A Serious Attempt

I’ve talked myself out of writing this so many times. I know it will be difficult, and I’m afraid it might hurt a little, but that’s not really what’s holding me back. Over the past few months, whenever a stretch of several consecutive hours has opened up and beckoned me in to explore this interior world, I’ve shied away because the patronizing adult in me admonishes the wide-eyed child in me, telling her she will one day be embarrassed by it, that she will eventually come to see how naive she was, that things only appear this way now, that her observations and impressions will become stale with time.

Now I, the wide-eyed child, would like to say to her: yes, that may be true. But tell me, what piece of writing, from poetry to scientific papers, does not fall into the category of How Things Appear Now? This will be an attempt, and I have a feeling it won’t be the last. It’s a snapshot of my current understanding, which is all any of us can ever hope to capture.

A year ago I took a sabbatical from my job as a violinist in the Richmond Symphony. For the first few months, I was still quite busy playing chamber music concerts and recitals, but for the entire month of November I decided to leave my violin in its case, resulting in the longest break I had ever taken in my life since starting the violin at age 5. I can’t say exactly why I did this or what I hoped would happen. I just had a hunch that there was this tangle of knots in my brain which needed copious amounts of time in order to loosen.

I’m going to give it to you straight. I loved Noviolinber. I enjoyed it immensely. At no point did I miss playing the violin. I read books, spent time with family, threw a baby shower for my friend, took fall walks, drank tea, took naps. I did not become a different person, nor did I experience a loss of equilibrium. I did not feel lost or empty.

When December rolled around–and with it, all the holiday gigs I’d agreed to play–I felt a familiar anxiety enter my body. The prospect of re-entering The Music World, where the peer-to-peer sizing up never ends, made my stomach drop. I felt sad that my happy, healthy, Noviolinber glow had not caused my baggage to evaporate.

After Bare Minimum December (I got my violin out only for gigs and to prepare for gigs), I got on a plane to Paris where I would be participating in a two-month-long artist residency, supposedly as a violinist, but with writing listed as a secondary discipline. Secretly, my plan was to bring the violin, essentially as a prop, but to use the time to write. (How that turned out is a story for another time, I hope.) Once again, my violin stayed in its case for the better part of a month.

Then, on February 4, I decided it was time to play a few notes. Perhaps I was ready. Perhaps I would be inspired! After warming up my wimpy fingers, I launched into whatever I could play from memory, i.e. music I had studied between the ages of 13 and 23, i.e. music with baggage. Here, miles away and years apart from these negative experiences, they still cut to the quick. It was like my violin case had acted as my Pandora’s box–none of these thoughts had crossed my mind during November or January, but now they swarmed around my otherwise empty atelier. As I observed in my journal the next day, “Not playing regularly, you lose your callouses, and not just on your fingers.”

I didn’t try again for the rest of the trip. I was troubled by the fact that, despite my lengthy supposed rejuvenation periods, I never felt any more ready to come back. I questioned the wisdom of living one’s whole life with the kind of low level anxiety that crept into my body every time I got the violin out of the case, an anxiety I’d never noticed before.

I asked myself why I tried so hard, at this stage in my life, to play the violin well–to keep getting better at it. What was simmering underneath the hours of practicing that no one was asking me to do? I suppose some people might think that there is only one kind of practicing, but there are at least two: the first involves preparing for a specific concert, and the second involves working on playing your instrument well. It is possible to get through a career in music without the second kind (once you get a job, that is). The first is always motivated by money (although there may also be deeper reasons for it), but the second must have its own motivation.

With time and the contemplative air of Parisian streets on my side, I eventually discovered that my motivation for the second kind of practice was this: although the attainment of perfection was not possible, I still held that it was honorable to pursue it throughout my earthly life. Once I articulated it in this way, I realized it had a familiar ring to it. It sounded a lot like something from my religious upbringing. Because we are human, we can never be perfect, except through Christ. That said, you have to show Christ you’re serious by trying your best to get as close to perfection as you can every day. And he will know if you didn’t try your best, so.

It had been 17 years since I’d supposedly rejected this mentality (see: Easter Someday), yet I’d continued to adopt it unconsciously in my musical life, and it had kept me locked in a constant state of self-criticism, a nagging sense of inadequacy, a life sentence of not measuring up. It gave me a certain low level anxiety I thought I’d left in the dust when I was 21.

Naturally, I rejected this mentality all over again, if only because it had enjoyed a free ride for all these years without being examined once. Perhaps, as many people seem to have concluded, this is a way to live a good life, but for now, I’m spitting it against the wall so I can get a good look at it. Denied its presumed legitimacy, it now reveals the absurd implication that I was born a bad violinist and must work to become a good one, as if all people were born bad violinists. Of course, this is true, but it is also absurd.

I returned home in late February with several weeks’ cushion before my first performance. For the first time since December, I had my pick of motivations for the first kind of practice: payment, obligation, binding social contracts, you name it. I got my violin out, did what I needed to do to prepare for the gig, then realized that I no longer had a reason to do the second kind of practice. For two or three days, I floated in this oblivion of meaninglessness, pushing bits of scales and etudes around on my plate.

I ran through some possible alternatives. I practice to…avoid humiliation? To not disappoint my teachers and parents? No, too negative. Plus, those kinds of fears practically ensure their fulfillment. What about bringing the joy of music to audiences? Sure, but let’s face it: I could still bring lots of joy to lots of people without ever doing the second kind of practice again, considering how much work I’ve already done. Ok, then perhaps it’s about doing artistic justice to the composer’s vision? Maybe. But at this point in time, I find it difficult to care enough about that to want to spend hours developing a perfectly inaudible bow change.

Finally, mercifully, the answers started coming, answers that held water, and still do. Here are my new reasons, in the order that they occurred to me.

First, doing that “deep work” kind of practice is how I make myself at home in this world. I read an interview with the poet Derek Walcott this year in which he says that “any serious attempt to do something worthwhile is ritualistic,” and the philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that, while dwellings are how we find our home in space, rituals are how we find our home in time. Applying myself through deep concentration on a regular basis to the art of violin playing is my way of making myself at home in this world.

The second reason (as if I needed one) is that playing the violin puts me in touch, literal touch, with paradox and mystery. Why does music make sense to us at all? Why does it affect us in ways we can’t fully express? How is it that, the more I relax, the stronger and more stable I become? It’s a portal out of our overly defined, overly certain, overly verbal world, a tangible reminder of our own unknowableness, a front row seat at the meeting of limitation and possibility.

And thirdly, practicing the violin prepares me as a vessel for the New to flow through. Whether it comes as new music or as a new interpretation of old music, I want to be ready for it, and that means honing my skills. After all, what is the point of repeating all the same sounds everyone else has already made? Sounds that people will recognize and approve of? I am reminded of this chilling line, from Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern fables: “Why all this cultural busyness, colloquia, interviews, seminars? Just so we can be sure we’re all saying the same thing.” The drive toward social acceptance certainly fuels the pursuit of sameness, but it also invites the kind of pain that cripples us as musicians to varying degrees throughout our lives. Falling short of an agreed upon standard reduces a person’s gifts to a unique constellation of defects.

I hesitate to say that this shift in thinking has changed everything for me but, by all appearances, it has. All the weird things that people say to musicians, even the weird things that musicians say to musicians, are like so much noise to my ears now. I am more confident in the strength (not to mention the existence) of my gifts, and the idea that some people may not see them or value them or approve of them doesn’t seem to faze me. I have zoomed so far out that all the little clubs that I am excluded from seem tiny and insignificant. My sense of self-worth is rooted much more deeply and widely than my status in the music world. It’s rooted in my very humanity.

Of course, I leave open the possibility that I’ll come home crying one of these days, or that a painful memory will crop up and stop me in my tracks, but I’m not ruling out that I really have been transformed in some way. As Susan Sontag writes, “an event that makes new feelings conscious is the most important experience a person can have,” and I can never un-have my sabbatical.