Late night thoughts on coronavirus, violins, etc




My inbox immunity is low. Still, the message from the Winspear Centre hit home.

Soon after Alberta Health Services recommended on Thursday that large gatherings of more than 250 people be cancelled, the Winspear scratched its March concerts. Helping to flatten the curve means instruments down.

"The health and well-being of our patrons, staff and musicians are of the utmost importance," the email said.

So, for now, the music dies.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that live orchestral music should be maintained in a pandemic. I'm just saying I remember what C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948 in a piece called On Living in an Atomic Age.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let the bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds. 

(Quibblingly, I would substitute riding a bike for playing tennis, and add helping Shelagh make Turkish beans with lamb. I would not include hoarding toilet paper. There should be enough toilet paper to go around.)

Turkish beans and lamb in the making

Of music, Lewis chose to formulate it as listening rather than playing. Etymologically, "listen" carries with it the sense of "paying attention to." Listening to music involves us in a kind of contract. I will give my time and attention in return for an experience, for emotion, for entertainment. Part of that experience is exactly the joy of not playing music, but, instead, receiving it as a gift from the outside.

These days of quarantine have me reaching for a lot more information and data from the outside. I am reading the New York Times more, listening to podcasts more, checking Twitter even more—all for the latest on coronavirus. But I notice, too, that I am being pulled downstairs to the record player more, and listening to Bach more. Upstairs on the Bose, we're listening to Milk Carton Kids more.

And we're even listening to Puccini, who will not accept isolation.



Thank goodness for the nurses and doctors and epidemiologists and public health workers of our time. Thank goodness for the people who share their information. Thank goodness for science. Thank goodness, too, for the artists who give us music. So we can listen and not feel alone together.

It will be exhilarating to have the Winspear back after the chaos.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more