Time

Years ago I attended a Buddhist retreat, which was meant to be a silent retreat, but because I had volunteered to work in the kitchen, I was not bound to silence, and I exploited my freedom to speak to engage in conversation with one of the teachers. In one of his dharma talks he made the classic Buddhist argument that only the present exists: the past is only an idea, and the future is obviously even more just an idea. The purpose of this conception of time is evident: if the cause of our unhappiness in life is that we cling to ideas, then freeing ourselves of the burden of the past and concern for the future is clearly a way out of our unhappiness. During our conversations, I argued with the teacher, saying that our ability to beat out a regular rhythm is proof that the present is connected with the past and future in our very experience of time.
In the past two weeks or so, I have been working on my sense of time in music. I was shown that my failure to anchor myself in rhythm was my biggest failing as a musician in the big band. I share this weakness with many other members of the band, it turns out, and that's why we don't play tight.
This insight into my weakness came from a rehearsal during which the wind players in the band played without the rhythm section. Our conductor, Eli Benacot, turned on a metronome, which gave an extremely loud beat, but the band kept drifting away from it. He told us that this is what was happening to us when we play with the rhythm section. We generally slow up, and instead of pushing us back up to speed, the rhythm section slows up with us.
Eli explained that the major difference between the kind of music we play - jazz, Latin, and rock - and classical music is what musicians call the groove, the underlying beat that keeps going all the time: swing, funk, samba, bossa, whatever. As if we didn't know that! He told us that he once spent hours and hours playing with a metronome until he had internalized the beat.
During the break I asked Eli how we should practice with the metronome, and he had a very clear method. The main point is being able to shift back and fourth from accenting the first and third beat in 4/4 time (which is the way Western classical music works) to accenting the second and fourth beat, which is the way that jazz and jazz-related music works, something like the difference between "DAdaDAda" (trochees) and "daDAdaDA" (iambs). Eli said that it was something like learning to ride a bicycle (an analogy people use for all kinds of things): suddenly you find that you can do it.
Following Eli's exposition, not only have I been practicing with a metronome, I've also been walking around beating time as I walk (which, by the way, is an excellent form of meditation, because if your mind is entirely on the rhythm, there's no room in it for other thoughts). Yesterday evening, on the way to my pottery class (centering clay is another things people compare to riding a bicycle), I suddenly found that I was able to shift easily between trochees (DAdaDAda) and iambs (daDAdaDA) as I counted off eighth notes while I strode along. So, have I learned to ride the bicycle of rhythm? Only time will tell.
By the way, of course, all this is far from new to me. I've been playing music, including jazz, for quite a few years, so it isn't as if I had to start from nowhere. Eli gave me a way to reconceptualize and improve my sense of musical time, and I hope that it helps me to play better.

A New Way of Writing

Several mornings in the week, I take the dog to a place where I can let him wander about without danger, and I sit down on a rock or a low stone wall and write in a big fat notebook I bought in CVS or Staples on a trip to America. The dog wanders around, comes back to check on me every now and then, and finally loses patience and starts nudging me with his nose: enough writing, take me home.
I have been attending a poetry workshop for the past year or so. I began attending with a lot of misgivings and have become a convert. The teacher, Jennie Feldman, is a fine poet herself and an excellent, low key discussion leader. Gently she guides us in the direction she wants. The group, mainly women (of course), is otherwise quite diverse, in taste, in literary experience, and in goals. Parenthetically, in my musical activities, I am involved almost exclusively with men, but in my ceramics and poetry groups, I'm almost exclusively with women.
But when I write in the notebook in the morning, I don't try to write poems, though sometimes a poem does grow out of what I write. Nevertheless, I do write in separate lines, as if I were writing poetry.
When you write a phrase on one line,
And the next one on the next line,
You can see your sentences take shape,
Because, after all, it's the shape
Of your sentences
(Metaphorcially, of course)
That makes your writing what it is,
And it helps with word choice too,
Because you can see and hear the words better,
When they're sitting in broken lines.
And it's easier to revise your work.
As for writing in the notebook, my guiding ideas are twofold: first, making a moment in the day to write is a way of taking the thoughts that otherwise flit through my mind and disappear and making them sit still for a moment, so I can examine them; and, second, catching the thoughts on paper ought to give me raw material for more consequential writing later in the day, or later in my life.

Koan

On Saturday night we ran into a friend who posed us this paradox: can God create a knot that He cannot untie?
On Sunday we visited a friend, an excellent painter, in her studio, and she showed us a book of koans that inspired her work.
Then I thought of a paradox of my own.
Buddhism teaches that the self is an illusion, a mental construct. When you reach enlightenment, not a likely occurrence, you'll understand that about your "self."
So, if the self is an illusion, how can art be based on self-expression?
Or perhaps the illusion that we are ourselves is so powerful that it enables the illusion that is art.