Bringing order to the whole

Every day is a word.
Every week is a sentence.
Every month is a paragraph.
Every year is an chapter.
Every life is a novel.

What are you writing?

Regional flavor revisited

Something surprising in a news story about a restaurant opening in Manchester, N.H. To quote the proprietor: "The menu will be very similar to what is offered now in Merrimack and Milford. Cheung described it as “traditional New England Chinese,” with a few twists, including a Japanese-style sushi bar."

Traditional New England Chinese. Talk about fusion cuisine!

Boy, do I like this...

“The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at the least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. But he is not to do any other thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines. Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”

—Raymond Chandler

Forgetting about the calendar

The whole year, spread out for you on one page.

If you didn't know what date it was, would that influence what you did or how you felt as you went about living today?

Say you didn't know the name of the month, or the day of the week. Or that you had no way to relate this day—today—to any in the past or any in the future. It's just today.

I suspect you'd feel more buoyant and more free because of it, and that life would seem to have more possibilities. I think you'd feel more optimistic.

Just as one feels lighter and more buoyant after a house gets decluttered, a person might benefit from forgetting the constant framework of passing time that surrounds us: hours, days, months. The subconscious "calendar" function in our brain would be deactivated, dissolving a set of limitations that perhaps hem us in and hold in check our emotions, our imaginations, and maybe much more. Who knows?

Alas, this act of forgetting is not easy to do, with time or with anything else.

My own personal experience in the difficulty of forgetting involves something that happened to me with music.

Consider: Beethoven wrote his 'Pastoral' Symphony No. 6 to depict specific scenes in nature: a babbling brook, bird calls, a storm, and so on. The piece is loaded with musical "tone-painting," and has long been accepted as a masterful example.

Okay, now to Leonard Bernstein. In his book 'The Joy of Music,' Bernstein wrote about the difficultly of listening Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 just as music, with the "Pastoral" removed. Could it even be done? Once you knew Beethoven's 'nature' angle, could you ever not know that, and just hear the music as music?

Bernstein believed it could—that a trained musician could indeed "forget" Beethoven's nature program and just regard the symphony as "absolute" and abstract music, just like its much more iconic predecessor, the Symphony No. 5, which is full of drama and beauty but tells no specific story and paints no specific scenes.

Beethoven, in a relatively good mood. Possibly having a bad ear wax day?

Why bother? Because, Bernstein wrote, it allows one (either a musician or a listener) to experience a familiar piece of music—a warhorse, really—in a totally fresh and new way. And that can have immense value in keeping a masterwork compelling across the generations, rather than have it sink beneath the weight of familiarity and accepted notions. If you can forget the program, what was once a warhorse is remade entirely. It can be heard fresh!

The notes haven't changed. Just your attitude has—because you've forgotten something about it.

I know this is true because it actually happened to me with this very piece of music. As a teenager who was into classical music (yes, it was a rough adolescence), I remember tuning into a Boston Symphony Orchesta radio broadcast from Tanglewood one summer. The concert had started and I didn't know what piece was being played, but it held my attention immediately. I was transfixed: it sounded familiar, like something out of the standard classical "Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven" era, but was also altogether different.

It was slow, and didn't seem to have a melody. Instead, it was more of a texture. The music ambled along, filled with graceful clarinet arpeggios and trilling woodwinds and not seeming to have any forward motion, but with one remarkable passage following another.

The music ended, and I was going crazy. What was it? When the next movement began, I recognized the piece right away. I had played the "second half" of Beethoven's 'Pastoral' many times (for the exciting storm sequence), but had never paid attention to what I thought would be the "boring" slow movement. Now I had just heard it, and with no idea what it was, and I thought it was great!

In this case, I hadn't forgotten anything. Instead, I just hadn't yet learned. But still, I was able to experience for real what Bernstein was talking about: the power of forgetting.

Which takes us back to the question of the calendar. How much of what we see and experience and feel about today is linked to our all-to-human awareness of it being Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013? A specific day with a specific number, related as such to all days before and all days to come. A framework that was in place before we were born and will live on after we're gone. Kinda smothering, in a way.

Does this knowledge in limit us? If we could somehow forget the day, the month, the year, would that allow us to be more fully in the moment right now? Would being able to disconnect from the calendar be like a housecleaning or decluttering of sorts, and result in us feeling more buoyant and light and full of possibility?

I think there's something there. And anyway, if the act of 'forgetting' is good for our soul, then I'm way ahead of a lot of folks just with what keeps happening with my car keys.

The problem with Scrooge

Like a lot of people, I sometimes wonder about the arc of my life.

I'm now in the final stretch before turning 50, and I sense that the din of daily life is beginning to subside just a bit. Guess what? I've lived more than half my years. As nephews and nieces grow up and begin lives of their own, I'm now starting to get maybe just a hint of the quietness and solitude of future old age.

Increasingly, my own future will be the result of past decisions I've made and attitudes I've held for lo these many years. Right? And the world will keep turning, and you won't necessarily be involved or even approve. And at some point, grace is the ability to accept all that and come to terms with it. Right?

But, on the other hand, there's Scrooge. You know -- the old Christmas-hating miser in 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens. My whole life, I've always been drawn to this story, especially because of the emotional payoff at the ending. I always responded to how even old Scrooge could find it within himself to change his ways, and just decide to help so many people and create such happiness after all.

As the years have rolled by, I've had a growing sense of how my response to that ending might be increasingly a kind of wish fulfillment that might apply to me personally. Hey, if Scrooge could undergo a miraculous transformation, then I might be capable of that, too! It's not too late. Anything can happen! Life is full of possibilities!

Ah, but then I've recently begun to wonder about one aspect of Dickens' tale that troubles me. Scrooge has money. Lots of it. And would the reaction to his transformation be quite so positive if he wasn't loaded with dough?

Think about that. Would everyone be so happy about old Uncle Ebenezer if, instead of owning the counting house, that he'd had Tom Cratchit's job instead? A lowly clerk with a clerk's salary, weighed down by a hardened heart and a chronically bad attitude toward his fellow man? What would happen if he was miraculously transformed?

Well, the few people in his life would be far less impressed, I think, because what would he have to really offer them? For many people, sudden good cheer would be a cause for suspicion. In fact, in my experience, it's unwelcome, especially in the face of dire circumstances. It would be looked at as yet another burden: geez, now he's manic-depressive! And by the way, why should we believe anything about this sudden transformation when you've proven again and again over the years that you'll let us all down. How can we trust you? And now, given this behavior, we have reason to trust you even less.

What a difference a bag of money makes. And even though I've just starting thinking about this aspect of the Scrooge tale, I think I've sensed it all along. Why? Well, for one thing, I've always been uncomfortable in any situation where I'm not earning at least some money. This unconscious awareness is perhaps at the root of my middle-class existence.

In terms of Scrooge, it would be fun to re-imagine that story, in the same way I'm re-imagining 'It's a Wonderful Life' for my first novel. We'll see. Meanwhile, I'll wait awhile longer for my own miraculous transformation. I just hope it's not on a weeknight, because I need to a full night's sleep or I'm grouchy all day.