Change in the air

This blog will soon get a new look! Here are the beginnings of the new design: 

Stay tuned! :)

Pedestrian Access to Grace

On a San Jose side street a parking garage's blue awning jutted over the sidewalk.  On the awning was the international symbol for parking, a white "P" in a blue rectangle. The awning said, "Pedestrian Access to Grace."

Alea passed and put her bag on the sidewalk. She opened the door beneath the awning; a set of concrete steps stretched upwards into darkness.  On second thought she retrieved her handbag, then let the door close behind her and began climbing the stairs. Ten degrees cooler inside, mechanical-smelling air, receding waves of darkness. And then...

Corsica

This summer, I spent two weeks on the island of Corsica, studying traditional three-part polyphony with a group of 27 singers from the UK, Sweden, Columbia, and the US. Two expert Corsican singers, Jean-Etienne Longianini and Jacky Michaeli, guided us through this tricky, heavily ornamented music; they shared their repertoire and coached trios of us on how to sing Corsican padjellas in the style. (Listen to one here).

The wonderful organization called Village Harmony ran this trip, led here by Patty Curler and Mollie Stone. This blog post will give you a flavor of what Village Harmony means to me. It's just some personal impressions; my apologies for leaving out so many wonderful moments and people and stories! 

"I have to go to Corsica," said everybody here, and somehow we all did. We are a yoga-doing group of amateur singers and choir leaders and professional musicians, many of whom are vegetarian or vegan.  Many attended Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey or knew each other from choirs in Chicago, Illinois. On my first day in Corsica, I smile at this new circle of singers, feeling so thankful for their presence. I'm so glad there is a new circle of singers. Somehow, there always is. 

We sleep in a former monastery and rehearse in a church. The window of the church looks like a photograph. Down the road from the church is a clock tower by the sea, and the clock tower is an epiphany at night. 

We rehearse from 9.30 am -1:00 pm, 2.30 - 6:00, and 8:00 - 9.30 or 10:00. These blocks of time are the squares into which stained glass is fitted.  We eat three square meals a day, home-cooked: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with tea and coffee available when we want it. Most meals are not rushed and can be taken inside or out, under what may be a mulberry tree in the courtyard. Everybody sings at lunch, while washing the dishes.  (There is no distinction between work and play, and why should there be?) At lunch we do yoga in a room with a mannequin in costume who looks out onto sea. 

Singing Corsican music literally takes your breath away. It is a game for seeing how long the seconds can push the terzas can push the basses to not breathe. And the ornaments reach a bedazzling level of complexity. To warm us up, Jean-Etienne sings us passage after passage of ever-more-complex ornaments, and asks us to repeat. I can keep up, I can keep up, until suddenly it is one ornament too many and my lines fumbles amid laughter and the limits of short-term memory. Jean-Etienne smirks; there is always more iceberg under the ocean where he comes from. 

Corsican trios are vocal chamber music. It is some of the most intimate music you can make. And it's hard! The Corsican language is neither Italian nor French but some unique combination of voiced consonants and beautiful vowels. We struggle to pronounce the words, and forget most of them, except for the name of a  beach snack shack, U Snaccu, which becomes a running joke. We struggle to read a Jean-Etienne's Kyrie written in an ancient style of notation that looks like figured bass. And we struggle to adopt the right vocal tone for the padjella's. When our teacher Jackie comes in around day 3, she screams into our ears and punches her stomach and insists we sing from the gut. She models for us by screaming out the door of the church: "Hey JOHN!" We pretend we are saving John from a burning house, beneath the palm trees and transparent sky. 

The melodies are haunting and seemingly impossible to pin down, yet after the first day I begin to see their outline.  There are points at which all three parts hit a chord -- these harmonies form the skeleton of a piece -- and then wide-open spaces of indeterminate length between these points, which are stretched or shrunk as the middle part says. After one day's rehearsal, my notation from the first day barely makes  sense any more. I had notated all the unimportant notes. 

I stay away at night trying to transcribe Jean-Etienne's ornaments.  

There is so much to learn from my new friends. I must read Concerto in Memory of an Angel and Apollinaire's Cortege, listen to Blowzabella and Inuit mouth music and a thousand other bands, discover how to make a great lentil soup and conocut rice pudding. Once I try to steal oranges at midnight from a tree by the our monastery while listening to creepy sounds of Swedish kulning. It is a strange unrepeatable experience that lasts the length of its soundtrack. The camp is composed of singular experiences like this, like when we rewrite the anthem "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" as "Keep Your Eyes on the Wine." These passing moments of collective improvisation bear the spark of the divine. 

I experience so many profundities during rehearsal week that I don't have to time to put them into context, or to write straight. We repeat the old French song Puis Qu'en Oublis while walking in a circle, and it is a walking meditation. Patty tells us we should not give up an instant of a chance to put everything in. If we're not digging into it, we're just marking time. In the confrarie, we sing the South African song Tino Sinxobele, and the notes keep flowing into the space before the echoes of the previous moment's notes die away. So long as we keep pouring our energy into the space, the church is alive. Like swimming in a pool, we must make new waves while the old waves still haven't died away.

Half-way through rehearsal week, one of the singers, Joy, learns that her grandfather has passed away. We sing the shape note Hymn To the Angels for him, and Joy records our singing and sends it to the memorial.The work that singers do is to soothe people who grieve, celebrate people who are joyful, uplift those who are down. This is important work. I understand that what you do at 10 am in the mornings five days a week is important, too, the routine just as much as the epiphanies. 

There is something about what we do here -- the singing and the cooking and late-night conversations and cuddling -- that enables us to to become ourselves and be accepted for it. I am Joelgoose to friends here, a nickname I haven't been called in years but which feels right. Once, after Kerry, who is blind, blew our socks off singing terza, the whole group said "step" when she had to step down to return to her seat. That is acceptance -- group-wide, joyful recognition of each of us. 

And yet I encounter the edge. At harder moments before we audition for the trios that we will sing in concert, it feels like the game is to earn our teacher Patty's approval, to duck her scorn or boredom. Yes but no. The game is really to make music and get better as a singer. The trap: It feels like I can't workshop a piece unless I know it, and I can't improve a piece unless I workshop. But gradually I improve. I go from singing the secunda part to the singing the higher terza part, which supports the second and then resolves the chords. Ah, that feels better. The music is about supporting and being supported, like human relationships. 

Jean-Etienne says the music does not come from pages and books, but from memory. "The dead are still present," he translates from the lyrics of a padjella, and I recall my tour of two years ago: what it feels like to be in the spotlight, how the light shines on the back of your hair. The names of Monteverdi and Mauchot  awake something in my soul. And I recall that unique chain of introductions and transitions that feeds your adrenaline when you sing the same program of music at 7:30 every evening, a chain so familiar while you are singing it, and so forgettable when you are not. 

Our chain of concerts in Corsican churches draws to its end -- our stories from those concerts will have to be another post -- and I encounter the questions that will haunt me when I leave. How important is it that the identity of the groups of which I am a part conform to my own sense of identity? I feel so much congruence at Village Harmony, somewhat at Harvard, not at law school, definitely when Joy calls me Joelgoose and I trade back rubs with Hannah Rose, who pinches my ears for 10 seconds at the back of the church. I keep a list of true callings: physical therapist for horses, music therapist for autistic kids, the bookseller at a poetry bookshop. I begin to see that my passions are music and writing -- maybe singing and writing or songwriting and writing -- and that so long as I am progressing on those, I can be happy.  

I expected the trip to Corsica to be my last Village Harmony trip. I expected to end this trip and be an adult and work a 40-hour-a-week job and be satisfied, somehow. In fact, this trip is a not a farewell but an encounter with a deeper level of self.  I need to recreate all that has made me so happy here. I need to gather more friends to sing, to record more, to keep performing, to get my damn manuscript out into the world. Maybe I'll never do another Village Harmony tour, but I am certain there will be another circle of singers. There always is. 

My novel is a tree in progress

I 
cradle 
you. 

"Argles!": the story of a new word

It all started with a pair of argyle socks:

The first time I heard the word for this diamond pattern was in high school. Forgive me; I grew up ignorant of fashion and feet.  For about a week afterwards, "Argyles!" became my exclamation of choice for anything new or surprising. "Argyles!" swiftly morphed into the more pronounceable "argles:"


Parents: How was your day today?
Me: Argles… (I'm tired and I don't want to talk about it).

Imagined little sister: Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Me: Argles! (You're so annoying you don't even know. Just stop)

Mom: I'm feeling under the weather today. Must have come down with a cold.
Me: Argles. (That sucks, doesn't it?)

 Argles spawned Blargles! (stubbed tow or a surprise jet of cold water in the shower) and Shmargles!? (Really? Again?). It's the perfect word for the curmudgeon in all of us. Feel free to adopt or create your own variations.

Do you have pet words? What's their story?

There is always more text

Compulsive journalers, you'll know the feeling I'm about to describe.  You think you've just met the love of your life, or you've had  a devastating break-up, or - lucky you! - you've won the lottery.  So you describe the event in its tiniest details, down the geometry of the linoleum floor and the variety of ginger green tea you drank for lunch, hoping to capture every last groove and bump in the fabric of reality so that you will have achieved verisimilitude. There. You've done it. Encapsulated the experience once and all. You place your last period, put down your pencil, and close your book. You're done.

But wait - there is always more text! Always, always, always! There is tomorrow's journal entry, and the next day's, and the next, until you die.  Even then, someone else will be writing! Imagine the polyphony of everyone's life story lined up one on top of the other, like a Tallis Mass with 6 billion parts.  Though no one I know of has ever glimpsed it, this grandiose collection of parallel stories exists -- at least, in theory, one could understand it. In my life, I will have the privilege to know but a handful of people; I will glimpse but a barest sliver of the story. And yet each person is a multitude! Each moment! The fractal nature of existence keeps me curious about the big-in-small. That's why I keep asking questions.

Q: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then...how would 6 billion parallel stories look?

(journal image from http://www.thechangeblog.com/keeping-journal/)

Clocks versus Demons: How do you work?

I'm investigating the boundary between work - what you do until you quit - and what Lewis Hyde in The Gift calls labor - what you do until it's finished. (Notice the change in pronouns). Recently, I've started writing projects with the intent to work on them for 45 minutes and then quit, only to discover that I'm so excited about writing that blog post or revising my next chapter that I'll finish it, no matter how long it takes. What changed?

Let's start with the baseline of boring old work. Often, when I'm working on something for a spell, I stop because my productivity peters out: either because doing the task is hard, or because knowing what to do next is hard. The "tipping point" when timed work becomes labor has do with conceptualizing my task in enough detail to know the sequence of actions to take. Suddenly, all I have to do is my task, and I can stop thinking about what to do or how to do it. It feels like I'm almost possessed by a plan. I give up to the goal. And the work gets done.

According to Stephen King's On Writing, Anthony Trollope wrote for exactly two and a half hours each morning before work - no more, no less (p 147). That's the clock approach. Being possessed by an idea is the demon approach. What is your preferred habit of working - clocks or demons?

What makes work meaningful?

Teresa Amabile is a psychologist at Harvard Business School. I heard her speak today, and she made the obvious-but-true point that making progress on meaningful work is one key to productivity and happiness at work. (See her TEDTalk).  That started me thinking on what constitutes meaningful work for me. I'd love to hear about what makes meaningful work for you! 

Meaningfulness for me can come from what I make: a story or a performance,  as compared to a dryer document like a report or an outline. Meaningfulness can come from how I make it: by creating, inventing, or synthesizing, rather than listing or analyzing. Meaningfulness can come from who I make it with: a report done with friends is infinitely more fun than one done alone.   

Meaningfulness for me combines what I call dry joy and wet joy. Dry joy includes feelings of thankfulness and gratitude, the intellectual sense of "I'm happy to be in this community doing in this work moving in this direction." Dry joy is an intellectual feeling of rightness. Wet joy is in-the -moment jubilation, the emotional IM from your amygdala saying: "I'm happy!" Find exactly the right word for your character, envision the arc of your plot, and this is what you feel. 

Writing and performing are two of the most meaningful activities for me. When I performed with world folk ensemble Northern Harmony, audience members clapped and smiled after our concerts (most of them, at least), and ran up to us afterwards to say "Thank you" in French, German, and Swedish. When I sang in college, an audience member once told us  "I felt a tsunami of emotion." It's this constant feed-back and emotional connection that can make performing so powerful. Writing is meaningful for me because I think most readers  appreciate being in the hands of a good writer. Stunning sentences make us stare at the ceiling. And remember how we devoured books as kids!    

I think about meaning in relation to potential summer job opportunities in environmental mediation and creative business consulting. Environmental mediation could be meaningful for me because I am "helping the environment" or "helping people solve problems". But this so abstract! I would need to a see a stream that is now clean, salmon that now run free, or people who now talk to each other to see the meaning in this work. 

I'm not sure if business consulting could be meaningful. In fact, it could be destructive of meaning and corruptive of morals, not to put too fine a point on it.  But could a creative process make consulting meaningful? Could a team of smart people? Could a call from a company CEO saying, "This changed my life?" Could the mere act of getting feedback on work - any work - make it meaningful because feedback enables growth and progress? Is that enough to transform a business consultant into more than a knee-jerk enabler of capitalism? I don't know. 

Question: The folks at the Good Work project have done a lot of work on meaningful work . What makes work meaningful for you?