Saturday
Four for 8am calisthenics. We work (at a much slower tempo) on the A Harmonic Minor exercise and this time, the chords begin to get identified. CG advises me on fingering choices. He suggested anticipating the NEXT chord in making fingering choices. That moment reminded me of a favorite section in Mark Twain’s ‘Life on the Mississippi:
'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'
He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.
I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I waited. By and by he said--
'My boy, you've got to know the SHAPE of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the day-time.'
'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?'
'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it.'
'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?'
'On my honor, you've got to know them BETTER than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.'
'I wish I was dead!'
'Now I don't want to discourage you, but----'
'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.'
'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd RUN them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways. You see----'
'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.'
'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'
'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it. Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?'
Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch, and he said--
'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that country clear away up above he Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore-snag, now.
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.
~~~~~
The TTA team reconvened at 10:30 to follow-up on the challenge BillR gave last weekend. I was out of town, but received an email summary in which B suggested we find an area of work/play we wish to improve and become ‘demonstrably reliable’ in this area. Intending to address the persistent difficulty of coordinating the activity of the right and left hand, I selected this challenge:
By the spring equinox, I aim to be able to play the BillR exercise without looking at the fret board.
I was disappointed that the only participants to take up Bill’s challenge were guitar players (or aspiring guitar players.) I can’t help but wonder what could be possible if the others joined in.
~~~
The afternoon work with Curt & the house team continued the A Harmonic Minor work from the morning, this time in the form of a circulation. More opportunities to study listening to transitions. Then, a circulation based on a bit of Bach. Again, a sense of knowing where my notes belonged. And occasionally even being able to place them there.
~~~~
After a nap, out with CG and TS to see ‘There Will Be Blood’. In so many ways, this is an excellent film, but I walked away feeling the film had missed the mark. Perhaps it is because I looked at the film through its relationships – and found them wildly inconsistent and unbelievable. The main character, while incredibly well-acted – denies his depths even as he suffers from them.
Friday
Still trying to work out the kinks in my day from this 7am gathering at CG’s. Not sure why this is so disruptive, but it is. This was followed by a (spontaneously arranged) brisk walk around a frozen Green Lake this morning. What a pleasant way to finally meet a Seattle member of the Well community.
Back to the home office to follow up on several leads. Applied for two more positions and requested advice on two others.
Yesterday, while composing a cover letter, I struggled to describe one of my approaches to refining project requirements into specifications and the term ‘narrative prototyping’ emerged. It describes what I do perfectly. Curious about the term, I googled it, and found four hits. (Unsurprisingly, one of these hits related to the term to Barry Katz of Ideo. Great minds and all that. ) Narrative prototyping is a form of story telling, you enter the future you intend, live it narratively (what does it look like? what does it feel like? who is there? what are they doing? etc. etc. etc. ) In Jerry Mander’s book, ‘In the Absence of the Sacred’ he describes how most of the impacts of the invention of the telephone were predictable and predicted. (Skyscrapers, for example.)
It is a regret of mine that I have only begun to recognize this capacity for what it is so far into the arc of my life.
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