Week in Seven Words #575

This covers the week of 1/24/21 - 1/30/21.

crumbs

Instead of buying a pandemic puppy, she has gone outdoors more frequently to feed pigeons, easily summoned by crumbs.

domestic

Through video chat, I've become familiar with the view of his burgundy couch, the cat kneading a cushion before settling in.

ethereal

A special blue-white winter light on bare branches.

pianissimo

A fumbled song on piano keys in an unlit room.

subvert

Heavy metal drives her anxious thoughts away. But they come back in her sleep, bringing her to consciousness on a rising wave of dread.

sweetens

While working, I pick at a platter of figs, apricots, dates, and almonds, and I feel as if there should be palm fronds over my desk.

topiary

He's tried to trim the shrub to look like a cat. It looks like a vaguely feline creature emerging from a terrible green fog. But I like the effort.

Week in Seven Words #572

This covers the week of 1/3/21 - 1/9/21.

abed

Tousled hair, face smushed into the pillow, cold air leaking in.

attends

Applying for a job, she wonders how she can make her qualifications look more impressive. "Doesn't fall asleep during Zoom meetings, usually," is a good one.

continue

Stay calm, and keep writing.

friend

Whenever I hear from her, I think about how glad I am that we're friends.

incapacitated

Once seated at the piano, she merely stares at the keys. She doesn't know how to begin, because inside her there's no music, only knots of fear.

morbid

As soon as I start slipping into helpless spectator mode, I try to wrench my attention away from the news.

unsteadily

Buildings in the background, denuded trees in the foreground, and slick muddy paths that make the world wobble.

Week in Seven Words #369

arachnids
As I pick through a Bach prelude, my hands feel like spiders crawling over cracked pavement.

baked
I pry the lid off the banana walnut scented candle and breathe.

fearful
One night is a rough night, anxiety a rising flood in my skull.

filing
We are docile and subdued on the line through the metal detectors. A guard is curt to an old woman who isn't sure if she's at the correct location.

hissing
His thoughts are oil in a frying pan and a crackle of buzzwords.

judicial
The room where potential jurors wait is full of sunlight, warmth, and murals displayed well above eye level, to no one's loss. The clerk splits our heads open with a whining microphone. From time to time, we listen to lists of names, and people shuffle out. Shoes squeak, and newspapers rustle. One man falls asleep. His snores sound like a bumblebee trapped in a bottle.

staleness
In an unlit hallway, they've set up tables with cookies, chips, and sandwiches of uncertain freshness.

Week in Seven Words #202 & #203

202

accord
Comfortable silence over pasta and fish.

concavity
Small fingers bending like ski slopes on the heavy keys of the piano.

conifer
The scent of evergreens on street corners.

demands
Having to look at it again through the eyes of a beginner, I see how much goes into piano-playing. Learning to identify the keys, learning to read the notes, developing the coordination in the hands. It's difficult. A love of music is a large part of what sees you through.

implore
The jingle bell sounds are the panhandlers rattling their cups.

limbed
Trees aren't dead in winter. They're expressive in ways they can't be when covered in leaves.

slip-ups
People behaving foolishly, young people who don't think things out well enough, are stuck with their indiscretions: photographs floating around the web, videos, comments that can't be deleted. Like having to walk around everywhere with several squares of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes.

Week in Seven Words #197

beam
For the first couple of minutes we're on Skype, we just smile at each other. There's really nothing to say that can't be better said with a smile.

clawed
I read a book that rips open old scars.

dipterous
Already the F-sharp has a sour buzz. It will never be fully in tune, but will instead hover over the landscape of the Moonlight Sonata like a mosquito.

disquietude
I spend too much time worrying that something will go wrong. It's exhausting.

enticing
Bags of dark chocolate in a green barrel. A faint chocolatey smell tickling my nose as I stand in line.

eraser
They look smaller. Time has rubbed away at them.

organic
The inside of the piano is magnificent: faded gold, stained wood, an eagle bearing a flag in the dark. Strings, knobs, and hammers, a soundboard that's cracked. It's a piano with character, stubbornly and majestically out-of-tune.

Week in Seven Words #134

autopilot
The mind tends to make decisions based on familiarity and comfort. But this time I stop myself and ask, "Why?" - Why are we going for this problematic option that will cost more and give us a poorer return on our efforts?

aversion
When reading at the park on Saturday afternoons I'm used to seeing squirrels dart across the small paths by the lake. What I'm not prepared for are rats. Rats don't belong here. The first rat is a large one with a long tail dragging behind it. The second rat, which darts out a minute later, is smaller and might have been cute had it been in a cage at the pet store. Rats aren't 'park animals.' They're pests or pets (or lab specimens). Then I remember meeting with someone once in an old building in west Philly where our conversation kept getting interrupted by loud thumps from inside the walls. "The squirrels are lively today," she told me, and I guess any animal can be a pest if it violates the boundaries people have placed around it.

gears
After playing piano for half an hour I sit down again in front of the computer and forget how to type. For ten seconds or so my fingers can't settle on the keyboard and every movement I make with them feels alien. It's as if my brain is still in piano mode, wanting me to play chords and trills instead of typing (this is what a trill looks like on the keyboard: jkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkj). It takes a mental shift just to get started again.

intermixture
She plays hopscotch on a basketball court where her brother and his friend shoot hoops with a soccer ball.

oddballs
We're a pair of misfit Jews.

plenitude
More bookshelves!

yolky
We talk over runny eggs. At the table next to us a baby shrieks.

Worth Watching: Autumn Sonata (1978)

Title: Autumn Sonata
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Language: Swedish (and some English)
Rating: PG

Synopsis
Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), haven't seen each other in seven years. Charlotte is a brilliant and celebrated pianist, touring around the world. Eva lives a quiet life in a parsonage with her husband, Viktor (Halvar Björk); she also cares for her sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), who suffers from a progressive illness. After Charlotte's longtime companion and lover passes away, Eva invites her to visit the parsonage. Eva hopes for some sort of reconciliation with her mother, a closeness they've never shared. When Charlotte arrives tension mounts between them, and in the course of the night years of pent-up anger, bitterness, and hurt boil over.

Characters
Liv Ullmann's magnificent performance as Eva bares layers of emotion, whether she's flying into a rage or quietly sitting beside her mother as Charlotte animates the room. There are a couple of scenes where Eva is observing her mother silently; no words are necessary because Ullmann's face expresses everything: sadness, admiration, resentment, longing and wonder. This especially comes out in the scene where Charlotte is at the piano explaining and then playing a Chopin prelude that Eva plodded through earlier.

Ingrid Bergman's performance is also powerful. She handles Charlotte's complexity beautifully, the shifts in her mood - she can be lively and coquettish, then stalk around a room looking anxious and lost. Charlotte is a passionate artist, living in her own world, loving the fame and admiration that isolates her from others even as she laments her difficulty connecting with people. She has also been a distant mother; her treatment of Eva is fond but superficial. In the company of both her daughters, Charlotte feels guilt-ridden and suffocated. She's probably ashamed of them too; she can make brilliant music but was unable to produce a brilliant daughter. Eva lives as a shadow, and Helena's illness is so unbearable to Charlotte that Charlotte avoids her.

Eva's husband, Viktor, observes the mother-daughter drama with resignation. Viktor is kind and perceptive but also passive. At the film's start he addresses the viewer directly and reads from a book that Eva has written: "One must learn to live. I practice every day. My biggest obstacle is I don't know who I am. If anyone loves me as I am I may dare at last to look at myself. For me, that possibility is fairly remote." He then tells us that he wishes he could make her understand that she is "loved whole-heartedly"; the difficulty is, he can't find the right words to make her believe him. He's a friend, a gentle companion, but too tired for any passionate emotions or interventions.

Relationships
The Charlotte-Eva relationship dominates the movie. Eva can't live with her mother and can't live without her; Charlotte is a beloved mother, a hated enemy, an angel whose blessing is sorely desired, and a scapegoat blamed for every sin and mischance. The relationship at some points shifts from mother-daughter to accused and accuser, as Eva brings up every bit of childhood neglect, subtle cruelty, maternal inadequacy and selfishness ("All that was sensitive and delicate, you attacked. All that was alive, you tried to smother") and throws them in Charlotte's face. Charlotte isn't a good mother, but there are times when Eva goes too far, carried away with her need to blame Charlotte for everything, past and present. What does she want from her mother at this point? Would she be satisfied if Charlotte admitted responsibility for her mistakes? Does she still want her mother's love and approval?

Eva's own child, a boy, died at a very young age. In one scene, set in his old nursery, she tenderly speaks of how she senses him near her and feels that he's still alive. This strikes Charlotte as morbid and fanciful, detached from reality - more evidence that Eva is a disappointing neurotic daughter, an impression strengthened when Eva's musings turn philosophical: "To me, man is a tremendous creation," she says. "In man is everything from the highest to the lowest." She adds, her face dreamy and contemplative, "There are no limits. Neither to thoughts nor feelings. It's anxiety that sets limits." (This applies not only to love - once Eva moves past her anxious attitude of trying to please her mother, there is no foreseeable limit to her anger.)

Eva's warmth towards her son contrasts with Charlotte's limited ability to love. But one also wonders what sort of mother Eva would have been had her son lived and started growing apart from her, into his own self, as all children do. Would she have smothered him, stunted him, done everything she could to keep him secured to her? Or would she have been a wonderful mother? As it is she's much more of a mother to her sister, Helena, than Charlotte ever was to either of her daughters. I love how Ingmar Bergman presents these characters to us for close consideration, allowing us to see different sides of them.

Memorable sights and sounds
Autumn colors permeate the film. Fallen leaves and pink flowers. Walls and furniture in warm shades of yellow, brown, and cream. Eva, first seen in a long red dress (Charlotte will later wear a red dress too, with pearls). Eva's and Charlotte's hair. Their eyes red-rimmed with tears.

The camera often lingers on the actors' faces; I can't look away when this happens - the human face is a world in itself. Though the screenplay is powerful the dialogue is sometimes too stiff and stagey (maybe in part because I'm reading an English translation in the subtitles); the feeling of intimacy and humanity is preserved by the close-ups on the faces and the force of the actors' performances.

Stand-out scenes
There's one scene I returned to a few times: when Charlotte watches Eva play Chopin's Prelude No.2 in A minor and then plays it in turn, explaining the piece to Eva (the pianist Käbi Laretei, who was also Ingmar Bergman's ex-wife, played both Eva's version and Charlotte's). The camera settles on the actors - Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman both brilliant - and the scene as a whole sums up their characters' relationship. It's also I feel the best written part of the movie; to understand a work of music and write about it clearly and unpretentiously is difficult.

"Chopin was emotional, but not mawkish. Feeling is very far from sentimentality. The prelude tells of pain, not reverie. You have to be calm, clear and harsh. Take the first bars now. It hurts but he doesn't show it. Then a short relief... but it evaporates at once, and the pain is the same. Total restraint the whole time... The prelude must be made to sound almost ugly. It is never ingratiating. It should sound wrong. You have to battle your way through it and emerge triumphant."

Later in the movie Charlotte will speak of her own childhood, spent with cold parents; music became her means of expression. Unlike Charlotte, Eva's most profound expressions of emotion and thought emerge in her reflections on human nature and her abiding love for her son. Both Charlotte and Eva are capable of deep connections, but in such different ways. The scene of the Chopin prelude echoes throughout the whole movie; when I think about it now, my skin prickles.

Further thoughts
There's a raw nerve running through the movie. The characters tap at it and flinch. They can't help themselves. They're locked together in love, pain, rage, and endless struggle.

(*Image links back to its source: Wikipedia)

Good Short Fiction: Dance of the Happy Shades (Alice Munro)

Title: Dance of the Happy Shades
Author: Alice Munro
Where I read it: Selected Stories (by Alice Munro)

It's that time of year again - Miss Marsalles, the piano teacher, is throwing her annual party for her students.

No one really wants to go. The students are expected to give a recital, which is bound to be disappointing. Miss Marsalles has faith and optimism in all her students, but because she hesitates to criticize their playing and finds pleasure even in their most mediocre offerings, she's not a particularly good music teacher.

And there are a number of other reasons not to go. Miss Marsalles is homely, old-fashioned, and unmarried. With the passing years she's lost more and more students, and the ones left are mostly just the children of former students.

She lives with her sister, and they make a strange-looking pair:

... it was surely an arresting fact that there should be not one but two faces like that in the world, both long, gravel-colored, kindly, and grotesque, with enormous noses and tiny, red, sweet-tempered and short-sighted eyes. It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways... for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild, and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.

Over the years they've moved to increasingly smaller and shabbier homes; the one they live in now is in a rundown neighborhood. The sister has recently suffered a stroke. Everyone knows the recital will be in a small stuffy room, with offerings of bland food, music played poorly by indifferent children, and then Miss Marsalles' year-end gifts that she hands out to each child - books they'll never read, quaint pictures they'll never hang up, or boxed games that are "insipid and unplayable - full of complicated rules which allowed everybody to win."

Still, some people agree to come to her party. They do so with an air of martyrdom; it's a yearly tradition, just one afternoon to suffer through, and if they refuse to come it will probably hurt Miss Marsalles, who believes that "All children need music. All children love music in their hearts..."

What people don't know is that for this year's recital, Miss Marsalles has also invited her students from the Greenhill School, where she's been giving a music class. The Greenhill School is attended by children who are developmentally disabled.

Their arrival at the party is an unpleasant shock.

There is nothing to be done. These children are going to play. Their playing is no worse - not much worse - than ours, but they seem to go slowly, and then there is nowhere to look. For it is a matter of politeness surely not to look closely at such children, and yet where else can you look during a piano performance but at the performer?

And what happens when one of those children shows a natural gift for music?

There are a number of reasons why I'm recommending Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades. The quality of the writing, for one, and the thoughts the story offers about human gifts and talents, and how they are distributed among people.

It seems easiest to accept talent in people who are good-looking or socially approved. But Miss Marsalles, in her bright unselfconscious way, appears to find talent acceptable in anyone. She doesn't think that there's anything remarkable about a girl from the Greenhill School sitting "ungracefully at the piano with her head hanging down" and playing beautiful music.

What she plays is not familiar. It is something fragile, courtly, and gay, that carries with it the freedom of a great unemotional happiness.

Miss Marsalles herself is one of life's oddities - aging and out-of-touch, and so full of earnestness and innocent perceptions (but not cartoonish; Munro keeps her believable). She lives on the fringes of society, almost in another world. Most people don't know what to make of her; they would probably live in a state of despair if they had to swap lives with her.

But the piano teacher doesn't seem to see anything about herself or her life to pity or lament. She loves music, and she loves children; she expects to see miracles in the midst of people's imperfections. Why should she not have those sources of happiness and that talent for taking joy in life?

-------------

Other stories in this collection include Lichen and A Wilderness Station.

Week in Seven Words #21

accented
Out in the hall a French woman and a Russian woman speak in English, their voices bright and cordial. Soon after, a Greek woman speaks boisterously on the phone, sometimes in English and other times in her native tongue. In a different time and place, two men from Ireland harmonize together on a stage and banter between songs.

limpid
On a day when heat chokes the air and cars snarl along the road, I listen to limpid music; it spills and flows over all the other sounds - horns, brakes, birds, the stutter of machinery, conversation, the creak of trees in the wind.

loop
We could easily have taken the bus, but why not walk? Without walking we wouldn't have as much time to talk, or see the river at thirty minutes to midnight, or come across that sculpture with the words carved into it from several different languages, French and Greek included.

pluvial
There's a primordial fury to the rain; it mashes up the ground, crackles on the windows, and clots the air.

sundered
In the wake of the storm, trees stretch out leafy and shattered on walkways, cars, and roof corners. Branches lie in all angles on the sidewalks and sometimes dangle in the embrace of other branches that have remained aloft and intact.

tunefulness
Music in a long dark room lit with candles in glass, the illustrations on the walls crowding around to listen in shades of red, white and black. With voices that fit well together the musicians sing about old love, new love, a laughing universe, what it would be like to be a work of art, and how they're traveling around in search of feet; at one point they invite a friend to jam with them on the guitar, and she's in a trance, so happy to be up there playing and part of the music.

wresting
It's a song he once knew by heart; now he wrestles different passages out of the piano. Whenever he comes to a lacuna in his memory, he sits with fingers splayed across his forehead and stares with a puzzled frustration at the keys.

Need to rest your weary feet?

I don't know if you'll be able to, because your toes will be tapping too much.

Imagine you're sitting in a warm saloon, where the barkeep knows your name, serves you the best drink in the house, and lets you tug your boots off and put your feet up wherever you please. From the piano comes the light-hearted patter of Something Doing, and in spite of all your cares you're feeling carefree.

You're at ease at the end of a long day. And as the music plays, you ease your feet back to the floor and tap along:

Something Doing, composed by Scott Joplin

Found at this archive of piano roll recordings.

UPDATE:

Evanissimo at Youtube does a really good job playing Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, a wonderful ragtime piece (and the piano itself looks suitably old-fashioned too). The music's clear, and I like the tempo he chose:



This light and breezy music is challenging - something you may forget when listening to it played by a performer with skill and talent, who's put in the effort to make it sound as effortless as possible.