, you will eventually walk down the street and be able to point out the flora. Ah, there’s a maple. Here is a spruce.

In other words, if there is anything in this world that is pulled toward your heart, why not do it now? As musicians and artists, we have the ability to choose to construct our lives the way we want.  I still believe there are a lot of “shoulds” around the careers of musicians. Many people from a classical background are expected to go to school until they get a job in an orchestra.  This is what I thought I would do from an early age, but at a certain point this stopped feeling right to me. I realized I had other choices and I wanted to experience them.  When I first started playing fiddle tunes on the cello at age eighteen, I felt like I was flailing around. Learning by ear was hard. My musical rug had been ripped out from under me.  As I’ve continued on my search, I notice this to be true over and over. My two years at NEC took everything I thought I knew about music, shook them up and dumped them on the floor.  Instinctively, I dropped to my hands and knees to clean up the mess, and here I am, still on the floor, slowly and steadily lining up the broken pieces. Without a doubt they will get scrambled again and again, only each time, I will have a new scrap of knowledge to add to the mosaic of my life.

We must take risks to be in this profession and this, as I am finally realizing, is the real meaning of D.I.N.  My grandfather’s favorite quotation was by Goethe: “Lose this day loitering and it will be the same tomorrow. If you can do it or think you can do it, begin it.  Boldness has magic, power and genius in it.”  To do it now is to throw oneself in, one hundred and fifty percent. Eventually the flailing becomes graceful.  The bees become approachable.  The piano keys start to look like chord shapes.  Making a life as a musician becomes a reality, one day at a time, easier and easier, broken piece by broken piece.