They are irresolvable contradictions, arguments that can neither be won nor lost. And so they drift again into the endless conversation, the repartee, which is their form of dreaming. By this, their art defines itself.
They talk of course of purpose. They talk as well of the true meaning of words. And meaning itself, which can be many things, they soon decide. It changes with time. It is in some sense really indeterminate, even subjective. In the end, they realize they are only talking to themselves, of themselves, for themselves. They talk in behalf of no other. For while they have heard much talk about art being universal language, they have grown old enough to know, nothing is universal. The rules of art are only soft clay in the fingers of reality as it percolates in the universe out there and the singular universe they build between each other.
But they do accept: Some realities are more inflexible than others. Such as the cost of things. The things one must do to get anything at all. And then the cost of legal tender: Money. Which might also matter. Especially if the young teenager is dreaming to buy herself a grand piano one day. But how to get there?
She resolves to keep getting better. This translates into hours on her electric piano, which piano is good but not quite good enough for her dreams. Something about the weight of the keys and the soul of its sound. Some days, she plays until her fingers “feel funny”. And then she stops to wonder if she is getting any better. The father says, it is always that way. That is how it is.
Logically, frustration is her only indicator of the rate at which her art improves. Any increase of awareness results immediately in the recognition of her own shortcomings. The better she gets, the more awful her art will seem to sound. And so she learns also to be self-forgiving. Without forgetting that every act of self-forgiveness must be made inside the context of the history of her own body of works.
Today’s work must be heard against previous works. And then they might see if indeed she is getting at all any better. She must never forget: She hears herself differently from how others hear her.
True genius makes art seem to others so easy. It is a form of a trap. For in truth, it is never really easy. Genius recognizes the complexity of the whole process of doing. To get to where she must go, there is a particular path she must take.
It passes through many hours of suffering. She must train her eyes to read the music in front of her. Her imagination must hear the notes before they actually come to be. Her fingers must fall where they should. And all these must be done “without thinking”. Because the total sum of the music, like all art, is a physical embodiment. It is a dance of a sort.
When one plays, the music is a world of its own, not much different from a painting or a string of words as in a poem or a story. The music is a narrative into which the player must lose herself inside a wonderfully lonely world.
The music plays in the mind where the mind is an empty theater. It sounds best in abject loneliness. It is dark even when the eyes are open. Nothing enters there except the art that must be done, the music, as it plays. Nothing enters besides. Not even the dream of a baby grand.
The baby grand will come with time. One must only believe this. To be good enough for one’s highest dreams, one must first claim to be good enough. This is a claim not ever made in the spirit of pride which always asserts the goal over everything else.
Better to make the claim in the spirit of true humility which always calculates in a most pragmatic way the things one must do, the ways one must go through, first, before one gets what one desires.
The baby grand is beautiful thing. But it is only as beautiful as any other dream. Its beauty is amplified because it is a dream. Beyond that, it is only a simple construct they build between each other in the course of a conversation they hope will run into the years ahead of them. But they do decide: This is the object from which emanates the bigger universe of their art.
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