such a small and sympathetic resonance

I am writing from an unfamiliar location this afternoon. It’s raining cold needles today, so the trip to my usual weekend spot seems too far off. The bus stop is an inch under water.  Add to that the sad fact that my preferred (read: ‘closer’) weekend back up spot has been shuttered. Blame the economy. Everyone’s doing it. In the case of back-up spot, it’s actually true. They’ve written out the figures on the butcher paper that blocks out the windows.

At any rate, there were no chairs available here when I got in. None near outlets anyways, and I need one. I took what was available. I am writing on an old broken-down piano. One of those super old, super sturdy venue uprights. Built not only to spill, but to withstand decades of pounding drunken paws, spilled beers, and frequent moving. The thing’s like a mountain of sound, even with the cover closed. I can tell already how out of tune it is. How probably every forth string on the board is out of step with it’s partner. How worn the middle keys must be without looking. I know how much-loved instruments wear. I know the signs and I also know that if you follow the trails of scrapes and bumps— the wending pathways of paper-thin finish that you can almost hear the songs that are burned into each one.

Pretty good for a former percussionist, huh? I wasn’t in the back of the hall because I couldn’t read music, my dears. I was back there because, other than my voice lifting out of my blood and my belly, those were the simplest and most immediate tools for music. Besides, I would urge you all to remember that the piano is technically a percussion instrument. No, I can’t play very well at all. No, that doesn’t bother nor stop me.

The board is loose on this thing, if I type too hard it starts humming, the haunting out-of-step tone settles somewhere in between an E7/D and Cm13. I wish it would settle, or that the bartender would turn up the Talking Heads because there’s no way it can resolve itself gracefully. I pop on headphones and pick through the beginning chapters of the novel I started almost a year and a half ago, realizing that I need to pluck out a sub-plot that never really worked, but that has insinuated itself pretty deeply into the thing. Much like the loose board of strings behind this piece of wood, its every other word is just a half-degree not right. I can’t hear the piano anymore thanks to my headphones, but I can feel the stray vibrations in my wrists. I can tell it’s still doing that. It’s so visceral that my ears hallucinate the sound all over again.

I remove two sentences, smoothing the spaces over with a smaller one, one more on point, but under my computer the vibrations keep rolling. I used to want to be a piano tuner. I would watch the old man work that the school always called. He’d pull down the casing and strum the whole board with his little wrench— blowing C on his pipe. He’d eye the whole thing like it was a vexing anagram and push his glasses down far to the tip of his nose. Then stubby fingers one by one would seek out the pairs and triads of strings to fix them. At any point if the vibrations from the whole board stopped, he’d strum across again. He looked a lot like The Silver Man does nowadays. I suppose that’s fitting.

This is not the way pianos are properly tuned, my friends. But it is the way that novels get written sometimes. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered to my dismay that piano tuners traditionally work on 1-3 notes at a time. I never ‘learned’ how to write, so I’m just going to assume that I am, like that old man, coming at this the hard way. The whole way. The way that requires me to pay far too much attention to the little ripples of sympathy each sentence might have somewhere else in the story. The long way.

Good thing there’s an open outlet by this workhorse piano. I’m totally going to need it.

~ by weltschmerz on March 8, 2009.