The game of bridge is an interesting challenge to me. It involves learning its vocabulary – like much computer software, I find it exasperating because it is, actually, not a language so much as a code.
With commercial computer products, this is a regular problem. If an employer asks you whether you are comfortable with Windows, it has nothing to do with physical panes. Names keep emerging that reduce English vocabulary (at least) to nonsense: Python is a computer language; so is Java; so is BASH.
Bridge is a game in which the first segment of play uses coded terms – and the number of terms is extremely restricted – to communicate between partners. The quality of this communication is a substantial determinant of ultimate success. The exchange of these coded terms is “bidding,” and this segment gives way afterward to “the play.” I get confused because the coding is not merely a tit-for-tat exchange, but (if I may quote) “alters when it alteration finds.” So the same bid means one thing if the first bidder uses it, but something quite different if the second, third, or fourth player uses it instead. Or if that same bid were to appear in one round of bidding versus another round, before the “auction” concludes.
I practice with computer bridge applications, on my laptop and even on my phone (which I otherwise dislike for anything but brief communications, separate curmudgeonly post some time). The only way to improve my capacity, they say, is to play, and play, and play.
No one likes to be the stooge, anyway – but with bridge, as a partner game, the penalty of my inexperience falls not just on me but on anyone who partners with me. There are likely problems with learning so substantially in virtual environments, but at least the only one exasperated at my rookie mistakes is me.
The exasperation is not less, however. I am learning that bridge is a game of cumulative ups and downs; there is no point in getting too dejected by a terrible hand, nor too cocky by a successful one. People who play bridge seem to play immense quantities of it.
It is extremely annoying to be at the beginning of this learning. I know perfectly well that great players exist who started even older than I am; that mediocre players who are pleasant companions can still be welcomed as partners in real life; that everyone loses at times, and that professionals all agree on all these things. I don’t think I’m aspiring to becoming a Great Bridge Player. Maybe I am? Maybe I have fallen into the trap of wanting to feel smart by now, and my frustration is just a harsh, and distored self-judgment.
It’s a matter of carry on or quit; and I do not feel ready to quit.
But all that elevated rhetoric about embracing my ignorance? So far as I have gotten yet, I have not learned how to awaken that attitude. There, I’m still just playing dummy.
I’m happy to find myself able to spend more time at the keyboard this week. At least, I am on my home keyboard. I have not been to the nearest organ to practice in a while, and it may be yet another while before I go back, for a number of (mostly) logistical reasons.
What I am finding lately is an increasing impulse to slow. down. more. No. more. than. that. I am still committed to my scales and HANON at 100 bpm. Most days this is entirely workable, and when, as sometimes happens, my hands seem to fight it, I either slow down for them or abandon the exercises altogether.
What I am trying now is to become calm and steady. (“So too in the spiritual life. . .”)
The first job has always been to Hit All The Notes. Now that I am usually hitting them, in scales and the HANON, it is increasingly important to hit them with consistency, so nothing plunks out louder than its fellows, or fudges into silence as I race by. Often, too, I find my attention is erratic and I fluff a few bits, almost like saying “Eh, uh,” and lose my fluency. Some days are just like that.
But when I have all the notes, then I can think about that flow; I can think about the evenness of every movement. I can try to believe my hands can do what they are, in fact, doing, and then relax a little more.
This is also true with repertoire. Both in Bach and in rags, I am gaining steadiness, but only at slow speeds. When I go slowly enough, I can play entire preludes and fugues with accuracy. Now, as with the technical exercises, I need to establish that accuracy and evenness and, above all, relaxation in my hands.
This feels so much like accommodations for learning differences. It is, in fact, just that: my glib cognitive mind knows what should happen; my slower, tentative, physiological mind is still absorbing information. So if I truly want to learn, and own any music, I must let the body set the tempo.
I should be grateful for the mindfulness exercise. It creates its own realm, a mental space in which music plods, but believes it will one day soar. If I clutch at it, I nail it to the earth. I – the thinking Ego I – need to be following my hands, not trying to drive them forward. As with children, I have to believe in their innate impulsion to grow and blossom. As with children, I want more for them – and I want it now.
As with children, they can only do what is in them to do, and so it is my task to play my pieces again, and again, as slowly and appreciatively, and as easily, as I can manage. It is at moments almost unbearably frustrating; then, at others, it feels promising beyond my courage to believe.
It’s a lot of drama. Adagio.
In western music, based on the chromatic scale, it is possible to move through harmonic changes that sound natural even to the untrained listener. This is because the harmonies that are natural to one key include some that have place in other keys. The most common pivot through the keys is called The Circle of Fifths. Just listen to some Vivaldi, you’ll hear it; it’s very nice.
In a completely different set of circles, the poet Dante depicts a world of hurt- of hurt self-induced, self-involved: nasty hurts. He creates several sets of circles: there is the Purgatorio, but the juicy one is the Inferno. In both places, people get to stop and explain their tortures and why they deserve them; but in Purgatory, they’re repentent, and comparatively cheerful. In Hell, they’re so immersed in the evil that brought them there, that the disgusting and terrifying things in which they are immersed almost make less impression. I have been revisiting the Fifth Circle (in my reading).
In the Fifth Circle of Hell Dante locates the enraged and the sullen. The sullen! They are submerged in foetid water, thick with murk. Bubbles stream up to the surface because they are eternally gagging on the sludge of their stubborn dissatisfactions.
Makes you want to read the whole thing, doesn’t it?
From Dante to Vivaldi is a tidy handful of centuries, so their shared Italian heritage is really only a slender connection. It’s just my taste for irrelevant similitudes that connects the Fifth Circle with the Circle of Fifths. In Dante’s time, that harmonic circle was not yet established as a standard. In my head, it all goes around.
In music, the Circle of Fifths will eventually take you back to where it began; that’s part of its beauty. In Dante, the Circles are really layers; we read our way from one to the next and point of the whole voyage is to get out and to the top of Paradise.
I am struggling with a number of apparent failures this spring, some of them musical; perhaps that is really why the two concepts are conjoining for me. My keyboard skills show some continued signs of improvement – but the more I practice, the more I encounter my limitations. It’s normal, but it’s painful. I’m still left with a fish-or-cut-bait choice – I may have bad practice times, but I’m not planning to stop.
It is a shock to be reminded that sullenness is a moral position. I may not share Dante’s entire theology, but if I’m going to appreciate his catalog of sins, I need to digest it. Is it sullenness to want attention for struggles? Surely that is wrong. I think sullenness is a cold refusal of joy; but that so easily leads to a sense of victimization. Aren’t I allowed to pout a little, for crying out loud, when I try and fail and mean to keep trying? I think I am, some.
I just need to avoid getting into a loop.
Six months ago I decided to try to learn two languages: ASL and bridge. I have made modest progress, and I wish that were self-deprecation. American Sign Language is fascinating to me, complex and rich and excitingly different in its flow than English, or the romance languages as far as I know them. Bridge is interesting to me also as a language, but it is even more foreign.
I purchased an “app” to practice bridge with. I joined a class for a while; it was very loosely structured and I eventually left, at least for a while.
Learning styles are a very popular subject these days, and I’m sure I have fared better with some kinds of learning than with others. In my one term with ASL, I felt I was burbling toward the front end of class, learning vocabulary and crafting sentences eagerly. That seemed more natural, if not more familiar: ASL is so firmly grounded in human facial expressions, in physical energy and attention. I am an infant in its structural world, but it feels attractively interpersonal.
Bridge is another matter entirely. Bridge appeals to me because, again, it is sociable and interactive, and even more because it has a very structured environment. One may stumble into a situation in a public place, and be able to say, helpfully, “Excuse me, I speak jive,” (or ASL, or French, or whatever). No one is going to lay a nervous hand on my arm at the bus-stop, and ask me to explain a cue-bid. And a good thing.
Bridge is a game. I grew up playing infinite games, and somehow most games have lost their appeal in my later life. There is something about the competitive stress, or the uncertainty of chance, and the complexities of elaborate games or the tedium of simplistic games – the environment of most games, their mood, or their objectives, cannot entertain me these days.
Bridge has some odd kind of allure. It attaches to my childhood memories, I know that. It has a very ritual quality to its two stages, of bidding and of playing. Bidding, in particular, has a language that is almost like a computer programming language. The words in use sound as though they make ordinary sense, but they absolutely do not. There’s an arcane, almost occult sense of mystery around the complexities. One looks at one’s hand, and enters upon a rota of statements. When the rounds are complete, expert players have told one another a story about their cards. Then the play carries out the implications of that story.
So far, I have learned the most basic elements of this system. Mostly, I play with computers, and I lose, and I lose, and I lose. I don’t know quite why I don’t abandon the enterprise entirely. I think it is because, even in my defeat, I can tell a story has been told. I want to stick around and learn how; I want to understand the story. And tell some.
They say that truly creative work doesn’t fret itself about originality; yet the most immediate condemnation of any kind of creation is to call it “derivative.” I prefer the idea that works can be in conversation with one another – even that idea, I have to confess instantly, is not my own. It speaks for me, however, and speaks to me. As in all else, there seems to be a need for balance – something entirely new is usually so befuddling that readers, listeners, or viewers, tend to come to it slowly, needing to buffer, or contextualize the novelty before assessing the work.
I also relish that conversation image because my own impulses to create are most often responsive. Listening to Beethoven, long ago, made me want to learn to write music. It didn’t seem enough only to hear those symphonies; I felt a deep impulse to somehow reply. I’ve never yet managed that, but I’m not dead yet.
Likewise, certain writing goads me to write – in truth, more things goad me effectively into writing than have ever successfully goaded me into musical work, and so I have generated far more words than notes.
Maybe every 6th or 7th grade American still reads The Diary of Anne Frank; maybe in the cushioned and overwrought corners of the country it has been successfully suppressed. We all read it for the obvious historical introduction to Naziism, right? Or was it because Anne is a remarkably insightful, indomitable little soul, about the same age we were. I always felt we read Anne Frank because Anne Frank herself was that important, even more than her tragic and historical circumstances.
And Anne Frank wrote a diary. She wrote to her diary, calling it Kitty. In all her writing, she was writing to, not just about. She wrote to Kitty because she had to have someone to tell things to, and even before getting shut into the Annex – still in the midst of a lively social world – she needed that confidante.
Anne Frank started me off. With deference to Anne, who never imagined it, (and to Oscar Wilde, whose Cecily absolutely and hilariously did), I also began my journal with a distinctive idea that no one else would ever see its contents. Keeping a journal (I so dislike the modern “journaling” as a verb) was an enormous balm when I began it at 12. I’ve never been able to do without one since.
I have a dim sense that my earliest journals were corny, maudlin, and, well, derivative. But I reread my entries often, so I wrote for myself as reader – allowing myself the anachronisms and excesses that made me a “weirdo” to my peers and siblings. Journals still function that way for me.
What I miss from those early years is the sense of gestating new ideas. Recent journals are rubbish bins, safe places to say unpleasant things: still indispensible.
Wouldn’t it be lovely to restore that older, livelier tone? Like brave young Anne, determinedly seeking light.
#Codgeralert: This post is probably just a #getoffmylawn, #toooldforthis, hash-tag-complaint post about the rapidity of the changing environment. (“And their music – it’s just noise!”)
It’s at least 10 years since my favorite opera writer (I don’t have that many) discovered heavy metal and became deeply enamoured – without losing a jot of his love or sensitivity for the operatic literature. It’s about that long since one of my kids was offended when I used “Word,” to signify affirmation of an idea. It’s been less than a week since I pissed off a #techbro friend by critiquing Jeff Zuckerberg for his couture. Cultures, and subcultures, shift and keep shifting.
Once upon a time, we considered the desert island idea as a conversation-starter, or as a way to explore, or reveal, a person’s character through their tastes. What Ten [music/books/foods/friends/your name here] would you bring with you to . . .?
I feel lately as though I am, in fact, on a desert island, with my Top Ten Favorites, all the time. And my nearest and dearest are on adjacent isles. If we were worrying about music clashes, it’s okay; the waves of headphones and artificially established distances keep our sounds from overlapping much.
Maybe this is why, when we get the chance, so many of us dearly want to exchange – or at least present – our latest favorite items- songs, film clips, memes, etc. They’re messages in bottles, sent from one island to the next, or to as many islands as possible, trying to establish at least an isthmus or two. (Isthmus: best word ever.)
Despite all the bottles that land on my beach, what I notice is the widening expanse of sand between me and the water. Am I withdrawing into my central palm grove? It is shadier there, of course, and I think I’ve ruled out the risk of serpents, and anyway, it feels safer under shelter. Besides, I have all those books, and all that music, and apparently endless short, humorous video clips.
What’s disturbing me is neither my own hiding in the shade – perhaps it ought to – nor, theoretically, the communication flotsam arriving on my shores. The trouble is, among the bottles I open, I feel fewer and fewer of them are conveying any information to me at all. Are they even addressed to me? Or are they random expressive gestures coming from sources I fail to understand?
Perhaps the problem is my expectations. Perhaps I have assumed that any message coming to my shore should follow a particular form – either an SOS, or a Dear John, or a You May Be A Winner. My first language is full of class, gender, cultural markers whose value seems to be fading; which may be a very good thing in itself. But I don’t understand much of what floats toward me lately. Also, the bottles in which they arrive seem different in shape and material from what they were when I first found my island.
At least I still have my 10 favorite . . . whatevers.
It is ridiculous to start Holy Week with a head cold, but I have.
Christians talk with elegance and pathos about the Big Things: Hope, Shame, Guilt, Glory. But I caught a whopper of a bug over the weekend, and while it’s a small thing in itself, it has obtruded all its slimy preeminence over my higher thoughts.
European Christianity has, over the years, produced stunning, even shocking images of the suffering Christ. Centuries of devotions have invited us to focus our attention, in this one great week, on the entirety of self-giving that Jesus managed. After some years of itinerant ministry, with healings and preachings and miracles of one kind and another, he voluntarily walked into catastrophic arrest, betrayal, torture and death.
Some devotions have really seemed to dig into the particulars of Jesus’ bodily suffering; there are famous depictions of the Crucifixion, in particular, that invite intense contemplation of his physical pain and the harrowing, intentional cruelty that his own community thrust upon him.
In these delicate days, theologians in my world argue about the Doctrine of Atonement: the idea that Jesus had to undergo the worst possible suffering as a kind of payback, compensation for all the awfulness of human sins. That idea certainly dominated the religion my youth, and prayers and guided meditations and musical devotions plowed that guilty furrow deeply into our hearts.
Later I heard other theologies, in which Jesus’ suffering and death is redemptive but not in that tit-for-cosmic-tat way. Because an essential element in the Crucifixion narrative is the Easter emergence at the end. In these more recent (to me) theological discourses, these ordeals, undergone by the Messiah, reveal God’s presence even in the worst of human indignity and horror. There is no pain or fear, says this version of the story, so dark and so isolating that God cannot be present. More: beyond that pain there is transformation, and a story of renewal.
I blow my nose again. It is hard to keep my thoughts elevated and transcendent while my sinuses and my throat are being so disgusting. It is hard to feel sorrow for my sins; to mourn the wreckage wrought by human freedom to be vile; to ponder again the mysteries of foot-washing and eucharist and tombs and resurrections, when I’m worrying whether my tissue supplies will hold out.
I would be ashamed of this, I think, if I had the energy. In a few days, when it all clears up, I will still be just beginning the great Three Days of Easter commemorations. With luck, my heart will lift, as it often does when a cold clears out, just at not feeling so beaten up.
This has to be okay with whatever Redeemer I’m counting on. It’s petty, and self-involved, and reductive. How can my drainage matter more to me than that lone figure on a cross, continuing to reach toward the Absolute Divine as to a loving parent? It doesn’t matter more; it’s just more intrusive. Temporarily.
My (then) young ‘un came up with this name – I still find it hugely clever and apt. It’s what we call the week that leads up to Palm Sunday, or Passion Sunday. Or Palm/Passion Sunday. In liturgical Christian tradition, this Sunday the service begins with a reading of the gospel that describes the big entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, when the crowds are jubilant and supportive. In the course of the service, the tone shifts drastically to include a recounting of the crucifixion. It’s a microcosm of the last steps before Easter. The duality is part of the point. We start with jubilation, we end in dread. At the other end of the week, the services embrace that dread, deepen it from Last Supper through Crucixifixion through Silent Tomb With Big Rock In Front. So the entry into Easter itself comes blaring out (often with actual trumpets). But all that’s later. (SPOILERS.) For now, we’re here with the donkey.
I’m looking at the shambles of my Lenten undertakings. I definitely flunked Lent this year, from the project point of view. My Lenten Observance became a source of joy to me; why was it so easy to let it get swept aside? Why is it so hard to talk about that I cannot bring myself to name the simple exercise I tried? The same factors, I think answer all my questions here.
I don’t know the exact, clinical, or psychological descriptors with which I can sew up all my predilections. Like many people browsing the internet, I have found information that seems applicable, some of it useful. Like most, I’ve searched partly from vanity and self-absorption; but also from a desire to understand better how to make my way in the world. There are so many times when it seems crushingly difficult, or mystifyingly aleatoric, or just not successful. There are, of course, many much better times, though some of them are also odd and idiosyncratic.
What I currently understand is that attention is, to me, almost a material weight. Sometimes that’s a lovely thing, like a weighted blanket; sometimes it’s disturbing, even if it’s healthy, like cold mist on produce at the store. But it changes things. I am glad of the ability to draw attention, occasionally. I can use it to stoke my ego; I also use it to redirect conversations, or to break tension, sometimes.
Attention, however, leaves ripples in my own awareness. It distracts me from my engagement with a subject, and draws some of my notice to the attention that the subject is getting from someone else. And then I am no longer so focused on the subject; the subject becomes something in a crowd of thoughts. I track how people are tracking. That’s all apart from whether the attention is for something shameful or something rewarding. (Another can of worms.)
So sometimes it is better just to hide. Though, how absurd it is to say I’m Hiding Something! Perhaps, this Lent, I am the donkey.
So my Lent got shredded. More opportunities for showing oneself mercy! Because what can one do, actually? Two choices: Toss up one’s hands and abandon the whole idea, or start again. I wish there were other choices, some ways to make lemonade, which is more fun than lemons anyway. But there are only these two. So, I’m just back to trying again.
My bustling house, and a slight increase in outside activities in the last week, threw me completely off my stride.
This losing one’s stride is actually a major disruption. There is the stride, interrupted; then the lag wherein I realize that I am Off My Stride; then there is a pause to Have Feelings About Losing Steam; then the recovery of some steam; then the thought about starting again; finally, hopefully, there is starting again.
How can 40 days accommodate a slow pace like that?
Learning more about neurodiverse people of all types, I am losing my certainty about hurrying up a slow pace; just as, learning more about emotional wounds of all types, I have long lost my certainty about imposing objectivity on an emotional situation.
I don’t like this at all. But it’s very Lenten, indeed. Lent is the journey through the desert, the 40-day (an ancient expression for Too Freaking Long) withdrawal from safety and plenty. It is preparatory for the completely bizarre tragedy and apotheosis of Easter (“apotheosis” is perhaps an arguable word but how often can one use it at all?).
The point I currently make of The Easter Mysteries is this: Life contains suffering and evil and division; but humanity – each person – has an innate existence and cosmic truth which only love comprehends, which love calls forth. I believe that each human is meant to be able to turn toward joy; and, with fragile clarity, I believe that beyond the life of each person in their body, an eternity of joy is also part of Whatever The Design Is. I believe that the Jesus of the Bible – the Second Person of The Holy Trinity – spent an earthly life in order to manifest this, but it often seems like a very strange way to accomplish anything of the sort. I also believe that the apparently disastrous ending of Jesus’ earthly time, in the death by torture by cross, was upended three days later into concrete, extraordinary encounters that shortly afterward erupted into something that still rattles the world, and dares people to engage with it. I’m more-or-less contented to let the centuries of Church engagement set most of my own wrestling with this stuff.
Anyway, every Lent I try to direct my attentions back to that cosmic confusion about love and death and hope, and maybe away from lesser things. At least, to redistribute the weight I give to the greater and the lesser. Because of the shape of the holidays, I’m trying to prepare for the get-down-and-dark as much as the awake-and-sing.
In that light, a hole in my Lent makes sense.
I just finished an old novel – Penhallow– by a favorite fluff author. It is an old English scene, with an irascible, infirm patriarch who dies by the end. Although it is crafted like a murder mystery, the murder is in fact not a mystery – we know Who Dunnit, even in its improbability. It is ultimately a story of injustice done, and it leaves me with a curious sense of inconclusion. Many of the author’s favorite tropes and stock characters are present, but the resolution is profoundly irresolute.
In a not irrelevent sidestream, this week I have hosted – or “parahosted” – a collegiate offspring with several companions, so that my current tracking of Young Adults has covered more bodies than usual. It has expanded my realm of worry proportionately, for none of these 20-somethings seems to have a firm handle on basic self-regulation: they all suffer from serious conditions. Anxiety, insomnia, auto-immunities, digestive disorders – and yet, paralyzingly, it seems impossible to set them at ease, or to persuade them to pursue healthier comforts. This generation seems unable to relax in a hot bath, but unable to resist hours of online distraction as a way of calming or soothing themselves. It makes my heart ache, and it wreaks havoc on their stability. I freak about their instability, and yet their continued progress – and yes, this is all of them – suggests that I am overvaluing the need for stability.
In the same week – and not surprisingly – I have faltered badly in my own spiritual and Lenten practices. I cannot seem to confirm to myself the time and the security and the discipline (in that order) to Do The Things.
I have been preaching to these youngsters, and I mean what I am trying to say, so I am trying to say it also to myself.
With mercy, most things are possible. Without mercy, most things are impossible.
I find the young adults recently with me are uncertain about mercy, so I need all the more to demonstrate it. I must begin, despite some shame, by being merciful about my own failings. I haven’t been faithful to my intentions and that’s simply the reality. My reasons may be good or bad. It doesn’t matter so much; going forward, I must try again.
I need to extend the same to the young ones, perhaps especially those I have seen fall into frustrating spells with no sleep, or inadequate meals, and unfinished jobs, and uncompleted commitments. There is a choice – condemn, or forgive. The choice I want, of fixing it or changing it, is not on any menu.
I’m trying again to read fiction, and drawn back into the build up and release of narrative tensions – I am reminded why this became so hard that I virtually gave it up during the Covid shutdown. Penhallow is “escapist” but there is no escape in stories. Everywhere I look, I see us make messes. Don’t open that door – but always, someone opens that door.
And that’s why mercy matters.
Marianne Again 