by John

Notes while listening to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth

The first record I ever bought was a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #6. It was 1968, and I found myself alone in Pretoria, South Africa. I listened to the music on a cheap stereo record-player. I heard it on the car radio a few days ago. It took me back to those years in the late 60’s. The brooding music resonated deeply. I was lonely then, in an inarticulable way. I had chosen that life and so the music simply described what I had chosen.

Several years later, my mood had changed as I listened to Tchaikovsky: Not his Sixth, but Swan Lake. I had met a woman who introduced me to the ballet. We listened to it together. I found the music liberating. Both set me on a new path.

The path, a long one, took me to Kingston, Ontario, to the shores of the St. Lawrence River and Fort Henry in Canada, a fortification constructed during the War of 1812 to protect the Kingston Royal Naval Dockyard on Point Frederick from a possible American attack.

Year after year, we would take our children to a Sunset Ceremony at the fort for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with canon, that temporarily obliterated any recollection of the Pathétique or Swan Lake. But today, the memories return and, with the help of the internet, I access a 2017 performance of the Sixth under the baton of Kirill Petrenko and, in our living room a long way from the little parish rectory in South Africa, I watch and listen to the Berlin Philharmonic.

And so, I listen once again to the Sixth as I type these notes and learn that Tchaikovsky died at age 53, just nine days after he conducted the premiere of his final symphony in 1893 in St. Petersburg.

And here he lies with his sadness and his secrets on a sunny autumn day with Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov and Mily Balakirerv.

by John

When Bats Come Out To Fly

This is the thin time
in desert’s diaphanous dusk
when blackened shapes
stand stark against a liquid sky
faintly marked
by the early evening star
pinning night’s silk shroud
over a dying day.

This is the thin time
in twilight’s warp
when bats come out to fly.
Like shuttles weaving frantically,
they stitch up vespers veil
and pick at threads of memories
embroidered long ago
in the fraying fabric
of a slowly fading mind.

This is the thin time
between the chatter of the quail
and the coyote’s fearful cry
when our gilded mountains
turn their greasy grey
and I slip quietly
into darkness
at the dying of the day.

by John

Memory of a Dance

She broke away
from our table in Piraeus
to dance to the Bouzouki
at the café on the bay.

She was drawn by the music,
by the taught metallic beat,
of the Kalamatianos
with its diastolic flow,
the flywheel of a watch,
moving clockwise, anticlockwise
to the heartbeat of the dance.
Arms entwined, all were one
like a crab from the Aegean
scuttling, scuttling to the pulse.
And I loved her as she laughed
in white cottons bought in Naxos
as her scarf from Santorini
scattered colors in the air,
and she danced the Syrtaki
as if no-one else was there.
And I watched as if forever,
loving voyeur lost in time,
like a painter freezing motion
in an icon byzantine.

And though the music’s ended,
my Athena is still dancing,
dancing, dancing, dancing
across the canvass of my mind.

by John

Looking Up Looking Down

Left: M31, Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda       Right: Gastropod exoskeleton, Sanibel Island

Seashells are the exoskeletons of mollusks such as snails, clams, and oysters. They have three distinct layers and are composed mostly of calcium carbonate with only a small quantity of protein. These shells, unlike typical animal structures, are not made up of cells.

I picked up the shell shown above on Sanibel Island. It is the exoskeleton of a gastropod, more commonly known as a snail, and is part of a large taxonomic class within the phylum Mollusca. The class includes many thousands of species of sea snails, as well as freshwater snails, limpets, and land snails, second only to the insects in overall number. The fossil history of this class goes back about 500 million years. There are 611 families of gastropods known, of which 202 are extinct and appear only in the fossil record. They are the most highly diversified class of mollusk with 60,000 to 80,000 living species.

Often, I look up and marvel at the Milky Way, its 400 billion stars, and the galaxies beyond, the faint smudge of Andromeda. Today, I look down and marvel at the beauty of a very small part of the Milky Way: The delicate exoskeleton of a snail.

Calm is the soul that is emptied of all self,
In the eternal moment of co-inherence.
A happiness within you – but not yours.

Dag Hammarskjöld

by John

A Meditation in May

On the right:
Lilian picked four peony blossoms from the bush outside the bedroom window and put them in a vase. I photographed them against the backdrop of flowers in the bush from which they had been picked. I could not remember ever having taken a similar photograph before.

On the left:
Quite by accident, I came across this earlier photograph. It shows the peony blossoms outside the window although, because the image is intentionally indistinct, the flowers could just as well be inside the window. The photograph was taken almost a full year before the second photograph on the right.

Does not remembering the earlier image mean that one is living in the moment? Then, some loss of memory can be good.

The image on the right is delicate, almost fragile. That is how life sometimes is. On the left, the image is dark and indistinct but, if we look carefully, we see how the sunlight has caught the top of the flowers. We, too, are sometimes caught by passing light.

I now remember that the peony is an early bloomer: An early splash of color in an otherwise still green garden. And I remember that it doesn’t last long. It is here in the moment and then it’s gone. Like us.

by John

Mahler Revisited

Left: Mango Tree & Music Right: Lilian, South Africa, 1972

Resurrection

My girlfriend liked Mahler,
his second symphony:
She listened to it often, so I did too.
It made her think of the child she lost.
It made me think of her,
so I bought the record for myself
and played it looking out of my
apartment window at a mango tree.
I thought, ‘this is the only place in the
universe where Mahler’s music floats
among the branches of a mango tree.’
The Resurrection
is what they call the Second.
These long years later,
I listen to it, and every time
I feel her pain,
and watch the mangos
as they slowly ripen.

Fifty-two years later:

Left: Severance Hall, Cleveland. Right: Lilian viewing Mahler score

The Cleveland Orchestra owns the only complete, original, handwritten score of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 2. Mahler wrote it between 1888 and 1894 in his characteristically bold musical script, mainly in intense black ink, with some parts in brown or violet. It is a working manuscript with inserted leaves, corrections, deletions, and revisions. It was purchased by Herbert Kloiber, a trustee of the Cleveland Orchestra, for about $6 million in 2016 and donated to the orchestra.

by John

View from the house

Once or twice every few weeks, I record something in my View from the House file. Just a few lines. Sometimes, it might just be a cloud, or a full moon shining through the branches of an oak in winter, or workers on the street. Yesterday, I wrote about the female cardinal feeding her chicks.

Mid-morning, a female cardinal flies in and out of its nest in the trumpet vine outside the sunroom window. There are three chicks, not yet ready to fly.

In the early evening, a snapping turtle struggled up the small embankment from the creek behind the house. As the creek would soon be dry now that the rain has ended, I carried it down to a nearby pond where it scrambled into the vegetation in the shallow waters. Snapping turtles are territorial by nature. Something to think about as the turtle disappeared from view.