Hi everyone. I had to break from commenting due to a bad back and some problems at home. I'll return to commenting today. This is a little tale about growing up as an artist. (A musician actually.) Much of it is based on actual experience. But some of it is fantasy. (You might say, it's the journey of the soul as well as of the body.) I hope those of you who get inspired by stories of 'how we all got started' will find some inspiration in this. It's not perfect, but I hope it touches something real... I wish you all an inspired week, and I'll return to you galleries today. Be well, and stay inspired, mark * * * Artistic Encounter ...he sat, crouched over the keyboard, a single lantern flickering, his eyes burning, his fingers arched in a bony, exquisite ballet---we knew, even at age 14, that there was no more articulate expression of the beauty and grace of the skeleton than a classical pianist playing a piece masterfully---and tilting his head like a dog, trying hard to penetrate, more and more with each stroke, the music he was creating; finally bringing his ears down on top of his knuckles (!), wincing and moaning because he couldn't get the sounds he wanted: They just didn't happen: They were stuck. So, fed up with his failure, he placed his ears directly on top of the keys, and we cringed: How could he compose like that? Yet, as he played that little scrap of melody over and over, getting more exasperated with each rendition, he finally got what he was searching for: the nucleus of the melody, its nexus; the place where the melody came from, creating that look that every artist knows, the look of "I got it, that's it!". And, having found that moment, he could now write it---ie, finalize it, make it public. And so he did. He madly scribbled the rest of the piece, his pen scratching his manuscript with that oh-so-familiar sound, scratchy and annoying as all hell, yet heavenly to the ears of musicians. We leaned in---careful not to be seen, of course---to watch this gigantic composer finish pieces that would one day capture the paths of the stars and the weight of the galaxies, presenting them to his listeners not as a bunch of sounds toiled and crazed over---which they were---but as jewels unearthed from quarries just as he found them: whole, virginal and untouched. My friend---Bonnie---started to cry. She did her best to hide it, as classical training could be severe, and showing weakness wasn't always appreciated. But I knew those tears: We got tears because we were witnessing our art at its very highest; and we couldn't fathom how a human with all the faults and quirks that humans have could reveal the secrets of the cosmos in a mere melody, a mere art-stroke, or a mere utterance. Yet, as this composer played what he'd just written, Bonnie turned to me, tears cascading down her cheeks, and moaned: "How long before we can do that? Will we ever be able to do that? Ever?" The yearning of the still-developing student. "It's all so near, but all so far..." I wept as well. Fact is, beauty is sometimes too astonishing to believe. So we stood there, holding each other, yearning to be that deep, and marveling at what a single person, so frail and seemingly small, could produce in one anonymous night... * * * So who was this composer? This is the hard part. You're not gonna believe me, but it happened. Here it is: Bonnie and I would always say: "if we could only go back to a composer's time, and sneak into their studio and be a fly on the wall---i.e., watch him or her compose..." If only...But---despite the fear of sounding absolutely crazy---it happened to us that day: It really did. I could tell you that we had a 'vision' (after much conjuring and waving of burning sheaths, in which were transported back 130 years to find ourselves miraculously "plopped" into the study of the great and tempestuous Chopin). But it didn't happen that way. Not quite. We were walking to the train---we were both still in high school, and had to get home for homework, having finished our lessons at the conservatory---when we took a bad turn. There was no crime or anything like that: just a wrong turn. We suddenly found ourselves surrounded by 19th Century cottages, huts and scruffy fields. Horses and buggies clacked in the background; lanterns flickered in the distance; and the language---Spanish (we were in Mallorca where Chopin once lived)---bristled in the cool night air. It was magic. We just stood there---until, that is, we saw a studio with piano music wafting from its windows...could it be? could it be? We'd both studied piano under the massive shadow of Chopin, whose music was so deep, so very touching, and so magical; it was a cornucopia of absolutely perfected melodies pouring out one after the next, and containing such mystery and richness that you heard every joy and every pain from inside it. And his music had enormous yearning too: sounds born in exquisite loneliness, of deep night song; and yet reaching out to any heart willing to receive and hold and keep it... So believe what you will: We wandered into Chopin's study. It was him, too: that long bony nose, that yearning troubled face, his hands (we wanted to touch them!) running across the keys as if they had motors in them...We were there, hiding in the corner and watching him as he hunched over his keyboard, pouring out ballades, nocturnes, polonaises...all of which we knew. We pinched ourselves to see if we weren't dreaming: But we weren't: We we watching Chopin---we, two 14 year old students struggling to compose a 5 minute piece and play a single page by this man---were watching Chopin. Holy freakiing cow. So we watched him, late at night, frail and coughing and wincing as he scratched-out one famous phrase after another, coughing and wheezing from the cystic fibrosis or pericarditis or tuberculosis that would take his life 10 years later (at age 39). We watched him compose feverishly as if knowing that his time was limited, leaning into the keys as if trying to extract every last drop of nectar, and scowling as if the birth of each passage caused him excruciating pain: This was his solitude, his sacred process. Yet it struck us that no matter how many melodies he created, there were more and more to come. They were endless: Each time he found a new one, he found more and more and then more...and we thought, my god: how did he carry so much sumptuousness inside him? Wasn't it a lot to manage? Were we meant to carry all that inside us, and someow miraculously "set it to paper"? I mean, who taught us how to manage the art inside us? And yet, he found that fountain which felt like all eternity were in it. And, as we watched this, we felt such unexplainable yearning: We wanted to scream: "How do you do it? Tell us! Share your secrets! You can't keep them all to yourself!" (As if he even knew how to share them!) "If only he could wave his wand and it'd be ours," we thought. Poof! Ay ay ay...Both of us clenched our fists because the emotion was just too great... And when he finished---when he stopped for the night, leaving pages of works scattered across his piano (which are now among the motherlodes of the repertoire)---we stood there, frozen, not moving an inch. Not because we were violating some hidden law of mixing time periods (his and ours): But because, after hearing his music so many years, to watch him actually compose it was simply boggling. Sigh: As fast as it all appeared, it all disappeared: We walked a few feet, and, poof: We were back in Chicago. We stood there, breathless, wondering if this had just been a dream; and, further, how would we ever explain it without being laughed out of every room. We pinched each other, then hugged each other: "This really happened, right?" we said. (Yes, of course it happened. And I had dinner with Beethoven last week...) Fact was, "we saw Chopin" sounded as ridiculous as "I just ran into Moses." So we couldn't share our secret. I swore, though---me becoming a writer---that one day I'd finally share it. And that's what I'm doing here: We really saw Chopin. True story. We saw him compose his music... * * * Once home, went on to study many of Chopin's works, hoping to touch their depth-of-inspiration by merely seeing those notes on the page. I mean, literally: I'd stroke the notes in the hope that it'd liberate Chopin's actual sounds, his actual performance---the way a surgeon unleashes worlds of their patient's memory by moving an instrument across the furrows of their brains: I'd literally run my fingers across the notes, hoping to do the same. I still do it to this day. Later that year, our teacher placed the famous D Flat Major Nocturne in front of us (Opus 27 Number 2, by Chopin), saying: "This doesn't have a lot of notes, but sometimes it's harder to play the simplest music than the most complex and ornate." You all know that...that sometimes mastering the smallest gestures on a page takes more depth than mastering the most elaborate...As she opened the score in front of us, we thought, "today we'll see a simple work reveal the entire universe..." And as we played, she, like all good teachers, stopped us over and over, pouring over every phrase to convince us that if we played these the right way, it could open the heart like an ocean. And she was right: She reminded us that the glory of being an artist is that even the smallest stroke can reveal the pathways of the stars, while the hugest gestures can be so intimate, they leave us caressed as if by a loved one. She reminded us that doing this most 'useless' of activities---creating and re-creating art---was like walking in the footsteps of heaven which---if it didn't exist 'up there', certainly existed down here; and, as crazy as it was to make art, that heaven made it exquisitely and breathtakingly worthwhile... * * *