Summer Countdown: Day 11

Posted on by Dale

Step one to re-entering productivity: take my laptop back upstairs to the study. I’ve been sitting in the living room and it’s hard to write productively when I’m using the thing actually in my lap. And it’s impossible to compose.

Not that this produced anything. My batteries are still depleted. The only valid stuff I did today was more reading in Opening to Inner Light and Cleansing the Doors of Perception.

Now I’m off to visit GHP. Tonight is the dance concert, along with the ongoing student art exhibition, and tomorrow night is the Prism II concert. Then Saturday morning, as soon as everyone has gone to majors, I will come home.

Work may resume on Sunday. Maybe.

Summer Countdown: Day 12

Posted on by Dale

Today (yesterday —the time slippage in these posts is always a confusing thing for me) was a regeneration day. I nursed my continuing gastrointestinal distress—I’m seeing the doctor again on Wednesday (today), thank you—and read, mostly Opening to Inner Light. Also, a new book came in the mail, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: the religious significance of entheogenic plants and chemicals, a collection of essays by Huston Smith, author of the classics The World’s Religions and Forgotten Truth: the common vision of the world’s religions.

Inner Light (Metzner) is a pretty powerful little book. As I posted previously, the first chapter’s metaphor, that of waking from a dream, was instrumental in helping me see my way out of a significant funk that I had gotten myself into. Already, then, the author’s purpose, providing a summation of the world’s metaphors and symbols as structures for psychological transformation, has borne fruit.

The second chapter’s metaphor is that of lifting the veil. “Now we see darkly,” “I was blind, but now I see,” that kind of thing. Is there any interest in the readership for a running commentary on each of the metaphors? It might make for some interesting discussion, either here or in real life.

I also began to work assiduously on my backlog of Middlemarch readings. This is my daily email from dailylit.com, and I fell off my morning readings back at the beginning of July. I don’t remember why, but I just didn’t feel like reading about those people one morning. And then the next morning. And then before I knew it, I had four or five days of reading to catch up on. And then nearly a month.

So yesterday, I dove back in and found that Eliot still delighted me, and that I was just as involved in the working out of her issues and themes as before. I’ve set myself a daily reminder to read three of these emails every day until I’m caught up.

Other than that, just basking and meditating. Tomorrow I return to GHP to catch a couple of performances and to retrieve some personal belongings, and then we are hosting some Chinese youth who are in town with the Hangzhou Welan High School Folk Chinese Youth Orchestra. This is the group who was to come last summer but made the fatal error of agreeing to try to play Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. It was very kind of them, especially considering the effort was futile, given that they are a traditional instrument group and in no way could approach the Western chromaticism of that particular piece, and it unfortunately dragged them into the curse on my music: the tour was canceled due to an H1N1 outbreak in their province.

What I’m saying is that though I’m in good spirits and have no excuse not to get down and work on something, I may not have the time until Monday or later. And then we head up to Abingdon, VA, for the Festival. And then I go back to work. There is not enough time, not enough time.

Summer Countdown: Day 13

Posted on by Dale

My brain continued in lockdown mode. There was no point in attempting any composition or painting. I had thought I might get by with the color exercises, but it seemed that this simple—ha!—task would require too much thought.

So since the weather was clearing up, I decided to toil in the earth. I went outside to the labyrinth.

[ed. note: you can skip to the next section if you like]

I began clearing the “planting area” of the patio. This patio is an area on the upper level of the back yard that I plan to level and pave over with stones. The side next to the fence will be a raised planting area with flowering plants. I’m not a big fan of flowers; they require a lot of care to look good, and as the Japanese might say, they “hot up the blood.” The labyrinth is all green. But the patio is Ginny’s area, a kind of a sitting/dining area that is not the labyrinth, and she likes flowers, so flowers it is.

Because of one unexpected expense or the other, we can’t afford the patio this summer, but I have plants that need to go into the ground: the cute little bat-faced cuphea plant known as “Tiny Winnie” (in honor of our late pet), and a couple of gardenia bushes given to us by our neighbor in the same vein. So I figure I will do the planting now and the paving later.

To that end, I mowed down the weeds in the area; transplanted a couple of irises that our former neighbor planted on the bank between our yards and which now sprout in the decline under the current neighbor’s fence; weeded the vinca major from the monkey grass; and sprayed Round-Up on the vinca major on the decline. Kill it, kill it all.

At some point I will have to figure out how to build the retaining wall for the planting area, but that’s for another day.

I also moved the remaining bricks from their perch over behind the firepit area over to the paving brick staging area. That counted as today’s exercise. Then I mowed down all the undergrowth in that area. It’s an area for which I have no defined landscaping plan, but now it’s clear at least, clear enough for me to start looking at it. Also, it reminded me that I need to install the bamboo fencing along that last stretch of the chainlink now that the diseased pecan tree has been taken down in the other neighbor’s yard. (Taken down, yes, but not removed. I don’t know what that’s about.)

All in all, a fun afternoon of sweat and toil.

All this is boring, I know, but it was therapeutic. I regained a sense of purpose and what our 19th century friends would call vital energy. It was fortuitous then that the mail brought the painting DVDs I had ordered a couple of weeks ago, and a book: Opening to Inner Light: the transformation of human nature and consciousness, by Ralph Metzner, ©1986.

I decided to stow the DVDs for the time being and plunged into Inner Light. This is a book that was referenced in a monograph I’m reading, and its author’s thesis is that “metaphor, symbols, and analogies are essential to describing [psychological transformation] and that there appear to be about a dozen or so key metaphors—from dream to awakening, from captivity to liberation, from fragmentation to wholeness—and symbols for tranformation that occur over and over in all major cultures and sacred traditions throughout the world.”

You can see the appeal.

Preface, introduction, first chapter/metaphor: “Awakening from the Dream of Reality.” And there was a quote from fourth-century Christian theologian Gregory of Nyssa:

All who are seriously concerned with the life of heaven must conquer sleep; they must be constantly awake in spirit, driving off, like a kind of drowsiness, the deceiver of souls and the destroyer of truth. By drowsiness and sleep here I am referring to those dream-like fantasies which are shaped by those submerged in the deceptions of this life: I mean public office, money, influence, external show, the seduction of pleasure, love of reputation and enjoyment, honor, and all the other things which, by some sort of illusion, are sought after vainly by those who live without reflection. For all those things will pass away with the flux of time; their existence is mere seeming; they are not what we think they are.

Well. This is not a new idea to me, of course (vid. Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, et al.), but it was a gift from the universe. It enabled me to rethink my state of funk and almost miraculously shed it. (Sorry to be so opaque about the issues which have been troubling me, but this is a blog, not a diary.) I was able to cook supper and build a fire for the evening and peacefully contemplate my perfect life. A good thing.

Summer Countdown: Day 14

Posted on by Dale

I got nothing done. It was a rough day, and you’ll pardon me for not going into details here on the World Wide Web, and the only thing I could manage was the anodyne of surfing the web. There are those of you who might have noticed the strong uptick of forwarded URLS.

We traveled to Valdosta last Thursday to visit GHP. We saw Mike Funt’s theatre students perform two “silent movies” and a “Bat,” i.e., an in-the-dark improvised radio play. And it was good, of course. The slapstick movie was quite charming, and the table chase sequence was primo.

We also stayed to participate in the annual Hogwarts Event. We had more than 24 people take part this year, including a house elf: Tom Fulton, math, had his whole family dressed as the Malfoys, including his two-year-old son. The students, as usual, went nuts.

An interesting event: the two RAs portraying Harry and Draco are engaged (I know, the slashfic writes itself), and as I was passing through the lobby they were working on their wands. (We build our own wands.) They asked if I had a moment, and I sat. They wanted to know if I would officiate at their wedding next June. I was quite touched and immediately agreed. Details to follow.

And yes, I am as confused as you are as to how this works, since the state of Georgia does not recognize such a marriage. But it was a good part of the weekend.

Group portrait:

We were still missing Harry, Draco, Cho, and Cedric at this point. They still had desk duty.

Summer Countdown: Day 15

Posted on by Dale

I wrote another Rondo fragment. This one turned into a fugue, which I don’t know that I can sustain. Given the nature of the piece, perhaps that’s as well. How about we just call it a fugato?

Stephen Czarkowski—he of the Symphony in G catastrophe—has requested a cello sonata for his own self for next year. He has some gigs lined up, he says. Sure, fine, why not? I figure I can use the sketch for The Labyrinth in Snow for the slow movement; it had a lovely cello theme, and it won’t be hard to convert the rest of it into piano accompaniment. I wonder when he wants it by? And how long should it be?

I’m writing this on Friday morning, at GHP. I’m about to head down to the Fine Arts building, where Maila Springfield will be playing with her trio for the jazz majors. She will not be performing the Preludes, not having had the time to get them ready, but she is prepping them for a tour the trio is doing next year. Which means I need to go ahead and get Nos. 5 & 6 written. (She says she particularly likes No. 3. I agree with her.)

Summer Countdown: Day 16

Posted on by Dale

I took a stab at Rondo. I got one fragment done. (I’ve decided I’m going to work in fragments then sew them all together.) This one is quite cute, although I’m not sure how it’s going to fit into my plan of having the music go astray. More work is required.

I revamped this blog to include the material generally found over on my “real” website: all my music, the Arts Speech, the Invocation, and my translation of Marriage of Figaro. You might want to check it out over there on the left. There’s probably music you haven’t heard before. In fact, I still need to provide mp3s for a lot of the church choir music. That can be a distraction for another day.

Finally, I picked up the labyrinth after the storm. Lots and lots of tiny twigs all over the place. I’m now ready for a fire, if I ever have time to be back there any time soon. We leave for Valdosta this afternoon through Sunday , so no countdown days until I get back.

Summer Countdown: Day 17

Posted on by Dale

Not very productive at all yesterday. I wasn’t feeling well, so I just moped about.

I did a concerted search for a hard copy of “Children of the Heavenly Father,” but I cannot find one. I don’t know why I’m obsessing about this particular piece. I think that if I found it I would find that it was not that good to begin with.

In rummaging through the attic boxes, I did come across a handwritten score for a Gloria I wrote many many years ago, before 1980 at least. I know this because it ended up in the Street Scene in Christmas Carol: “Isn’t it cold today? Weather fine for Christmas day!” I think Marc wrote those lyrics.

Perhaps I should reconstruct Christmas Carol instead?

In other news, Craig’s daughter Kathryn has accepted some of my raw paint-sketches for the ELP for an exhibit at her gallery. The show is called “If a Body Catch a Body,” and opens August 7. I’ll keep you posted.

Summer Countdown: Day 18

Posted on by Dale

I finished Prelude (no fugue) No. 2. How’s that for productive? Actually, I started work on it, decided it was too pretty, and started over.

Prelude (no fugue) No. 2: score | mp3

It’s actually more vigorous than I originally planned for it to be. The original idea was for a more gentle, gracioso, melodious thing, to become between the outrageous faux-counterpoint of No. 1 and the hyper-Romantic No. 3. Oh well. Now everyone has to wait until No. 4 to take a break. Because Nos. 5 & 6 are going to be tough for everybody.

I got bored waiting for our yard man to show up, so I devised a cover for Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet.

It occurred to me that I don’t really have a page for my instrumental music. Over on my “real” webpage, I have a page for my choral stuff, and not even my newest of that. I’m thinking of making the blog my web page, period, and adding a page for all my music. Because of course the only reason we haven’t heard more performances of Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet is that people haven’t had a page upon which to find it.

Come to think of it, we haven’t heard any performances of PB&SQ. Michael Giel, what is wrong with you?

I’ve had on my to-do app, for days now, to reconstruct “Children of the Heavenly Father,” the ill-fated hymn arrangement that should have warned me off composing years ago. Why “reconstruct,” you ask, as well you might? Because it got left behind on hard drives gone by, on musical software so quaint that the young folk marvel that we could do more than bang the rocks together.

I tried half-heartedly to find a physical copy yesterday, but if the music exists —and I know it does, I just know it —it’s in a box of all the stuff I wrote for the Presbyterian choir, in the attic. Too hot, too icky. Much easier to find the computer file, I thought.

Right. You know those geeks who still have every computer they ever owned? That’s me. Almost. I did give my 7500 (is that right?) to the theatre, and I had even revved up the chip to a G4, baby. But I still have my SE/30, my PowerBook 190 (oh yeah, I had a laptop), my blue-and-white G3/G4. I would have my old MacBook Pro, but it was stolen last November.

So I sought out “Children of the Heavenly Father” on both the old PowerBook 190 and the SE/30. Neither would even come on. Well, to be fair, the SE/30 is over 20 years old, and the last time it even ran I had to give it a whack on the side to get the solenoid started. But still. It was heartbreaking.

Even I had been able to get either of them running, what then? None of the cables would feed into anything I have in the house, needless to say. And where would I have found a 3.5” floppy? And then how would I have gotten it onto my MacBook Pro?

And finally it dawned on me—even if I find the file—it’s from some music software so quaint that the young folk marvel that we could do more than bang the rocks together.

I drove to Sam Flax in Atlanta— and trust me, I only do that when nothing local will serve—to pick up my gallon of White Absorbent Ground that they had ordered for me. I also got a color wheel (thanks, Diane!), a tube of raw sienna (mine had completely dried up on me), and a palette knife. I used to have one—I probably could put my hands on it if I had to (ah, but I was wrong about where I thought it was)—but it was never as elegant or precise or as flexible as this lovely thing is.

Then back to Newnan, where I charmingly thought that perhaps a light rainfall —perhaps—might intrude on the evening, so I went ahead and set up candles and the makings of a fire in the labyrinth. Then upstairs I went to check on mail while dinner was in the microwave, and then back downstairs to find the deluge upon us.

I dashed outside to grab all the candles and cover the firepit. Modesty must draw a curtain over the state in which I finished my labors. I sat awhile in the torrents of water, luxuriating in that unrepentant sense of being completely wet when you have no reason not to be dry, until I realized that all that lightning was occurring right over my head. I tiptoed back up to the house, stripped off what remained, and toweled dry.

I actually repeated this, believing the storm to be past, although I was more sensible than to get a fresh change of clothes drenched. After the second rain-soaked reverie, however, I was done.

Throughout all of this, I completely forgot about our bedspread, freshly washed and hanging out to dry on the deck.

Summer Countdown: Day 19

Posted on by Dale

Yesterday I got up at an ungodly hour to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Clarkesville, GA, for my One Day Art Camp.

For those who are coming to this late, here’s what the deal is. Forty years ago, in the summer of 1970, I spent eight weeks on the campus of Wesleyan College in Macon as an art major in the Governor’s Honors Program. Although art majors all had to cycle at one point through all three of the components— painting/drawing, sculpture, and textiles (hey, it was the 70s)—we could focus on one. I chose painting/drawing with the ever-wonderful B. Diane Mize.

The woman was amazing. She opened my eyes not only to new ways of thinking about art , and I famously say that while GHP taught me I was not an artist—which she disputes—she taught me that the creative process was at the root of everything we do. For that matter, she showed me what the creative process is.

I had not seen Diane since May of 1976, when in one of those scenes that you would disbelieve as too contrived if it were in a movie, I bumped into her in the bookstore at UGA one month before I graduated with a BFA in theatre. On the final night of GHP, six years earlier, I had performed with my theatre minor group to such acclaim that Diane had asked me if I had considered theatre instead of art as a major. Smart woman.

Three or four years ago, I was in my dorm apartment at GHP and somehow I thought of Diane. I googled her and for some reason found her Amazon wish list. I sent her a CD in gratitude for everything she did for me—you know, change my life forever, that kind of thing—and we re-established contact. This spring, I suggested that since I have the summer off, I should visit her and let her teach me all the things I failed to learn forty years ago.

And that’s what I did yesterday.

Once again, she has changed my life. She looked through my sketchbooks. She took notes on what my goals were and what my problems were. She showed me ways of looking at color—and mixing color —that render those tubes of Flesh Tint largely irrelevant. She set up an exercise in color mixing that will take me the rest of the summer to get halfway through. (As she puts it, a musician has to learn scales and etudes; why haven’t artists been trained the same way?)

She showed me a few tricks of the trade in drawing and gave me the title of a book—another book—that I need. She had me mixing paint and matching colors. (Jeff, did you know that part of you is lilac? No, not that part.) She looked over all my paintings and agreed with me on the good ones.

And the entire day she laughed at my feeble attempts and my frustrations, taking great joy in my revelations and my stubbornness and my acid struggles. It was enormous fun, and by the end of the day I was exhausted. I seriously wondered whether I would be able to drive home without falling asleep. But I was too exhilarated from what I learned. I flew home.

So did I get anything done yesterday? Not if you expected to see completed still lifes or portraits. But in most respects it was the most productive day of the summer.

Summer Countdown: Day 20

Posted on by Dale

After running errands and generally being distracted for much of the morning, I was finally able to settle into the labyrinth and do the first leg of the color exercise Diane had sent me.

Simplicity itself: grid of 1-inch squares, seven across, five down. Put a pure color in the top square. Put a barely tinted white in the bottom square. Devise the middle tone. Devise the second one. Devise the fourth one. Repeat.

It was of course not difficult, although the yellow ochre defied me in the upper, darker half. Alas, I didn’t have time to do more than the “lights,” and I don’t think I want to schlep all that stuff to St. Simon’s with me. I’ll have to see if I have time when I get back on Saturday.

In our Summer Countdown, we now have a break of four days. I’ll be at St. Simon’s with my lovely first wife, serving as arm candy as she swans about being important.

This is not to say that I won’t get any work done. I’m taking my sketchbook, and my goal is to fill the last 20+ pages at the beach before heading off to Diane’s house on Sunday. In fact, I’m taking my new one with me as well. I may be ambitious.

I’m also taking my laptop and graphics tablet so that if I get inspired I can work on music as well, although I really don’t see that happening. I work better with my keyboard, and I’m not taking that. Or maybe I will.

In other Lichtenbergian distractions, I bought a timer for the water in the labyrinth so that the new grass plugs can have their daily watering while I’m away. We’ll see if this keeps the grass alive and flourishing.