Eldora. Mid-day Saturday. We arrived up here last night around eleven, having dined at Billie and Jed’s in Boulder. F and I slept in until 10:00 this morning, a couple of sleepyheads. The past weeks feel like I am finding a new / old sense of center in terms of piano playing. It’s like I have space where I can remain, where I can be balanced, rather than off-kilter. It is like I don’t have to throw myself into whatever the piece is, and just be dragged along by some mysterious, inchoate process. Now there are glimmering that I can, indeed, strategize, that I truly can interact with the music. A sense that the process is dialogic, that I am a significant part of a process. That it isn’t a crap shoot, a crazy house that I step into with the purpose of my becoming disoriented. It doesn’t have to be a crazy house. It’s not about me losing, with the music having defeated me.
Steve presented me Monday with three new pieces, to explore all three simultaneously. Even at first blush, it did not feel overwhelming about doing this. It felt conceivable, do-able. And, indeed, the doing this week has felt efficacious. It feels like I know what I’m doing, that I am in possession of useful strategies to interact with these new pieces. A Chopin Waltz, a Prokofiev Etude, a Chopin Mazurka. The pattern-making skills and strategies I’ve been learning with Steve are working with these pieces. I am allowing myself to believe that I CAN employ the strategies, that I am permitted to be grounded in getting to know the music.
Very significant for me is that Steve selected these three pieces because of their relationship to the theme of Exile. He talked about both composers having been actual exiles, that their music deals with this theme. The loss of Home, the yearning for Home. It is deeply touching for me, that Steve so explicitly introduces this major theme of my life into the realm of piano playing. The revolutionary notion that classical music and piano playing can actually have to do with the themes and issues of my life!
So, too, I, for the first time ever, consider how to bring the direct energies of sex and sexuality to being at the piano. The fact of having a cock and balls, an asshole, tits, the fact of loving men, bringing this, all of it, to the piano. Rather, that as I’ve always done, leaving this at the door, to become some sort of disembodied, disimpassioned eunuch at the keyboard. To integrate all of me and my experiences into playing, instead of disintegrating myself to play.
(Later.) Lunch has been eaten around the two café tables set up to the side of the house. Fritata, salad, goat cheese rounds breaded and baked, and Italian white wine. F has driven “downtown” (to Nederland), as Bill & Josh, Don & Joanie have set out on a walk. It is me alone in the house, listening to the velvety tones of a cantadora whose identity I don’t know.
Thursday evening F & I went to The Lounge (the former Jan Leone’s) to join in an “adios” gathering for St. Mark’s Zeb, before he heads out for the farm in Washington state that his lover Harlan and Harlan’s mom have purchased. Feral Fruit Farm it’s been dubbed. There is a radiant core in Zeb that is supremely pure and idealistic, a certain glow of white light.
Yesterday afternoon F & I stopped at The Trident for coffee. We sat outside, enjoying the gentle sunlight and breezes. At one point there appeared on the sidewalk a fellow who was quite pleasing to my eye. He and a friend wound up standing at the curb, drinking coffee and chatting. I described him to F as a blond Jean Paul Belmondo. A tiny fellow, maybe 5’ 8”, very lithe in his body. Muscular arms, narrow hips. A square head, with a prominent, straight nose. Clear, dark eyes. Short, straight, brownish blond hair. Dressed in a grayish t-shirt and gray cargo pants. Loose and lanky in his body. A pleasure to watch. Seems he could be gay.
Somehow almost everyone else in front of the Trident while we were sucking coffee struck me as oddly sad-sack, shopworn, unattractive. This fellow, in his elegant sensuality, shone like a diamond among gravel.
At the table next to us sat a young lady who strongly reminded me of Inna. The same body and face, the same nervous mannerisms, the same clipped speech. How young and foolish I was to have thought any sort of connection was possible with Inna. The pattern in my life of trying to connect with intelligent, neurotic, emotionally knotted up females. The Zaiga Pattern.
Driving through Eldora up to the cabin last night, we saw two foxes at different points. Passing Storage Tech on the way to Boulder, there was a coyote walking along, a hundred feet from the highway, not perturbed in the least by the surge of vehicles zooming by.
Plum Creek’s Dell at the funeral, was determined to talk to me about how things ended last spring. Apologizing in a way, wanting, it felt to me, for me to exonerate him. I was mindful to not say “it’s OK, mīļā miera dēļ.“ To not give in to his hang-dog eyes was not easy. „Yes, Dell, it was pretty crappy, how it ended.“ Period. „You know it wasn’t personal, right?“ „Yes, Dell I realize it wasn’t about me.“ Which it wasn’t. He behaved as he would with anyone, that I do realize. I’ve no interest in rescuing Dell from his discomfort. I really don’t care what he thinks or feels. His attempts at apology don’t touch me. I’m not even certain as to why he decided to try and apologize.
My challenge: how to negotiate interactions with troubled, not mindful people, and not wind up getting screwed over by them. I see how folks are, how they act in their worlds, I see the potential dangers in their patterns and somehow still wind up getting burned by the behaviors I’ve noticed all along. Part of it’s my naivete, part of it is about not taking pro-active steps to get myself into better scenarios.