The Irish have an expression, “A Thin Place,” that refers to a location where This World and The Other World meet: a sacred mound, a holy well, or any number of other places. It’s my own opinion that there is also a phenomenon that one could describe as “A Thin Day,” or period of a couple or several days, when This World and The Other World seem to be phasing in and out. I don’t know why these phenomena occur on some days and not others; astrologers could probably tell us, or maybe it has some other scientific cause that hasn’t been discovered yet so that people still think it’s magic, like fire. Or, perhaps, like most phenomena, it is a product of our minds. Hell, maybe it’s the result of seeing both “Ground Hog Day” and “Buckaroo Banzai through the Eighth Dimension” within a 24-hour period; Wherever You Go, There You Are, and are and are and are.
I began the day yesterday pondering the passage of time, as a young friend whom I had met when she was about 16 turned 24 and, rather than being taken out to brunch, made brunch for everyone else. We went to her new apartment and I looked at all the pictures on her wall, of various ancestors and family members. She has an obsession with J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan, and a bookcase shelf full of his books. She has more light and youthful spirit and grace than Tinkerbelle, and yet all around her, ancestors look kindly down. Not just from the walls, from which their visages smile, but in the abundance of inheritance: Grandpa made the furniture cabinet, and a strange canteen-shaped ceramic pot that belonged to Grandma hangs curiously in a macramé-style hanger, dangling precipitously over the unwitting head of the potential victim sitting in the chair underneath it. Time has passed; she has lived in West Texas for years, but her parents live in Houston now, her brother is fighting in Iraq. Just yesterday she was a little kid learning Irish fiddle, now she is a graduate student writing a thesis about the medieval fiddle called the vielle, and makes killer cinnamon buns and biscuits and oatmeal that is exactly the right texture. Last summer she went to Vancouver Early Music and studied medieval music with Sequentia; just yesterday I did the same thing, or was it two decades ago?
In the afternoon, I went to a concert given by some of my colleagues. One of the pieces was a 20-minute tour-de-force for electronic tape and piano, played brilliantly by one of our theory-composition colleagues who did not write the piece, but interpreted it with a beauty and depth that was awe-inspiring. The piece had been written as a meditation on the death of the composer’s sister; the sonic landscape was rich and varied and intense and drew upon everything from mathematical ratios to Zen chant. I cried during it and was speechless at the end, until I remarked to Coyotebanjo that “for a person with synaesthesia, it was about as intense as an acid trip.” Synaesthesia is a phenomenon experienced by people for whom the stimulation of one sense produces a response from another sense: the texture of an object produces the sensation of a taste in the mouth, or colors have smells, or in my case, sounds produce vivid visual images. That piece was followed by another compositional tour-de-force, a four-movement piece by a very talented colleague based on the story in the Lotus Sutra of the Dragon-King’s Daughter, who reaches Enlightenment at the age of 8. The piece included dancers and a huge screen onto which beautiful abstract graphics were projected. At the end of the concert I was completely exhausted by the intensity of the experience.
In the evening, C went to rehearsal after preparing a whole bunch of food with which to make home-made pizzas for a little Super Bowl party. The Super Bowl is a little weird for me, because my father, who loved to watch the Super Bowl and used to look forward to it every year, died the night before Super Bowl 1997, 13 years ago. He had mentioned to my sister and my mother several times that week how much he was looking forward to watching it. I figure he either missed it or had a ringside seat… but I think of it every year. After my Dad passed away, I said to my Mom and sister that my Dad had told me several times during his life that when he died, he wanted to be marched down the streets with a band playing “When The Saints Go Marching In” like they do in New Orleans. It was then discovered that he had said the same thing, at various and separate times, to both my sister and my Mom. So at his funeral service, his jazz friends, including his 2 jazz-playing sons-in-law, played “When The Saints Go Marching In” while they carried his casket out of the church. This year, the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl; a momentous occasion, since they had never even played in it, never mind won it. The TV cameras showed the crowds back in New Orleans going wild and screaming and dancing on Bourbon Street, and I thought of “When The Saints Go Marching In,” and my Dad, who always rooted for the underdog, and how he would have loved watching the Saints win that game, and how he would have seen the crowds on Bourbon Street and said to me, as he always did, “When I die I want one of those bands to march me to the cemetery.”
During the Saints-Colts Super Bowl game a number of friends came over, including a new friend, a composer from Michigan who also plays Irish traditional music, so we had a lively session. It’s been a long time since we had a session; it’s been painful to play without our friend Coop, who almost left this world after a case of life-threatening and virulent pneumonia had him on a respirator in intensive care for seventy-something days. He is miraculously recovering, to our great joy, and he would have been at the session too, if it wasn’t so cold and miserable out; but he needs to recover some more before throwing himself out into the winter wind. We missed him at the session; but we know he’ll be back soon.
That was all yesterday. This morning it was cold and misty, raining and icy. C sat down with his computer and had an e-mail from his brother; their Mom is in the hospital in Providence.
C’s mother has Alzheimer’s. She’s had it for awhile. After her husband, C’s step-dad, passed away this summer, she had to go to an assisted living facility in Providence. It’s an exceptionally nice one, and we feel fortunate to have found it.
She lost the ability to speak coherently awhile ago. Mostly, she has just walked. She’d get on her walker and just walk, back and forth, back and forth, from one end of the facility to the other, most all of the time when she wasn’t either sleeping or eating.
Sometimes she knows us, or seems to, and sometimes she doesn’t. She seems to know C’s younger brother and his wife, who have been nothing short of heroic during the last couple of years of her decline. Both of Chris’ brothers and their wives have just been incredible through the whole thing, and since we live 2000 miles away we feel a great deal of gratitude and appreciation for this.
So C’s younger brother’s e-mail of this morning explained that their Mom had a sudden decline. She had seemed to be ill, stomach-flu kind of thing, but after stabilizing her in the hospital it transpired that she could no longer walk. This did not appear to be the result of anything physically wrong with her legs. She also will not eat.
I don’t know anything about Alzheimer’s other than the things that I have read since she was diagnosed, but this doesn’t sound good. But, then, what is “good?” What are we supposed to “hope” for in a case like this? I think if it were me, I would hope that I would slip out of my body easily and end the suffering of being in a body with brain full of data and a busted hard drive. I find myself “hoping” these things for her: for peace, for as little suffering and fear as possible, for no pain, and frankly, for escape.
We went to work. I got an e-mail from my Mom. A family friend had lost her father Saturday night. The night before the Super Bowl. Hmmm. I called my Mom, who did not remember that my Dad had passed away the night before the Super Bowl. We talked about that, and about her visit to my Aunt Dottie.
My aunt Dottie has Alzheimer’s. She is my late Dad’s late brother’s ex-wife (got that?). I don’t remember how old she is. My mother goes to visit her once a week. Dottie is, as far as I can tell, in that stage of Alzheimer’s that the local assisted living facility calls “pleasantly confused.” She enjoys my mother’s visits.
Until recently, my mom had also been taking Dottie’s sister to see her occasionally. Dottie’s sister hasn’t been well, and this past weekend she passed away. My Mom went in to visit Dottie, who had not yet been told about her sister’s passing, and found her completely beside herself. For some reason, she had become lucidly aware of the fact that she could not remember anything, and was in a state of panic, as if she had just realized the truth of her condition. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t remember anything. What will I do? If I go somewhere I’ll get lost. What will I do?” My mother spent a good amount of time calming her down: you’re in a safe place, you won’t get lost, everyone here loves you and takes care of you, your son comes to see you and brings you to his house all the time, everything is OK. Dottie was still upset: “But I can’t remember anything. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.” And my mother (the lifelong Congregational Protestant) said to her, “Dottie, you don’t have to. All that matters is now. We have to make a Buddhist out of you—the past doesn’t matter, the future doesn’t matter, just right now.” My mother told me, “I was trying to make her laugh.” And apparently it did. And I laughed too, on the other end of the phone, and cried also, with tears running down my face, although Mom didn’t know that. How do you know the guy sitting next to you isn’t a Buddha? The Buddha taught that all sentient beings have been our Mother; apparently, mothers can occasionally be our Buddhas, too.
My mother wondered if Dottie had had an “ESP” experience of communication with her sister, and if that had somehow set her off; if she had an experience that she felt intensely but then could not remember. I didn’t know. I reminded my Mom that when my Dad’s mother had passed away, one of my cousins told me that the night before she passed, she had told my cousin that she had been visited by her (deceased) brother and sister. These things happen. The day my Dad passed he asked my Mom who “that guy was” who was standing by her; she told him that there was no “guy” there, and he said “Do you mean to tell me you don’t see that guy?” I have always wondered who That Guy was. I have no idea if my mother remembers this. I didn’t mention it to her.
Tonight in Early Music Ensemble we worked on two songs by Thomas Tallis; more images of passing over to the other side, including his deeply beautiful Procul recedant somnia, a setting of a passage from the Compline prayer Te lucis ante terminum. “Lord, as the light subsides at the end of the day, keep us safe from all those phantasmagoric dreams and nightmares and the defilements of the body.” Great monastic 16th century stuff, with some harmonic changes in it that would have made Gesualdo happy. Then on to the next composer’s forum concert, where our new friend had two pieces performed; one inspired by Sufi poetry and a performance of the late, great Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; the other a piece for voice and orchestra inspired by epitaphs from old graveyards in New Hampshire. Both were beautiful and extremely intense meditations on life and death. The second work included a movement whose text was the epitaph of a two-year old. I cried through most of it.
I cry a lot at concerts; if music moves me, the water works start. I used to be embarrassed by this, but I don’t give a damn anymore. Let ‘em see me cry, I don’t care. People don’t become musicians for the money-that’s obvious. Most of us become musicians because at some point in our lives we realize that we’re both stimulated into a transcendent state and struck dumb and senseless by music and can no longer live without doing that forevermore, the thing that before the advent of recording was the most impermanent and ephemeral of all the arts, heard and then gone forever. Just so, you never feel more alive than when you truly realize that you, too, are going to die; in the moment of that fleeting realization, we are in the ultimate “thin place,” where there is in fact no life and no death, just calm clear light mind; where there is no past and no future, just Right Now.
