Silent Ivory Keys
It's ironic how you like to sit of a simple stool and want to play the most grandiouse pieces on simple, plastic keys. You started when you were in Grade 1 and it's the same piano that you've been playing for the past 13 years or so. It's a fairly simple electronic contraption, none of the hardened stilts dressed together that you might find in a normal piano. When you play, none of the normal vibrations echo from within but the sound rings clear to you and when it rains, the keys don't begin to wallow in themselves the way they do in wood and ivory. In that sense, it would seem to be dead and the fact that it runs on electricity would make you feel like you're playing frankenstein. You picked her back then because of the little buttons on her with a limited range of 6 instruments and you still don't mind because she gets the job done and she never complains (unless in a brownout). You appreciate the fact she doesn't play like a keyboard with its own superficial key textures or like a real piano whose keys are too stiff. She's Baby Bear from "Golidilocks and the Three Bears" and her porridge is just right.
You used to play for other people a lot. You could only play 2 pieces by heart, "Eyes on Me" and "Fisherman's Horizon" and the rest were fairly simplistic songs from John Thompson and Micheal Aaron which you found repititive and annoying. It was "Eyes on Me" that got you playing again during Grade 7. All your friends praised you for it because you were the first that learned how to play it in class. Lola used to showcase you in front of family guests and you'd ask for a little service fee of a hundred bucks. After all the praise you decided to memorize more and you were able to fine-tune your style to technical perfection. After a while it just trailed on like a forgotten leash and you realized that you never really cared what anyone else thought about how you played. At the end of the day if you were feeling sad or stressed you would just play for yourself. If you read it on the page you can still play "Eyes on Me" like you always used to after all.
The notes that you would fossilize in your mind now came in waves and you were living life a note at a time. Some shores you familiarized yourself with quickly; you could tell where the wind blew and navigate the vast array of stars with ease--you knew where you had to go because it was all so familiar and easy. Some seas demanded much that you did not have and you ambled away from them on the first few measures. Regardless of how your fingers stuttered even when you weren't playing stacattos or the how they would trip over themselves like a Three Stooges comedy on the trills you were living a life and it washed away all the days other people would have slashed their wrists in their solitary rooms or some of the restless nights that Eliot measured in cups of coffee.
You realize though that what the water washes away it also takes away which also means that if there is a rut in the road, passing your car over it will not remedy the situation when you wake up the next day to drive to work. There are irreconcilble, indissoluble things that you can get across but you can never really solve by simply running your hands over treble and bass clef, taking it on stride and pressing against the notes. But sometimes it is simply enough to do just that, because you would have patched yourself up and gone through one more day, swallowed up by silent ivory keys.
posted by Tim @ 12:48 PM
0 comments
