Music and Writing, Stewed

I have been ruminating lately on the connection between two great passions of my life: writing and music. The truth is, I spent at least half my life taking the music for granted. I grew up surrounded by music at home and in church; played piano and French horn in band through high school; and after high school, when that opportunity for making music with others was gone, began to seek out handbell and vocal choirs. Yet I have never considered myself a “musician.” I grew up determined to be a writer, and thought that was it. But now here I am, mid-life, realizing that it’s not about the labels.

I have long believed that my love for poetry influenced my prose style. I’m also starting to see that my love for music influences my poetry, in rhythm, sound, subject. It is, as I have admitted to friends, a slow-cooked revelation. And now that I see it, what do I do with this knowledge? Do I rush out and try to begin writing hymns, songs, lyrics? Head back to school to brush up on music theory? Or do I just savor the extra dose of joy when I hear music exquisitely suited to lyric, or true words about music? Keeping it in the slow-cooker for now.

Meanwhile, I’ll share part of a poem titled “A Night at the Opera” by William Matthews. It is “about” a lot more than music, but I savored these lines particularly:
 

                                          …their voices rise
and twine not from beauty, nor from the lack
of it, but from the hope for accuracy
and passion, both. They have to hit the note
and the emotion, both, with the one poor
arrow of the voice. Beauty’s for amateurs.

Five Fat Files

I’ve been musing on this concept since last week’s women’s Bible study. In her book Life Management for Busy Women, Elizabeth George discusses the idea of creating “five fat files.” The goal is to choose five areas for growth and learning, and then purposefully start researching and developing oneself in those areas. It didn’t take me too long to come up with a preliminary list. Though the idea sounded gimmicky at first, I think the concept is sound. Whether or not I actually create physical files (or computer files), the list will help to focus my time and mental energies. Here are my five:

1. Writing—developing my skills for personal fulfillment and inspiring others
2. Education—considering its meaning and purpose, and how my kids can best develop their own talents and skills
3. Textile arts—developing my skills for personal fulfillment and helping others
4. Music—developing my skills for personal fulfillment and inspiring others
5. Gardening and Environment—expanding my knowledge, creating beauty, living a more healthy lifestyle and better caring for God’s creation

This should keep me busy for a while. What five areas would you choose?

The Power of Drudgery

So yesterday during my pre-dawn writing time I stared blankly at the blank computer screen, the blank journal page. Apparently the great epic whatever had not entered my brain as I slept. Sigh.

In the afternoon I set myself the task of untangling a jillion yards of yarn from various skeins that had decided to have a party in the yarn basket while I wasn’t needing them for something else. (This little piece of self-torture is part of my seven-year cleanout of the house. Yes, we have been living in this house for seven years, which may not seem long to others, but is longer than we’ve lived any one place, ever. It is pretty dreadful what can get stacked, piled, jumbled, and forgotten—especially in the basement, especially when one has three children—in seven years.)

My fingers were untanglin’, my ears were filled with the soothing and lovely sounds of Ann Heymann’s Celtic harp, and my mind wandered off on its own thing. Which turned out to be latching onto a line for a poem which has been floating around in there for some time. The magic that happened was that another line joined up with it, then another and another, until, yarn tangle made neatly into several little balls, I just had to go type up those lines and begin shaping them into a poem.

Metaphorical, ain’t it? Perhaps only another writer could understand just how good it felt to get those lines out of my head and onto the hard drive. Sigh.

Hey, I feel pretty good about getting that yarn straightened up, too.

Back from…

…well, Life. What have I been doing for 7 months (!!!) that has kept me from posting here? I can break it down into three basic categories:

1. Wallowing in mid-life angst
2. Un-schooling two of my children
3. Working furiously on a ginormous church project

Oh, and reading of course. Rather desultorily, alas. I ripped through Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, at the behest of Number-One Daughter. They were fun. Delightfully diverting. Then Number One and I did Pride and Prejudice as a read-aloud (my third or fourth time, her first). Have I mentioned Dorothy L. Sayers, or did I discover her after I went missing last May?

Oh dear, I have a lot of catching up to do.

I haven’t described my blissful tomato-canning experience (August) or how I uploaded my novel onto the web (November). How I sang for the first time with the Lutheran Festival Chorus (last weekend). And all those false starts and dashed enthusiasms and wanderings in my writing life (ongoing)…

Diversions

1. Gardening

I had the best intentions for Friday. Due to the kindness of a friend, I had the day to myself. I had a nice long list of industrious to-dos (including writing a blog post). But before I sat down to the computer, I went for a walk. I discovered it was 70+ degrees, sunny, light wind. In March. In northern Illinois.

Reader, I stayed outside.

I had a marvelous time. I trimmed shrubs, raked out garden junk, unearthed tender green shoots. I grew the compost pile by 150%. I got a sunburn on my shoulders. I had a genuine, stay-at-home, mental vacation. Now I just might have enough recharge to get through this week’s “spring break.”

2. Nonfiction

I picked up my library hold on Thursday: Jasper Rees’s A Devil to Play: One Man’s Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra’s Most Difficult Instrument. I read through the first chapter and besides a few laughs and nod of recognition (I, too, abandoned French horn after high school, only to pick it up again 20 years later), I found something even sweeter: reassurance.

Rees describes how one day, on the verge of 40, he rediscovered classical music, and suddenly couldn’t bear to listen to anything else.

I’d heard about this same taste shift happening to other people, but always assumed it was gradual. . . It felt like a conversion, in which in an instant you are suffused with an insight, or a way of feeling things, that was not there before. You go round a corner, and the view is shockingly new.

As I read this, I had my own flash of insight. The wintry struggle of the last months, seeking some book-world in which I could lose myself, as in days of yore; my frustration with writing anything but the smallest, most focused of pieces. . . Aha! I’m not going crazy or losing myself, it’s just a mid-life taste-shift!

It makes sense to me, in this light. What books did I once love but can now barely stand to read more than a chapter or two? Novels. What are the only books I’ve been able to finish in the last couple of months? Nonfiction. A taste-shift, pure and simple. I think this also accounts for the fact that my imagination refuses to delve into any of the several fictional worlds I’ve started creating. Instead, I find myself drafting poems, and reveling in the multiplying requests for such things as short essays and dramatic sketches.

Is it just a phase? This, too, shall pass? Possibly. But meanwhile I can stop beating myself up over what turns out to be perfectly natural.