Halp.

I just got back from a piano lesson.  Evening sunshine streams through the vertical blinds, the clock ticks, and I'm sad.

My playing was half-assed - no, it was flaccid.  Half-assed implies some degree of apathy, and I certainly wasn't apathetic, I was impotent.  My highs were uninspiring, my passionates were fakely urgent, my darks were a sort of murky gray-brown.  I failed, despite my intentions.  I finished the Chopin and just sat there on the bench, my soul completely and utterly distant from the piano, not wanting to touch it and sully it for a very, very long time.

Then, Kokopelli started talking.  Not about my playing, but about the music.  She reached out to the piano and separated the melody from the harmony, and with that one hand, delivered more feeling than I've mustered this entire day.  Maybe this entire week.  The music exists in-and-of itself as a message that doesn't have to be translated.  When we hear a song, sometimes we translate it into words, assign adjectives to it, anthropomorphize it to explain it or describe it to somebody else - but in doing so, we're just circumscribing it.  It's like an early hominid grunting and leaping and gesturing to describe the splendor of a a sunset skyscraper to his fellows after being swallowed by a quantum whirlpool and experiencing 2010 for a minute or two.

The fascinating thing is, even the message - the song - in its endlessly variant repetitions - never, ever, ever repeats itself truly, and yet each repetition is a separate truth.  My flaccid rendition told the truth right then and there, told it loud and clear - or rather, murkily, crappily, softly scrambling and fumbling with ineptitude like a blind ox through a muddy paddock.  I can't channel Chopin and feel exactly what he was feeling, play exactly how he played it when he scribbled that final glissando with a flourish.  I can only try to do so, try to interject my own feelings in there in order to connect with him, and I do, and it's my duty as a pianist to abandon my feelings and act upon how I'm translating his song, in his spirit, while still expressing my own integrity, telling my own story - - - ah.