On Not Paying Attention

Well, we’ve descended to a new low, since a woman I like and respect has just sent me a critical email. Although perhaps not, since I didn’t open it but deleted it immediately. And that was her point: “Marc,” she titled it, “You have not been paying attention.”

In fact I haven’t, PelosiForCongress. So what have I done with my morning? Well, the question is better: which one? The one that started some minutes before 2 AM, when the residual of pain from a broken back woke me up just enough to try to fight back to sleep? Then it was time to make a decision—take Benadryl and hope for an additional four hours, or slug it out until the café opened at 10AM? I decided to do it, even knowing that the Benadryl, for reasons not even a Nobel physiologist could explain, wouldn’t work until after the morning soundscape had played out.

It’s a weird world, the land of the sick. Time loses meaning, space shifts, and the sounds you thought you knew are augmented by others. In my case, it is first the sound of the bags of bottles from the nearby bars being thrown into the garbage truck. The hydraulic whine of the scraper follows, and then the second crash as the bags land inside the garbage truck’s main compartment. Silence. Then church bells, from Iglesia San Francisco, which is the church everyone in Old San Juan goes to, and not the Cathedral. So I get done with those, and then the pigeons start cooing. At this point, the sun is rising, which in the paradoxical world of sickness means that my night is done, and I can go to sleep.

The time between taking the Benadryl at 2 AM and falling into chemical sleep at 7 AM has to be filled, and have I read—as I resolved—Ann Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov? Of course not, but I did start in on Renée Fleming’s book, The Inner Voice.

“I’m getting a little tired of Renée Fleming,” said my adopted older brother and opera aficionado Pablo, “she’s perfect but bland….”

I agreed at the time, but then got to wondering—wasn’t that an easy, almost cheap, criticism? Because to be perfect is no mean feat: nobody opens their mouth and belts out four hours of Puccini without a hell of a lot of work. So I began to be interested in Fleming, and began to wonder: what would it be like to be, as she certainly is, one of the leading sopranos of her day (if not the leading one)?

She is, for all her perfection, a surprising human person. She was always goody-goody, always the teacher’s pet, and it was a relief to her when she was chosen to play the part of Mother Abbess in “Sound of Music,”—then her nickname could change to “Mother Abscess.” Surprising, she got to be prom queen, and then started a long, arduous process of training her voice.

She talks about the importance of finding the right teacher, and her luck in finding two unknown but very good ones. And then, on a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany, she met the great Elizabeth Schwarzkopf.

How much of a Nazi was Schwarzkopf? We’ll never know, but if you’ve ever seen one of her master classes, you’ll pretty much know. She is the Butcheress of Buchenwald at one moment, and indulgent grandmother the next. Oh, and she changes her victims daily, so that everybody got the sting of the whip, but nobody knew on whose back Madame might chose to unleash it.

Well, Fleming had a week of it, and she later stated it took her two years to get over it. Schwarzkopf insisted that she learn the art of “covering,” which is a technical term for—if I understand it correctly—singing in a different way, with less volume and with a different physical placement of the voice. It’s done in those two places where the voice changes…

OK—I bought the book to learn more about Fleming’s development as a singer, but also to see if, at long last, I could understand the mysterious world of vocal technique. Because for anyone not a singer, it is unbelievable the things that singers believe their bodies can do. The tiniest adjustment of the lips, the tongue, the soft palette, and even the cuticle of their right big toe (OK—making that up, but try it on a singer, and they’ll believe it)…anything and everything makes a huge difference. Think I’m exaggerating? Fleming actually cites someone who believed that focusing the sound through the two tiny indentations where the nose meets the body will produce a glittering, shimmering pianissimo high C.

All right—find me one anatomist who believes that possible, and I’ll send you a school bus of biologists who believe in “creation science.” But if it worked for Montserrat Caballe—who did it better than anyone else—well, why not try it? And in fact, singers believe wildly impossible things, and it works….

…at least some of the time.

Well, Fleming came back from a week of Schwarzkopf, and met with a universal question, “what in hell happened to your voice?” And her voice teacher in New York was—seeming—adamant against covering. So now, did she have to undo a year of work?

It’s a garden that never, never stops needing a good weeding, since by the time you have mastered one level of vocal art and progressed to the next, you have also incorporated a new set of bad habits, which will have to be corrected for you to progress to the next level. That, of course, will be in addition to the work necessary to get to that level, so you are seeding, planting and watering—as well as pruning—at the same time as you are weeding and tossing on the compost heap.

In the meantime, after telling you to lift your clavicle without increasing pressure on your intercostal muscles and not tensing your shoulders while still keeping your chin ever so slightly raised while making sure that your soft palette is elevated while the tongue remains forward, so as not to compress or put any tension of the glottis, which should always…wait!

WHY ARE YOU SO TENSE? RELAX!!!

The wonder of it is that any of us survive it—this musical training that somehow spills into the rest of our lives. Because do you leave it all behind, tucked up in a neat neurotic package on top of the piano, ready for the next day? No, of course not, it follows you right out the door, where it gives you a steady stream of criticism about how to arrange the pillows on the sofa, as well as a report on what absolutely every one of your friends would think—but never say—if they saw dirty dishes in your kitchen sink.

“You have not been paying attention,” said Nancy Pelosi to me. “You have not been paying attention,” says every music teacher to every student, and so we do. We pay attention to all of the flaws, and the commentary is endless. For many of us, we always wondered what happened to us, when the piece of music that we played so easily, so freely, the first week we practiced it became wooden, dead, filled with mistakes the next? We had practiced and practiced, and it just kept getting worse! Was the solution to performance to look at a piece once, and then go on stage and perform it? Seemingly, since it was all downhill from there.

It was and it wasn’t. There had been no expectations, the first time we played the piece. By the second week, all the problems had been identified, and the criticism started on awakening, intensified during breakfast, developed a strong convection current over the well-formed eye on the way to the musical school, and burst into a category four hurricane on seeing all your cohorts in the hall of the classroom. And what were they doing?

Listening!

Oh, and commenting, among themselves:

‘does she really think she can play the Dvorak cello concerto?’

‘just wait till she gets to the bariolage section in the second theme…’

‘her thumb position was always shaky….’

“DARLING! The Dvorak you were playing sound MARVELOUS!”

So it was almost a relief, when whatever Schwarzkopf you were fated to meet blew up into your day. And at last, most of us collapsed under the weight of it all. In fact, the best of us may have collapsed: every major singer has a friend who was more talented, more driven, and more technically proficient than they. And they’re teaching public school choir, while their lesser cohorts are dazzling La Scala.

In my case, I left the cello behind, but still couldn’t shake the critic. Sleep in, as I did today, until 11 in the morning? It took a broken back to let me do that. Eat a pound of shrimp in the middle of the night? Thanks to two burst fractures of the lumbar spine, I can do it in a flash.

And I can tell you, Nancy, that you’re right. I had not been paying attention. Because something in me knew—I wasn’t crazy. They were trying to help, all of those people who told me that my shoulders were too high, and my vibrato too tight, and all the rest. They were trying to help, and in fact, they did help. Though I haven’t touched the cello since before my fall, I know that in a week I’ll be back in form, and can come into the café, play through three Bach suites, and then pack up, shop for dinner, and carry it home. By contrast, when I was studying with a teacher, I could not play through a single movement: the critic wouldn’t allow it.

The paradox is that it was critical to pay attention to the critic. It was also critical not to. Or perhaps it there finally came the time when the critic had done his job, and I ushered him out the door, thanked him, asked him to come back when needed—namely when I was practicing, no playing—and sent him off.

And so, Nancy, you’re right!

I have not been paying attention!

Or have I?

    

                

No Credence in the Creed

“It’s hardly my fault,” I told Lady, “since you’re never around any more. So I have to fabricate dialogue, and all of a sudden something or somebody put Janet on the page, and then she got out of hand. Or rather, the crotchety old invalid did. And can I help it if all your friends write you emails starting, JANET!? Anyway, we had been watching Becoming Jane on Netflix, and I think I was channeling Jane Austen.”

Well, she was clearly still grumpy, but really, anybody who doesn’t want to be written about should avoid friendships with writers, right?

“Of course I want to written about,” she says or does not say, because—once again!—she’s brillancing by her absence. “You can say things like, ‘the profound and internationally famed poet, Lady Lee Andrews…’ But you can’t call me Janet.”

Right—she’s not Janet, and I won’t call her that again. Now what I have to do is figure out what in the world to write about, since I can’t confess the truth: I spent the entire morning watching a BBC documentary concerning whether Jesus Christ was a Buddhist monk.

There are little hitches, you see, in the story line of the resurrection—coming soon to your neighborhood. First of all, Christ died either six or perhaps nine hours after being on the cross, and that’s seriously weird, since it usually takes much longer.

But wait, Robert flies in through Facebook and drops the word: Christ never died at all! “Read the gospels carefully,” he adjures, and I think: Will I? Because, unless I want to be modern and do it online, the only Bible I own (taken, of course, from a hotel room) is between two large mahogany windows and the tranae—or cross bar—that is keeping them shut. Why? Because during the last hurricane, the windows were banging frightfully, and I needed something to shut them up. Completely-absolutely-and-thoroughly coincidentally, the one book at hand to do the job was the King Jame’s Bible.

All right, I hear you sniggering out there.

But wait, I really don’t need to read the Bible, because one of the most seriously spiritual, if not religious though maybe she is…anyway, my friend Susan says I can skip the Bible. Nor is she alone—I well remember the Amazon review I once read that went something like, “I would never allow this book in a good Christian home….”

So Christ died or didn’t die, and the Bible is out—though admittedly useful during hurricanes—but now the question is if he ever lived at all. After all, there was one Biblical scholar—ok, in the 19^th century, but still—who argued that Christ didn’t exist. And if you read the gospels, as I occasionally do, when confronted with a Bach cantata I want to listen to…well, you get plenty of miracles.

The God Niggah, as I might call him, in Montalvo’s honor, certainly got around, and really might have benefited from Miracles Anonymous, so constantly was he switching the natural into the supernatural. And did he do it alone? Nay, nay, say the gospels, since Jesus (or the GN for you-know-what) never travelled without a multitude or two. And he must have chosen his multitudes well, since they always were standing about, mouths open in amazement, and then what did they do? As we’d say today, they got the news viral.

OK—so then I remembered; a Yale University professor on YouTube had dismissed the idea of the nonhistoricity of Christ as the preoccupation of—gasp—bloggers! But suppose Christ hadn’t existed? No problem, since Christ was, for the professor, quite unnecessary, since the whole business of Christianity was all about the teaching and the doctrines and the history of thought and belief—and none of that needed Christ.

Of course, maybe Christ did exist, and maybe he pulled a fast one—or another miracle—and didn’t die on the cross, but just appeared to have died. Think zombies. And so, he was entombed, and then extombed, and then what did he do? Well, he wasn’t going west—straight into Roman territory, and the GN had learned that lesson well—so where else but east? And there was both the silk trade and the spice trade—with their corresponding routes—so it was easy to get to Srinagar, India, where he spent the last 50 years or so of his life.

So says Robert, via Facebook, and so utterly, utterly devoted am I to my readership that I of course have to take the morning off to watch a YouTube documentary by the BBC—and if that’s not respectable, what is—about Jesus being a Buddhist monk.

So the GN ends up in India, but then something weird happens. Because he had never been particularly shy about publicity—remember all those multitudes?—but now he lives the rest of his life quietly. Or at least quietly enough that I, 2000 year later, had never heard any of this.

So that a puzzle, but then Susan reappears and tells me that—well, here she is:

Despite claims to the contrary, no one knows what the resurrection is, or was.   What I hear in the Episcopal Church (heavily overlaid with outdated but beloved Book of Common Prayer language) is that all we can say for certain is that after the crucifixion, the disciples continued to sense the presence of Jesus with them.  I sensed it once myself, and I hadn't been drinking, have never used illegal drugs, it was 9 AM and I was in a room full of quilters.  

Having said that, I don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth, if indeed God incarnate, is the only incarnation of the Great Generative Spirit, whatever one calls it.  A lot of Christians I know feel the same.

No, no, I thought, because I know the Nicene Creed—in Latin, because after compulsively listening to the B Minor Mass at one period of my life, I had memorized the thing. But was my Latin faulty? By no means, since I went onto something like anglican.com, and there it was. “I believe in one God,” and then it goes on. So that takes care of that, and I write Susan to—gently—remind her of the Nicene Creed, so she can get on board, theologically, and she writes back a day later and says…well, why not quote her?

Many Episcopal churches do a little exercise with the Nicene creed.  Everyone stands to recite it, and when we get to something someone can't accept, they sit down; when we get to the next thing they can accept, they stand up.  It's like watching a flock of penguins ducking and popping up!  I did this once in a group I was mentoring, and the person who sat down the most went to seminary the next year and is now a priest.

Well, I think to myself, by the time we got to the end of that little exercise, I’d have a bedsore. And it did sound suspiciously—following Robert Frost—like playing tennis without the net. Actually, without the net, but also with a dead opponent, and your best friend keeping score.

But wait—is that fair? Because the alternative to the spiritual practice of Susan and her co-religious is the kind of religious fanaticism I just abhor, and speaking of which, what is ISIS up to? Because according to The New York Times, those merry men are giving birth control to their female sex slaves, because the Koran forbids sex with pregnant women. Oh, but having a female sex slave is just fine….

Now let me see, where’s the nearest Anglican Church?

So I’m with Susan, generally, and I can get on board with her statement that the one condition to being Anglican is the willingness to pray together. But mine is the particular paradox of the atheist: I crave certainty…

…but fear it even more!

        

Desperately Seeking Janet

“The problem I’m having,” I told Lady, “is that we’ve lost the art of recuperation. In fact, I wonder if we’ve even lost the art of sickness. It used to be an honorable estate, just like marriage, but now it’s stigmatized. You used to be able to be a sickly person, a person who enjoyed—in every sense—ill health. Look at Florence Nightingale: she got done with the Crimean War at a relatively young age, came home, went to bed, and never got up again. True, from her sick bed she did a great deal—invent modern nursing, pioneer statistics in health sciences, even try to reform the War Office. But she did it all as an invalid, which is absolutely what I want to be at the moment.”

“What,” cried Lady, “not possible. Your spot is at the last red table before the shrine to Clara Lair. You can’t be an invalid!”

“There’s no transition,” I told her. “I went from being at imminent danger of paralysis to being, seemingly, out of the woods. And am I grateful? Yes, but I long, somehow, for a lingering recovery. And I definitely wish I had been more demanding, a la Florence. She made everybody’s life impossible by being the constant martyr. How everyone pressed her, a poor frail woman forced by cruel fate to face insuperable odds! Yes, I should have had all you people around, and put you to work! My pillow! How can you expect me to rest, let alone recover, when my pillow is as hard as a rock! Janet! Fluff the pillow at once, Janet!”

“Who’s Janet?”

“You are,” I told Lady, “since all chauffeurs are named James, and all ladies’ maids are named Janet. And as Janet, you would have been completely at my beck and call. Janet! Janet! I must have my tea! At once, and see that it isn’t stone cold as it was yesterday! Ah, how all of you vex me, try me, a poor cripple barely able to raise his head above the pillow, and all of you—hale and able bodied—doing nothing but vex me! I suffer, I suffer, how greatly do I suffer!”

“Marc?”

“Yes, you, Janet—you are the very worst of the lot! How you loll about, wagging your tongue at any passerby, throwing yourself at the butcher’s boy and the postal clerk, when you know, Janet, you know that I lie in agony, virtually having crossed the vale and into the arms of our savior, and do you care? Not a whit! Ah, fie, Janet.”

“Fie, Marc?”

“Fie indeed,” I told her, “and I’ve always wanted to use that word. Anyway, the point is that someone—if not a league of someones—should have been lingering around my bed, anxiously pressing cooling handkerchiefs to my fevered brow….”

“But you fell, Marc, you didn’t have a fever….”

“If I am in bed,” I scolded her, “I have by definition a fevered brow. Every invalid knows that. So first you refuse to be Janet, and now you completely ignore my fevered brow, which may in fact trigger—I fear it greatly—a reverse. And nothing, as you know, could be worse than a reverse!”

“You mean a relapse?”

“I have no idea what a relapse is,” I told her, “but a reverse would call for the gravest of measures. Janet, summon the doctor—the doctor must attend me at once, ere I perish!” 

“But how do I know…”

“Curse the girl! Haven’t I told her that I am having a reverse? Janet, fetch the doctor, and then have the goodness to summon the solicitor, and then the vicar or the curate, whichever it is who abides in the village and attends to those soon to leave this vale of tears!”

“But Marc….”

“No, Janet, another morn I shall not see, and may it rest on your shoulders, Janet—you, who met my love with insolence, who closed your ears to my feeble pleas for succor, you who closed your eyes even as I grew pale, and lingered facing the grim visage of death itself. Yes, Janet, you vexing creature, on your head shall rest the death of one who loved too much, and was cast a base coin by all who knew her!”

“Her, Marc? Don’t you mean ‘him?’”

“I shall not be gainsaid,” I cried. “Do not try me with trifles, I so soon to cross the bar, to meet my maker face to face….”

“Hey, Tennyson,” said Lady, “I know that one! ‘And I hope to meet my maker face to face….’”

“You really made a hash of it, you know,” I told her. “You were completely useless as Janet. And you know what? There was absolutely no Janetry anywhere on the horizon, all those months when I suffered alone and unattended, cruelly cast off from an uncaring world….”

“Well, you could have called….”

“No, I was thrust onto the dust heap,” I told her. “When the story of my life is writ…”

“You mean written….”

“IS WRIT,” I told her. “And I certainly know what I mean. No, the stones themselves will shed passels of tears….”

“Passels?”

“Passels—and don’t ask me what they are, or send me searching through Google to find out. If I tell you the stones themselves…”

“Fie, Marc,” said Lady, getting up from the seat she had never sat in (which made it easy to vacate, and anybody can see that!) “Fie, Marc, this post has been a complete waste of time! No information, no narrative, just a lot of tomfoolery, and I won’t be called Janet!”

She flounces out the door.

You see how cruelly I am used?     

Striving to be in Sorts

“Well, I’m out of sorts today, which is too bad, since my preferred, and in fact default, position is to be in sorts. But I’m not; the sorts clearly have chosen not to sort themselves out—and can I be responsible for that?”

I said it to Lady, who wasn’t there but was, since now the coffee shop is in the capable hands of Amir, scion of the patriarch Santana. He’s the guy who gave me free papaya smoothies for a couple of weeks: free because the smoothies were medicine, and not drink. Anyway, I can complain to Lady since she is not there, though she always was even when she wasn’t, but can I complain to the man who cured my back? Of course not….

For it seems that I may be cured. That at least is what the neurosurgeon told me: and why can’t he be sure? Well, I was supposed to have gotten follow-up in the same distant hospital I was treated in. I, of course, decided (on the basis of what the discharging doctor had told me) to see a neurosurgeon closer to home. I mean, how hard could it be?

Well, not having the imagings (and I so agree, computer, that that shouldn’t be a word!) that the other doctor had, the new doctor can’t be entirely sure. But he’s 95% sure, which is good enough for me.

“So that should be great news,” said Lady, whose sorts have clearly been sorted out. “So what’s the problem?”

Do I have to make everything difficult? Can’t the divinities throw me a bone without my sniffing suspiciously at it? Again, of course not….

“The problem first of all is that we do illness very well. Illness we all get. Go to bed, take your medicines, see the doctor, let time and diet and prayer work. But recuperation is another story….”

Which in fact it was, since I came home from the hospital and faced a series of challenges. The first was that my in-laws were in crisis, and it was entirely normal. My father-in-law was facing a disease for which there is no cure, and would need, at some point, more care than a very frail wife could give. And yet they had been together for over sixty years—how does one give that up? And so decisions were made, then unmade, then remade—and the times were not easy for anyone. Except, of course, for the required Yuletide merriment, which I blessedly skipped.

In addition, a week after I had been released from the hospital, we got the news that Montalvo, our young son, had himself fallen and dislocated the left hip and fractured it as well. All this while running…

…at the beach!

“How in the world can he do that damage by falling at the beach,” said Lady, who was in fact there in all senses, when Mr. Fernández snapped into the café. He was holding my cell phone, and demanding, “what is this for!!”

Forgivable, and understandable, since all the attention goes to the invalid, but what of the man who sits at the gurney-side, copes with the house and the meals and all the things that I could no longer do? So I had escaped bed rest after only a week—forgoing the 11 other weeks I had been prescribed—and was drinking coffee cellphone-less at the café.

So Montalvo’s birthday present—as well as Christmas present—was an 160$ ride by ambulance to…

….Centro Médico!

Yes, Raf was there again, in the same dreary hallway, and the patient? Well, a bit less stoic than I had been, since when I called Montalvo to tell him Raf on the way, all I could hear was yowling.

So Raf had a husband on bed rest with a broken back, and a son awaiting surgery in a place not known for rapid action. In fact, it would be over a week before Montalvo got operated, and who would be there for him? Someone had to call his mother, and guess who did that? Right—not me, but Raf. Oh, and then, and even more difficultly, Taí, our sister home for the holidays.

It doesn’t seem right to replay the scene as it unfolded, because in the end, Montalvo’s mother came through. But here is what didn’t get said:

I totally understand that you are the messenger, and I absolutely comprehend your concern that someone be there for him. And despite the fact that NOT ONE of my children has given me a fraction of the trouble this kid….

Taí handled the situation brilliantly, and, as I say, all worked out well. And so, I called Montalvo every day for a week, and both of us gave numerical rankings of our level of pain. And he, damn him, was getting Percocet, while I was struggling along with a placebo called Tramadol.

The weeks dragged on; the nerves frayed. And then, one day Raf snapped, and I snapped, and I—once again!—completely lost control. I was tired of being in pain, and tired to the bone of being in suspense; I was raging and sobbing and alone, so whom to call? Lady!

Here’s the thing about being sick: your world has completely changed, but other people? Their world has not, and so, when Lady told me, “Marc, I can’t talk right now—I’ve got somebody right in front of me,” that made perfect sense. And did I say, “crisis, Lady, I’m having a meltdown!”

No, because I was and I wasn’t. Also another thing about being sick: when your femur is sticking out and wagging off the sand…well, that’s an emergency. That’s “stop everything and talk to me.” But was it an emergency? The fact that I was terrified of children on bikes and fat ladies with cell phones and of cats? And that I was tired of being terrified?

Blessedly, the Gods sent Taí, but not before I had called my eldest brother, Eric. Why he, and not John, whom I tend to call more often? Because Eric is retired: it was a Monday, John would be working. And so Eric got the meltdown, and very well he took it. Yes, he turfed the call, but I would have too….

“I’d call your psychiatrist,” Eric said. “You may need to jump up your antidepressants….”

I agreed, knowing perfectly well that I wouldn’t. Because I wasn’t depressed, or at least, any more depressed than the situation legitimately led me to be. No—I was simply venting all of the frustration and the anxiety. And so Taí made me slow my breathing down, and we went off to the café, and the storm was over.

In fact, it was the last meltdown. All would, apparently, be well. The only question now is….

…why am I out of sorts? And when will I get back into them?