October 9, Giving Thanks for Bartok

Angela writes:


I would like to wish you a very happy thanksgiving week. This is a marvelous holiday to which I used to pay little attention when I was younger. It did not belong to my childhood and I did not fully understand it, mainly because when one is young, one thinks less of what one has, or has been given, than of what one is poised to expect and receive. This is not only true of the young, it is also true of the university setting of which, for so long, I have been a part.

It is wondrous to be, as I am right now, the object of the attentions of those who are around you and notice the manner in which they achieve such presence. I am certainly wary of judging those overwhelmed by their work, if not by life. I have been there, where there was no time for those far away. Not to speak about those left on the sidelines. I had a job to do, and no matter how hard I tried, I never got it quite right. Or so it seemed. That is how mother university (or is it a father?) trains her offspring.

On the other hand, people who have other occupations than the academic seem to have an easier time. With the understandable exception of the illness-fobic, and there are a few I came to uncover. Yet all are saved by the retired, and I take that in the wide sense of the word. Oh, the retired! Those who have given up ambition! Where would we be without them, who fortunately have time to take care of the ill, the busy and the stressed out?

You may remember that I was apprehensive about going to Montreal. Fortunately, the first day I had there, Heidi spent a whole afternoon with me. Not because she did not have more pressing things to do. She came to see me and alluded right away to the physiotherapist who wanted me to practice the computer keyboard, no matter what words or numbers would cross my mind and come under my fingers. What a narrow use of my precious energy, she mused. For her, who, among other talents, including writing, is an accomplished musician, a keyboard is a piano keyboard first. We went to the music store to look up pianos. And at the end of another couple of hours, we came up with a choice.

While waiting for my keyboard here in Springbrook, I started looking into some of the rudiments of this trade. My long distance teacher sent right away a whole cahier with music exercises put together by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok for his son. Of course these exercises contain a lot of motifs which used to fill my childhood's everyday musical landscape.

Now the keyboard is here, looking out over the turning foliage and the everyday more barren trees. And I have to say, the effort it takes to work those keys is very different than what it takes to write on a keypad. I have the sensation of touching something original, I would venture to say from before writing, even if I never thought of the writing keyboard as the approximate replacement of a more authentic one, which would by now be lost. But there is this visceral pleasure contained in the pushing of a key and that resulting sound, hopefully the right one, which should come out and greet you with what feels like encouragement. Not to speak about the effects of a series of sounds, which, in the right order and with due exercise, may begin to make sense. When I am not practicing, I listen to a recording of this music, while doing my painting. There is ever less time left for me in one day. And since I only have a few hours of active energy to begin with, i do not quite know how to give myself to these tasks, one more pleasurable than the other. I am afraid the first casualty of the true keyboard, you might have noticed, was the computer.

That is how, for this thanksgiving, I had to give thanks for all the friendship which has accompanied us for the last year. Soon it will be a year since Colin wrote a long letter to my family doctor, asking not only for the appropriate pain medication, but for a serious investigation of the pain in my back. What else can I wish for, if not to grasp the one thing to be thankful for, even as life put us through her blind, cruel workings.