middle brow

on music and time and changes

I repeat, “depth is not intensity.” To anyone who will listen. But being an intense person, I am not sure how to get from one level to another. I turn on a track, “It’s a Passage”¹.

Here once again
Just following tracks through frozen soil
Where once we ran
Love in mind
[...]
So start again
Somewhere in search of a clearing
Love in mind
It's a passage
Seen through lost and open eyes
It's a waste of time for an idle mind
That needs to walk
Where once we ran
[...]

I process information too quickly to write music. I even play in a rush. I talk to someone about how piano lessons are more intimate than therapy sessions. He agrees. All of your little problems, strung through years, now captured in your hands, played out through keys. My piano teacher tells me to turn my palm up and takes my hand. He presses his fingers down on my palm, transmitting to me a sense of the pressure that I should maintain on the instrument. It is strange but nice to have my hand held in this way. When my time is off, we count out loud; he plays one hand and I the other. I’m conscious of a desire to impress him. I often fail to because I have not practiced enough. I don’t have a good excuse for my behavior, so I don’t say anything about it. I let him believe I’m a mediocre learner without really knowing if that’s what he would conclude from my playing.

And so it is a microcosm of life. Or a compartmentalization of its other aspects. Out in the world, I am always asking myself, “how badly do I have to play to have my hand held?” I am not sure how to get from one level to the other. Something about walking where once we ran. I quickly go over my past. I see each year as its own long receipt that curls under in the final months from the curve of the machine. I’m always printing, printing.

Something is changing though. I usually feel a little like something is stuck in my chest and throat, but this time whatever’s there is stirring. In therapy, I start to headline with the embarrassing thoughts. In piano lessons, I present my middling work with fewer apologies. I worry less about my intense interest in other people, my quickness to love and my hesitance to admit it. I look within to know how far it goes, but so far, I can’t see it.

1. by Daniel Rossen, from the album “You Belong There” (2022)