Sleep

Why do I think about how I think?

I do find it fascinating.  Hoping that it’s not all rooted in some hideous narcissistic obsession. 

I worked hard at the keyboard yesterday to cement in place a particular passage in Brahms op. 76 #2. I made progress, but at the end of the day I still couldn’t get through it reliably and without considerable anxiety. I tried hard, but it just didn’t stick; countless repetitions didn’t make it natural. I was a little discouraged, but I didn’t freak out.

What's happening in there?

Today, I sit down (without warming up) and play through that piece, and all is well.  I execute that passage in the new way without a problem. Why is that? Today was many hours away from yesterday’s practice. If anything, I would expect some backsliding from yesterday's endpoint, but instead today it works, with no practice between yesterday and today. What changed?

Can it be that the brain sometimes needs time to process a new approach?  “Do it this way now!” may not be enough, especially if this way is very different from the old way.  We somehow understand the new way, but can’t get far enough away from the old way so quickly. It takes a little unconscious mental effort to shelve the old way and accept the new.

I’m starting to think that a particularly important factor in making that transition easier is a good night’s sleep.  There really does seem to be some kind of hard drive defrag that happens while we sleep that makes everything work more efficiently.  Part of that defrag may be that we archive more deeply the old pattern that we've decided is no longer optimal.  Maybe we can’t so easily move it off to a remote folder with different access rights when we’re awake and conscious.  It took effort to put that pattern into memory, so why should we surrender it so easily?  Perhaps that pattern was part of a crucial survival mechanism?  If so, we give it up at our own peril.

We understand so little of what sleep really accomplishes.  Surely it has nothing to do with physical exhaustion or lack of energy.  We consume enough calories to keep us going for more than 14-18 hours at a stretch. But our brains seem to require time to recalibrate and move thoughts, patterns, and memories among the various levels of storage that are available to us. We need a period of time without new input for the brain to sort through recent data and experience. Without it, we get confused and frustrated.

And that same ability to recalibrate and re-store is what makes memory so subjective and so unreliable. We remember what's useful for us to remember.  Truth be damned.

The computer hardware industry doubles capacity and processing speed every few years.  The human brain evolves much more slowly.  I’m ready for an upgrade.  How about you?

Memory

Memorizing at the keyboard.  As a young classical pianist I didn’t think too much about it.  I just did it.  And I clearly could do it, in one way or another.  I gave many recitals, even before going to college, and memory was not an issue.

But at the keyboard, memory is a complex issue.  We don’t just have a single capacity to remember.  Instead, we have many abilities which are called on in various proportions.  Different strokes for different folks.

Sentamentalists to the contrary, it all seems to come down to brain chemistry.   There are multiple mechanisms for what we cavalierly call ‘memory’.  What’s your mix?

Imagine yourself as a classical pianist onstage at Carnegie Hall giving a solo recital.  You  walk onstage, bow.  You sit at the keyboard.  What neural mechanisms will allow you to perform?

In my experience, there are at least three distinct types of memory at the keyboard.  There’s visual memory, aural memory, and muscle memory. We all have all three types, but in various proportions.

The pianist with a predominantly visual memory is essentially reading from a photographically-induced imaged of the score.  That pianist is in a permanent sight-reading mode.  It’s not a bad spot to be in.  When things get spotty, just slow down.  You can always read more carefully. You can sight-read it at a slower tempo. Squint a little, squirm a little.

For a pianist with dominant muscle memory the situation is just the opposite.  The connection between one muscle memory movement and the next is tenuous.  Slowed down, those connections disintegrate into chaos.  Instead, we speed up in an effort to minimize those intolerable spaces in time between muscle movements.  Keep them connected at all costs.  Sometimes, that gets us through. But other times, it’s a rushing disaster.  Well learned passages go out the window in an effort to just get to the next phrase before it all falls apart.

And then there’s an aural memory.  We remember exactly what it sounds like.  And if our musical training has been exacting enough (solfege, dictation, score reading, etc.), we know what to do at the keyboard to create the sound in our mind.

So our musical memory is multifaceted.  Like other areas of our lives, we tend to rely on our strengths, and neglect our weaknesses.  At our own peril.  There’s nothing that will increase empathy more for our fellow man than attention to our own weaknesses.

Nothing.

How do we promote that?

An Unexpected Pleasure

Book prizes do serve a purpose of sorts.  When an author I've never read and know nothing about wins a major prize, I take note and often add him to a list somewhere if the work sounds appealing. That's what happened when Julian Barnes won the Booker last year.  This smug little American didn't have a clue about him, and I was intrigued by the reviews of 'The Sense of an Ending'. Turns out I love the soft self-doubting meditative tone of the book.

While wandering around Kepler's the other day (the newly revamped, i.e. shrunken independent local bookstore that nonetheless continues to please me), I noticed lots of other fiction by Barnes. I wasn't sure that I was in the mood for more foggy metaphysical speculation, having just finished the latest Banville, but I don't get to Kepler's that often, so I included one Barnes book in my haul. I chose it almost randomly.

'Pulse' is a new (2011) collection of stories, most of which had previously appeared elsewhere.  Not sure how I missed the ones that had appeared in The New Yorker, but I did. Started reading the first story and was very pleasantly surprised, indeed. Finished the book in a couple of days.

Here there is none of that 'Sense of an Ending' brooding.  And these are old-fashioned short stories.  No tricks or tweets. No vague connections among stories.  No experimental forms, no self-referential circles, no questions about writing while writing.  And unlike Carver, for example, very little happens in these stories.  Not much plot, and a narrow emotional range in each.  Just a snapshot of characters at a moment in time. How refreshing is that?

Within those boundaries Barnes is remarkably versatile. Very different settings, characters, and tones.  Dialog is a major strength.  He can absolutely nail a character with dialog.  Also very British. Very urbane. And very good on relationships and couples.

I try to stretch myself as a reader.  DFW, for example.  Now Proust is on my list.  Recently tackled Barthelme for the first time. And of course David Mitchell. So it's a relief to easily find pleasure in a more traditional high-quality author.  There's so much there to enjoy, and it feels good to have at least the illusion that my ability to understand and appreciate the writing need not be questioned. Maybe it's like swinging the weighted bat in the on-deck circle.  A normal bat then feels light and easy to control.

But enough about me.  How are you enjoying my blog? :)

Again

John Banville has delivered another stunning novel.  The main character in ‘Ancient Light’ is a man in his sixties.  In much of the book he recounts his love affair with an older woman when he was only fifteen.  There is insight here into the nature of eroticism and what it might mean to a boy. There is little that is titillating, but much that is fascinating.  We also learn of his adult life, the loss of his daughter, and of the circumstances of his life in the present.  The language is, for Banville, typically lyrical and poetic.  I just adore his writing and take such pleasure in reading and rereading the sentences.  I have to mark favorite passages as I read.  The ending, where we finally learn yet another and very different version of some important events described in the book, was for me very moving.  How wonderful that mere sentences on a page can magically evoke such a fascinating and complex image of life.

I’ll just mention some of the themes and quote some relevant passages.  Banville speaks best for himself.

Even in the present, we can hardly know in any objective sense what is happening or who or what is in charge.  We can only see through the tiny keyhole of our own selves at that particular time and place.  We can never truly know what another might see or experience.

Hence, about his daughter, the protagonist speculates:

'What may one know of another, even when it is one’s own daughter: A clever man whose name I have forgotten – my memory has become a sieve – put the poser: What is the length of a coastline? It seems a simple enough challenge, readily met, by a professional surveyor, say, with his spyglass and tape measure.  But reflect a moment. How finely calibrated must the tape measure be to deal with all those nooks and crannies? And nooks have nooks, and crannies crannies, ad infinitum, or ad at least that indefinite boundary where matter, so called, shades off seamlessly into thin air. Similarly, with the dimensions of a life it is a case of stopping at some certain level and saying this, this was she, though knowing of course that it was not.'

And about his lover, he confesses that though intimately involved with another, he was actually totally self-absorbed:

'Often it seems to me the closer I come to a person the farther off I am. How is that? I wonder. I used to watch Mrs. Gray like that when we were in bed together, and would feel her grow distant even as she lay beside me, just as sometimes, disconcertingly, a word will detach itself from its object and float away, weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble.'

'I should say that I did not imagine myself so treasured, I did not think myself so loved. This was not from diffidence or a lack of a sense of my own significance no, but the very opposite: engrossed in what I felt for myself, I had no measure against which to match what she might feel for me. That was how it was at the start, and how it went on, to the end. That is how it is, when one discovers oneself through another.'

And when looking into the past, we deal with memories, which are by definition even less reliable than our limited perception of the present. The passage of time enables us to make our own version of the past that serves our present-day needs:

'Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions. Not that there is much difference between the two, if indeed there is any difference at all. Some say that without realizing it we make it all up as we go along, embroidering and embellishing, and I am inclined to credit it, for Madam Memory is a great and subtle dissembler.  When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage – and what is a life but a gradual shipwreck? – may take on an aspect of inevitability when I put them on display in their glass showcases, but they are random; representative, perhaps, perhaps compellingly so, but random nonetheless.'

Even the recollections of specific, seemingly objective ‘facts’ are suspect.

'Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible.'

Where, exactly, does that leave us?  How are we to live?

'I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realize that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions.  Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be.'

'I see nothing, or little, anyway; little. It seems not to matter. Perhaps comprehension is not the task, any more. Just to be, that seems enough, for now, up here in this high room, with the girl in her chair at my back.'

With Banville perhaps words can at least portray, if not bridge, the gaps among people, among times. Maybe words can, if carefully crafted, represent the shimmering set of overlapping realities that is our reality.

'Some savants hold that there is a multiplicity of universes, all present, all simultaneously going on, wherein everything that might happen does happen. … Which eternal realm shall I believe in, which shall I choose? Neither, since all my dead are alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.'

The Closets Are Still Full

It doesn’t seem to matter how many closets we have or how big they are.  They are always full.

I wonder if the same isn’t true about unhappiness, desire, disappointment. We always want something we don’t have, or complain about the latest disappointment. And if things change to give us what we want (or thought we wanted), it doesn’t take long at all for us to fill up that closet with something else we want and are deeply troubled or disappointed that we don’t have.

The brain is an amazing organ. We’re beginning to understand its awesome power to interpret and filter huge amounts of data into useful concepts, ideas, perceptions.  If it isn’t useful, the brain conveniently filters it out so that we can focus on what might truly ‘help’ us.  I can’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as objective reality out there, or do we simply create what we need out of thin air.  Sometimes we create a version of reality that we desperately need at that moment, even though that version is clearly unreal in many aspects.  But it gets us through the day and on to the next.  Or so it seems, anyway.

If the brain can do all that, it must be burdened with considerable overhead from the stresses of continually constructing and reconstructing a useful reality.  Somewhere we do know more about what’s really out there, and it takes effort to keep it from our conscious thoughts.  We know but we don’t want to know.  Maybe the brain necessarily has its own agenda; maybe that agenda is the source of its power and its limitations.

Perhaps part of that agenda, or part of the resulting overhead from the burden of creating and executing the agenda, is a fixed space for unhappiness.  Maybe we need someone or something to blame.  Maybe we need something to strive for.  Or maybe the construction and continual maintenance of the conscious reality we build is so costly that we’re just plain tired and need relief from the work.  Do we just long for a rest from the burden, a time when we can just be?  And perhaps that longing is deeply unconscious, so much so that we feel compelled to pin assorted aspects or our ‘reality’ onto it so that we can at least have a way of naming it.  If so, it would make sense that if the superficial need or desire is fulfilled, we would just replace it with others.  The closet of unhappiness remains full.

Full at least until we give ourselves a break from constructing and maintaining our conscious reality.  Religion can help us trust in the unknowable and relax a bit in our faith.  Just getting old enough to realize that almost all of life is ephemeral can also help.  If our reality construction job has to proceed, fine, but maybe we can go about it with a healthy dose of cynicism and with less short-term desperation than we did when we were younger. All the world's a stage, so let's do our best to enjoy the show.

It’s all artificial, and once we realize that we can invest our energy a little more wisely. The closets will indeed be full, but perhaps we can be less troubled by that.  Maybe that will free us to act more compassionately towards others because we realize that our own unhappiness may be inevitable but is also quite livable, and maybe even has its own charms.  It’s part of who we are, and we can learn to embrace it.

Or is this all my own peculiar brand of self-deception?

Objectivity? Funtoosh!

I’ve never been strongly attracted to Salman Rushdie’s books, so it was with more hope than enthusiasm that I picked up ‘Midnight’s Children’, the much lauded 1981 novel that put Rushdie on the map.  The novel deals in part with the history of India after independence.  I am a big fan of  Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Vikram Seth, and Amit Ghosh, so it seemed logical to go back to early Rushdie, who in some ways paved the way for these writers.

‘Midnight’s Children’ was a challenge for me.  It’s not short.  I did get bogged down a few times and it took some willpower to get back to a steady reading rhythm.  I’m glad I finished it, but my feelings about the book are mixed.

The story tells the life story of an Indian man who was born at the exact moment when India became an independent country.  Rushdie has this character tell his own story in a fanciful and attractive way.  The style of narration borrows quite a bit from Dickens, but without the clear moral compass that is part of just about every Dickens work.  Rushdie’s use of language is fun and creative.  He includes many words from Hindi and Urdu, from slang Indian English, and he also just plain makes up words when it suits him.  No Queen’s English here, and the resulting informality is both charming and entertaining.  ‘Funtoosh’ is slang for ‘finished’ or ‘done’.  Rushdie here clears a path for Amit Ghosh, whose use of dialect is even more radical and fanciful. 

But language is not the only area where Rushdie denounces objective standards and objective truths.  Rushdie also implies that in history as well there can be no single standard or truth.  Instead multiple truths coexist and comingle in complex and confusing ways.  The lack of a simple truth may be the only simple truth.  There is room for a rich interplay between memory and fact, between perception and reality, so much room that objectivity itself becomes an old-fashioned and quaint concept.

That being said the vast sprawl of the plot is both the book’s strength and its weakness.  At times it’s the Pickwick Papers of the sub-continent: very entertaining, but sometimes incoherent.  If the defense is that coherence is in itself necessarily arbitrary and artificial, so be it, but this is clearly dangerous territory.  For me it did make for difficult reading at times.  Best to savor the myriad of wonderful details and trust that the larger picture will somehow take care of itself.  Trouble is that for me sometimes it just didn’t.  Probably my shortcoming.

While I know a little something about the history of modern India and Pakistan, I certainly don’t know more than the average educated American, and that puts me at a distinct disadvantage.  Rushdie’s intentionally distorted and sometimes satirical view of events is probably somewhat lost on someone who isn’t familiar with the details of the traditional textbook account of events.  I’m sure I missed the intended significance of many references and images.

Rushdie also relies on magical realism as a plot element.  He draws on techniques from novels like ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ to clearly differentiate the narrator’s tale from a more objective approach, and to fancifully connect the history of an individual with the history of a nation.  In this way the novel is very different from Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’, which is much longer but very traditional in plot and concept. I think I understand Rushdie’s approach in concept, but I’m not so drawn to reading it. Seems like he wants us to have it both ways: a view of real history, but one that makes up its own rules as it goes along.  Again, that’s in part the whole idea.

A movie version is set for release in early November of 2012.  Rushdie himself wrote the screenplay and does the voice-over narration.  Mixed reviews.

There’s considerable literary bravura and writer’s ego on display here.  Be prepared.  If you’re ready for lots of ‘godknowswhat’ and a view of the world that is ‘updownup’, go for it.  I’m a little dizzy after reading it. 

Memoirs

I don’t read many memoirs; the genre is often problematic for me.  An author may be among the least qualified to write about himself.  Political memoirs are often primarily an opportunity to spin for the historians and settle old scores.  Then there’s the credibility factor of many modern personal memoirs.  The bar has been set so high in terms of exaggerated suffering, kinky relationships, and horrific abuse that publishers seem to demand more and more startling confession, less and less good storytelling. I’m not a big fan of the Jeannette Walls books.  Sorry, but I just don’t believe her.  I do better with more casual memoirs that loosely connect memories, books that just try to tell some first-person stories in an engaging way.  They don’t try to drive home key points about the meaning of life.  Try ‘Stuffed’, by Patricia Volk.  In broad terms she takes the approach of one chapter per major figure in her life.  No consistent chronological line from beginning to end.  It’s more along the lines of “Here are some things that happened to me and people that matter to me. You make sense of it. I won’t even try.”

So while 'The Tender Bar' came highly recommended to me, I confess to picking it up with some trepidation.  On the whole, though, J.R. Moehringer has written an engaging book that hangs together pretty well.  Born in 1964, Moehringer published the book in 2005 at the age of 41.  The book deals with his life up to the age of 25.  Pretty early to be writing a memoir.  I’m not sure I can make much sense of my life now at the age of 60. At 41 my vision was even more limited. But nonetheless Moehringer does his best to weave some strands that hold the book together.

But it does make me appreciate the sublime artificiality of fiction.  Blank slate. The author can make up whatever he pleases.  He has so many resources at his disposal:  plot, character, language, tone, structure, etc.  As long as it makes sense on its own terms, fine. Reality be damned. Readers are the real winners.

So let’s start with the title, 'The Tender Bar'.  Play on bartender, of course.  The central place in the book is a specific drinking hole where the author spent lots of time as a young adult.  But it was anything but a tender place. A place that ‘tended’ to him?  Maybe.  I guess.  Seems a bit of a stretch to me.  Could have done better, I think. Seems awkward. What am I missing?

Alcohol as father stand in?

There are a some themes that run through the book: missing and disappointing father; struggling but admirable mother; alcoholism; extended family populated with intelligent but under-educated and under-achieving adults; the usual coming-of-age struggle to find the right place in the world. The father theme was most compelling to me.  At 25 he finally understood that while he was entitled to need what he needed from his father, his father was simply incapable of filling those needs.  Keep looking for that person in his father or accept that his father was in many ways a screw-up.  A lose-lose proposition. His father would never be the person he needed him to be.  To fool himself into thinking that his father was that person but was somehow unavailable was not productive.  Ultimately, accepting disappointment and heartbreak is the only key to freedom. But it sucks.

The writing is just fine, but ultimately a little precious for my taste.  Most chapters have that little tie-up at the end that’s a little forced.  Reads a bit like a collection of college application essays.  Trying really hard to come across well.  (The film rights have been purchased.  Do I want to see this as a film?)

Moehringer is clearly a gifted journalist.  I haven’t read the Agassi book, but from what I hear it’s pretty daring.  Agassi read 'The Tender Bar' and immediately thought: this is the person to ghost-write my memoir.  That’s impressive.

There’s a new book of historical fiction about the bank robber Willy Sutton.  Probably worth a try.

And on a personal note, I’m so pleased to see that Janice Van Horn’s memoir ‘A Complicated Life: My Life with Clement Greenberg' has been published.  She’s an old friend and neighbor from New York, and a terrific person.  I so look forward to reading it.