52 :: tabula rasa :: 6/29/01
Arvo Pärt: Estonian composer: "In the Soviet Union once, I spoke with a monk and asked him how, as a composer, one can improve oneself. He answered me by saying that he knew of no solution. I told him that I also wrote prayers, and set prayers and the texts of psalms to music, and that perhaps this would be of help to me as a composer. To this he said 'No, you are wrong. All the prayers have already been written. You don't need to write any more. Everything has been prepared. Now you have to prepare yourself.'"
It's late. The auto shops and industrial supply warehouses outside Thomas' window are silent and dark. The room glows with the light from a screen. Arvo Pärt is on the stereo, a piece entitled Tabula Rasa. A swarming field of beauty and action; massed layers of strings. And then the layers crack open, revealing behind them— silence. Shaped only by the dull mumble of a prepared piano; the thin voices of one, two violins.
The piece is crushingly sad; it has that capacity for immense sorrow that Thomas has mapped onto Eastern Europe. Pärt, in the ECM liner notes: "When the musicians saw the score, they cried out: 'Where is the music?' But then they went on to play it very well. It was beautiful; it was quiet and beautiful."
Blank slate. A music that is no music. A creator told not to create. Everything has been prepared. There is a comfort to that idea, but, like all religious ideas, the comfort only cushions the first step on a challenging path. Now you have to prepare yourself.
Thomas is checking his e-mail. There are two, one from an e-mail address he doesn't recognize, and one from Lydia. Something seizes in him at the sight of this last one: he knows he has neglected his relationship with her, and he suspects that at some point she will take him to task for it. Perhaps tonight?
Pärt: Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers — in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises — and everything that is unimportant falls away.
What Thomas wants is to dissolve.
There is a discipline involved. This is apparent in the things Pärt says. And it is here where Thomas finds himself the most confused. He has studied drones and trance states, he has recorded his dreams, he has filled notebooks with information, and yet he has found access to no experience that he could genuinely describe as transcendent.
He wonders about sex. He is twenty-seven and a virgin. He had a handful of relatively chaste relationships in high school and then in college he spent most of his time studying, he didn't really pursue relationships very zealously. In his senior year he began to study with Rachel, a pretty, shy young woman who was suffering through the early stages of muscular dystrophy. After graduation they became involved romantically, and they remained so for about a year and a half, but between his timidity and the physical difficulties involved with the disease, they never managed to get to sex.
It was something that she wanted. She told him this on a handful of occasions, but he balked time and time again, and she eventually came to resent his chronic hesitation. He remembers conversations over the dinner table, remembers the tight, clipped voice she would use to speak to him. If you love me you'll work with me on this. He would look down at his plate. These conversations left him with a deep sense of shame, which only compounded his reluctance, which inflamed her frustration, until there was nothing left to do but end the relationship.
He was reassured for a while by his study of magical traditions, which led him to the discovery of the so-called right-hand path disciplines, which advocate sexual abstention. But he is aware also of the left hand path disciplines—which encourage the integration of lovemaking into the pursuit of higher states of consciousness. He has, of course, noticed that people say that sex joins two people in a transcendent unity. And so he wonders if he needs to integrate sex into his discipline. (The drones he's so enamored of combine several parts into a whole.) He has another opportunity now, with Lydia. But when he considers it, attempts to prepare himself, he feels— well, afraid.
Afraid of what?
He opens her e-mail first. It reads:
Hey Thomas, haven't heard from you lately, what's up?
Drop me a line. I just want to know what's going on.
He clicks Reply, and a new blank window opens. He stares at it for a minute, listening to the Pärt build in intensity around him. He doesn't know what to say. He feels like he will, in the end, be useless to her; he feels like he may be best off just leaving her alone. He minimizes the window and opens the other e-mail:
Hi, Thomas. My name is Jakob; I'm a friend of Freya's. She mentioned a while ago that she gave you my number, in reference to a "sound map" project you were working on. I was going to get in touch with you about that, and then I stumbled upon a page of your website where you review a piece of music that's an interpretation of Toyo Ito's Tower of Winds. I've been doing research on the Tower, and I'd be interested to hear the piece, and also to talk to you more about what you think of the relationship between architecture and music. Let me know if you'd be interested in going out sometime and grabbing a drink.
The sound map project: he hasn't thought about that in a while. Maybe working on that will bring him closer to what he wants. Adding a new section to the website.
He looks at his Inbox. There are eighty-nine messages in it. Eighty-nine points of connection with other people and he still doesn't feel like he's discovered what he wants to discover. To entering the world that contains the world. He thinks about the pile of webpages he's created and wonders whether any of it is worth it, what any of it is for. He momentarily fantasizes about wiping it all clean. You don't need to write any more. Everything has been prepared. Now you have to prepare yourself. He believes this. But he does not know how to begin.
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