I spend a significant amount of time worrying. What am I worrying about? Oh, everything.
I worry about my kids. Will they make friends? What will they do when they’re lonely? Will they call me when they’re adults? Do we travel enough? Do we do what we want too often? Am I projecting my own dreams on them by making them learn to practice instruments? Are they free enough to have passions? Are we structured enough? Should they have more disciplined activities? Should they have more discipline?
I worry about culture. Are popular values stronger than my home values? Is history one long erosion of everything that came before? Is progress always destructive? What will it cost us? Will the world be recognizable to me when I’m a grandparent? Am I too confused by technology now to be a functional person in twenty more years?!
I worry about my profession. Why is classical music a niche interest? Does it matter if other people care about art? Will live chamber music dwindle away? Will I ever perform with other musicians again?
And then I worry about my worry. Will clenching my jaw at night cause TMJ? Can I do enough yoga to undo these worry lines on my face?
I have a talent/curse for hashing and rehashing anxieties. Theme, variation, recapitulation.
So I walk, and I run, and I hike. I cannot outrun a running mind, but I focus on the strike of my feet on the ground. Pound, pound, pound. That obsessive mulling is sometimes stilled when I can direct my attention to the feel of exertion. The only other thing I can do to quiet that exhausting inner chatter is play music. So I work hard exhausting myself, and I try to hold onto the peace that comes in repetitions—scales, arpeggios, 5k, cycle up, cycle down. And I worry a little less.
A few weeks ago, I hiked one of our peaks with a friend. She exudes calm. She cares about so many of the same things, but she also has a glass of wine on a Friday night and loves the family dog and, I suspect, doesn’t grind her teeth as a matter of course. We were clambering along one of the saddle ridge trails together. The woods were dry and still. A branch suddenly cracked and tumbled to the ground just off the trail, and we both jerked our eyes just in time to catch the silent swoop of an owl crossing the trail. “Was that an owl?!” she said, turning around with wide eyes. It had to have been, so utterly silent was its flight. It was strange to see an owl take flight in daylight, and a sensation thrilling and unsettling passed over me. How odd these woods suddenly seemed, their brown, still trees holding off on life in the drought, the silent night creatures wrested from their perches and swooning slowly across our empty trail. How unknowable it all suddenly felt. The mountain’s breast seemed to rise under us and envelop us as we rounded toward our descent, a mother of dust and rock to enfold us. Nature is not partial to any single creature. She held us there as she held that owl, those broken tree limbs, the vast ecology of desert scrub to pine, community latitudes in the sky islands, the rising temperatures, the dying sea. However much we worry at the arcing Anthropocene and its spreading impact, earth is recomposing life ever and always. Compose, recompose, recompose, recompose. She has her own pounding pace across 4 billion years. We fiddle with the parameters and she changes again, perhaps discoverable, but mostly outpacing us.
Three weeks later, everything is on fire. I’ve cancelled three camping trips. My running mind is running fast without a long hike to settle into. I run. Pound, pound, pound. I worry and grind my teeth and do guided meditations and practice Liszt. Life is blistering. How does everyone avoid thinking about all of this? So many things are decomposing. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
Max Richter is a contemporary composer. In 2012, he released an 8-hour composition called Sleep. The program has been performed live a couple of times overnight, and the audience members all get beds to lie down in (it’s obviously not performed in traditional halls but, rather, in parks and at campgrounds). He said, “I think of it as a piece of protest music. It’s protest music against this sort of very super industrialized, intense, mechanized way of living right now. It’s a political work in that sense. It’s a call to arms to stop what we’re doing.” He sounds, frankly, a little wackadoo. He works with a lot of self-serious artists and also composes for TV shows (The Leftovers, anyone?). He also, clearly, hasn’t been to one of my concerts, where people routinely drift off. Lulling your audience to sleep is not, I think it’s safe to say, a radical political statement. But I appreciate somebody else feeling a little harried these days.
A few years after Sleep, Richter assembled the ultimate classical remix. I am not a fan of classical music remixes, generally speaking. I’m not European enough to feel like digital house music renderings of the first four bars of a Beethoven symphony are really nailing an emotional core, but it’s very popular across the pond. (Richter is German, by the way.) But he released an album called Vivaldi Recomposed. The original Four Seasons is familiar to almost everyone, even folks who aren’t so into classical music.
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons get a lot of play. Excerpts crop up in commercials, opening credits, closing credits, theatre works, museum exhibits. The music is so familiar, it’s a kind of grained woodwork in the background of every Western life. I’m never tired of them. (I should add I’m not a violinist, so I have the luxury of not being tired of them.) But I love their repetition. Vivaldi likes to take a theme and churn it through the circle of fifths, pressing sound into a form that becomes and re-becomes and re-becomes. Pound, pound, pound. The sensation of movement is intoxicating to me. When I hear the opening credits to Chef’s Table (perhaps the most-heard excerpt of the Seasons, given its use in popular TV shows and jewelry ads), I’m moved every time, primed to cry when whichever cook shows off their plated food at the end.
Max Richter is considered part of the minimalist movement in Western art music. He is also interested in repetition. Minimalism has a unique relationship to the Baroque period. If you think about these artistic movements as manifested in architecture, they seem entirely opposite. But Baroque music is a kind of gyre, and minimalism is married to the same cyclical structure. Counterpoint over ambient ostinatos informs both styles of music. They can be a sort of sonic meditation. I’ve always loved theme-and-variation compositions, perhaps because they are a nobler manifestation of my own hash-and-rehash curse. There’s something relieving about hearing some other mind say, “Do you hear its radiance? And its melancholy? And this buoyance? Have you heard it thus? And thus? And thus? And thus?” It is a nod to the infinity of joys and sorrow that can stretch across a simple structure. And isn’t that a little bit what it is to be a tiny person within a universe, containing a universe?
One definition of minimalism runs thus: “The basic characteristics of minimalism are rooted in building blocks of pitch, harmony, and rhythm. A minimalist piece will take one or more of these building blocks, develop it into a small musical cell, and repeat it several times.” How resonant this helpful definition! A cell repeated and repeated…this is how life grows. Is it not amazing to think that we are born because a single cell will repeat and repeat itself? New things become a complete organism not through stark invention but through repetition. A reimagining of a few simple elements explodes into the variations that are, despite and because of repetition, unique and marvelous.
My hiking friend just turned 35. All we moms who walk and raise kids and run and hike and commiserate and compare notes had a few drinks together. Except her. She did not have a glass of wine. She had news. A new baby on the way. Not her first, but a third baby to come. (“Thus, and thus, and thus,” says life.) I love this person and her husband and her boys and their dog. Sipping my own coffee, a kind of still gladness seemed to spread across me like a rapture. She’ll go to those sonograms soon. Pound, pound, pound, goes that tiny heart. Pound, pound, pound, a universe unveiled. Pound, pound, pound, life will keep making and remaking and making anew. Nothing truly created or destroyed, only reborn a thousand times over. This friend whose mothering years are my mothering years too, we’ll keep worrying together, recycling the motherly concerns that swaddle and enfold the creatures to whom we are, indeed, most partial.
I don’t know how we fit into the larger work. The earth is inscrutable. I can’t find the pattern. But I run, and, above all, I listen as much as I can to the things outside of me that articulate the cadence. Changefulness worries me. I find solace in repetition. This is prayer.
Life churns on, recapitulating its themes, decomposing ideas and reassembling them. After a very late night celebrating life and new life with my friends, I drove home in the dark. The dry earth seemed to sigh as rain slicked the streets, which reflected the lights of my car. I turned from the drive of my friend and my lights swept across the road just in time to catch an owl collapse and expand its wings in two great strokes across my field of vision. Swoosh, swoosh, I imagined, though I know they were silent strokes against the night. That great visionary creature was almost unseen, known only to the earth that will eventually unmake this animal, decompose its call and its beat. Nature is indifferent to my witness. She’ll undo it all, parch the ground, drench it, remake and unmake. But I drove home with that swooning soul scattered across my sight, and the rain picked up, and the mountain gathered mist and cloud and thunder somewhere unseen. And an unborn baby’s heart thrummed, and I’m so glad, so glad, so glad.
Headphones recommended.
Suzie, I love you. Congratulations.
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