piano

return to the studio

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I have spent the summer tending ‘the studio inside’ after my one week residency in June. The communal garden has been a studio. And my neighbours’ apartment with their piano. But the days are getting colder and soon the neighbours will return to inhabit their city home full time.

I returned from holiday and two absences stared me sternly in the face. Indisputable and unmoveable. One was the absence of a studio.

I am a very joyful person and quite good at smoothing over bumps and being grateful where gratitude can reside, but somehow the absence of a studio is very stern, and immune to substitutions or platitudinous comfort. There is a joy in a studio which literally nothing can replace. This is a mystery to me. I’m somewhat reluctant to concede this ground.

But maybe starkly facing our absences has an importance? So I pondered to myself.

Into this absence I said a fierce prayer. If your commitment to existence is not to control your longings nor to detach from them, both of which constitute a harsh diminishment of human being, and if you refuse to despair, a fierce prayer is mostly what is left. I leave the deeper questions for another time, but in this case I was astonished to find, shortly thereafter, I was sitting in a studio again. A temporary arrangement, but astonishing nonetheless.

I reviewed the writing I did here at the start of the summer. I pondered the renovation of ‘the studio insight’ and now reflecting, this is indeed what has happened. Through piano, plants, play, seaside, parties, festivals and dancing, many of the old broken places have been substantially mended.

The day I heard I would have a studio, a project took shape in my being. Since that day, a series of disruptions have overwhelmed my daily life. This is a recognisable and now almost encouraging pattern showing that I am on to something.

This does mean however that some of the renovating got trashed so now I am attending to that.

But there is a deep thrill in the heart of the project, and its existence cannot be prevented.

the studio inside – rhythm

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All the while of la vie suspendue en l’air and la vie revenue à terre, I have been maintaining, more or less, my studio rhythm – piano, writing, documentation. So then something is going on in the studio inside, but to me, there is a kind of absence. An absence of expression. There is something about painting in particular that releases me into some kind of inner depth, while, mysteriously, materialising this depth into a visible form.

Is something preventing me from getting there?

Sometimes I just need to insist.

But as I write a recognise, yes, I’ve been doing immense works. Inner ones, in most cases, but also material ones of another sort – organising, unpacking, tending.

Perhaps now is time to try another intensity of insistence. Maybe I have a week before I leave for traveling to insist this into reality, to come home to water and colour, and to see what I find there…

perseverance – suspendue en l’air – testing

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It’s the last morning, I think, of la vie suspendue en l’air. Several things that felt linked to this liminal space are shifting. I’m not really ill. The absent friend returns today. I have to take up some work next week. And some other things. This week I have almost entirely completed the gathering of the journals of my self, decades of self it is hard to believe. And they are all stacked there, in boxes, a kind of double of me, made out of paper, or a self portrait.

I’ve been having such a beautiful time, and then imperceptibly, I wasn’t. Was it my beautiful garden being disturbed by drunken chatter while I ate my lunch, or a sudden host of probably very sweet teenage boys, but in a posse that reminded me of the ancient vulnerability of womanhood. Was it things suddenly breaking and being hard to mend? Was it hearing the disappointment in a friend’s voice that I couldn’t be there for her? Or looking back over old photos for another friend’s hen party and being starkly confronted with certain losses? Or, finding that, after all my efforts, in fact two journals had been overlooked and they belonged to the least accessible boxes of heavy books, that what I thought I had triumphantly accomplished, I hadn’t?

All of them, of course, accumulating unseen, many trivial by their very nature, but poking at a vulnerable spot.

I woke in the same bed with the same view and the same life as all the other mornings, and instead of being filled with happiness, I was uncontestably sad.

So began, as usual, a little digging through the moments of the day, turning things over, pondering them, on the look out for a deeper significance to the turbulence, or if there wasn’t one, how to tame the circumstances back to towards a collaboration.

And I found something, whichever one it is, from my memories of similar times, similar patterns of being and becoming.

Often, on the brink of some completion, small or large obstacles appear. It is a fact of all the completions I have ever accomplished. And I used to fret about it, because a completion moment is by its nature vulnerable, and often accompanied by the intense weariness of a long perseverance.

But now I am wiser: What looks like fretful and often personal obstructions can conceal an important opportunity. The need for one final, conclusive effort to overcome the hindrances, to insist on the completion is what makes the work truly complete. It is what establishes the work and the substance, its power and its resilience.

So I look courage from the appearance of minor upsettling events, and summoned a deeper intention. The completion and I will prevail. The discouragements will not. The old thrill returned from somewhere buried. I am excited for what will happen next. Yes, and grown enough to announce that hope.

Divenire

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So I was in the studio and then I wasn’t and then I was trying to find the studio inside and to get to it I found a studio rhythm and this is indeed helping me to dwell in the reality of the studio inside and even though I have not got to painting yet I am in something, definitely.

And all the time, every possible day, I have been playing Einaudi’s Divenire on the piano that I have been given the keys to in the neighbours’ downstairs apartment.

In the studio week I finally linked, for the first time, the bits I knew with the mysterious bit in the middle, and suddenly I had a whole.

But it was a kind of scratchy, awkward, patched-together whole, because my fingers had not been accustomed to playing music for such a long time, nor my brain for concentrating so continuously on something so precise. The piece is nearly ten minutes long and it is a work to hold my attention in the exact present without having it distract somewhere else – and in fact usually this distraction does not totally affect the flow, but what does affect it is the jolt of realising that you are elsewhere and then trying to relocate yourself in the music, which usually causes a stumble.

So each day of the month since I left the studio I have been playing – of course as part of the studio rhythm – and then often recording myself to hear how the piece is feeling. It has taken time to ease out places of complexity and to smooth the trickier jumps of hand and the release the tension of areas which require more skill and concentration, which is all very well, but until the skill and concentration is mastered, there is anxiety that makes itself felt by the listener.

Over the month, I have become aware that somehow the piece was also taking me somewhere; in losing myself into it, I am finding a self, I am becoming – divenire – a self that I have not been for a long time, perhaps ever.

There are different elements in a journey of allowing music to form you; some are intellectual, some physical, some emotional, some deeper. There is an integration that has to happen which must be then somehow anointed with a grace from somewhere else. It is work and mystery.

Yesterday I had a very important insight: I had been working towards a recording that sounded accurate; each note in place, sounding beautiful. Yesterday it was sounding often beautiful, but still, there were occasional, sometimes jarring errors. But suddenly it came to me, listening, that I’d forgotten the fundamental fact of live performance; that there is a humanity in it that cannot and should not be eradicated, the eradication of which, in fact, would substitute a kind of overworked tension, and anyway would only likely be possible through mechanistic means.

But this insight had a follower, as if hidden behind its back. If it already was (almost) beautiful, and there would always be some humanity left in the beauty, then the moment I had been waiting for might be arriving sooner than I’d expected.

And then yes, this morning, I was there, in a beautiful completion of piece and self. Divenire.

And now I am waiting for what happens next.

la vie suspendue – time

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In la vie suspendue, time is running through me, or to be more precise times. I can feel them, some of them streaming through with no thought of clinging on, some ferociously disputing ownership, claiming my desires, my thoughts, my imaginations, my frailties.

Perhaps it takes this enforced slowness to truly notice the other forms of speed swirling. I am poised in some kind of eternal time, and despite the continuous risks I feel of slipping off its axis, this eternal time, now that I have returned to it, is steady, more steady than I realise, and I don’t seem to slip off as much as I fear.

And so then the other times are making themselves felt, the slow slipping time of summer tempo days punctuated occasionally by the panic of the end time, when I will have to return to the demands of work. So then business time and the seasons of my clients – holidaying for July or holidaying for August or holidaying for a two week scrap of childcare before swapping with the other partner to return to work, according to culture.

His time, how long will it take him, what is he thinking, does he have a time with me in it, should I reach out time, no probably not, patience, time.

Biological time, googling statistics, pondering depleting likelihoods.

Ageing, in a way the same, but felt differently, eyes, hair, skin just a little bit different from last year’s summer photos.

Divenire time, Andante, one dotted crochet = 60 beats per minute.

Ontological time, such a very very long time it takes to manoeuvre the human psyche into new orders to wholeness, always a shock.

Capitalist time, now, immediately, preferably yesterday although then you didn’t actually knew the offer existed, or the deadline.

Poor pitiful modern time, no depth, no heart, no soul, no allowance for grieving, passion, healing, compassion, renewing, also known as ‘according to my personal convenience time’, and ‘validate me! validate me! Entertain me! Feed me! before I pre-emptively reject you’ time.

Nature time, everything in its season, can’t be cheated, nature of reality time.

Sometimes when my younger friends are fretting about how Long everything is taking, I remind them; remember, you were raised in a culture of timescales for the insubstantial. It is a hard lesson, and I have to learn it again.

The eternal time is helping soothe the pains of this emancipation.