Soul, Man

There are things everyone says, so they're assumed to be true.

This is why I keep some things to myself.

Don't speak ill of the dead. Don't wish ill on the living.

That whole notion--that all human life is precious, that our souls make us something special--has never made sense. Perhaps all people are precious to God, but they're not to me. If Beethoven had a soul, it's worth more than Donald Trump's. There are people I will mourn and other people I won't miss at all.

I'm not sure what a soul is. It seems like something you invent to get out of dying. If I do have a soul, I'm quite certain my chickadee Studley does too. In any case, every one of us will die. Our souls will survive us, or they will fade back into fiction.

So I don't, mostly, wish ill on a living person. At least out loud. COVID-19 is purely awful. And I wouldn't, as the mandatory sentiment would have it, wish it on anyone.

But if I did, bingo, he would totally be the guy. I hope he recovers. And lives long enough to go to prison.

Why? Not because I enjoy imagining someone suffering. I don't. I'm at least that much of a liberal. But this man has been jaw-droppingly careless with other people's lives. People of color, immigrants, peaceful protestors, and, in the face of a pandemic, every still-breathing American. 

And now, for him, finally, the shit got real.

It got real for someone who doesn't believe anything is real and has duped half the population with his whims and fantasies and play-acting and ever-flowing fountain of bullshit. I can celebrate that. I do.

Because it's not just a pandemic. We're also well on the way to destroying our planet as a livable habitat for us and most of our fellow travelers. We know exactly how we got here, we know what to do about it--but criminally greedy souls are pretending we don't, and are blithely sacrificing their children. And yours. And Studley's children too. They are willing to risk it all, for a little bit of money. It makes no difference if half the people are willing to swallow their lies whole and ask for seconds. It doesn't make it less real. Shit needs to get real. If it takes a dead man to do it, I'm good with that.

I do not particularly believe that human life is sacred, or at least any more sacred than other life. But tonight, I was thinking about our souls and our pretense to immortality, and I put on a recording of Beethoven's Ninth, second movement. I cranked it way up. I lost my breath.

The top of my head tingled and dissolved and lifted off until it soared with the angels I don't believe in. It was as real as anything I know.

It's A Bummer About Peter Pan

I joined a music performance group years ago. We meet in each other's houses and play whatever we've been working on. The benevolent founder of this salon shanghaied virtually every one of the original members. We were scraped right off the streets, some of us. He's an insistent guy, and doesn't know how to take "I'll probably throw up" as an answer.

It's been a fluid cast of members, and on any given night about a dozen of us show up. At first I was relatively comfortable. There were many people much more accomplished than I, but there were also a few rank beginners and one or two who could be counted on to (praise Jesus) play woodenly, which calms me down. I can play very musically. I can do this when I'm alone at night on my home piano and there's no danger of anyone actually listening. I can play the hell out of that instrument in those conditions.

Usually I don't do that well on performance night. And over the last few years, all the lesser lights seem to have moved on, and I find myself surrounded by lovely people with master's degrees in music performance. Opera singers show up. Clarinetists. Competitive teams of string players. It's all gorgeous and memorable, and than it's my turn to walk up to the gibbet, I mean piano bench, and, well--plink away.

But even the accomplished musicians figure I at least have what it takes to be a page-turner. I've been drafted on a few occasions. "My four friends the string players over here are going to spank the hell out of some Dvorak and Beethoven," my pianist friend Carole said recently, "and all you have to do is turn the pages for me." All righty then!

I can read music, I thought. I can sit back and watch my friend flinging out a bazillion notes and get up in time to turn that page, I thought. No problem!

The view from the page-turner's seat

Problem. Turning pages turns out to be just as terrifying as note-flinging. One false move at the switching yard and the whole quintet goes off the rails.  And it's ever so possible. Do I have the next page under my fingers, or did I accidentally grab two? I've got one and a half measures to make sure.

And then there's Beethoven, a well-known bitch. He sticks in something he calls a "movement" just for fun, but that doesn't mean the movement is always forward. He sails into it for a bit and then repeats. Lurches ahead and then backs up again. Two pages in I need to whip back a page. A little later I need to whip back two pages. Later yet he wants me to whip back to an unrelated page, probably in the Dvorak, and only then does he get up enough momentum to go forward and keep on going. It is utterly terrifying.  The possibility looms that I will whip the entire score into the audience, where it will flap around like a spooked bat.

Even without the repeats, sometimes the musical pace is so torrid that my eyeballs can't keep up. Here is a movement entitled Molto Vivian Vance which means, in Latin, that chocolate bon-bons are about to come down the conveyer belt faster than you can get them wrapped. And then there's the other problem. Twenty minutes in, your friend and her friends, with no thought to your comfort, might start playing so damn beautifully that you're caught up in the majesty of the moment, and suddenly you realize you have no idea where she is on the page. All you can do is scout ahead for a big stand-alone chord and hope she beaches herself on it long enough that you can get your bearings again.

It's a horror.  At some point, when you're in too deep to bail out, you realize that you are the invisible person up in the rigging who is solely responsible for making sure everything on stage happens as it should. And if you let go of one crucial wire, Peter Pan might go sailing end-over-end into the audience and splat into the balcony.

Heh heh heh.