The Whisper of the Muse

“I want to play the way a cat jumps.”

Claudio Arrau, Chilean pianist

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Fortune cookies aren’t always right (though the next-to-the-last one I got--“You are an exciting and inspiring person”—was spot-on). My most recent one read: “The important thing is to express yourself.” The idea of expressing yourself I associate with three types of people—parents of brats, artistic wannabes, and British football (i.e., soccer) commentators.

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To take the last first. The football commentators, usually resorting to the third person plural and forgetting that they are talking about a team sport, bemoan any defensive strategy by a manager as not letting the players “express themselves.” It is interesting that in all the years that I have watched ice hockey (which is a parallel sport, only on a different surface), I have never heard a commentator speak of his desire for the players to express themselves. If anyone got down to the essence of team sports it was Freddie Shero, who coached Stanley Cup championship teams in Philadelphia: "If it's pretty skating they want, let 'em go to the Ice Capades."

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“Lady Constance's flush deepened. Not for the first time in an association which had lasted some forty years, starting in days when she had worn pigtails and he had risked mob violence by going about in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, she was wishing that her breeding did not prohibit her from bouncing something solid on this man's bald head. There was a paper-weight at her elbow which would have fitted her needs to a nicety. Debarred from physical self-expression by a careful upbringing at the hands of a series of ladylike governesses, she fell back on hauteur.”

P. G. Wodehouse, Service With a Smile

I have most often associated “self-expression” not so much with aristocratic granddames but with bratty children. They not only throw things (as Lady Constance refrained from doing) but scream at the top of their lungs until they get what they want. Their doting parents usually dismiss those antics by explaining that the child was only “expressing him/herself.” What exactly a child’s “self” is—and why it couldn’t be expressed at a lower volume—has never been satisfactorily explained to my philosophically-probing mind.

But it’s not only bratty children and overpaid footballers with bad haircuts who have a desire to “express themselves.” A good number of years ago I was browsing through Bloomingdale’s (in New Jersey; I was never chic enough to be allowed through the doors of the New York store), finally ending up in the stationery department, when my shuffling through greeting cards was interrupted by an intense woman followed by a covey of serious young men and women. The leader of the pack moved quickly to a table and pointed. “I’m not satisfied with that display,” she said. “I wanted to make a statement.” It took all my powers of self-restraint to keep from shouting at her: “Lady, they’re just boxes of goddamn envelopes!”

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For many years I have collected quotations by artists in all fields from jazz to ballet about the nature of artistic creation. And I have never once read or heard a serious artist—in any field—speak of his/her need for “self-expression.” Indeed, what those artists have said is the exact opposite—the creation of art is a selfless undertaking. Consider the words of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos: “I create music out of necessity, biological necessity. I write because I cannot help it.” Or those of the great jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli: “When I improvise and I’m in good form, I’m like somebody half sleeping.” Or those of the poet Elizabeth Bishop: “I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written. There is a mystery and a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.”

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“Sally pinched him. 'Ass,' she said. 'I'm interested. Tell me why a poet doesn't have to be a man who needs a hair­cut.'

'Because,' said Cadogan, uneasily attempting to gauge the length of his own hair with his left hand, 'poetry isn't the outcome of personality. I mean by that that it exists independently of your mind, your habits, your feelings, and everything that goes to make up your personality. The poetic emotion's impersonal: the Greeks were quite right when they called it inspiration. Therefore, what you're like personally doesn't matter a twopenny damn: all that matters is whether you've a good receiving-set for the poetic waves. Poetry's a visitation, coming and going at its own sweet will.'“

Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

What the fictional poet Cadogan says is what so many artists have said; the art seems to have been mysteriously introduced into the artist by some outside force. The art chose the artist.

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“I didn’t make a decision to pursue astronomy. Rather, it just grabbed me, and I had no thought of escaping."

Carl Sagan

Just as with artists, so too with scientists. In ancient Greece there were not only Muses for artists like poets and musicians and dancers, there was a Muse of astronomy, Urania, and it was her twentieth-century counterpart who picked out Sagan, who could not escape doing astronomy. Any more than Marina Tsvetaeva could escape writing poetry:

“Why I write”

“Not for the millions, not for some one-and-only, not for myself. I write for the poem alone. The poem, through me, writes itself.”

And when the work is completed, perhaps every true artist utters a version of what novelist Edna O’Brien calls the writer’s prayer:

“Please, God, let me start another.”

Ill Wind

After writing a few blogs ago about the retirement of the great singer Thomas Quasthoff, I began thinking about the artistic talents that I sadly lack but wish I had. Singing is one of them. Mel Torme is who I wish I could sing like; he was a great interpreter of ballads, but could also swing the pants off anyone else. Alas, that punctured tire lying over there is less flat than my voice.

I also wish that I could draw. I would like to be able to produce caricatures. However, the best I could ever do was a stick man (and that was in the first grade). It wasn’t some childhood sexism that prevented me from producing a credible stick woman; I just could not manage the trapezoid for her dress.

And the piano. Yes, I would love to be able to play the piano. Actually, I can play the piano: with one finger I can tap out “My Coun-try Tis of Thee Sweet Land of Li-ber-ty Of Thee I Sing” (exactly like that—and please don’t ask for the next line). Although today I can’t imagine myself wanting to play any other instrument than the piano, I once did try to learn to play the recorder. I thought, "What could be an easier way to be musical than blowing into a little wooden tube?" So, outfitted with the wooden tube and a borrowed book of songs for beginners, I went to work. The first step was to try to figure out the notes. Following the little instruction booklet that accompanied the instrument, I attempted to place my fingers over the appropriate holes and blow. Sometimes a noise came out; I had no idea if it was a note or not. Finally, after running through noises that I hoped were all the notes of the scale, I decided to make music and turned to the borrowed beginner’s songbook. Fingers placed over holes; blow. Re-finger other holes; blow. After a few minutes of unconnected noises, I conceded defeat. Besides the fact that a noise followed by a silence (while finger repositioning was in progress), followed by another noise and another period of silence, and so on, was not very tuneful, I had no idea if I was actually producing the appropriate noises--since I had no idea what the tune I was attempting to play was supposed to sound like. Because all those songs for beginners had titles like “Bulgarian Tractor Dance” or “Albanian Hopscotch.”

But I did take away an important life lesson: If I wanted to call the tune, I would have to pay the piper.

You Were Saying, Milord?

It was around the year 2002 that I was forced to write a letter to the editor of the Times of London. One of the paper’s columnists, a certain William Rees-Mogg, had written that “everyone knows” that Hillary Clinton will run for President of the United States in 2004. I protested that that statement was in error, for I didn’t know that and several persons of my acquaintance (like my butcher, my baker, and my candlestick maker) swore that they did not know that either.

The Times did not publish my letter, which was just as well, seeing that Rees-Mogg was correct, Ms. Clinton transgendering herself to run under the nom de ballot “John Kerry.”

It should be noted that Rees-Mogg, the peerless prognosticator, was no less than a life peer, having become Baron Rees-Mogg of Hinton Blewett in the County of Avon in 1988.

To be honest, though, one must admit that the Baron’s prognosticating skill was really less peerless than common. Recent books by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman* and the pair of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson** cite the research of Philip Tetlock***, who gathered over 80,000 predictions from political and economic prognosticators. The results, to quote Kahneman, were “devastating”:

. . . people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys . . . .

I wonder if the Baron would like a banana.

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*Thinking, Fast and Slow.

**Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.

***Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Trippingly on the Tongue

I spent the day getting a haircut and irritated. (Pedantry note: that’s a rhetorical trope known as “zeugma.”) After returning home from the shearing, I decided to watch a DVD of Shooting the Past, a BBC drama from 1999. IMDB.com concisely describes the show as follows:

A US property developer realises that he has a battle on his hands when he tries to renovate a London building containing a vast photographic collection and discovers that the library employees will resort to anything to thwart him.

What irritated me about the show were the Americans—not that they were depicted as philistine, heritage-bashing money-grabbers, I can live with that—but the fact that on British television and in British movies they can’t get American voices right. And it doesn’t matter if the American is played by someone from the British Isles or by an American himself (in Shooting the Past, one by an Irishman, another by a San Franciscan) he or she is going to sound wrong. It’s as if all the drama schools told everyone playing an American (who isn’t instructed to bellow his or her lines in exaggerated Southern twanginess or alleged Nooyawkese) to pronounce every “r” as if it were as important as the last trumpet and to speak generally as if a clothespin were a permanent fixture on one’s nose.

It’s not as though British actors can’t be believable as Americans; they are—when they don’t try to sound American, don’t attempt to act the voice. For example, quite recently, I watched a DVD of Bugsy, a movie I had seen years ago. When the final credits rolled, I was surprised that the actor who so perfectly played the Jewish New York gangster Meyer Lansky (and without the Nooyawkese) was Ben Kingsley, of all people (although I had noted his name in the opening credits, I promptly forgot about him). But, of course, that was an American movie.

Cary Grant, James Mason, and Anthony Hopkins are a few other British actors who have played American roles in American-made movies and were successful—because they didn’t do acting-school American-ese, which no one in the 50 states speaks. Oh, they may have sounded at times a bit moneyed and cultured, but they never sounded wrong.

Then again, there’s the otherwise wonderful Hugh Laurie, whose comic Prince of Wales (in Blackadder) was only bettered by his embodiment of Bertie Wooster; he has so de-Britished his accent for House that he sounds neither British nor American, but perhaps a native of some yet-to be-discovered landfall in the middle of the Atlantic.

But probably the worst British portrayal of an American was perpetrated by a Scotsman—Sean Connery—who, in A Fine Madness, uttered some Bronxish babble in his role as the eccentric poet Samson Shillitoe. It almost, but not quite, makes one yearn to hear once again Dick Van Dyke doing cockney in Mary Poppins.

The Life Worth Living

TSN is the Canadian equivalent of ESPN (indeed, TSN broadcasts some shows by ESPN babblers). Its website, TSN.ca, is one I visit for news about ice hockey. TSN.ca is also a good source for information, assuming you care, about the sport of curling, which, as I’m sure you know, is bocce on ice, played by guys with brooms.

For the last few days TSN.ca has been running a banner across the top of its home page saying, “See Commercials from Super Bowl XLVI. Watch now.” I have always thought that among the most pointless wastes of time was watching the Super Bowl’s inane, over-the-top, crass halftime shows instead of making an overdue visit to another room in the house. But while one can sigh about it, one must acknowledge that bad taste has always and will always be with us. However, this obsession with seeing and evaluating the commercials on the Super Bowl broadcasts totally eludes my comprehension (the New York Times gives out grades as for a student essay, “A” to “F”). Now thanks to TSN.ca (and, I assume, other websites) you do not even have to wait for the game tomorrow to see the ads.

Amazing—but perhaps this is what modern life has come down to: a rush to give hucksters the opportunity to separate you from your money.

River Man

It is like death, the retirement of a singer. The voice stilled; its beauty heard no more.

Thomas Quasthoff, the great German bass-baritone, has declared that, at age 52, his health will not allow him to perform up to his high standard. He will, however, continue his teaching of younger vocalists.

Quasthoff was less than half the height of a normal grown man; he hobbled onto the concert stage bouncing from one stubby leg to the other. He turned the pages of his music with arms that were little more than flippers.

Born in 1959, Thomas Quasthoff was a physically-deformed victim of the drug Thalidomide. Thankfully, the drug spared Quasthoff two things: his booming voice and his sense of humor.

The after effects of treatment for my own illness (lymphoma) last spring prevented my hearing Quasthoff’s last appearance at Carnegie Hall as part of the vocal quartet in Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Walzer.” But I had heard him on several previous occasions at the old Hall. What stands out in my mind was an encore at the end of a (Schubert, I think) program: Kern and Hammerstein’s “Ol Man River.” Quasthoff sent chills up my spine. You can hear it here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbcBr-ZdnnI

So, thank you, Thomas Quasthoff, and good luck and good health in the future.

Mine

I recently made a purchase at Amazon.com. After the process of submitting my credit details, confirming the delivery address, and sending off the order, I was informed by a little box in the upper right hand corner of the screen that I could tell other people via Facebook, Twitter, or email that I had just purchased X.

I was quite fazed by this. What is this modern compulsion to tell the world what you are doing at any moment? Is it because of a misplaced sense of one’s own importance? Or because (at the opposite end of the ego scale) a feeling that one’s own existence can only be confirmed by the recognition of others? And why would anyone else care?

I have always had great abhorrence of people (I’m thinking especially of official types like college presidents) who gaze out at their audience from an auditorium platform and coyly state that they have “something to share” with us. When really they just want to tell us something. I have always been tempted to shout out, “Then give me half of your chocolate cake!”

So, I have desisted from sharing with you the details of my recent purchase.

Besides, I’ve eaten it all myself.