Skinny Dipping

[12.xii.23.a : mardi] woke at 4 a.m. this morning, not necessarily to emulate Jacques Roubaud and compose a prose moment in the light of a desk lamp while the rest of the world is dark, but : Gide’s Journal ,, the idea of a project, I’m always chasing after these passing and beautiful butterflies, here I am with my little net, I in my short pants (but no varicose veins yet : !) dashing through budding groves in pursuit of — the idea of a project is this : comb through Gide’s Journal and read what he writes about the piano and then do what I always do, what comes easy, to use what I read as a starting point to explore the thought-association map that is always forming and reshaping ,, my mental field. / It was in the spring of 2022 (April, I believe) that Alice purchased a new piano for me. Concerns about where to put it. It doesn’t matter, I said. Whether there is space in the house for my piano, my books, whatever, is irrelevant — the important thing is not available space, but how that space is used. I made space in my study for the new piano. I only had one rule in the beginning : that I would play every day, I wouldn’t allow my piano to become just another piece of furniture taking up space in the already too cramped house. What I wanted : two things (i) another mode of expression, (ii) to learn how to “play jazz” — I wanted to be able to touch the keys and hear the what sounds like jazz piano come from the instrument. But how? After some research, I started taking a course online. Learning the fundamentals of jazz and improvisation. / Though one might justifiable ask why I wanted my playing to sound like something else? Why not experiment at the piano as well? Different modes of expression : at the piano, the experiment is in combinations and arrangement, the quality of the notes.

I began my jazz piano course with enthusiasm and, of course, I was impatient, I wanted to have already done all the necessary study and practice to be able to sit down and play. As soon as I thought I’d mastered one thing, playing all the chords, ii-V-i’s, inversions, scales, alternate chord voicings, etc. I moved on to the next thing, only to discover that I had to go back and practice the chords again because it hadn’t stuck. I was going too fast. Now, I’m in my second year and I’m learning patience, but I’m less disciplined and allow my laziness to guide my practice : what do I feel like doing today? rather than what is it that I should be working on and mastering? Perhaps, I should have started writing the book a year ago. Another idea for a project : The Poetics of Improvisation.

Oh, my time! my time will be frittered away like this until death.

I’d begun reading Gide’s Journals a few years ago. A reference to his Journals in a novel by Enrique Vila-Matas prompted me … now! I just had a memory flash. We (Alice, Patrick, & I) were in Maine, the town of Waterville ,, I only know this because, the bookmark in volume 1 of the (abridged) Journals tells me it was The Iron Horse Bookstore where I bought the book. I see myself in the bookstore, holding the paperback, picking it out because of the idea of Gide’s Journals given to me by reading Vila-Matas. (I just realized something important. The two volume paperback set is complete. It’s a selection drawn from the complete ?? Journals of André Gide translated by Justin O’Brien, but published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1948/49. And I only have volume 3 of that edition. [Update: I’ve since ordered the other three volumes of the original hardback edition. Update: and they’ve arrived (!) ] …

let’s try this again : I’d begun reading the paperback (abridged) version of Gide’s Journal and so, this morning, I flipped through the pages I’d already read, paying special attention to the passages I’d marked and on p. 20 I find that Gide describes precisely what the last ten or twelve days has been like for me : Oh, if only my thought could simplify itself! . . . I sit here, sometimes all morning, unable to do anything, tormented by the desire to do everything. Yes, that’s my situation, I want to do everything, I want to read everything, write everything, play all the songs in my musical library, but one must choose, one must pick a single thing and focus on that, or nothing gets accomplished. / The first lesson in my online jazz piano course was this : do NOT chase more than one rabbit at a time. Also, make sure you’ve actually caught the rabbit and put him in the cage, before you chase after another. What my piano instructor actually said was (in the style of Confucius) : “He who chases many rabbits, catches no rabbits.” My expansion of this saying derives from my personal experience : for about three weeks, I worked every day on interval arithmetic, it’s the equivalent of learning the multiplication tables. A jazz pianist has to know how to figure intervals at lightning speed. For the pianist there are three aspects to knowing : intellectual, tactile, and aural. I can know that the fifth above C is G, but I should also know what that feels like with my hands on the keys, and when I strike the notes, I should know what a fifth sounds like, not just to know that I’ve figured correctly, but when one is improvising, one needs to hear before one strikes the notes, the addition has to be done before the notes are heard if one wishes to play well. But three weeks was only how long it took for my intellect to learn+memorize the intervals. I should have spent three months on this rather than just three weeks.

Back to what Gide wrote in his Journal (1893) : “I have twenty books before me, every one of them begun. You will laugh when I tell you that I cannot read a single one of them simply because I want so much to read them all. I read three lines and think of everything else …” That is so true! My study is cluttered with hundreds of books of which I’ve read the first twenty to a hundred pages. When will I finish them all? Gide ends this paragraph-long lament of indecision paralysis with : “But I had promised myself to spend an hour at the piano.” Yes. That too.