Archive for the 'Creative Memories' Category

Aching Cold Morning

Published
by
Garnet David
on December 6, 2007
in Creative Memories, Garden and Nature and Stories
. 7 Comments

Snow Morning Aching MoonHe awoke, as usual, way too early, around 7 AM. Being a night person, that meant he only got 4-5 hours of sleep, not quite enough. But it happened often to him. And since optimism wasn’t one of his surpluses, a heaviness filled him seeing dawn’s early light.

He felt the warm little body of Punky, his oldest cat, next to him. The thermostat was set to go down to 55 at night to save energy, so Punky, now almost 18, always slept as close as possible to his body to keep warm.

Instead he found Perlin, his younger Siamese, in Punky’s place. He petted Perlin, and asked him what he had done with Punky, whose spot he had taken. Perlin just looked at him with that look cats give which can mean anything. “Punky, who?” or “I was just asleep, why are you asking me?” Rather than roll over to fall asleep until a more civilized hour, he got up to see where Punky was.

The furnace had kicked on to heat the house up, as it was set to do about this hour. But the air was still burning cold to his near naked skin. He had almost no fat on his body, so the cold went right through to his bones as he descended the stairs in boxer shorts.

He found Punky sitting on one of the spindly café chairs by the back window, like a little monk folded up in a peaceful meditation pose. At first he seemed lonely to Dorn. After all, if he were human, old as an oak sitting alone in a cold room, he would seem lonely. But then he realized Punky wasn’t too bad off. The chair he was sitting on was right over a large heating vent, which was now blasting nice, cozy warm air, and would be for at least the next half hour.

He approached Punky and tried to pet him, but he pulled away. He rose out of his meditative pose and turned to face the picture window behind him. Dorn’s eyes followed.

The morning was a brittle white icing on a cake which had sat out for a day too long. The fresh snow from the day before had hardened under a bitter blanket of night cold. Tracks and various marks held account of the previous day’s activities. He could see where he had stepped to sweep the back steps and where he walked through the garden to shake the piles of snow off the evergreen branches to keep them from collapsing under the its weight. His car had made two crystalline geometric tracks into the now closed garage.

In the sky, a sharp slice of thin moon pierced the aching dawn. He was reminded of the movie he had seen the night before on network TV, The Day After Tomorrow, about how global warming could create terrible mega-storms which might, in one scenario, bring down the crushing cold of space to earth’s fragile surface, freezing everything on it. But this sky had the promise of life-giving warmth just beyond its horizon, a glow to which the moon pointed, and which Punky faced through the window.

Through the double pane glass he heard a bird chirp, one piercing peep. It was still gray enough to hide clear sight of the scene outside. Most birds were still asleep, he figured. He found the bird, a female cardinal, her brownish red blending with the twisted sticks of the wisteria clamoring over the garage.

Then he noticed that the bird feeder, a covered rectangular platform like a little house atop a six foot pole, was empty. Though he filled it daily they ate it as fast as he could fill it. He knew a swarm of birds would soon be fluttering around looking for breakfast on that feeder. They relied on it, especially when snow covered the ground.

The cardinal swooped to the feeder and pecked at it. It was only ten feet from the back window. Half naked and singed with cold, Dorn stood there and watched. It looked so cold out. But he knew he had to fill that feeder. He couldn’t go back to bed with the lingering thought of those cold birds.

He went upstairs to cover his bony body with a terrycloth robe and bedroom slippers. Punky continued staring out the back window as Dorn opened the back door. As he broke beyond the wall of heat coming from the vent by the door, his skin recoiled against the heat sucking molecules of dense lifeless air. If he had fur, it would stand on end to conserve warmth. Instead, the benign terrycloth did little to help. Luckily the garage, where the birdseed was stored, wasn’t more that twenty feet away.

After dumping a bowl full of seed on the feeder, he scurried back indoors. Punky ignored his shivering entrance and continued to peer out the window. Within minutes the show began as the light rose from within the dead cold snow. Dozens of birds appeared from the dormant scenery around the garden. The feeder became grand central station, with flights arriving and departing in a continuous stream from the hub to all the bushes and trees around the garden.

A lone squirrel, covered in snow like a little kid out in it for the first time, dug for scrap seed in the frozen icing as patiently as a scholar seeking a cure for cancer. All this activity filled Dorn’s mind against the leering void of the the approaching day. Sharp rays of sun now splintered the aching cold morning into pieces he could grasp and hold onto.

Punky turned around to gaze at him with a kitty kiss, eyes slowly closing and opening.

What Does It Want To Do?

Published
by
Garnet David
on December 3, 2007
in Creative Memories, Deep Thoughts and Philosophical Questions
. 1 Comment

swirl water leavesThe words came into his head. Out of nowhere. Like someone else said them. The voice wasn’t even his, but sounded like someone doing a bad imitation of him; slightly nasal with a raspy piercing deepness.

He lounged on his screened front porch, shielded from the eyes of passersby. Not that he knew any of them, really. Just neighbors. The same faces passed his house regularly, fulfilling the daily routine stamped into their lives, in this case by the dogs they walked. He envied them this regularity, at least from a distance. It gave them the power of rooted steadiness, able to withstand gusts of windy life without falling over.

He, on the other hand, felt more like a pile of leaves, able to take any shape and move with the wind, but having no particular form or solidity. He felt like the foam on top of the waves of change and time. For that reason he liked his name, Dorn. It sounded like a part of a decoration. Just part. Not even his name was complete in itself.

“What does it want to do?” Was the question directed at him or from him? He’d always thought of himself as an object, a human form rather than a unique person. So he could be the “it” in question, like the hamster whose owner asks aloud in its presence what it wants to do. He could imagine the neighbors wondering why he didn’t rake his leaves or mow his grass much. Why did he sleep so late before starting his day? He smiled, imagining himself under observation to learn about the perplexing and perhaps dangerous behavior of slightly deviant humans.

But he’d also approached the whole human race from the same detachment he applied to himself. To his misanthropic thinking, most people had no free will. Certainly not as a group. They did what they had to do to survive, or compete, or follow the group.

How many dared break all the “rules” to be free of them? Most desperately “wanted” to fit in, even if they disagreed with the norm. Wasn’t that the way of the world, to be the best behaved lab rats on the block? Wasn’t modern life a conglomeration of activities born of doing what’s healthy, right, smart, well researched, popular, chic, compassionate or efficient?

People thought it was free will to shop when and for what you wanted. Sure, like it would be free will to snort coke when you “wanted”, or sleep when you’re tired or eat when you’re hungry. No. To him people had about as much free will as cats or birds. Clink their bowl and they come running for more treats. The “It” in question could mean humanity flowing along the luscious and complex Cinerama of cause and effect, survival and conformity. Freedom is an elusive thing.

Thoughts continued to burst like microwave popcorn. Body, mind, systems of language, culture, society, history, chance; all burst with answers to explore. All seemed to operate in systems of their own, with particular patterns of cause and effect, like an IT without will. Letting the scope of the question grow, it now encompassed something beyond humanity and earth. What if “it” in question is the universe. What does IT want to do? Is the universe conscious of doing anything? How can it be? So how can it want to do something?

This thinking began to give an answer, not so much an answer as another kind of question. Why was Dorn able to ask these questions? If all aspects of the universe, from individuals to groups to cosmos, were operating under definable and determinate rules, what did it imply about his ability to wonder at the unanswerable nature of the questions? Gazing with wonder at snow falling, or leaves swirling in a gust of wind, or the peaceful purring of a sleeping cat, or the powerful ephemeral majesty of the setting sun; were those activities just another cog in the wheel of cause and effect?

Sometimes Dorn wanted to do things. Yes, he himself actually wanted to do something, without consideration for their usefulness or conformity. He wanted to sob for hours at the horror of the human race’s continual violence to other creatures, torture, abuse of power, manipulation of lives for personal gain, blind selfishness, pettiness, laziness, destruction of the planet. He included himself in that mass of insidious perfidiousness. He also wanted to hug and kiss anyone he met on the street, to break the ice of distance and normality, to start a new spark of spontaneous love. He wanted to reward with the greatest possible emotion anyone and everyone who struggled to make the world a little better place.

But he was usually paralyzed into doing what’s normal; smile, go about your business, leave the worrying to someone else. Sometimes he wanted to stop doing anything, because so much of “normal” life involved conforming to patterns of tacit destruction and manipulation and evasion of naked truth. He felt trapped, unable to escape his own involvement, his complicity in such a world. How could he fight it without becoming further caught in the vicious cycle? However, these thoughts embarrassed him, because of their wimpiness. He could imagine someone saying, “Get off your ass and do something about it!”

He quickly grew overwhelmed. How could he fathom what the universe wanted to do or how to determine what is truly free will? A fuse burned out in his mind. That often happened to him. He’d break open a huge subject, even with friends, and by the time they had gotten deep into the discussion, he’d poop out, move on, wanting to do something else. He had a feeling it was an escape, a kind of laziness, to give up on the big questions. But what the heck, everyone else did it.

So he finished his last swig of beer. Out of habit, the idea of a walk came to mind. According to numerous studies, walking is good for you, and it passed some time in a way others would accept as normal. So off he went, to be healthy and normal.

That’s what IT wanted to do for now, at least. But the question would haunt him toward further exploration.

Touching Juice

Published
by
Garnet David
on May 11, 2007
in Creative Memories, Healing, Social Culture, Spirituality and Stories
. 3 Comments

Moon Rake Over MeThere are places we go and places we need to go. They are similar. They both fascinate us and thrill us and also terrify us. Spiny urchins with unforgettable foibles chuckle at our fear, or knock in the night. (play dramatic, clutching string chord, perhaps a nice healthy 13th cluster, with vigorous tremolo, diminuendoing to background) We fear the unknown, lurking, well… unknown, beneath the surface, beneath our physical lives and in our psychic lives. “Could you pass the pickles? I love those Kosher dills!” We are hard wired to ignore a lot.

Learning is doing and letting. When we face what we fear, we learn. To learn we must let. To let we must trust. To trust we must believe. And it goes on, until we get to experience. When we experience, we find change, it begins to carry more weight. When we see things as they are we admit they are absolutely new. Sure, there are patterns. Like spirals and swirls and hatcheted hounds tooth patterns looming over the surface. What I mean is the raw, visceral newness, like opening a new box of Cheerios. It’s not pretty. Accepting and opening to everything is daunting, terrifying. But it can happen. And it needs to be acknowledged, heightened, fleshed, lived, feared.

Johnny, oh Johnny boy, take me to your haystack and shine your sun on me! Yes, Johnny redeemed me resuscitated me, brought me back to reality, to the reality I sense is right for me, for anyone, to cherish the sweetness of life as it happens, from as early on as you possibly can, to give that whenever you feel it. Johnny hungry skin, perfectly hungry, salient. Connecting with his perfect hunger, giving it back, sharing it. Just for the moment, carefully, formally. Yearning, but with open eyes, embracing, shocked, vermilion snare. There is only one lesson. There is only one lesson. Do I need to repeat myself?

I know when I’m outnumbered, and when I makes sense to give in, I know. I don’t try to kid anybody. I take it as it comes. I flop around a lot. Others may not see it, but it’s me. Quiver, huddle, crouch, scream, rejoice, vibrate, weep, smile, give myself completely up to the glory of being alive, no turning back, no redemption, just gratitude, giving in, giving up, giving over, and finding the glory of just being, just breathing.

I get out of the car and press the garage door button. The noisy motor grinds for 10 long seconds. I stand there, pausing, knowing I’ve paused safely here before. High above the wind chimes barter their wares, seductive questions, partial answers, an essence of music, sampled sirens messages. She swims between two notes, daringly, favoringly. I look up at the great beast hovering over my house, reaching unrelentingly, immeasurably, knowingly, anciently toward the sky. One of it’s great, gentle hands, magnificently delicate hands, at the tip of its long, almost grotesquely feminine fingers, cradles the moon. The wind chimes pause.

Regal, diminutive, she notices me, sideways, alluring, and smiles, looking someplace beyond what I see, across the neighborhood, across the house with the perfect lights. She blows clouds around her noctilucent face, swirling them infinitely slow, a slow liquid, like glass. She listens as I watch. She calls deeply, she shows me myself, my weakness, my perfection, my end. She somehow touches me inside. She calls up my innocence, my child, my hurt. She tells me it’s OK. She lets my tears out. She lets them out from far, far inside me. I stand there, looking up at the moon through the arms of the great, gentle beast. I cry, wailing inside. Not wanting to wake the neighbors with the pretty lights, not wanting to disturb them, wailing silently, for all I cannot do, all I fail to do, all I wish to do, all I am afraid to do. I have so much to learn.

After spacing out at the moon, I come inside the house, greeted by my little friends, whom I ignore way too much, like many of my friends. Why do I do that? Why do I let pass so many perfect, sweet, gentle moments in favor of some kind of thrill, a roller-coaster ride? I get hooked on far out orbits, swinging low, way low, on a glittering chariot, way, way too much.

My little, patient friends, warm, so free, so reliant, so poetic, they know me and cannot speak, they ground me, tell me things, remind me to eat, to sleep, to breathe, to love, to hug. They are so patient. They embody some subtle, effulgent fragments of a great spirit. They embody something, at least to my fertile, lumbering sense of it. How come we do the things we do? How can we be so sensitive and so seductive and so dull, crashing and flopping across exquisite landscapes, barely noticing, just passing, blinking, into some strange night.

I cross the bridge. I walk away from the river into the fields. I walk with the moon, hold hands with a tree, weep with the night, end.

My Summer of Healing

Published
by
Garnet David
on July 28, 2006
in Creative Memories, Healing, Inspiration, Personal and Spirituality
. 15 Comments

lotus in the drivewayThis has been a great summer for me. A violinist friend, Orbella, has been staying with me 4 days a week. She plays part time with my orchestra here in Columbus. She has quickly become a very good friend. We joke that we are the happiest unmarried couple alive. If only I were straight…

Orbella, whom I dubbed “the Orb”, has allowed me to laugh my way back into a comfortable happiness. She has given me the confidence to know the respect that my 46 year old presence commands, to know the value of my questioning depth. She has showed me many things which I hadn’t experienced in years, a kind of exuberant, European sophistication. Her spirit is healthy, rich, subtle and yet very similar to mine, but younger. We are much alike. So we have learned from each other who we are capable of being. We are soul mates.

Since we both wear Chanel colognes/perfumes, we call ourselves the Chanel Twins. Watch out, here we come!

The other thing which has changed my life is the Alexander Technique. Here is that story.

For much of my life I’ve existed in a kind of abstract physical denial. I live in a world of thought and ideas and emotional reactions, barely present physically. I was always worried about the future of the past, anxious about my playing, uncomfortable with my instrument, never able to relax and just be. I was also mistrusting of everyone, including good friends. I never felt comfortable practicing clarinet where anyone could hear me, for fear of being judged, or some other neurosis. I think that being sick for so long in the 90’s, then being depressed, added to this problem. I would basically go through the day filled with anxiety, fear, inhibition, expectation, judgment and unbalance. Exercise helped. Meditation helped for awhile. Self-examination, which would seem to help, actually aggravated the situation.

I developed pain down my left neck side and behind my shoulder blade. It got worse with yoga and weightlifting. I finally resorted to chiropractic and massage therapy. I had heard of Alexander being good for musicians, but had never felt the need to explore it. It happened there was a teacher in the building right next to the chiropractor.

I went to my first lesson and was blown away at the good energy coming from the teacher. She showed me, with my own body, how it felt to have space and freedom in all movement. She suggested I stop playing with my legs closed and the clarinet sitting on my lap, since it closed a major flow of energy. For the next week, I floated as a lotus does above the water, barely aware of the drowning prison I had endured for years.

I went to another teacher, who came at the same technique more intellectually. He outlined the method:

Most of us react to stress unconsciously, and the body goes into “startle position”, head and neck pulled back and down. This position becomes a constant habit, and as a result, the rest of our body is never able to flow and becomes unbalanced and unhealthy.

The solution is to learn the body’s language and learn to consciously control it.

1) primary control, or primary flow- releasing the neck forward and up, where it is free from tension and free to flow with the body following.

2) global awareness- being aware of your 3 dimensional surroundings, your body in space.

3) kinesthetic awareness- being aware of the body “from the inside” as opposed to from the mind.

4)Part of this process is “body mapping”, learning what feeling in the body connects to what parts, and separating fact from fiction as to how things work.

5) inhibition- a positive way of “thinking before acting”; in other words, acting very consciously.

As with most people, I was acting and living unconsciously. And my unconscious habits were atrocious. My emotions were so doubting and anxious that my body felt the same. My breathing was forced, artificial and tight. My neck was constantly in the “startle position”, pulled in and back. My back was tense. My abdomen was tense, more so because of all my surgeries and the resulting scar tissue.

Some of the problems, such as the pain in my neck, will take years to solve. (Part of the reason I don’t blog much is that I had head and eye strain from sitting in front of the computer. Hopefully this will improve with better usage) But I’ve found that the body awareness I’ve learned has also helped me emotionally. My constant anxiety and fear were deeply held within my body. I had become an expert at looking relaxed on the outside, but was usually anxious on the inside.

This brings me back to the way I’ve lived my life, or at least how I’ve lived the past 12 years, but perhaps much longer: in a kind of abstract world of ideas and fantasy and emotional reactions, without ever listening to my body’s language.

I’ve learned that being in my body is a way of staying grounded. I am naturally full of imagination and millions of thoughts and observations, chunks of worlds, seeing through people, giddy with possibility, or slumped with emotional and physical stupor from self-doubt. My body was dragged around behind all those wild emotions. Now that I have “primary control” (at least learning it) I can stay grounded, while my mind is free to explore all kinds of stuff without me losing who I am.

My physical existence is also incredibly important to playing the clarinet. Now that I know better how to breathe, support, stay loose under pressure…I can play more freely, finding the path of least resistance to being a better player.

As you can see, I’ve been busy, in very good way.

I’m off on my summer travels now. For the next few weeks, until August 18th, I’ll be: hiking in the Adirondacks (the BEST healing for me), visiting Father in Cape Cod, visiting Mother in Bethesda, and attending the International Clarinet Festival in Atlanta for a few days.

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll be back soon for more explorations of of Garnet-David’s existence.

Dreaming Big; the Perfect Conductor

Published
by
Garnet David
on March 5, 2006
in Creative Memories, Noteworthy and Social Culture
. 28 Comments

rainbowI’m still pinching myself. I’m sure I’ll wake up and find it was all a dream. In all my 17 years as principal clarinetist of the Columbus Symphony, I’ve never been this optimistic about my career.

Four years ago I was chosen to be on the search committee to choose a new music director of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. The music director is much more than a conductor, especially in the US. He not only shapes the musical product of the orchestra, but fashions the image of the organization to draw financial support. The music director IS the organization to the public eye. Big shoes.

Oddly enough orchestral musicians have not traditionally been asked to help choose the MD (music director). We are obvious choices, considering our experience and skill in the orchestra, and since it’s our jobs which are at stake. Who better to choose our musical soul mate than us? But we are perfectionists. Our relationship with the MD is intimate, and the glamor sometimes wears off. Hirokami even joked about it, saying “I hope the honeymoon lasts”. Something tells me it will last this time.

The search had been rocky, with some candidates popular among the elite supporters of symphony and not the orchestra. The point was to choose someone who could flourish both on and off the podium. We were all worried that a universally loved candidate would not appear.

The very last candidate was Junichi Hirokami. He is Japanese, 4′2″ in height, and spoke broken English. But the musicians loved him. His natural ability with musical phrasing, rhythm and style elicited our best playing. His charisma was infectious. My friends who attended that first weekend raved about him. So after only two “dates” with him, we used our newly acquired clout to recommend him the sole candidate.

As a committee member, I felt the responsibility of my position in shaping the future of the orchestra. There were some contentious meetings where reasonable doubts were raised about Hirokami’s ability to raise money and commune with needed donors. I wondered myself. He had never run an American orchestra. But he promised full attention to anything necessary for us to succeed and flourish. He really, really loved us as an orchestra and desired to take us to the next level. I believed him. So did most of the orchestra.

In response to the non-musician committee members doubts about his ability to flourish off the podium, I used a business model to clarify my point. I asked them which is more important in the long run: a great marketer or a great product? Ultimately, the quality of the product is what sells it. My arguments, along with the excitment of the other musicians on the committee must have had an effect. They chose to take a chance and agreed to hire him. I was elated, but uneasy.

The negotiations took several months. The musicians became apprehensive, perhaps a lover’s fear of being jilted. Understandably we were nervous that our dream would pop. Hirokami was slated to appear in February, and only two weeks before his engagement it became official. Finally. He was to be our next music director. We were relieved. But I still didn’t exhale.

In the first rehearsal his familiar, friendly way of leading continued from the two “dates” we had with him before “marrying” him. In fact, he was almost too friendly. He kept saying, “Just relax and trust yourselves.” Why? Now that he was our boss, shouldn’t he criticize us more to improve the product? His tempos were relaxed. Perhaps too relaxed. Where was the excitement? Uh-Oh! Were we merely drunk with love on the first two dates? Was I the nervous bride with cold feet?

A press conference was held after the rehearsal to splash the news of his arrival around town. President Bush happened to be in town, so the press crowd for us was bare minimum. Lucky for us. In responding to the first question asked of him by a reporter, Hirokami became confused and had trouble understanding. My spirit sank. This wasn’t looking good.

Thankfully he perked up soon after and gave an impressive interview to Barbara Zuck stating clear goals for the orchestra. At the many hobnobbing parties held through the week, he was direct about asking for money. He began to fashion an iconography, using a green handkerchief to symbolize peaceful world relations. He hailed the American principal of “freedom” as the reason for his being hired and emphasized the value of international connections. He was building bridges artfully and skillfully. His wife and daughter were a big hit. His charm and charisma reached beyond his differences. This relieved me, but I was still apprehensive about the musical product.

Friday night arrived. I showed up early to work on reeds and warm up thoroughly. I wanted to play my best, especially since the we in the orchestra had chosen him. Junichi Hirokami walked out on stage. The musicians all stood in the traditional respect for the conductor. The maestro was dwarfed among the towering American bodies. He stepped onto the podium, and after acknowledging the audience, he smiled at us. He lifted his baton and gave the downbeat.

The first piece was Dvorak’s Carneval Overture. Though the tempo matched what he had rehearsed, the spirit was fresh. Maestro Hirokami exuded control and confidence far beyond his diminutive stature. He was larger than life. He knew exactly what he was doing. The orchestra played buoyantly, as someone who jovially laughs in celebration of great fortune. Music was encouraged and allowed to flow from us. Our desire to play well rose up to meet the maestro’s geniality. The audience seemed to agree, judging by the enthusiasm of their cheers.

After the concert, I remembered a question Maestro Hirokami had asked us rhetorically; “Why isn’t your orchestra more famous?” Now, rather than doubting him, I was thinking, “Why not?”

Pinching myself never felt so good.