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| Rip at the Piano |
I have a charming friend who is a stellar pianist, who lives
part time in the Northeast Kingdom, and part time in sunny Chile. In order to
have the means to feed body and soul, he – as did I – used to work for various
computer magazines, writing articles, doing some freelance editing, sometimes
translating, and occasionally taking on a big project, like a white paper, that
we would work on together.
When he’s in the Kingdom, the
Musician lives in an old hippie house, cobbled together out of used parts,
loose stones, salvaged windows and doors, and anything that would fit in his
car to make the trip down the dirt road and the next dirt road to his house in
the old, overgrown field that’s situated between an ancient cemetery and a
growing beaver pond.
Back in the day, the house had running cold spring water,
gravity fed via pipe and hose from a springhouse on the hill, an attached
outhouse, and one giant room. One end served as a closet, the other as a kitchen
(portable 2-burner Coleman stove and a giant insulated cooler regularly filled
with bags of ice for cold storage). The middle of the house was a big room that
was dining room, bedroom, sitting room, workroom and concert hall, as needed.
For bathing purposes, a solar shower bag hung off the corner of the building
near the loo, and next to it a shallow pit, straddled by an old-fashioned,
footed, cast-iron roll-top bathtub. When the Musician wanted a bath, he filled
the tub, started a fire in the pit, and after a couple of hours – hot tub! To
put out the fire, he just pulled the plug.
This was back in the
dark ages when a solar shower bag (black plastic – leave it in the sun and the
water inside heats up, the on-off toggle lets you sploosh yourself with warm –
sometimes very hot – water) was pretty high-tech. Solar panels existed, but
didn’t work very well and were extraordinarily expensive. The Musician’s house
was completely electricity-free, and the expensive propane alternatives were too expensive and hard to acquire for
someone saving every extra penny for the annual winter trip to Chile’s summer
and the services of a piano tuner who charged extra to travel to the back of
nowhere to practice his craft.
The house was brilliant in
summer, and I can attest, as I borrowed it for a few weeks one year, snug and
comfortable in winter so long as you were willing to pack in and out, via sled
and skis or snow shoes, your food, water, and trash, and also willing to share
the building with the winter shrews who move in as soon as the Musician
migrates south. In the Northeast Kingdom, for reasons I don’t know, there are
very few mosquitoes, so doors and windows could be left wide open to gather
summer breezes.
Without the subtle hum of
electric devices that we civilized folk have become so used to hearing that we
don’t hear them anymore, the house was incredibly still, incredibly silent.
When I spent long weekends there working with the Musician, we would work by
the light of the sun all day on the manuscripts that provided our life’s booty,
with no noises except the scratching of our pencils, and those of the birds,
the mice, the squirrels and chipmunks, the occasional deer that visited the
garden we grubbed out of the long grass one summer, and the ever-present chorale
of crickets. Thunderstorms were monumental; nightfall was inevitable and
eagerly awaited.
When dusk drew the sun too low
for us to continue work, we’d put away the pages and red pencils and various
other hand-held writing devices, and ritually light the candles and oil lamps
that chased the dark to the corners of the house and dimly illuminated the big
room at night. The Musician preferred candles over oil lamps, because the smell
of kerosene or other lamp oil was
intrusive; but they helped keep our fingers safe while we were chopping
vegetables for the evening stir-fry and lighting the propane burners.
Meal accomplished, the Musician
would extinguish the oil lamps and rearrange the candles so he could see his
music; and then he’d retire to the baby grand piano that took up most the space
in the big room. The next four, or six, or eight hours would be devoted to
practicing the classical music that he lives for and that comes alive under his
fingers. I would take a book, or my works-in-progress, and crawl under the
piano with pillows and a blanket to read, or write, or simply listen, until
sleep spirited me elsewhere.
If you never have, take any
opportunity that arises to sit under a piano when a musician is playing. The
vibration of the strings and the resonance through the wood of the instrument
will overwhelm your body, and sometimes your mind. You’ll find you’re
experiencing the music in a way you never have, or could, before; it will
master you, and make you its creature, and send you to realms you’ve never
imagined. I believe it’s as close as those of us who aren’t musicians can get
to entering the creative genius of the musician as she gives in to Muse. It’s
similar to other creative spells, but different, because it’s so physical and
fills the body, and the ears, and the entire mind, with something other than
our usual experience.
One night, late in the evening,
the Musician began a new piece. Something about it resonated with the beat of
the blood in my veins, with the path of my breath through my cells; it picked
me up and turned me inside out, and I was no longer me, except for a
dimly-aware, tiny hard pebble deep in my mind. A veil was torn; I saw other
worlds. I ran out into the night, into the field where the moon sailed high and
shone on mysteries I’d never before imagined. The music followed me, having
hooked a claw into my heart and gut, and was like a ribbon of mystery fueling
my new sight: there, there were
wildings in the long grasses and under the trees, there were wisps threading through the garden, and there were strange beings peering at me
through the darkness. The Musician played on, and I watched myself, from up in
the sky with the moon, grow feral, and sensitive, and strange, tethered to the
earth by the ribbon of music that wound out from the open door and windows of
the house. I could see it, like fireflies, lighting the way back and glittering
brilliantly forward into my new realm; I could see, like fireflies, the energy
of the music rising up the Musician’s spine, down his arms, into the keys.
My soul howled at the night sky;
and then the Musician ended his practice, and the fireflies winked out, the
heavens stopped spinning, I returned to myself. Over the years, every time I
heard that particular piece, I was tossed back into the Other World. Even now,
decades later, I can tell by the stirring in my heart and belly that the
background music I was barely hearing has me by the heartstrings. My eyes open;
the veil rips; I become Other.
The piece was Brahms’. I’m not
telling which one.
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| Rip and Reinmar |
All artwork by Deb
Marshall.
Originally published
in the Concord Monitor, April 29,
2017, as “Set Adrift on the Notes of Brahms", in a slightly shorter form.
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