my dead father

returns to me damaged

in my dreams

between broken harpsichords

and impossible music

10/14/11

I need to keep it brief today because I have another busy day ahead of me.

I accomplished quite a bit yesterday. I met my Mom’s psych nurse when we dropped by to invite Mom to have lunch with Eileen and me at the cafeteria where she lives. I also had Mom sign a release form for the pain doctor and dropped that off.

After lunch with Mom, I went over to the church and chose several anthems from the extensive library of choral music there.

So now we have some more excellent music to prepare. I decided we should sing “Create in Me” by Brahms for Ash Wed.

It’s the first movement of the piece. Here’s a video of the full piece. We are only singing the slow beginning section. I quite like what follows. we will sing it in English.

Also planning to sing “Adoramus Te, Christe” by Mozart for the first Sunday in Lent. I had chosen a much simpler adaptation of Mozart but I think “Adoramus Te” is lovely and it was sitting in the files.

This is the best video of it I could find. This indicates that it is erroneously attributed to Mozart. If that’s the case it doesn’t diminish my estimation of the it. I still think it’s a decent little piece.

After choosing music, I played a ballet class. Came home and did more phoning and connecting with Mom’s health care providers.

The young player I am accompanying this morning had arranged for a 5:30 rehearsal, but he canceled at the last minute.

I was both disappointed (for his sake) and relieved (for mine). Eileen and I decided to go for drinks and dinner. We always seem to find each other’s company relaxing after a tough day. And the martinis don’t hurt either, heh.

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Violins, Old and New – NYTimes.com

Interesting letter from a violinist.

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Mike Kelley, Influential American Artist, Dies at 57 – NYTimes.com

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Dorothea Tanning, Surrealist Painter, Dies at 101 – NYTimes.com

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I’ve had a busy morning already. I worked on an accompaniment I am playing tomorrow. The piece is a Flute Sonata by Platti which has been arranged for Saxophone and Piano.

When I say arranged, I really mean arranged. The editor, Eugene Rousseau took tremendous liberties with Platti’s original composition.

I was poking around online and found what looks like a copy of a contemporary version of the pieces (link to the PDF). Very interesting to compare this version with the performing version I am working from. I would like to see a better edition of this piece, but don’t think this information would be very helpful at this stage (the day before the performance).

I did use the manuscript to add a couple bass notes where Rousseau completely abandons the bass line in a way that feels inadvertent to me.

I’m trying to take this terrible edition on its own terms so that I could do a good job for the young Saxophonist I am accompanying.

I like this performance which goes a bit slower than Platti recommends (but still seems to be using his edition.

The harpsichord is nice touch. Not sure what kind of music this becomes when rendered in this way. Certainly neo-baroque.

So I spent a good deal of time this morning rehearsing the accompaniment.

Then, I started doing the leg work for my Mom’s continuity of care issues.

My son introduced me to this idea. I understand “continuity of care” to mean connecting multiple health providers with information from each other and providing over view and asking questions.

Mom has not recovered from her recent fall. She is not as sore as she was, but she is complaining of back pain now and taking as many pain meds as she is allowed (1 every six hours). She has been holed up in her room for days.  Yesterday I spoke to her internist’s office and found that they hadn’t contacted the pain doctor. I also talked to her psychologist’s office.

Her psychologist requested a fax of her current med list at Maplewood and recommended a psychiatrist to replace her talk shrink who retired. I called Maplewood this morning and requested they fax the info the psychologist requested. They had the slightly encouraging news that Mom went down for breakfast (first time she has gone to the cafeteria there in days – weeks?) Then booked Mom in for an eval with her new talk shrink.

Busy busy busy.

Eileen and I discussed having lunch with Mom today. We would do this by joining her at the cafeteria where she lives. I have not called her because this entails her getting up and walking across the room to the phone (which is inconveniently placed not by where she sits but by her bed across the room).

I am planning to drop by this morning and have Mom sign a release form so that her pain doctor (who is truly a pain) will at least talk to me.

I also have to drop by the college and turn in my time sheet so I will get paid.

Only one class today. Tomorrow I drive to GR to accompany an 11th grade Saxophonist (mentioned above) then dash madly back to accompany Joffrey Ballet Company tryouts at Hope College.

I miss being a bum, but I like all the stuff I’m doing. I just wish had a whole day off now and again.

Silly me.

Yesterday after the ballet instructor described to her class how 2 dancers dealt with an onstage crisis in a performance a student commented that it showed “presence of mind.” The phrase leapt out at me.

I think it might describe what’s missing from so much of my interaction with people and also much of what passes for rhetorical and political commentary.

Ballet class is an exception to this. Thinking and mind are definitely present there. The teacher’s response to the student’s observation (about “presence of mind”) was “Problem solving!” This is a theme of hers.

I also brushed with present minds briefly (and surprisingly) yesterday when John Erskine, an acquaintance of mine introduced me to Billy Mayer, an art teacher at Hope. We sat and ate salads and chatted about music and art.  I later confided to my wife how seldom this kind of connection happens to me these days. Very pleasant to discuss Zappa, Juan Munoz, King Crimson, guitars, guitar playing, recording, Steve Reich, and other stuff over lunch with a new acquaintance. I’m hoping I get to chat with this dude again soon.

A positive approach to “presence of mind,” however, would be to think of cultivating one’s own “presence of mind.” I abhor the squishy phrase I have sometimes heard that a person is not being “present” to another. That’s not what I mean at all. I’m thinking of “presence of mind” more as being aware and awake, something probably nobody does all the time. We all go unconscious or miss stuff. But like many things I think of it as something to strive for.

I was reading (actually re-reading) Bacevich’s The Limits of Power this morning and believe that his writing and ideas exhibit a certain presence of mind. I was struck by his assessment of the political crisis in the United States right now. Basically he says the government doesn’t work. He quotes the preamble to the Constitution as a definition of the task of government. You know. “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Our current system of government, having abandoned the idea of a system of checks and balances (power continues to concentrate itself in the executive, while the Incumbent Party in the Congress concentrates on getting re-elected) is “dysfunctional” in Bacevich’s estimate. “Grossly incompetent” is another way he describes it. Writing in 2008, he mentions the “bungled efforts to ‘reform”the Social Security and health-care systems,” attempts to “fix the immigration policy,” “the inanity of the ‘war on drugs,” and the “ill-starred federal response to Hurricane Katrina.”

Since then one could add many more at random:  the unseemly display of brinkmanship around the federal debt and the confusion of the recent bill to fund the military pop to my mind.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like many U.S. politicians exhibit “presence of mind” these days. Just how it seems to me on an exhausted Thursday morning, of course.

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The Atheist Who Challenged Cranston, R.I. – NYTimes.com

Letters to the editor in response to the recent successful challenge of a young atheist to a prayer posted at her school.

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Paavo Berglund, Finnish Conductor, Dies at 82 – NYTimes.com

Winston Riley, Jamaican Music Producer, Is Dead at 68 – NYTimes.com

Two obits which sent me scurrying to look up music by these guys.

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Don N. Michael concludes his essay, “With Both Feet Planted Firmly in the Air,” talking about telling stories.

He is specifically talking about how people who claim to be thinking and planning about the future (i.e. everybody) would benefit from framing their ideas in stories and then examining the stories they tell.

The essays in In Search of the Missing Elephant (by Michael and in which the essay mentioned above resides) are directed toward technological and business oriented thinkers who are developing and thinking about what comes next.

Any clarity about this usually, in Michael’s estimate, creates enough discomfort to cause denial.  Michael says we live in “turbulent” times. This puts it mildly.

I love the way he embraces the chaotic as he tries to outline how to think about who each of is and where we are going.

“All worthy stories are first and foremost occasions, mirrors and contexts…”

He is using “story” in the sense, I believe, of what we say to ourselves about who we are.  This what is meant by “existential.”

He quotes Seymour Sarson who summarizes the basic existential questions:

” How to dilute the individual’s sense of aloneness in the world;

How to engender and maintain a sense of community:

and How to justify living even though one die.”

Semour Sarson, from “The nature of problem solving in social action,” American Psychologist , April 1978, pp 370-390 quoted in Don M. Michael’s In Search of The Missing Elephant

Succinct enough. I was pleased to read in an ensuing paragraph that Michael is intent on enlarging questions “futurists” ask to include asking themselves, “What is it all for?” and “Why am I doing what I am?”

These are the kinds of questions I think about and even sometimes raise in talks with people who are trying to think.

Then Michael talks about the term, “compassionate learners.” He calls compassionate learning a “precondition for a humane future.”

By using the word, “compassion,” Michael specifically means to recognize THREE things:

1. Nobody, including myself, really knows what they are doing

2. Everyone is, to some profound degree, living in illusions…. believing in the “factness” of their world instead of seeing its arbitrarily and unconsciously constructed reality.

3. Everyone needs all the clarity they can muster, regarding their own ignorance and finiteness…

I almost didn’t put this stuff up today since I’m mostly mulling over these ideas and am not really to the point that I can pull them together for myself.

But instead, I basically am throwing up (regurgitating?) the wisdom for anybody who reads this.

A couple last ideas.

First, discovery and being open to unfamiliar ideas and experiences requires a basic stance of vulnerability (again this is from Michael of course).

Even back in 1985 he could see that “those willing to risk a learning stance will be destroyed by the power hungry and hostile” unless compassion becomes a norm for a humane world.

In other words the whole deal is rather impossible.

But Michael looks this right in the face when he insists that he is “hopeful” but not “optimisitic.”

This distinction is very helpful to me.

Hope: the feeling that what is wanted can be had (verb: to believe, desire, or trust) link to source

Optimism: a disposition or tendency to look on the more favorable side of events or conditions and to expect the most favorable outcome… the doctrine that the existing world is the best of all possible worlds.
link to source

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Op-Ed: Get Out Of Your Political Comfort Zone : NPR

I endorse the idea that one must listen to people one disagrees with.

Heitman (the person interviewed at the above link) wrote an article about this back at the beginning of 2012:

New Year’s resolution: Seek the other side in political commentary – CSMonitor.com

He has an online column at the Baton Rouge Advocate called At Random.

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The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker

Sad little article. I’m about half way through it.

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Racial code words obscure real issues – TheHill.com

I’ve had some problems with Juan Williams even though I have read and admired his bio of Justice Thurgood Marshall.

But I think the idea of “code words” needs to keep being raised, especially when we tend to abandon anything that has not be thought in the last 48 hours (like history).

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The Austerity Debacle. – NYTimes.com

Another example of unheed history.  American pundits on the right latched onto PM David Cameron’s experiment with austerity in the U.K. Which has done some damage.

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Who Is to Blame for Polarization? – The Prospect

Even though I subscribe to the magazine, this article is the one that led me to the New Yorker article linked above.

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‘Strategic Vision,’ by Zbigniew Brzezinski – NYTimes.com

new book by Brzezinski.

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