Farther Along octet sings Palestrina's Adoramus Te, Christe

Because I am now 38. And I am Excellent. CG says so, and you've got bigger balls than me if you're going to argue with her about something like that. Thanks, CG!

I'm feeling very sheepish and apologetic about not posting and all, but that's what is. Everything's better than this time last year, that's for sure. I can think in a straight line again. So there's light in the lamp, but the woodstove's still cold. I need fire.

My dad is dying of lung cancer. Apparently. I get my information in rather roundabout ways. This development doesn't bother me much, for several reasons. Honestly I just wish it were my mother, the stalker who loves me so. These things are all too tiresome to explain. Does it sound too awful of me? Well, here I am, unhiding.

I'm almost finished my first year of massage school. From an academic standpoint, it's gone very well. It's embarrassing how neurotic I am about my marks. I mean, really - I know they don't mean anything other than I'm very skilled at passing exams, but you should see how I fret and pull my hair over it all. The proof of the pudding is the hands-on, after all. And that's the part I love. I do love people, you know; one at a time. And it satisfies my soul to be able to help the hurt that folks walk with, at least to some degree. Will I take second year? Hard to say. I'll post more about school some other time, if you can stand to listen to the grinding of my teeth.

Our house in Horsebite is up for sale. No takers yet, but it's only been a few days. The house in Gawdswat has electricity and water. No walls yet. I'm a bit fussy about having walls, so we won't be moving out before that point.

Right now there's no more to say. Thanks for sticking with me, faithless as I am. I mean well. Just... rather weary.

G'night.

Connecting the Dots

Recently I printed off a copy of Beethoven's Sonata #14, First Movement, the "Moonlight". I don't know what possessed me - it wasn't all that long ago when I packed up all my Conservatory books and gave them away to the second-hand store. At that point I couldn't imagine ever wanting to do this again. Not that I particularly regret it. Hopefully someone out there is getting more use out of them than I was. I figure if they've sat in a box for eight years in various points of storage, they can't be all that crucial to the function of my life.

Besides, there are all kinds of sites now where you can print off sheet music for nuthin-atall, and far better to have a few pages of something I actually want to play than a whole book full of things I mostly don't. Oooh, them Conservatory exams. Never again, me daffy-down-dillies. Must be the time of year that's bringing it all back. Early spring is when the musical flogging really began, in prep for the dreaded Music Festival in later spring.

I didn't actually learn to play usefully until I was thrown to the pious lions at Evangel. There, no one played by the book, it was all by ear, and slowly and painfully I managed to drag the interminable theory I'd been learning for ten years into the arena of workaday music.

Actually, mostly I figured it out by watching my cousin Lynne. She's a fabulous pianist, by dot or by ear, and I watched her hands to get some idea of how this was done. Rolling chords, octaves in the left hand, a few grace notes sprinkled here and then, and twa-la, you can play anything. More or less.

But there are things that just aren't themselves unless you play them note for note. The Moonlight Sonata is one of them.

So here I am, doing as Mr. Beethoven tells me, reflecting that this man must have had hands like catcher's mitts and thanking my stars for my octave-plus-one reach. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that finer-boned pianists have to fudge this piece somehow with fancy pedalling and non-simultaneous octaves.

I don't know why I'm doing this now. Is it because I need another distraction from studying? Or is it because I need something in my life that comes with a recipe, a step-by-step how-to? Some things just don't have a note-by-note, blow-by-blow instruction manual. Some things you just make up as you go along. Even myself wants a plan every now and then.

At least Herr Beethoven is accommodating that way.

Sharing Space

A friend was telling me recently that his five year old daughter wants to be a princess when she grows up. I don't remember those years from my own life very well, but I do remember loving long swishy dresses and Swan Lake Barbie. I suspect most little girls that age do - if they're not battered around the ears with precocious feminism or precocious La Senza propaganda. Poppy certainly did. It's a good age for it. Five year old daughters should be princesses; the cherished darlings of the realm, all the world blushing at their favour. It's the right time. Fifteen years is not the right time. Nor twenty five. But five is still a princess year, and it lays an identity groundwork for everything to come, the soil of benevolence. The other layers are later strata.

Patch was a knight from age 2, complete with an entire wardrobe of weapons of doom. He positively ached for an opportunity to slay someone for me, to save the family. Still does. Again that basic identity formation.

All this set me off thinking about archetypes. I haven't thought about them in any depth for quite a while; there was a time when I discovered the concept outside of my own head, and it gave me a few days speculation, but I never really delved into it further than that. I was busy living out my own archetypes.

It's something that possesses us. A genius, in the sense of a prevailing spirit of a place or time or idea. We are taken by it, manifest it for that moment, and it leaves us. Or it doesn't. Some archetypes take root in our souls and seem to work themselves through us into the world.

That's what falling in love is about, I would think. Suddenly the Masculine, or the Feminine, arises in some human form right before our eyes, and in response the corresponding archetype is called forth in us. Venus and Adonis walk the earth for a few moments, or months, or even years. Then the spirits flee, and two shocked people find themselves human again, and in need of new archetypes. If they're lucky they find them. It's good to have several available.

Some people seem to be Venus or Adonis for an entire culture. I'm thinking of a Sophia Loren or Marilyn Monroe. It's as if they manifest that spirit for a lifetime, for almost everyone. From here that looks pretty horrifying, and it would seem that for poor Marilyn it was more than she could carry.

What about Mother Theresa? She was certainly an archetype for an entire world. Which one? Is "saint" an archetype? I guess it must be.

Sometimes people say the most startling things to us, things that don't answer to reality as we're seeing it ourselves. I think they're speaking to an archetype that, unbenownst to the host, has risen up like a glamour in front of them. For that moment, we became Someone Else for them - Mother, Father, Wise Woman, Mage, Healer, Fool... I once had someone say to me, "You're just like Jesus!" and holy smoke, was I ever embarrassed. Bleh! But looking back, whatever nothing I'd done was just a precursor for her to see that face. It wasn't me she was seeing.

Last fall I had a strange experience with this myself. I went to mass (Ha! You're shocked, aren't you!?) and afterwards a very old nun I'd never met before came to me and asked, "So, my dear, and who do you belong to?" What a question! On the face of it a little strange, maybe, but at that moment for me she was the Wise Woman speaking to my soul. Who do I belong to indeed? It's a question I needed to ask. The spirit walked in, spoke through her mouth, and walked out.

Anyway, I've ordered a barrowful of books about archetypes from the library, and I wanted to get my own thoughts down before I fill up my head with someone else's. Who knows what might show up?

Bzzz....

Last winter Patch met another young lad in town, and for a little while they were spending a bit of time together now and then.

One afternoon he came home from this boy's house and said, "You know Mum, you and Peter's mother should get to know each other. You have the same hobbies."

"Really?" I asked, "You mean she quilts and reads?"

"No. She cooks and cleans house all the time just like you."

That's my life, alright - just a mad rush of insouciant pleasure morn til midnight. ;-)

I thought of that again this afternoon while I made bread, a week's worth of slaw, a big pan of butter squares, and a huge vat of borscht. I've neglected my other pastimes; like the dishes, the dusting, laundry, vacuuming, scrubbing the bathtub... in favour of my most recent hobby - studying.

What a hedonist! Madcap is back?...

Midnight

(picture stolen from Alecto)

I just finished reading Elie Weisel's "Night". He was a teenager during the Holocaust, and spent several years in concentration camps. He watched his father, sick and starved, brutally killed by the guards shortly before liberation. Elie didn't go to his father's side when he called for him for fear of being killed himself.

"I was afraid. Afraid of the blows. That was why I remained deaf to his cries. Instead of sacrificing my miserable life and rushing to his side, taking his hand, reassuring him, showing him that he was not abandoned, that I was near him, that I felt his sorrow, instead of all that, I remained flat on my back, asking God to make my father stop calling my name, to make him stop crying."

I don't know what to say to that. I want to imagine that Elie Wiesel, the old man, looks back on the young man he was with compassion. Starvation, torture; surely if we're ever to forgive ourselves based on circumstance, those circumstances would suffice. But who knows? Who hears the murmuring accusations of the human heart except the accused?

And who doesn't hear those voices? I wonder about that even more. Even an overwrought accusation serves to keep us awake. What if the voices are silent?

If we can't hear, are we accountable? Who blames the sleeper for his dreams?

My head hurts. My heart hurts. Sometimes the mystery is very bitter.