Interlude
One of the many good things about having a voice of my own on this page is that I can break patterns of my own making.
It’s time for a music post.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours remembering my life before there was email and before I had heard of the internet. I’ve been lucky over the last three weeks to play chamber music in four very different semi-public contexts, and the third of these events was last night. Probably stemming from Somewhere In Time (a very romantic movie that came out when I was in high school), I had the idea that if I really thought of myself as a musician I would indeed be one, if only for the period of time that the concert was going on.
(This was only a semi-silly notion - I discovered during the second semi-public musical event that trying to play a concert 45 minutes after I stopped teaching a very serious class about online surveillance wasn’t a great idea. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t as much fun as it should have been. I just wasn’t quite with the program - I was still in surveillance-land rather than in Beethoven-land.)
So I tried a kind of inner time-travel experiment. I remembered people that I played with in high school, college, summer festivals, music school, and afterwards. I remembered conductors and teachers - what they looked like, what their voices sounded like - and I did my best to remember what it felt like to play without constraint. My mind slipped again and again - without realizing it, I’d be thinking about the Verizon announcement this week or about CALEA. No kidding. But I’d nudge myself back to some performance 25 years or more ago, some musical event that was satisfying, fun, and deeply felt.
Of course, I’m only writing this post because it worked. For just a few minutes, yesterday and then again today, I did feel like someone who plays an instrument (rather than someone who plays at playing an instrument). It was genuinely fun.
As you may remember, there’s a terrifying moment in Somewhere In Time when our hero (who has successfully transported himself to 1912) suddenly sees a modern-day coin that got left behind in a pocket of the rented 1912-era pants in which he time-traveled. He stares at it, instantly vertiginous, and sweats ferociously as his memories of his own era overtake him. Blam - he’s out of 1912.
So my secret trick yesterday and today was to close the laptop and pretend it didn’t exist. There’s a lot of email pouring in these days, most of it list-mail, and much of it interesting to me. But the laptop doesn’t fit with the inner time-travel.
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The point here for me is that 1912 wanted him there and remembered him. “Come back to me” or something like that. So those places that we have enjoyed in our early lives, for me it is ballroom dancing, long for us as much as we long for them.