intimate geography

Three months in a new city, a new job, new circumstances of life, and there has not been a lot of time to reflect.  In California I got used to seeing far: up towards the hills, down onto the thoroughly settled streets below, across the water, the consoling twinkle of the Bay Bridge lights, the contours of Marin, the bold geography -- human and physical -- reassuringly legible, and after a few years, comprising a map I held and knew inside myself.  I like to let my eye move over these distances, and there is a special freedom gained, a healing salve received from these views and the many transformations and contrasts they contain, which take one out of oneself, supplying the energy of an exchange with a dedicated interlocutor.

In Portland, there are views to be had of the forest that surrounds the city -- to the east beyond Mt Tabor and out towards Mt Hood, and, from the westward looking window of my apartment, beyond the tamed, variegated leafiness of trees that line streets and shade houses, you can just see the top of a dark ridge of forest that lies somewhere on the other side of the Willamette River.  The climate and ecology here, even within the city, feel like they are of the forest.  My road is thick with wet fallen leaves; only the asphalt thwarts the regenerative processes of the forrest floor.

West from my window.

There has not been a lot of time for the regenerative reflection and leisurely wandering of the eye or mind, nor, alas, for the cello.  I now realize even more how my learning to play the cello was bound up with the writing of my dissertation.  The combination of relative solitude and a peculiarly singular focus in the dissertation-writing period (which I'm not necessarily harking back to as idyllic from this vantage point; it also bred its own moments of difficulty and dissatisfaction)  happily admitted another idiosyncratically singular focus into my near-daily life--the cello.


The cello also became bound up with the growing sense of connection and at-home-ness I felt living in the Bay Area.  I realized at some point in California--at a time that I think coincides with the beginning of learning to play the cello--that I was particularly vulnerable to, and derived great pleasure from, inserting myself into, or allowing inside of myself, stories and experiences that all laid down some deeper or more densely braided sense of connection to this place.  One simple instance, which never failed in giving me that pleasure, was taking the road from Berkeley to El Cerrito to where I had my cello lessons -- Colusa Avenue that winds northwards, probably about mid-way between the hills and the bay.  I simply loved knowing the way, possessing an experience, confirmed regularly, of everyday life against the backdrop of this landscape.  After the early years of myopic preoccupation in a place to which I had no links, personal or historical, other than to the university that welcomed me there, I had finally acquired a sense of something larger that I could at once hold inside myself and find myself participating in.  (I'm sure such a sense is a rather fundamental psychological need that must be met in order for us to experience fulfilling self-realization -- but it's curious how in the case of my years in California, all of this found a vivid articulation through my relationship to landscape and geography.)   


There were other things too, of course: playing the cello, I met Matthew, who had been born and lived all his life in California, and who is someone in whom the past lives vividly and so close at hand and as an abiding constituent of the present -- something which comes through in his stories -- and was one of the first things I noticed about him.  Through him, more of the map and more of the past of Berkeley and of California came alive to me.


Before I went to Yosemite for the first time in late spring 2009, Matthew told me a hilarious story of a visit of his own there, with two musicians who were brothers, and an older eccentric friend of theirs, Howie, one of Berkeley's cast of colourful characters (who I did then once meet, and who sadly died last year).  


In the room where I had my cello lessons, on the wall above the place where Matthew's own cello stood elegantly in its velvet-lined wooden box, was a striking photograph of a woman smiling and seeming to call out with joy from the picture.  She was leaning at an angle of about 45 degrees with her arms stretched out above her head to another large slab of rock above -- so that it almost looked as if she hanging or dangling from the granite.  The woman in the photo was Margaret Rowell, Matthew's cello teacher, and the picture was taken in Yosemite.  The photograph expressed an energy which seemed to come from the unlikely opposing forces captured in that instant.  There was a tension in the stretched body, but also an ease and delight.  The angle she was stood at was so unlikely that it looked as if it could have only lasted for a moment, but was, in fact, perfectly supported by the rock above and below.  The portrait was taken relatively close-up, but the scale of the rocky surroundings is still palpable, and the photograph spoke at once of the body's smallness against this backdrop of its liberation and life.

Yesterday was the first day that I have allowed myself to wander in Portland.  I went to Washington Park where the city begins to meet the forest.  I looked for the views of Mt St Helen's and Mt Hood, but either the cloud or the trees, or my own poor orientation, obscured them.  Then I went to Powell's Books (the largest independent used & new bookstore in the world, occupying a whole city block in downtown Portland).  I found myself in the photography section, looking at books of Yosemite, and found there an edition of John Muir's 1912 text "The Yosemite," in an edition with photographs by Galen Rowell, the son of Margaret, a climber, explorer and photographer, who had died in a plane crash in 2002.  The book was dedicated to "My mother Margaret Avery Rowell, whose lifelong passion for Yosemite started with a visit by open touring car in 1916."  I recalled Matthew also telling me of how Margaret played cello in the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite.  I obviously never knew these people and my links to them are vague and fragile, negligible, even, but suddenly happening upon these connections again yesterday was deeply restorative -- wandering reflection, the eye traversing distances, and entering into a dialogue that extends over decades and landscapes and enters, for a moment, into an exchange with the stories of lives that were closely wed to those landscapes.


After these three months of feeling like I had been acting only on one plane, with only the most proximate visible to me, feeling like only one thing is of any consequence--survival in this new working situation--it was revivifying to let the eye and  mind wander, and to see the transformations and connections that compose a larger picture of distances and proximities, and to let the energy and value that we attach to some of the more distant things let itself be felt in life again.

Galen Rowell, Sunset After a Storm, Yosemite Valley, 1970.

Galen Rowell, Clearing Storm over El Capitan, 1973.

From John Muir's The Yosemite: 

"These beautiful days do not exist as mere pictures--maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will... They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always."

Fwd: Please Re-Deliver to Bach

Last night I practiced: some scales, and then the Prelude of the first Bach Suite. Something always catches inside me when, at the half-way point, you reach the return of the G-D-B chord after all the journeying out from those notes that had opened the Prelude. The recognition of home, the same but different, after all that's come before. Then, as I paused on the long high D before the waves of scales start, I thought I heard applause from the street below. I carried on. This morning, as I left the house, there was an envelope on the porch, in front of the doormat. A slug or snail had clearly investigated it in the night, taking a few nibbles from the top.

I opened the envelope as I walked to the bus stop. A neighbour asking me to be quiet? Inviting me to join their garage jam opposite? As I read, my eyes filled with tears.

Dear Anonymous Cello Player,

Tonight you saved me. I cannot explain how or why, but you simply saved my life tonight.

Recently I had been planning to take my life and leave this world. But the music that flowed from your window stopped me, it paralyzed me. And in doing so, I was completely caught off guard.

The woman I love left me heartbroken and tortured, but the song that breathed on the air of this night reminded me that I would be leaving far more than just this world. I would be leaving so much more behind as well. Beauty, pure unparalleled beauty.

In saying that I cannot thank you enough. Tonight I heard the most breath-taking music I have ever heard. Nothing will ever compare. The memory of that sound, the reminder it gave me will never leave me.

So thank you. You have shown me that there is more surprise to this world than I have ever known.

Again, thank you for saving my life. I will never know you and you will never know me, but know that music, and the perfect night, are there.

Sincerely,

A Listening Stranger.

That the simple, beautiful designs of Bach can issue into the night from the cello of a novice and be -- music -- act as music in the world -- that, truly, is miraculous. That in one unwitting moment and for one accidental listener, I could be a musician and let music into somebody else's world -- with that, too, the letter-writer has shown me, in turn, that there is more surprise in the world than I have ever known.

I wish the Listening Stranger well, and may future happiness be his.

* * *

A day of unconventional mail, art again moving through the world and making its effects felt in unexpected places: also received today, from dear Matthew, in California, who taught me to play, a painting. It sat on top of his piano, and the window whose view inspired it was behind me as I sat with my cello. The light on the San Francisco Bay luminous in pastel as the framer carefully cuts it free of the packaging. He looks it over admiringly: "every inch is expressive, is an integral part of the work...." I tell him that if one knows, then this impressionistic light and colour is unmistakably the Bay, seen from the hills to the the east. The rise of Angel Island in the foreground, the contoured mass of Marin in the right-hand background. "I used to live there," he said. "This gives me goosebumps."

tale from the in-between times

The past few weeks I have been living in something of an in-between time - when the normal rhythms of daily life have been utterly suspended. Upon returning to the US from Russia (with quick dip back into the English woods on the way) just over a month ago now, I essentially entered the state of Moving. And although I've been at rest in my final destination for a week, I don't think I will truly exit this state until my furniture catches up with me, and I can finally be at rest on something other than the air mattress or the single chair I brought with me in the car (brought along for the cello, of course, for what good would it be to be in an empty apartment with a cello and no chair...?)

Pictures: (left) cello with houseplant in my empty old apartment (good acoustics!) (right) "Musician's chair" at "Duet," an exhibition of woodworking and musical instruments in Mendocino, CA (July 2011).

But the funny thing about this state of Moving was the sheer length of time it consumed -- there was at least a good week in the middle there pretty much entirely devoted to it (and that's not even counting the earlier house-hunting mission). And for this time I was very actively -- physically and mentally (the boxes even entered my dreams) -- engaged in the whole palaver -- yet all this daily effort had little worth in itself and yielded little meaningful creation in the world... I wasn't really Doing (and definitely not Relaxing, either) - just Moving. It all felt a bit like being on a very, very long plane ride...not just moving, but moving life on. It was all for the sake of what was to come at the Moved To destination.

So maybe there wouldn't be much to tell about the Moving -- a prolonged banality full of details which were of little interest to anyone outside the immediate context of attaining the state of Moved, all a bit of a non-activity that comes between the real tellable incidents at either end. But there's a particular delight in finding stories in the banal in-between times, in elevating the mundane to the tellable. And in this whole process, I think one incident, or non-incident, captured this for me above all:

I needed to procure a No Parking permit from the City of Berkeley in order to clear a space next to my house for the movers' truck to park -- or so the moving company informed me. Having spent at least the first half of my seven years in Berkeley feeling more like a transient student than an actual resident of the city, I quite relished the feeling of citizenry involved in making an appointment and showing up at the Permit Service Center in Downtown Berkeley. I dutifully drew my dubiously scaled diagram of the street, the house and the required kerb space on the orange form and waited my turn. In the waiting area I found a large-print edition of the Reader's Digest magazine to flick through. The Reader's Digest! This had been a staple of my childhood -- the true-life death-defying stories, the "It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power" vocab quizzes, and the humorous anecdotes sent in by readers -- all of these were consumed by me as a young, impressionable reader. The improbable anecdotes and gaffes, sent in by people from strangely named places like Coward, South Carolina or Carthage, Missouri were, in retrospect, one of my earliest encounters with America -- although I think all those names, places and comic incidents existed for me only in some haze of the obscure reality of the world of the Reader's Digest and its twelve little curlicues on the spine, shaded in, one more at a time, on each month's edition.

In the middle of reading a true-life story about a college student who rescues her boyfriend who's plummeted down a rocky ravine, my name is called. The clerk is quite stern, and I am scolded for not knowing the exact length of my movers' truck. I am sent away to make a phone call, and when I return (having rejoined the queue, but barely for long enough to even resume my place in the ravine rescue story) we conclude that I need four 20 foot parking spaces. The clerk retrieves four No Parking signs (considerably larger at close quarters than when you see them in situ at the side of the road) and begins to fill in the details on them in marker pen. I had seen something about buckets of concrete on the instructions for how to erect the signs, and was a little nervous about the prospect of concrete mixing fitting into my weekend plans... There was, however, I learned, an alternative. Having established that there was a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the kerb, the clerk sternly and soberly issued detailed instructions: I was to go to a garden center, buy some bamboo canes, cover the No Parking signs with Saran wrap (BritEng: cling film; for years, until I saw it written down (in Zadie Smith's On Beauty where maybe her own British ear was revelling in the local knowledge) I thought the AmEng was "surround wrap" -- seemed perfectly logical...), thread the canes through the sign, tape them onto the back, and bang them into the ground -- but making sure to water the ground first because it will be too hard. I nod, pay, thank her, and leave with my armful of signs, slightly anxious about the meter that would've expired at my parking spot while I was being schooled in the art of bamboo sign assembly. How absurd would that be, eh - to get a parking ticket while you were out obtaining parking permits...

I went to the Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, bought bamboo canes (not before inspecting the bamboo plant in our backyard and concluding that its stems didn't quite offer me what I needed) and devoted Sunday afternoon to a rather haphazard arts and craft project with the signs. (As a friend pointed out, perhaps I could have fashioned them into an entry for the Berkeley Kite festival that was taking place that weekend at the Marina). But the clerk was right, and I did indeed need to water the ground before being able to bang the canes in...I felt like I was consecrating the earth, sprinkling it with holy water.

My signs stood firmly by the roadside, duly offering their three days warning about the parking restriction. The designated No Parking day approached...A small white car occupied one of the spaces, and it had never moved the whole time...what if the owners where away? When it was still there the night before, I started to get worried -- my god, what if I actually had to have somebody towed away?! I wasn't banking on that! There was I feeling all nice and citizenly as I went down to the City of Berkeley offices -- not thinking that I would end up a tow-truck menace! Maybe the movers' truck will be smaller, I thought, hopefully. Which, of course, it was. You could have parked three of them in 80ft. So, in the end, the truck parked in a space behind the white car, behind all my carefully signposted spaces -- in a space that was empty anyway....

But I guess what really tickled and awed me about all this -- about the unflinching sobriety of the clerk, the specificity of the instructions and the established existence of the whole process was was just that -- its established-ness. That at any given time there were people in Berkeley who were in the extra-ordinary in-between time of moving (or doing construction work or whatever else means you ned to stake out the territory in front of your property) and who were piddling about with Saran wrap and bamboo canes and watering cans, or, pity the (BritEng) verge-less, mixing concrete and buying buckets.

Petersburg's In-Between Spaces

There’s a particular kind of daytime snoozing that I associate with the summertime in St Petersburg – a half- conscious, shallowly immersed, dream-state in which fragments of the surrounding environment and snatches of recent experience float and mingle and expand and contract. I didn't have so much cause to practice submitting myself to this art of lucid dreaming on this visit – for one, the curtains of my room were thicker and more effective at blocking out the midsummer white nights—but the couple of times I have surrendered to a daytime nap, the experience is as vivid as ever. I’m sure this state arises from a combination of the unrelenting daylight, the suspension in a foreign city’s bustle, and the foreign language’s rustle all around and inside. On this trip, at least, I felt some sounds and shapes of Russian a little more internalized than previously. Could this have anything to do with my newly attuned musical ear…? Of course, I’d like to think so, but who’s to know.

In my last week in Petersburg, I went to a concert of organ and cello music. The street address on Sadovaya gave little away about the actual location – it turned out to be set way back from the street, in the grounds of the Suvorovskii-Military Academy, in the Maltese Chapel.

[A Maltese Chapel in Russia? I had no idea…but it turns out that Paul I, son of Catherine the Great, had been made the Protector of the Order of the Maltese Knights of St John in 1797. Paul had grown up reading stories of knights of old, and he went on to develop a particular interest in things chivalric: he endeavoured (with no success or popularity) to reinstitute the honor of the old chivalric orders as an antidote to what he perceived as Russia's corrupt aristocracy. In Petersburg, city of royal palaces, it is a castle--Mikhailovsky Castle--complete with drawbridges and armored knights in relief on its front walls--that was Paul's residence. The Knights of St John were connected to the grail, and ss for the Maltese Chapel--and tales of knights that played on my own childhood imagination--I have to admit that something about the chapel's facade--which you come upon suddenly in a hidden courtyard, seamlessly joined to other buildings--reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the grail temple carved into the rock (filmed at Petra in Jordan).]

The Maltese Chapel at Sadovaya 26, embedded in the Suvorovskii Military Academy

But I digress…Russian tsars…Indiana Jones…ah yes, Vivaldi…To my delight, among the pieces they played was the Vivaldi cello sonata in Eb minor – one of the sonatas that I had played. This was a new experience for me – hearing something that I knew (and knew only through playing –not something I was already familiar with as a listener). Both this novelty and, perhaps, the very nature of this particular music – the clarity of its phrase structures – made for a different kind of listening experience – one where I was as aware of every note as of the unfolding movement of the whole. Listening to the clear line of the cello was like hearing it draw out of me something that I held whole inside myself. Like knowing the words of a play--not just glancingly familiar but deeply internalized—that you see acted before you.

The semi-conscious lucid dreaming is just one of St Petersburg’s in-between spaces. In this transitional society--definitely still transitional 20 years after the end of the Soviet Union--building work, repair and remodeling are going on everywhere, and building-use, commercial activity and consumer behavior are all in a state of flux. I had two particularly striking experiences of Petersburg's in-between spaces that seemed very much typical of the city's current condition and evolution. It is probably no coincidence, either, that they were both in the company of my young friends -- who have degrees in interior design and environmental design, a specialty that also belongs to and finds much application in today's Petersburg.

The first was a house -- an unrestored osobniak -- on the embankment right next to the Hermitage. The house was up for sale, but, thanks to its prestigious location and size, at such an enormous cost that it was hardly likely that a buyer would be swiftly forthcoming. So, in the meantime, it was being rented to group of young designers and artists who used the large empty rooms as exhibition and studio space. On my first night in Petersburg, I found myself on its balcony staring right across at the gold spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress against the midnight dusk sky. A party was being held to celebrate one young woman's fashion collection; the clothes were displayed against the flecked walls of peeling plaster, and some time after midnight were hoisted to ceiling-height to make more room for dancing. A couple of weeks later, my interior designer friends took me to their studio. An entrance from the street led up a dingy staircase; we were let into one door and led through a long twisting, high-ceilinged corridor, hung with sheets, and between the seams, every now and then, you could see the building pared down to its bare structural form -- way beyond even the shabby chic of the make-shift fashion exhibition, completely uninhabitable. Then, suddenly, the corridor ended and opened into a large double-sized studio, with beautiful wood floors, fresh paint and all new fixtures. The windows looked onto the yard, and I was completely disoriented as to which way we now faced compared to where we had entered. What will these in-between spaces, and the spaces they are between, have become in another five or ten years, I wonder?

Ensemble of Violoncellists of St Petersburg

Somewhere between the trips on vodka-vapoury buses that move at a rate of inches-per-hour and the trips on sleek express trains, where electronic cigarettes guarantee the cleanliness of the air as the kilometers between Moscow and St Petersburg are swallowed up, I have found my way to hear some cellos, and more besides.

First off, right at the bottom of the classical music listings, there was the Ensemble of Violoncellists of St Petersburg. I turned up at the venue, a recently restored Estonian church, with no idea of what to expect. I was vaguely recalling the night, some ten years ago, when I went to a jazz club in Samara: I had been thinking intimate smoky basement -- and I joined orderly rows of audience in a vast hall to listen to a four hour long concert of hopping big band music on a stage hung with a banner proclaiming, Soviet-style, glory to geologists.

(Lest I was overstating the dissolution of all difference between Russian and Western ways in my previous post, let me just say that on the way to the concert I had an amusing experience of Russia's all-too-often flagging (but evolving) culture of customer service: I went into a shop and asked for a bottle of mineral water. The sales assistant pressed some buttons on the till, then--ever so slowly--turned away from me, took up a comb, looked into a small mirror that was hanging on the partition that divided the drinks counter from the dairy products counter, and carefully combed her fringe a few times. She turned slowly back to me, and asked, moodily, "Is that all?")

On entering this cleanly painted, plain wooden Lutheran church just round the corner from the Mariinsky Theatre, we were handed a programme and a pen, with the instructions to rate each piece with points on a scale of one to ten. For an instant, I thought I'd come to see some kind of strange talent contest, and not convinced I'd understood correctly, I asked my neighbour what this was all about. "Just so they know what people like best," she told me. No contest, then -- just a bit of audience engagement.

There were 17 short numbers on the programme -- ranging from Rachmaninov to Chuck Berry, from Ukrainian folk dance to the Pink Panther. The arrangements were pretty great, and the eight cellists were joined by a soprano from the Mariinsky for a few numbers -- including, to my delight, Villa-Lobos' Aria from Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5, which I had stumbled through, piecemeal, in the string orchestra workshop in San Francisco last summer. My other favourite was probably the arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie's Night in Tunis...translated into marvellous jazzy cello riffing... Biased toward the cello I may be, but with that versatility, who needs any other instrument...

I'm not sure I was fully committed to the point allocation aspect of the evening -- but I nonetheless recorded my scores for each number (minimal distinctions between generally superlative responses--an opinion largely shared, my sneaks revealed, with my neighbour, and judging by the hall's response, with most of the audience, too) and dutifully handed in my sheet at the end.

I'd never heard a cello choir concert before, nor a concert with such a varied programme -- and as well as great musicianship, there was also what seemed like a good dose of adventurousness in exploiting the cello's potential. A couple of pieces were a little heavy on the romantic-sentimental side for me, but overall there was something quite refreshing about the whole concert (and which made me think of the conversation some fellow cello-bloggers had had a while back about concert programmes and the profiles of dwindling audiences): moving easily between such a range of genres, these Petersburg cellists quite openly and enthusiastically combined some serious artistry with music's emotional transports and an unabashed experience of entertainment. And as a result, while the music wasn't at all amateur, the feeling of community among the public (of around 80 people, probably) was somehow more akin to my memories of (English) village hall events than to the solemnity and urbanity of a concert hall.

On the Streets of St Petersburg

This post comes to you courtesy of wi-fi on board the Sapsan [Peregrin Falcon] express train from Moscow to St Petersburg...amongst whose other high-tech amenities number "electronic cigarettes"-- on sale in the buffet car for those who can't make the four hours...I wonder if these may have been introduced as a precautionary measure after desperate passengers, used to the lengthy stops of regular Russian trains, nipped out for a quick smoke at Tver', only to be stranded on the platform as the speedy Sapsan took silent flight....

Умом Россию не понятъ - You can't understand Russia with your mind, as Tiutchev's words come out rather less pithily in English. But sometimes with your body, perhaps: I walk a lot in my usual life, but why does walking the streets of Petersburg make my foot strangely swell up and my limbs ache with a deep fatigue? The air is filled with traffic fumes, cigarette smoke, and, at close quarters on pavements and in shops, the tragic smell of stale vodka. Yesterday afternoon I bought a slim volume about Shostakovich in an antikvariat bookshop from a man who gave off that familiar odour of toxic vodka tears. Last week, I sat on a bus for almost an hour, stuck in one of Petersburg's many probki (traffic jams) crawling along a few hundred meters of Sadovaya Street to join Nevsky Prospect. This was the very place that, on board a tram in 1918, a chance encounter took place between the poets Zinaida Gippius and Aleksandr Blok. Unable to reconcile herself to Blok's recently published long poem, The Twelve, and its depiction of the revolution, Gippius declared that in public, at least, all relations between them must be severed. The tram stops and Blok gets off. It was the last time Gippius was to see him before his death in 1921. Stuck in today’s city's traffic jams, they would have had time to thrash out the matter further; the probki grant no such fleetingness to encounters aboard public transport.

A man breathing sour vodka vapours sits down next to me. "You have beautiful hands," he says, through the slight thickness of drink. "Veins--that's good--they carry life, you know you are alive." (After the exertion of a walk in the heat, the veinon the backs of my hands were prominently standing out.) He compares his own hand to s mine: almost unnaturally smooth skin covered the puffy reddish hand; I recalled the more extreme bloatedness in the hands and faces of the drunken men and woman--the sight of the women was always more shocking--I used to see hanging around on Ligovsky Prospect near the Moscow Railway Station before a smart new shopping centre was built there. "No veins, you see." He took a call on his mobile phone. When it ended, he complained about a nagging woman, and then, with a hint of ruefulness, added "My daughter -- she took away my car because I drink." The traffic lights at the corner with Nevsky changed several times; we moved nowhere.

The St Petersburg traffic is somewhat calmer and less anarchic than it was six years ago--and not just because it spends most of its time ground to a halt in perpetual traffic jams. Many streets in the centre are now one-way (to make room for parking the rapidly growing number of vehicles at the curb), there are light-controlled pedestrian crossings with reassuringly large green-man walk signs, and, I am told, a new law stipulating that vehicles must give way to pedestrians. Crossing Ulitsa Marata each morning, though, is still something of a gauntlet to run: woe betide the pedestrian who thinks it is for him that the speeding car slows, and not to swerve a gnarly patch of potholes and raised tram-tracks...

I can’t help but wonder, though, how the changes in the traffic rules happened—I mean, in a way, it must have been a change that happened overnight--did they just put up sign and the next morning everyone drove the right way? Did people get it right straight away? Were there chaotic encounters as cars erroneously came nose-to-nose in newly designated one-way streets, or confusions and frustrations as drivers were sent looping round the block one more time…? And does this most banal change—the establishment, one day, of a one-way street, work as something of a metaphor for other processes of change in Russian society…? Now the traffic situation is more or less entirely normalized – as are the other changes most visible to me.

For the young Russian friends (5 years my junior) that I live with, the new normality is seamlessly assimilated: they tell me that clothes from [the English high street store] Marks and Spencer are simple, that bread from the French bakery is good, that a smart phone was really the only upgrade to go for. The five years that separates us in age is not a lot, but it does mean that their adult life began in the mid-to-late 2000s, when the “middle class” had grown, wealth was becoming more evenly distributed after the grotesque extremes of the unstable 90s, and the gap between Russia and western Europe, at least on the most readily observable plane of material existence, had shrunk. Their adult lives had largely been formed in the six years that I had not visited Russia, so the imperceptible assimilation of these new ways was somehow even more striking to me.

"Modernization or Death"

I had first come to Russia in 1998, and in forming my relationship to the place and to people here, the “difference” of the place that I came from had to be dealt with one way or another. Perception of the differences stood behind the interest, openness, good humour, and sometimes exasperation, that came along with experiences of everyday life in Russia. People would often ask about where you lived and what your life was like or how certain things worked—and I remember a feeling sometimes of the sheer impossibility of conveying some of these things—not because any one individual aspect of life was so wildly different, but because the whole picture of life that they formed was an altogether different kind of composition. Now, though, that difference has diminished dramatically, and in my relation to Russia and Russians, I no longer feel so much of that suppressed or under-expressed sense of the gap.

***

The other day I was stopped on the street and asked the way to the Dostoevsky house-museum, and the next day, the way to Pushkin’s apartment on the Moika. I was, of course, able to help these seekers of literary addresses –this layer of St Petersburg remains unchanged in the six years since I was last here--but when I speak and they realize I am not Russian, they laugh good-naturedly at the unlikely foreigner who knows where Pushkin lived…

St Isaac's Cathedral on a White Night, from Canal Griboedova

Travelogue ~ Prologue ~ Prelude

My cello has been left upstairs in the attic room at the top of M.’s house that looks one way onto the San Francisco Bay and the other way onto a wooded hillside that is home to new-born, long-legged prancing deer, sweet-songed orioles, a slinky red fox, nine menacing turkeys, and, occasionally, to the delight of M. the improvising cellist, a partner in nighttime duets, the ever-inventive mocking bird. The hard white case in which M.’s own cello has travelled to Russia, Palestine, Israel, Hungary and elsewhere lives up in this room as well -- and the room itself, with its odd-shaped ceilings and many angles is not unlike a giant cello case of its own. I think my cello will be happy there while I am off on this summer of restless travels. Perhaps, now and then, first thing in the morning, instead of picking up his own 300 year-old cello of dark, wise wood, M. will take downstairs my three-year-old anonymous cello, bought from the man in the subway station, and play Bach on it.

***

Returning to England for the first time in eighteen months, I made the hour’s drive from Heathrow to my parents’ house in Hampshire. After the expansiveness and scale of the American landscape, England always seems cosy and rounded, its features—both natural and built—huddling on an island, not stretching across a continent.

In the past few years of living in the Bay Area, I have found myself, now and then, perceiving the landscape in a more primal way--with some awareness the land and climate that exists separately from all that is built, natural contours and dynamics that exist apart from and prior to the modern life that goes on there. With the bay, the headlands of Marin and San Francisco, the Berkeley hills and the certainty of westerliness that comes with the sun descending into the Pacific, one comes to always be sure of one’s orientation in this place. With so many vantage points from which to admire the view of the bay, one is so often struck by how thoroughly humanly settled the area is and, at the same time, how dynamic and boldly defined its landscape is. (Knowledge of the possibility of earthquakes heightens this sense still more.) And as for the weather, one usually has the feeling that although it is so rapidly variable, it moves in large, wide fronts off the ocean or down the coast and across the land. Sometimes, especially when it rains in huge sheets for hours on end, as it did so much this spring, there’s almost some of feeling of processes that are not just local but that belong to the planet, or a relationship between earth and sky that adheres to geological time, not human time.

As I near my parents’ house in the village of Headley, and in the next few days as I drive to nearby towns, I feel that that habit formed in California to perceive both raw landscape and its relation to human settledness now apprehends something anew about this familiar place. What strikes me is how we really do live in woodland. There are woods all around the houses and villages that are joined by narrow, often deep sunk roads. The dense leafiness that is all around creates a sense of protective proximities, and the possibility of ever being able to see as far into the distance as one might from a window or hillside in Berkeley now seems strange and almost audacious. This sense of proximities has an audible manifestation too: issuing from the woodland is a true chorus of birdsong—not the single voice of an oriole or mockingbird, but a constant and variegated song, a tuneful babble of chirps and whistles and low and clear coos, all woven together and close around, through the kitchen window, like sticks and grasses making a nest of song.

***

Now St Petersburg: the first time here for six years. The same familiar smell of the tap water. My body remembers the odd feeling of encountering the one differently spaced flight of stairs on climbing to the fourth floor apartment on Svechnoi pereulok (Candle Lane). And though the trams are all new, the same rattle that’s felt right through the apartment when they pass along the street below. There have been some cellos in Russia, too (heard not played) but more on those another time.

***

I did fulfil the ambition of playing some Bach by the time I had finished the PhD -- the Prelude of Suite No. 1 --and so I made this recording the week after I had submitted the dissertation. It’s certainly quite crude and patchy, and despite a couple of more overtly botched moments (including, annoyingly, the end), it’s just about palpably whole enough. At the very least, a yardstick by which to measure future and hopefully ever- improving efforts…

[just wow]

Every so often the musical experience comes along that blows your mind, alters your state of being...tear-inducing and skin-gasm-giving (learned that one from Eddie!). Tonight it was the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yuri Temirkanov and Alisa Weilerstein playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1. Preceded by Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture (and followed by Brahms Symphony No. 4 and an encore --hurrah-- from the Enigma Variations, which did something beautiful and delicate at the very end, giving the final pronounced dying note to a violin somewhere at the back). But they had me from the first notes of the Rimsky-Korsakov. The sound of the orchestra was just beautiful -- a completely different experience from the SF Symphony (feel a little bad there resorting to such comparisons). So live -- in the sense that no recording could ever approximate this sound -- a performance that pulls you right there into the present with it, that doesn't just let you listen from the outside, as if through glass or through speakers, but pulls you right there into the music with it.

Lacking much proficient vocab for describing these things, I want to say somehow that their "pronunciation" of the music was different, and that its "posture" was somehow exceptional. Perhaps the pronunciation was the deep and many-sided emotion -- as well as something that I struggle to describe in how the transitions between different kinds of passages seemed to more meaningfully articulated than anything I've heard before. And perhaps the posture is the sense of an unshakable conviction that this was profoundly serious, that the efforts to use all this art form's abundant and varied means for communication and expression and to convey all that these pieces contained -- that these efforts were made with the utmost earnestness and with abandon. In short, I suppose what there was here (or what I was ready to feel) was art, unabashed, unapologetic art.

And, by the time we got to Shostakovich in particular -- art as a matter of life and death, in all its urgency. Weilerstein was tremendous. The Shostakovich concerto is terrifying and ferocious. And so devastatingly subversive. Appropriating music to fit a desired meaning is notoriously fraught (especially in the case of Shostakovich), and although the Soviet authorities found a perfectly acceptable narrative of their own in the concerto, it's impossible not to hear the cello as a biographical subject of the past decades of Stalinist Terror and war that preceded its writing. And that the cello could say what it does with the full support of the ranks, of an orchestra around it -- is somehow visually also deeply subversive. At one point, in one maniacally repeating dance right up high in thumb position, I swear you could actually hear the cello issue a caustic mocking laugh. Even the breaking of a string during the final movement and Weilerstein's departure from the stage to fix it did nothing to diminish the taught, terrible power of the whole. Maybe, like the enigmatic, ambiguous, disturbingly strained "sound of a snapped string" in Chekhov's famously obscure stage direction to The Cherry Orchard, it only enhanced it.

heaven, earth, sea

The concert-goers, with ample yards, between them, of the kind of good quality raincoat cloth that bespeaks wealth and decency, hurried out of the rainstorm into the sanctuary of Bach's Mass in B Minor in Davies Hall on Saturday.

I've never heard the whole of one of Bach's big choral works performed live before, and it was indeed a soaring, glorious edifice. I realized, though, how my sense of this music is so bound up with some experience of church interiors and architecture -- columns and interlacing of arches, traced by the voices that rise upwards, dancing and weaving in their polyphony, sent back to us the listeners by the acoustics of stone and the tall length of the nave. As I listened at the Symphony, every now and then, I would have some vague feeling of disconnect between the sound and the space--the rounded, evenly lit, open space of the concert hall--that I found myself in.

Interior of the Thomaskirche, Leipzig, where Bach was cantor for 27 years.
-- photo by profstewartrk @ flickr

At the end of one movement which closed on a powerful choral note, the sound of the voices hung and resonated and dispersed in the air -- like the puff of rosin dust issuing up from a bow, or maybe a puff of chalk from the wooden boards in the Lutheran church where the numbers of the week's psalms were written up.

The cellos and basses play almost continually throughout the Mass -- providing the bass line, the continuo part. In one gentle and beautiful movement (of the Sanctus) the cello is quite prominent, playing with only the flute to accompany the tenor. Yet at the end, as the conducted invited the different sections and soloists of the orchestra to take their bows, the humble cellos won little in the way of extra cheer or applause. Their part is too unremarkable, rarely attaining prominence, yet their the grounded earthliness of their bass line sends the harmonies soaring and keeps rhythm's surety of creation.

In other Bach news, I have started playing the Prelude of the 1st Suite in my lesson and have been practicing the first half of it, one note to a bow, in the kitchen this week. Maybe it's because the music is so familiar, or because of some more readily intuitable logic in the progression of the chords as they go a-venturing outwards, but I can feel, in a way that is new (there was maybe an inkling of it with the last Vivaldi sonata), some closer connection between the sound and my fingers of my left hand -- I mean I can feel it, hear it even, in my fingers -- especially when I go to sleep at night not so long after practising...in the same way you might feel like you're still on a ship when you lie down to sleep again on land after a journey by sea.

sympathetic vibrations

I wasn't going to practice yesterday, but as I was driving back from a quick errand in the evening, contemplating dinner and Dostoevsky (not to be confused with Dining with Dostoevsky), out of the car radio came some cello notes -- slightly electronic, musacky ones at that, barely real music, but just some filler between programs on NPR, but unmistakably cello -- and that was it -- irresistible seduction; I just had to take out the cello when I got in.

To say something was "pulling at the heartstrings" is obviously a total cliche, but the idea of the soul as something like a stringed instrument goes way, way back...in Plato's Phaedo the attunement of a stringed instrument is a metaphor for man's responsiveness to the divine. And, at the eighteenth century's gentlemanly invitation, "Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find," David Hume tells us, "that with regard to the passions, 'tis not of the nature of a wind-instrument of music, which in running over all the notes loses sound after the breath ceases; but resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays."

One of my early and most thrilling cello breakthroughs (a good many months in) was my discovery of sympathetic vibrations. I may have noted down something about this phenomenon from my Scottish physics teacher's endless dictation in high school, but it doubtless got lost somewhere between the formulae for calculating the elastic extension of springs and the speed of toy trucks rolling down ramps. If it did get a look in in those physics lessons, though, I'm also pretty sure it had more to do with preparing us as engineers of the future who made non-wobbly bridges, rather than as late-blooming cellists.

In short, though, when you play, say, a D on the cello's A string, it will cause the neighbouring open D string to resonate--due to sympathetic vibrations. The sound has an extra, glorious, quality of ringing resonance. As well as endearing the cello and its voice to me still further, this discovery went a long way at that time in helping me hear and understand how to play in tune. The sympathetic vibrations reach outwards, ringing with the potential to attract other kindred strings and spirits, and drawing the listener-player into their song.

The physics of the matter turns into both a beautiful sound and a powerful image for connection and communion, through music or otherwise.

In Virginia Woolf's long elegiac novel, The Waves, a work intensely concerned with the aural imagination and the aural landscape, Bernard muses as he walks the city streets: “Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which, unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks?”

Already moved by musical experiences and literary images of sympathetic vibrations--and having sneaked them into my dissertation chapter on the elegy--it was with delight that I came across Elizabeth Le Guin's book: Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Le Guin provides a brief sketch of the history of the soul-as-stringed-instrument metaphor (the examples above from Plato and Hume come from her), and concludes that by the eighteenth century what was new in the use of the metaphor was "its emphasis on the idea of bodies resonating, not only with God or with the organization of the universe, but in sympathy with one another."

My delight in Le Guin's book was manifold (but this element will make it into the dissertation footnotes; the cello deserves to be in there somewhere, even if covertly.) Now, I actually sat down meaning to tell you about Boccherini's Body (as I have been meaning to for ages), but this will have to serve as a preview of coming attractions....

springtime stock-take

The (sporadic) bloggeur is going to have to relinquish her original ambition of playing a Bach suite by the time she finishes her dissertation. This is not done with any sadness, though, as it certainly does not mean the cello itself is being relinquished; I still foresee it as an invaluable companion in what is hopefully the final couple of months of the dissertation-writing life.

And not does it mean there is any disappointment about what has been attained. In a way, that ambition was always a bit abstract, tinged with a gently jesting idealism. And besides, all this amateuring is premised on what is almost the sheer impossibility of the goal; the delight comes in the process, in having added to life the active experience of music, in hearing the most vaguely musical shapes emerge from the cello, in exerting the patience and perseverance that gradually bring the next elusive element of technique into reach, in the experiences of the genuinely new, of the not-yet-conceived-of perceptual and expressive possibilities.

And, in the end, maybe the ambition need not be entirely dismissed as unfulfilled: I have, at least, played, in my kitchen, in uneven and rudimentary form, the Prelude of the first suite, and, in a lesson, its first Minuet. The notes are deceptively simple, but how to give them shape and expression seems another matter altogether.

In some other more concrete sense--the sense that is constantly modifying and fluctuating week by week and lesson by lesson--the measure of things is good: I'm still playing, still enthusiastic, still improving, still thrilled by minor and modest accomplishments, still energized by practicing in my kitchen, and still convinced I'll play the suite one day. And of course, the part of me that still disbelieves that any of this music-making business was ever at all possible has had its expectations well and truly exceeded.

I think all three personas--the high-aspiring idealist, the persevering realist, the easily delighted naive novice--are key to the motivation and reward-reaping of the adult amateur (or this one at least).

In the meantime, though, I had a delightful experience last night of playing together with two patient and generous friends at one of our department's annual social events in the warmly welcoming house of two of its professors. In the company of my musically gifted friends, The Swan, as a cello-violin-piano trio sounded--to me at least--quite transformed. Playing with others, especially carried along by my friends' stronger skills, the music feels, well, more musical, more of an embodied whole. It's suddenly not just a line moving along in time, but a many-dimensioned shape moving and turning, with texture that's almost available to many senses all at once.

Last week at my lesson, I had one of those experiences of the new, too: my teacher modelled (with singing and gesture; he rarely plays to demonstrate) how to play one particular phrase in the Vivaldi final allegro movement, and told me to do what I might feel like was exaggerating the bow movement. The result of imitating his model made me gasp -- it both sounded and felt so different! But more than that, I felt it had taken me beyond some long-held reluctance or self-consciousness in the face of fullness of performative or extraverted expression. His particular choice of words to encourage me was even reminiscent of something an invaluable adviser had once said in helping me enhance my own presence as a teacher in the language-learning classroom: don't be afraid to exaggerate, she had told me, because, your sense of what exaggeration is probably takes you nowhere near what others, and your students, would actually perceive as exaggeration. The perceptiveness of that advice I now appreciate anew and all the more.

Symphony and Bookshelf

In the front rows of the symphony hall you can almost feel as if you are sitting underneath the piano, like a child amid the land of legs and hanging table cloths. The sound seems to come from above and all around you, not losing, in this proximity, a sense of the material—the elegantly reposing tabletop of strings and hammers—that issues its acoustic energy into the air.

This week the noise of time rushed in on all sides. I read The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt, a collection of elegant, clear-sighted, sometimes controversial, memoiristic essays composed by Judt in long nights of insomniac immobility when he was already paralysed by a motor neurone disease. The essays, beyond the opening pair, make few references to his illness; they are remarkable for their clarity and wit, a mind that is unrelentingly analytical, now presenting a vision of itself that is never self-pitying nor self-laudatory.

I do the essays a disservice by not writing more about them, but the feeling they left me with was strong — a kind of expanded sense of historicism, the sense of both belonging to and containing within me a larger sweep of history than that of simply my lifetime. Reading Judt, the contours of a post-war generation were tangible around me — familiar for their form-giving influence for my own generation too — and the vision of England in these essays resembles the formative one I hold inside myself. In fact, maybe this sense has gown in me largely because of being English in America — of feeling more acutely the absorbed-by-osmosis cultural knowledge and mythologies that are lodged deeply inside. For instance (not that this is something that Judt writes about explicitly) the proximity still of the Home front experience of WWII in my childhood: in films, books, school lessons, from parents, elderly neighbours. How many times had my father said he didn’t like to waste food because he was a war baby, how many times had I heard the halting speech of King George VI announce that this country was at war with Germany, how natural it seemed that Peggy next door was afraid of thunder storms and wanted to hide under the stairs because she thought it was a bombing raid, how afraid was I at having a luggage label attached to me and being evacuated far away from my mother to Wales…?

You almost feel as if you are sitting underneath the piano. The soloist has very shiny shoes. Beethoven tumbles and resounds around you. A small child amid the legs—furniture, tights-clad, and trousered—while thuds and movements of cutlery, plates and voices, dampened by linens, are audible above: the sounds of generations come down to you under the table of the half-century.

* * *
Beethoven Piano Concerto, No, 3. Largo. The stern, tender pull of the cellos and basses--grounded, yet somehow also yearning--around (for the first time) 2.16 moved me profoundly.

The Cello Parvenu

This was a big day for my pauper cello: I took it to the violin shop in El Cerrito where it will hang out for a whole week in the company of some of its more finely crafted kin and acquire a new bridge and a new set of strings.

I hope it doesn't show itself up there; after all, it got its start as a bundle rescued from an underpass, not scooped off the velvety counter of an elegant workshop like Ifshin Violins.

I bought my cello about 18 months ago at a BART station, at the end of the line, from a guy who had said, when we arranged to meet, "You'll recognize me because I'll be the one with the cello." I tried it out (playing my one tune of the week, a Brittany Air) in the BART underpass. Unsurprisingly, no coins were tossed my way.

The New

Of course we know that learning means coming to know or be able to do something new. Practicing the cello on the first day of this new year, I was reminded that learning is not simply receiving the new, but being in the state of actively seeking the new--even when it is something that we are not yet quite sure of the exact nature of. The physical-sensuous nature of playing the cello brings this principle home to me in a more experiential manner than, say, any form of intellectual learning.

When you start playing the cello, hapless beginner that you are, picking up the bow and making some kind of noise, whatever it is you are doing in that action of drawing the bow back and forth over the strings feels right to you; it's what you're naturally inclined to do left to your own devices. Obviously your teacher chimes in; adjustments are made; improvements are heard. The things your teacher focuses your attention onto shift and change and become more nuanced--or maybe more fundamental. There seems to be some fundamental glitch that's keeping that whole fluid circuit of the legato bowing motion from being quite right, preventing the nuances of difference in your hand, wrist, arm at all the positions between the frog and the point being quite one unbroken motion. Something which prevents all the infinite instants of the arrow's points of rest in Zeno's paradox becoming the illusory motion of flight.

In order to overcome this, you really have to search for something that feels different. Like a wing, the teacher says, your arm should feel like a bird's wing. You have to strike out beyond that default thing that is "right" to you, that became a habit because there was no alternative competing with it. And suddenly, yes, you are doing something different, something that truly feels different, that maybe even makes the sound different. There is less weight and force in your hand holding the bow, there is motion coming from your upper arm, there is a feeling of connection to your shoulder blade. The wing draws its circles in the air; the arc of flight is smooth and clean.

Will you be able to find this feeling next time you play? Can your memory take a snapshot of this feeling, a kinaesthetic memory (with an aural memory tacked on)....? Perhaps not, or not every time, but having found it once, it gradually becomes easier and quicker to find again. But the seeking never quite stops.