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I'm recovering from a small bout of a summertime head-cold, and I'm floundering a bit. There is work I need to do, and I know I need to do it, but I'm putting it off, doing tangential things instead. One of them is a set of new pieces, but I did them more from habit than from muse-driven inspiration. I'll put them up in the next day or two.
I wake in the morning, and I look out our bedroom window. If the dew point is such that it allowed the formation of water droplets on the branches and the grass, then I see magical rainbow-spots splayed across the view. If not, the sunshine (we've been without significant rain for awhile now) paints a picture of a glorious day to follow.
What do I do with this? I try to map it onto memories I have of other 'glorious days'. Maybe I'm hoping to reinforce my experience so that it becomes an unassailable reality. I want to have joy again! I want to have happiness! One of the central truths of Buddhism, apparently, is that existence is suffering. I don't think that is necessarily true.
I'm reading a book now, How Music Got Free, about the rise of audio-compression technology and how it radically altered the music business. What I find disillusioning -- and I knew all this before -- is hearing again about the actual business of the music business. I go upstairs and I listen to my old Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush records, and I think "but they were doing this music for artistic reasons!". When I was younger, I had such a pure vision of what it meant to construct a life in music. The irony is that I've essentially been handed that life: I can do whatever music I want, and I have access to the technology I need to do it.
Why do I feel so hollow? Maybe the business-market plays another role, an essential one for a creator: validation. But I doubt that, too. I suspect that if I had grown up to become a Real Live Rock Star, I'd still be facing these gosh-darned existential crises. And maybe that's the heart of the Buddhist "suffering": I want people to like me, me!
Maybe existence doesn't have to be like that. Maybe I can imagine a world, can create a world, where I am happy with what I do. Maybe.
I did finish a set of smallish pieces a week or so ago:
Fall can be both exciting and depressing. I'm so wrapped up in the academic schedule that this does indeed seem like the new year is starting (Happy Rosh Hashanah!). That's the excitement -- new things happening, new people, life continuing. Then there is the baggage that comes with that recycling, the projects undone from summer, looming deadlines, -- so much work yet to be done! Time, time, time. I am such a lazy, procrastinating bum.
I just finished a piece today:
Heaven It will be the past and we'll live there together. Not as it was to live but as it is remembered. It will be the past. We'll all go back together. Everyone we ever loved, and lost, and must remember. It will be the past. And it will last forever.
I ran next door to tell my neighbor Eric to turn on the TV. We couldn't believe what we were seeing. The world changes, sometimes very quickly. Most of the changes in the aftermath of the World Trade Center destruction were bad. We had a terrible leader, aided and abetted by terrible men. I am sorry for what happened to our country.
I posted this picture on Facebook as part of the birthday-ness:
I wrote this memo and did the bad-faculty-member thing and sent it to most of the deans and vice-presidents I knew. It was accompanied by this web site, and apparently they have caused a bit of a stir. We're having weekly meetings now with Columbia Facilities, and I hope that these may actually lead to some substantive action to make our building habitable. It really bugs me, because we've been astoundingly successful at what we do. I cannot continue with the present conditions at the CMC.
I felt a little weird about my memo, because for the first time I raised the issue of my myeloma in this context. I've been very, very wary of using my cancer as an 'excuse' for anything, mainly because of a strange sense of cosmic karma I carry. I have a superstition that if I talk too much about my illness or somehow use it, then it will assert itself to 'fulfill' the talk or the task. Or something like that. In any case, the connection is tenuous at best, but like the title of the memo, I have hit the wall.
So we'll see what happens. Otherwise, things have gone really well. Terry, Gregory and I had great fun playing at the Electroacoustic Barn Dance in Fredericksburg, VA again. I'll get a web-site with audio up soon. My sister and I had a wonderful weekend trip to visit my mom and dad over Columbus Day. Brenda's flight home was a mess (stayover in Detroit, egad!), but mine was fine. And the visit was terrific. Students and projects at the CMC are really great this year, despite the floods. Lian got a nice promotion and raise at Amazon. And Jill and I are travelling to visit Lipót, Hungary in two weeks! More about that later...
Wednesday night I was riding the subway back up to our apartment after a long day at Columbia, and I put on my headphones and listened to Iarla sing altus_silva from the Peter Gabriel compilation record Big Blue Ball. I listened to it four times in a row. Music still has tremendous power for me, and it was nice to feel that connection again. Thanks Iarla, if you read this!
Obviously I'm behind -- again -- with this blog-stuff. There are many gaps I need to fill. Or maybe not. Completeness isn't really necessary, I think. By way of excuse and as I said in my previous post, it has indeed been a "wild ride" at Columbia. Classes are great, though. The students seem to be getting better and better. If we can just hold on and get some substantive changes made...
But about this Hungarian business: When Jill turned 60 in September, I wanted to get her a really nice gift. But what to do? Jewelry? Books? Fine wine? Dancing (ha!)? Nothing really seemed to hit the mark. One of the things we both really treasure, though, is travel. Not too long ago, Jill, with the very uncommon last name "Lipoti", discovered that there is a town in northwest Hungary named "Lipót". One of the conjugations (which I don't have any pretense of understanding -- it's Hungarian for goodness sake!) is to "Lipóti". Although Jill's grandfather emigrated to the US from Zurich and he apparently spent most of his life in the Appenzell canton in Switzerland, she discovered that he was born in Hungary. We have a sneaking suspicion that he was "Josef from Lipoti" when he arrived in Schweiz at some point in the distant past.
We had planned to visit at the end of this past summer, but for various reasons we could not go. It turns out that was serendipitously a Really Good Thing, because Austria and Hungary temporarily closed their borders in August because of the terrible Syrian refugee crisis. For a variety of other reasons, it looked as though we wouldn't get another chance to go for several years.
Jill was disappointed. I thought "hey, why don't I surprise Jill with a quick trip to Hungary as my birthday gift?" Great idea! But the trip would cost about $900/each round-trip in airfare alone. If we planned to go for several weeks, as we had in August, it would be worthwhile. In the middle of the semester for both of us, however, all we could probably do was a 4-5 day excursion. $2,000+ didn't seem worth it.
THEN I remembered: I have used almost none of my 'frequent flyer' miles on United. I've flown a fair amount, and upon checking it I discovered that we could get to Vienna (about an hour from Lipót), round-trip, for both of us, for $203. Yowsa! Birthday gift fer sure!
So here we are. We had a wonderful stay last nightwith Deb and Mike Gilley, two of Jill's IAEA friends in Vienna, and now we've just returned from a marvelous meal and a long soak in the Lipót thermal baths. It turns out that Lipót is a really nice place. This is the hotel where we are staying. We can see the Lipóti bakery from our balcony.
More later, and I'll put up photos from this excursion (plus photos from other things) the near future. In the meantime, Jill has posted a few on her facebook page. Oh, life. What an adventure!
And this gets contrasted with the state of the world. November was a pretty bad month: a lot of terrorist activities, stupidity in many many ways. I don't want to write it here. Hopefully we'll all magically come to our collective senses, but I'm not optimistic right now. We do what we can, though.
I want to spread the music, as far and as wide as possible. This is not the world to leave to our children.
The other displays around Roosevelt are pretty interesting this year. A new laser-display technology is available, and several people have projections of tiny lights way high in their trees. Jill and I didn't realize how it was done at first.
Completely changing the subject of this post, here's a fun article link:
Wow, twenty-nine years ago. And I can still go through my memories and recall moments that will live forever. I'm speculating that we're all imbedded in a higher-dimensional reality here, and our lives are traces through that n-space. Whoooooooo!
It's still fun to think about, partly because rituals help to outline that 'trace through n-space' that we make. Here I am, and I was here before, and (hopefully) will be again. Even if not again, there once was a time...
Happy Solstice!
Of course it won't, and I sure have some big news of change to report -- but that will have to wait until after the new year. I look back at my very first entry in this blog, and I wrote: "With a little luck(!), I will be able to read this years from now as a record of a particularly 'interesting' time." I've been lucky. Will it hold? I don't know, but it's at times like tonight that I ever-so-slightly realize that it doesn't matter. The "holding" of luck is wrapped up in the future, and as much fun as it is to anticipate and speculate, the trick is to appreciate what is happening now, and how this now was reached. I have been lucky. Very lucky. Right now, surrounded by family and warm feelings, that almost seems enough. It should be.
Here are our trees for this year:
