Dissenters’ Chapel

<p style=”clear: both”>It starts with trying to review a book for goodreads, the only social networking I can do with any conviction at the moment. I have finished Arlington Park which is blatantly feminist, after all, the most sympathetic character being warned, “You have to be careful. Women your age can start to sound strident.” And of course I think political conviction has an appropriate place in fiction, I just worry about the axe-grinding drowning out a beautiful voice, and there is a question raised for me about technique in fiction, that clearly not every character should be endowed with all the abilities and insights and beliefs of the writer — but how does one go about respectfully creating those who are different? I am anxious lest we slip into a universe of those with insight-awareness-enlightenment and those without.

Only: I realize that this is the same old question for me, one of my ancientest ones, the one of how to encounter differences of conviction. Fragment in my notebook: I fear that to believe is to build the chapel walls that keep out the unbelievers, that absolutism begets intolerance, but relativism begets excuses. I long for solid ground, but as much for faith without abrasive edges and exclusions.

And then: I am distracted from the question by sheer joy that, after weeks of dullness, my brain seems to be turned on again. I want to dig into the friction between rosined horsehair and taut wound string; Carolynn and I did duets last night again and there was a looseness in my playing and the ability to fully be IN it, and it wasn’t perfect technique but happy expression and willingness to dwell in the sound I got. I whirl about this morning, to Mark O’Connor playing out of the speakers of my MP3 player, and to shifting shadows of branch, morning sunlight such as must strike this patch of earth only this brief moment of the year, that outside the studio doors dusty spring is the jumble of chaos of uncut grass, untrimmed shrubs, piled up decaying leaves and branches, weeds vital against dense dark moist earth challenging my powers of acceptance and immanence and — !

It’s all bright chill, and I am living from the spot just behind the base of throat from which I could surely purr if I were only furrier, only capable of the studied casualness of the full-on feline stretch, that flattening between the shoulder blades, the spine’s S of convexity and concavity. After struggling with Søren’s bow hand trying to get the knuckles to flatten, to drop, it broke in my brain, he could bring the backs of his fingers up for the same effect…

We shoot through life expanding and diminishing, slow motion pulsars, pulling on each other with gravitational tugs and mortality lies in the soil, beckoning us our whole lives long. And it isn’t, I arrive back, that there is a breed apart, of people who believe as I do, the articulate and enlightened set against dull masses, complacent and conformed, it’s that the drives for truth and for comfort set our focal lengths, the fields we perceive a little differently, but the drives have a universal quality. If the process of algorithm is arriving closer to the truth by diminishing corrections, then how to describe the increasing waves as we are now move seeking comfort, now are overtaken by curiosity; trace back to the first crawling away from a lap’s comfort, delight in exploration and the new and the pushing back limits of the world and then the drive back to that reassurance of familiar breast, enfolding arms.

The ancientness of the problems my brain turns over has two aspects, one an impatient rankling — this again! Surely if I had just attended properly I could be past this already, but also a comfort as a new problem resolves into familiar outlines.

As if from nowhere, I think this morning of a man I once worked for, someone I think must have had very different convictions and beliefs. The way we worked together was always proscribed-feeling, a propriety and formality, that the tie and jacket stayed on all day in the office, not just when there were clients to be impressed. He was father-aged and protective, I think, not that he would make comments about what I did with my life so much as express concern with a slightly raised brow, but — and all of this is in that unspoken, my impression of the situation decades later way — the protective was reassuring not patronizing, and however he would have voted on anything — we never talked about it — I was treated with the respect of having questions thoughtfully answered with explanations with as much detail as I wanted. And if I flailed about with unreliable cars and unreliable men who would pick me up to take me to lunch, and trying to manage a job and school and frequently needing to be two places at once, when I was at work with him the work had a comfort and peacefulness that was an important part of my life. Not that I was ever able to properly thank him for that.