More violin

This morning I kept a promise and strapped my violin case to my back, walked down the hill to the school where the middle two boys are and went in to the office where a substitute secretary went fumbling through desk drawers to find me a visitor’s pass so that I was official. It is astounding how every school seems to have its own culture of protocols, at my younger son’s school I have to create an account on a visitor’s computer on which I sign in; here the community is so small that everyone pretty much recognizes everyone, but there are concessions to security, a kidnapping from a Portland school last spring, I don’t complain.

And then I went out to the portable classroom where my son’s class is, open the door to a jumble of seven to nine year old bodies, discarded jackets, the happy chaos of bright paper — the class assembled on the floor and in a ring of chairs while the school counselor read them a book about bullying, redirected the goofiest questions, kept them in order steered away from straight-out tattling. The teacher made her way over to me, as soon as the counselor was done it would be our turn, she pointed out Soren’s music stand already standing ready by the desk where he sits. He loves that music stand. It was one of only three or four things he asked for for Christmas, and he is unduly proud of it, bright blue, collapsible, and with its own carrrying case. I sat down next to another mother I know and we whispered a little but mostly listened, I got a sweet little swell of pride when my child put up his hand and said something about how bullies think they are hurting just their victims, but really they are hurting themselves.

Then the counselor was done and it was our turn, we got the violins out and made our way across the carpet strewn with wriggling bodies, bodies that were restive, having sat still longer than they liked already, and wondered if it was going to be disaster. The tippy stand was set up and we managed not to step on any hands and I looked for a friendly face and I looked at my son, and I looked at the music and we played and it wasn’t as bad as I think the anxiety waking me up at 5:30 had made me think it was going to be. I know I don’t want to give him all of my weird feelings about playing in front of people, no, I’ll give him time to develop his own. I mean, no, he was so proud, and so excited I was there and it was awesome to see him glow. And the kids clapped and asked a lot of questions and then I was done and turning in my visitor’s pass and chatting with the math teacher in the office who has an eighteen month old and remembers that I have four boys and asks how I do it. And the doing something outside of the comfort range, it pays me back in this feeling of belonging and this school being ours however crazy the other parents are, however odd some of the kids are.

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Practicing this afternoon, by myself, scales, I am fierce with the tuner and the focus on just this one exacting aspect of my instrument to the exclusion of all others until I can keep the little light green, but I am not satisfied. Etudes, then, record, play back, record, listen critically, try again, practice, record, frustrated that the tone is thin and sickly, that it distorts under the force of my bow, is more wire than wood. I am mean to myself in a hundred ways, as I was as a girl, that somehow it would immunize me to the world’s meanness. Not that it ever did. Somehow it only ever left me weaker, more susceptible, with the meager satisfaction of at least having been meaner to myself than anyone else. I am angry at the sound but don’t allow the anger to manifest with the satisfying kick to the music stand that would send everything toppling but not really destroy anything. There is no point to that, I think. I don’t even bother with the ferocious scowl in the mirror that I feel. I think about the weird forms anger takes, when it’s not just spasmodic irritation and smashing; when it’s not unkind words, when it isn’t allowed because nice people don’t GET angry, that the anger of last resort was always the punitive renunciation, the anger of the powerless, the anger of hurting myself when I could get no one else to respond, the anger of not allowing myself the thing I want, of being a hunger artist.

I don’t know if I can muster grown-up woman compassion for the hurt and angry inside me but I focus more, instead, on the love that those four boys keep glowing in me, the determination to do for them what I cannot, would not, never could do for myself, which means I don’t shove the violin case under the bed for a week, means that I muster grace, build into the practice with them little evaluation questions that always start: “What did you love about what you just played, what are you proud of?” and then “What would you like to work on getting better?” This self finds games for making the memory easier, you play a measure, then I play the next measure, you the measure after that and we’ll see if we can do it so smoothly it sounds like one violin playing. It manages to be encouraging and cheerful and even patient when they wander and get distracted. It finds its own satisfaction in this, that this is its own art, has quieter rewards than thunderous applause and roses thrown on the stage, but applause fades and roses are already dead.

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I read memoirs, I read essays about memoirs, I think about mining truths in the deepest oldest memories. So maybe I am paying more attention to patterns in consciousness, thinking about how the violinist I am now is like the violinist I was when I gave it up at eighteen, how she is different, thinking about where grace has slipped in, and where I am trapped in ancient and painful thinking. Without even noticing it has happened, I realize that I am again preoccupied with questions about whether I am a good person or not, which I suppose is woven into the tangle of memories, but are alarming questions nonetheless. They are in such simple language, they seem like they must be innocuous and so I am unprepared when they send me sprawling. And I try to get at what it feels like, where it comes from, to separate out the assumptions behind the questions, assumptions that I reject when they are set out by themselves, the postulation of this schema of judgement and a binary moral system. I realize I have a hidden mythology where there are failures of knowledge and failures of will and failures of all of the various qualities to which I aspire, all the virtues of humility and patience and generosity and kindness, and I don’t know whether they are subsumed under on or the other of the above, or if there exists a special failure of self-knowledge that precedes the stupidest things I have done in my life, the moments of impatience and arrogance and unkindness and critical ugliness, directed at others, at myself. I try to make my peace with being messy and imperfect and it’s as hard as it has ever been.


Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 27, 2011 | 0 comments

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