Hello again! I hate to realise that I’ve just had the longest break from blogging since I began on the first day of 2010. I know now, though, that I was subconsciously building up to my ‘car crash effect’ post (17 June) for so long that since then I’ve felt I’ve reached blogging saturation. But now, spurred on by a combination of unexpected circumstances, an exhaustingly long period of indecision (revolving around the unavoidable dilemma ‘on which side of the pond shall I live for the next four months?’), an alarming number of train journeys, at last some post-injury cello playing (and consequently more listening now that I don’t have the irrational paranoia that I’ll never be able to play again), a bit of reading and a disproportionate amount of thinking, I’m getting, er, twitchy for some Rabbit action.

For a long time I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why I believe wholeheartedly, though I realise controversially, that music is the superior art form. First off there are some obvious general points that I’ve always thought about, for example that dance relies on music for its existence and that music is more widely accessible than any literature or language-based theatre. But then, whilst listening to music during my seven-hour wait at New York JFK airport for my flight to London back in May, I had a sudden thought that I’ve been revisiting ever since.

I sat listening to whatever music came up on shuffle on my iPod in the usually soulless departure lounge and watching the array of people milling around, who apparently had nothing in common except for a desire to be somewhere other than here, and immediately got the sense that the people and objects within this entire space were now unified. The temporal continuity and structural coherence of the music (we’re talking vaguely ‘conventional’ music here) instantly lent the space a reassuring unity or ‘oneness’, whichever way I turned my head. It was as if music was painting my surroundings, as far as my eyes could see, in exactly the same shade but, owing to the greater complexity and emotional depth of music, the connections I now perceived between space, people and objects became far more meaningful than anything a coat of magnolia could achieve. No wonder music is used in films, worship, football games, birthday celebrations, school assemblies etc. Its ability to bring people together and to create a (real or imagined) common purpose or identity is surely more powerful than any other means (legal means, in any case). Now to stick in my headphones and create an emotional bond with my poor unsuspecting fellow passengers. If it can happen in Taunton train station waiting room, it can happen anywhere.

I’m one of those people that finds the process of writing cathartic and somehow validating of thoughts. It makes sense, then, that I’ve been meaning and wanting to write about the car accident that my Dad and I were involved in, and the impact it has had on me, ever since it happened. But only now, almost 18 months on, having thought and thought to the point of brain saturation and, ironically, having just read the chapter ‘On the Sublime’ in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel, do I feel I’ve done enough thinking and made enough connections to put fingers to keyboard. It’s amazing how reading what someone else has written, even if not directly related to your situation, can speed up the journey to perspective and understanding so significantly. On 6th January of this year, almost a year on from the accident, I wrote in my then six-day-old blog that I would try to explain what I called the ‘Car Crash Effect (or less sinisterly the CN Tower Effect) soon’. What I’m writing now is, finally, my first attempt to put these thoughts into words.

After the accident people sympathetically and understandably made comments along the lines of “you poor thing”, “what an awful thing to happen” and “I can’t imagine having to go through that”, and have usually been more than surprised when I’ve responded with “oh it’s fine”, “the recovery period was the happiest time of my life” and even “I wish that everyone could go through a similar experience, only with less pain, trauma and inconvenience”. Whilst lying on various beds during the weeks after the accident, and afterwards hopping around on crutches and being pushed around in my wheelchair by incredible and long-suffering family and friends, I felt an unprecedented and overwhelming sense of happiness and perspective that, at the time, made no rational sense. My ankle was broken so I couldn’t walk, my thumb was broken so I couldn’t play the cello, I was missing some of my final weeks in Cambridge, I couldn’t celebrate my 21st the way we’d planned and my Dad was in a worse state than I was. Quickly I decided there was no point in telling anybody quite how elated I felt, as the confusion felt by other people would have no doubt only made me frustrated through my not being understood, and others may well have come to the conclusion that I had been mentally as well as physically damaged. My Dad was obviously the closest person to understanding, and I’m sure he always will be.

At the time I put my happiness down to the facts that my Dad and I were still alive, we’d emerged from the accident relatively and almost miraculously well-off and that I was surrounded by a network of genuinely supportive and caring people who had the very best brought out of them. I was also suddenly relieved of responsibility, since I was obviously not being expected anymore to perform the Schumann concerto (which I’d barely started learning) in a few weeks’ time or hand in a first draft of my dissertation (which I’d barely started thinking about). I had the sobering realisation that your complex chain of responsibilities is rarely broken until a major, and usually unpleasant, event occurs in your life which excuses you temporarily from functioning like everyone else. Of course all of the above was true, but I knew there was more to it, and this extra mysterious contributory factor to my happiness has become less and less abstract to the point where I feel it can be grasped, or at least blindly groped.

I knew I was feeling happy, uplifted and optimistic like never before and, despite my new disabilities, able to do more than ever before, which explains why I later felt the need to coin a new term, the ‘Car Crash Effect’. The ‘CN Tower Effect’, something I knew was somehow an equivalent, needs now to be explained. In the December following the accident I found myself driving with Andy and Abby from Rochester, NY to Toronto for auditions, and we decided we couldn’t leave the city without visiting the top of the iconic CN Tower, ‘the world’s tallest freestanding structure on land from 1975-2007′ (thanks Wikipedia). When we reached the top and looked out over Lake Ontario, the thousands of buildings, people and cars and beyond the land that we’d just spent the last three hours traversing, I suddenly sensed the feelings I’d experienced in the weeks after the accident being renewed. They had never gone away, but they were now instantly resurfacing. Why the almost identical extreme feelings on both a hospital bed and hundreds of feet above ground?

I believe that Alain de Botton, with the first clear explanation of the concept of the ‘sublime’ I’ve come across, has pointed me to an answer. The chapter explains that, over the years, writers have agreed on the idea that certain places of great ‘size, emptiness or danger’ provoke ‘an unidentifiable feeling’ (that of the sublime) that is ‘both pleasurable and morally good’. He goes on to describe the sublime as ‘an encounter, pleasurable, intoxicating even, with human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe’. He then discusses Edmund Burke’s theory that sublime landscapes are those that are ‘vast, empty, often dark and apparently infinite, because of the uniformity and succession of their elements’, and suggest ‘power greater than that of humans and threatening to them’. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that in my blog post of 25th March I wrote, having just seen a photo of Golden Gate Bridge taken from up high: ‘Healthy mental perspective can begin with beautiful, broad physical perspective. The world would be a happier place if we all lived on top of a green grassy hill’. Traditionally sublime places are entirely natural, but I know that in many ways my view from the top of the CN Tower could be described not just as beautiful but as sublime, however pretentious and contrived this may sound. In any case, writers on the subject in the eighteenth century, if transported to today’s increasingly built-up world, would surely agree that a largely manmade landscape could prompt an experience of the sublime. Like an ocean, desert or mountain, the Toronto skyline gave a very real impression of power far greater than the sum of its parts.

So, Alain de Botton summarises that ‘sublime landscapes, through their grandeur and power, retain a symbolic role in bringing us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles we cannot overcome and events we cannot make sense of’. Before reading this conclusion I had already started thinking: perhaps I am starting to re-evaluate my accident as a sublime experience. After all, the sublime is not limited to places, but it’s often referred to in, for example, more abstract realms such as music. Here is the final paragraph of the chapter which I think sums things up beautifully and which made me elated once more and probably a bizarre sight to behold when I read it on the train yesterday:

If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone could disagree with this closing statement, whether religious or not. The accident was an event which, by definition, was beyond our control and certainly not driven (so to speak) by malicious intent, or indeed by any intent at all. It makes perfect sense, then, that the feelings provoked in me both after the accident and over Toronto resulted from a then-subconscious acknowledgment that I was limited by powers that were not suffocating and sinister but awe-inspiring, humbling and worthy of respect. Although we should never stop being determined to stretch ourselves, there is something both reassuring and empowering in coming to terms and being happy with our place in the world. By giving over some control of our lives to greater natural (or partially manmade) forces, whatever they may be, the weight of total responsibility and accountability is finally relieved. We can then happily begin to realise that all we can do is make the best of any situation to the best of our constantly evolving ‘imperfect’ human abilities.

Even if this makes no sense to anybody else, and although I tied myself in knots trying to make it coherent, I’m glad it’s been let out. In the interests of safety, perhaps each government of the world should sponsor trips to the top of their country’s highest building rather than skimping on salt on icy roads this winter.

I’m still on an injury-induced break from playing and, as ever, new circumstances have led to new relevant(ish), related(ish) perspectives…

• Musicians should perform more music. Artists don’t just paint the walls of their studios.
• Being satisfied with just playing the notes is akin to an actor standing on stage reading a script.
• Practising for months on end without ever performing (or desiring to perform) is self-indulgent, selfish and, frankly, missing the point. If we waited for a ‘finished product’, the world would be eternally silent. And nobody likes an awkward silence.

[Not to be confused with March 30: 'The Silent Musician']

Musicians should listen to more music. Artists don’t walk around with their eyes closed.

Yet another connection between playing music and living life:

Both should have a balance between planning and spontaneity.

Yet another excuse for my experiments in the kitchen.

This afternoon I sat in an orchestra rehearsal in my normal place but, because of injury, without my cello. Even though the rehearsal did, of course, have my undivided attention, I started thinking about a note I hurriedly made on a list of vague, potentially bloggable ideas a few weeks ago (the Mac sticky note widget is a great invention), which reads: ‘We need to be more like conductors rather than individual players in an orchestra, who too often see one part of the bigger picture and do not empathise’. I wrote this during a period of thinking a lot about the parallels between playing music and living the other bits of life, and how the processes should ideally be symbiotic. ['Symbiosis': A great word which I spent an age trying to recall, defined by my Mac dictionary widget as 'a mutually beneficial relationship', and not to be confused with 'osmosis' which, for some reason, I keep doing, and totally misleadingly gives me mental images of GCSE biology experiments on potatoes.] My experience today has finally inspired me to transfer this thought from sticky to Rabbit…

So often we get so caught up in our own lives (our own instrument’s part) that we forget that others are sharing the same experiences, just from different perspectives, but being aware of how we fit into the bigger picture (the symphony, or whatever) may actually help us along our own paths. At the time of writing the sticky note on this subject I believed that attempting to oversee entire situations, giving equal but inevitably limited attention to each component (being the conductor), would help individuals gain the most valuable perspective. Sitting in my seat today without the challenging distraction of sight reading the music myself, however, I realised that I was in the prime position (similar to that of a musician listening back to their own recording, as discussed in the Feb 4 post, ’Hit pause on ‘perfection‘‘). I was connected enough to my own part of the whole to keep track of the small but important details for which I (or rather my fellow cellos) was responsible, but I wasn’t occupied so much by this part that I couldn’t keep an ear out (or more) for the overall ‘sound-vision’ or corporate goal. It’s certainly not invaluable to experience being the narrow-focused orchestral player or the zoomed-out conductor, but functioning on this middle ground between self-awareness and empathy seems ultimately ideal.

On a tangential note (perhaps a tritone – sorry, terrible geeky music joke), one more concerned with the temporal than the spacial, we should also keep in mind the teleology of a phrase, movement or complete work rather than only concentrate on the single note or chord being played at any given moment. In other words, living life with our longer term goals in mind, in addition to a more balanced awareness of the environment in which we function, can help us make sense of and tolerate the smaller steps along the way, just like my March 19 post (‘Save a goat this Easter‘) asserted that recalling previous personal patterns of mood and perspective can help us understand the present and anticipate or dictate the trajectory of our future.

So, as ambiguous and motiviation speak-inspired as this may sound, perhaps we should all try to live our lives as the Silent Farsighted Potato, I mean, Musician.

…Living life is also like playing solo Bach. You have to find your own comfortable balance between consistency and change.

Such a shame Forrest never made a recording.

When does an appealing personality quirk become an undesirable mental condition?

The answer surely rests on tolerance. For example, it’s lucky our predecessors have been open-minded enough to grant freedom to some of humankind’s most brilliant bipolar minds. There’s a whole lot of music spanning the alphabet and centuries, from Arensky to Zimmerman, Dowland to Ives, which never would have been born had we always mistaken artistic creativity for mental instability.

If anything, reading the seemingly neverending list of bipolar-affected greats makes us feel better about ourselves, and perhaps even innovative, for putting the dog in the fridge and the milk in the kennel.

To continue from my hang-up about originality from Jan 19 (‘You Say Nature and I Say Nurture‘):

Most people, including Albert in Sophie’s World, agree that, once upon a time, in fact once before time, something had to come ‘ex nihilo‘. But, now that the world exists, can pure originality, in thought and action, really exist? Or is there just a cycle of three ‘I’s, imitation, inspiration and (re)interpretation?

Don’t think too hard about this one – someone else will have got there first.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but nobody wants to read a blog about the life of a person who sits in front a computer screen all day writing blogs. I doubt anybody would buy a painting by an artist who never emerged from their windowless studio to see the light of day. By extension, certainly for me, a musician worth listening to is not a musician who camps out in a practise room from dawn to dusk.

Without life, art becomes a science.

Having said that, I should probably stop writing and at least set foot in my practise room today before I turn into the Serial-Blogging Busker.