About 10 years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I
worked for a piano player named Ran. Every Sunday around 12:30 I hopped on the T
(the Greenline from Lechmere bound inward to BU) with a new book in hand. The thirty-five-minute-or-so
trip was the perfect amount of time to be seduced into swimming amorously
around inside the waters of an excellent plot to the rhythm of the click-clack,
back-and-forth, hum-sway of the train and the in and out, get up, get down motions of its riders. Paragraphs
and pages later, when I got to my stop in Brookline, I would emerge from my
swim, put my book in my bag, then walk the rest of the way to Ran’s
underground, filled-to-the-brim apartment with the horizontal windows like
narrowed eyes hovering street level at the top of the walls.
I was one of a tiny army of people who worked for
Ran. I’d taken over the job from my friend Dawn and was there, like she had
been, to do small administrative tasks: jot down errands and reminders; transcribe
the letters (real ones, not emails) he continually sent out; and make note of
the labels he wanted me to type up for the new videos he'd added to his library
during the week (he recorded everything—60
Minutes, Dateline, the CMA Awards,
old movies, and for a while a Spanish language teaching show on PBS that for a
few episodes featured a little brown dog who had lost his way in Barcelona, thus
enabling viewers to learn to say in Spanish such dynamic conversation starters as: “Excuse me.” and “Have you seen my dog?” and “No, he isn’t big; he is
little and brown.”). Every week there were more letters: praises and
ruminations to authors of books he had just finished; advise to students from cities as far away as Bombay and Tokyo, who had emailed him for input about
their goals and abilities; and short notes simply saying thank you to people
who had come by, called, or sent him a package in the mail.
Ran taught at the New England Conservatory of Music
(still does). He had friends all over the world. He was a great cook. He was
co-founder of the Third Stream department with Gunther Schuller at the
conservatory in 1973 (It’s now called the Contemporary Improv Department). And,
most importantly of all, he had infinite faith in the primacy of the ear. If
someone were to say to me: “Tell me something about Ran,” these are just a few of
the things I would say. But not necessarily in that order.
Before Ran, I had never heard of Third Stream; nor
did I know too much about Contemporary Improv. These days I don’t want to
imagine the world without it.
***
When I was 38, I almost died. And stunned everyone around me (myself included) with two heart attacks followed by emergency
bypass surgery. It was a rare event in which the arteries on the top of my
heart started to split. If they had ruptured, that would have been it. I was
lucky: My surgeon knew what he was looking at when he saw my angiogram—knew he
wasn’t looking at plaque about to rupture or your average hardened, narrowed artery, but something much more severe—and he
knew he needed to act fast. I was lucky my body decided to enact its riotous convulsions when I was in Nashville, a city where all the hospitals in town want
bragging rights when it comes to excellent cardiac care, instead of somewhere
else, like Binghamton, New York, or Ellensburg, Washington—two much smaller cities where I’ve also lived, where I likely wouldn't have fared nearly as well.
Last night, while lying in bed thinking about my
heart and about the way many of my attempts to write poetry about my summer of
almost dying have been no more than that, I thought about Ran. About all those
Sundays we spent together: the conversations, the video clips we’d sit and watch
over lunch (he liked to include bits of dialogue in his video library log and
we would often rewind and review the episodes about which I was taking notes);
all the words I transcribed (words that I can’t help imagine would make the
most incredibly dynamic word cloud in the world); the lunches and the way he
would combine foods in unexpected ways; and eventually, the walks we would take
to the farmer’s market in the spring. I don’t know why he or those days came to
mind when I was thinking about my attempts to write my heart, but I decided to
pay attention. With a willingness that would make Freud proud were I
to jump into a time machine and become one of his patients spewing out my history while he listened in silence, I embraced
the mind in all its strangeness: opted to let it flow on its own accord—as serpentine,
circuitous, labyrinthine as it pleased. Trust enough to let yourself fall,
and you’ll end up in a place you never would have imagined. Sometimes, this can
be a good thing. At the very least, it will be revealing.
As I conducted this mental inventory of the writing
that hadn’t worked—because it came in combinations of words that felt too
dramatic, facile, mythic, and somehow false—compared with the writing (including
some lines from the shoddy pile) that had,
I started to notice that the writing I like followed a similar pattern: it came
up from behind, embraced my heart from the side, surprised it through imagined scenarios
and narratives, and most of all it was writing that trusted its medium enough
to simply let it be, in whatever form it took—even when the words that came out
were vernacular, banal, and didn’t “sound” poetic in the slightest.
This entire inner query ultimately prompted me—in
my eye-masked, ear-plugged, and nighttime cocooned-up-tight state—to challenge
myself to a narrative exercise. I asked myself: what story would you tell about
your heart if you started talking about it in plain language, with no
preconceptions of the story’s form or its literary parameters, with no ideas of
how it should be, or how you as an overly constructed “survivor” should tell it?
I let my mind wander (easier to do when one is in that space just before the
body abandons itself to its nightly mini-death) and within a few seconds, “About
10 years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I worked for a piano player name Ran,”
passed through my mind. I didn’t expect it, but followed it for a few
paragraphs before falling asleep. This morning I remembered and stopped to
write that sentence down.
One of the lessons I take from improv: follow
without asking why.
Another: if something strikes you grab on.
***
To listen to Ran play was to watch (and feel)
someone transform, to move from dusty-basemented afternoons of wrinkled shirts,
cluttered rooms, untied shoes, and the occasional echo of lunch lingering in a soft,
white beard into that extraordinary sort of moment when a sudden, welcome (even
if you didn’t know you wanted it) fissure appears in the universe. When the
world as you know it—the ordinariness of a room, some scuffed chairs, worn out
patches of carpet, a broken blind dangling over a window, dirty snow melting
off boots—is gone, when the mundane rings with a voice so physically alive that
what is expected out of a moment is split wide open, turned inside-out, as its inhabitants
are invited into a secret space behind a veil they didn’t know existed, a space
they aren’t even sure they will know how to take in, a sublime moment when you
realize you are in the midst of something unique, a putting together of body
and notes that never existed until then. A combination that won’t ever happen
again. A body and notes that feel much larger than everyone in the room
combined.
This could be referred to, more simply or directly
perhaps, as the ecstasy of the aesthetic experience—for the listeners and the
performer, both of who get lost when art is that incredible. But to say that
wouldn’t do (all the wonderfully delicious associations evoked by the mere
utterance of the word ecstasy aside). Because if I were to write: listening to the
piano player, one felt the ecstasy of the aesthetic experience, I would skip
right over the flesh—his, ours, the flesh of the experience itself—and the
color and heat of our transformation. When I write of him playing, the way he felt,
I want to hone in on the bodies in the rooms. If I were to show it to you, I
would direct you to his fingers, to his head bent over so low it seems as if
any moment he will kiss the keyboard, his curved back, the sound of his foot pressing
down on the pedal. I would point out the darkness, the small cone of light glowing
golden around his body, and the people in the audience who bow their heads and
close their eyes—not to a god, but to music. I would tell you to stop and
listen to the long, full silence that rises up between the performance and the
applause and lasts longer than you might expect. Though he has finished no one
is ready for it to be over, or break the spell with the slap, slap, slapping of
their enthusiastic—now sweaty, together let’s make a thunderstorm—hands.
***
Last night I caught a glimpse of myself standing
in Ran’s bathroom. It was late summer. Some of his students were over and I could
hear them laughing with him in his studio down the hall. I was washing my hands, and when I glanced
up at my reflection in the mirror, I paused: there was someone familiar looking back,
someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. The woman in my reflection looked happy, more alive than she’d been in months.
My years in Cambridge were a strange time for me—most
of them spent living with a man I should have never lived with in a city I
should never have been in, because I never should have followed him there. I
was dreadfully unhappy—for some months (I realize in hindsight) I was deeply
depressed. So depressed I didn’t leave the house for days on end, couldn’t talk
myself into going out no matter what I tried.
Sometimes, I think of it now and I am incredulous.
I was living in CAMBRIDGE after all: a city that, even if I shouldn’t have been there, was at the
same time exactly the kind of place I had for so much of my life absolutely
craved. I lived just minutes away from the line where the Charles River
separates the city from Boston, in the midst of art
museums, galleries, writers, conservatories, music at every turn, cinema,
architecture, all that creative and intellectual energy to feast on, but for my first few years I
didn’t see it. I had forgotten to open my eyes. I looked at, lived in, and
feasted from the refrigerator and its salty-sweet promises instead. I gained so
much weight that when I finally started noticing and stepped on a scale I
wasn’t sure I was the same person. I was shocked when I finally noticed how I was living, and realized
I had been hiding in some dark space I thought was comfort. By the time I
started working for Ran, I was slowly making my way out into the world again. I
was still blinking a lot and gun shy (As we know from Plato, it takes time to
adjust when you’ve been living in a cave, when you finally stop to notice the
sun.). But slowly my eyes were adjusting to the world outside of my own dark once again. The blinks were fewer and further between. I became more open. When
I talked to people, I was actually meeting their gaze.
Last night, I saw myself standing there and remembered
exactly how I felt that day—smiling in the mirror, realizing I was going to be
alright. I was wearing a V-neck tee. In the mirror, I had no scar.
For part 2 click here
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