Learning to be alone

A few scattered thoughts, since I've been dealing with windows installs gone wrong. I never thought I'd live to see the day when an install of linux worked perfectly on a laptop, but windows becomes borked beyond repair. Or perhaps I've had incredibly good luck, with as many windows boxes I get to reinstall in one semester.

In my surfing, I came across this article by Belinda Reynolds. She makes a lot of good points, and ones I often fall into myself. She speaks of a quality of time--one in which the mind is allowed to open and not work according to a set (slightly neurotic) schedule. Of course composers need to be aware of things like deadlines in a wider sense, but the actual act of composition is one that needs a quality of time to develop and work. That's something I needed to hear, while having to cram time for composition in the hours I'm not working.

And with her article, at times I wonder if Thomas Merton didn't write New Seeds of Contemplation with composers in mind:

"Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and beyond all desire, a fufillment whose limits extend to infinity." (81)

Living with opposites

At times, I can't help but feel like I'm being ripped apart between poles. I'm a grad student and academic, but I'm also in the arts. I'm a composer (something requiring a degree of extroversion), but I'm also an "urban monastic," (the contemplative life requiring a degree of introversion.) I'm a gamer geek who buys into Adorno's ideas of high art, and I'm a practicing Catholic dating a guy who's mostly Buddhist/pagan. Needless to say, I like the Benedictine ideal of balance in all things.

This blog article got me thinking about living with dichotomy and contradiction. When I realized I wanted to go into composition, my piano teacher (in college) recommended that I "seek help," since it was egotistical (according to her) to want to express myself musically. Granted, her advice was more than a little unbalanced itself, but at the time it stung horribly.

It's articles like Kosman's, which keep me honest. In composing, there is a need for some sort of expression (whether or not it's a self-expression is another post for another time.) But unbridled self-expression, unchecked by one's relation to others, is the danger of egotism, veering into megalomania. Or put more eloquently by John Rahn: "The megalomaniac egomaniac composer creates a world out of himself, complete with others, but the others are the compositions that are his own creation..." Egomania is as much pride as self-abasement (yeah yeah I know).

The other set of polar opposites I wrestle with involves public and private space. On the one hand, I'm a composer--I share my things with other people. I blog. I'm pretty open about a lot of things in my life to those who know me in the analog realm, and if I'm awake, I'm on various instant messenger protocols. On the other hand, I'm a contemplative and need to be somewhat hidden. I have a journal that doesn't get shared with others, and I have a whole routine which requires significant alone-time. I can't imagine publishing my journals, nor could I let others into the contemplative's realm. Yet, for me, each act of composition is some sort of act of contemplation.

Either my life is one big cosmic joke, or it's a koan of sorts. Maybe the conflict only exists in my perception of it. As a friend, a former Benedictine monk, puts it, a contemplative's life is one of witness, a kind of sacred attention to the other. Perhaps being a composer isn't that different.

Swanie's Bread

Putting this here, because I lost the recipe, then found it again. It's printed out on an email from a close friend of mine, who died last year. Swanie was the chaplain of the school where I did my undergrad, and if anyone's a saint, I'm convinced he is. You just knew there was something special about him. Seems like his recipe popped back into view just when I needed it--not the recipe itself, but a reminder of that friendship. This is the bread Swanie always used during Communion. It's not kosher for Catholic use--sadly--but it's really good.

"I am currently doing half-batches, so here's the recipe in half-quantities."

"Combine

• 1.5 C white flour
• 1.5 C whole wheat flour
• .5 C old-fashioned raw oatmeal [not the quick kind]
• .5 C cornmeal
• .33333 C sugar
• .5 t salt
• .5 t baking soda
• .5 t baking powder

"Mix well
"Add

• 1.5 C buttermilk
• .666666 C oil +/- (now using peanut oil)

"Mix well
Chill overnight
Flour a board
Divide dough into balls larger than a golfball
Flatten with fingers or roll with a pin to form disk
Bake on ungreased sheets about 12" at 350 d
Consecrate
Eat"

The Cloister

Mention the word "cloister," and a host of images come to mind, mostly with long hallways and arched ceilings. In most of the monastic communities I've been to, there's some sort of cloister, whether it's a simple walkway, or something more classical. It defines parts of the monastic enclosure, which can still be seen, either symbolic (a pile of rocks, a small fence, a gateway) or functional (an actual wall with signs requesting that guests respect it.) It's also functional, a way to get from one place to another, without worrying about inclement weather. At the heart of it is some kind of garden or fountain, representing paradise.

The term "cloistered" is also used to denigrate people. It's easy to dismiss someone who chooses a cloistered existence as one lacking common sense, one unable to cope, and a misanthrope. The notion that a cloistered person has renounced the world is an easy stereotype, but one not based in reality. Most of the cloistered monastics I know would argue that it allows them to interact with the world in a different way.

The ideal that one aspires to--at least among the Benedictines I know--is a life of continual prayer, one centered in the Eucharist and always open to God's presence. As an oblate--a lay person who lives according to the Rule of St. Benedict as best as he or she can do--one faces a different,and seemingly harder, set of distractions from this ideal. We have to carve out time for our practices (lectio divina, the Divine Office, some form of contemplation), and our lay lives are hardly conducive or easy to reconcile with our contemplative lives. Some days it feels like being ripped in half between both lives, instead of being perfectly balanced.

But then there comes the realization that the cloister isn't a physical place, but a state of being. One's urban monastic tendencies aren't a hobby or a job, but a way of life. It's realizing in the midst of chaos and a million things vying for our attention that we've chosen the better part, one which can't be taken away or desecrated. For a fleeting instant, there's stillness.

not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue,
not that I thought there was to be no more despair,
but that as if transparent all disclosed
an otherness that was blessèd, that was bliss.
I saw Paradise in the dust of the street. (Denise Levertov, from "City Psalm")