Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan
Читать онлайн книгу.
in almost anything. I just have to let go of self-consciousness for it to spill out freely, as if all I am doing is listening to music.
I’ve never played any of Rachmaninoff’s music on the piano. Had I tried, any one of his pieces would have killed me with its demands for polar-opposite dynamics, acrobatic articulation, and cool concentration while evoking the extremes of human emotions at inhuman speed. While I have always liked music that takes me into dark thoughts, Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique was about as gloomy and as difficult a song as I was able to manage. In comparison, I thought Rachmaninoff’s music was over the top on a psychopathology scale. It sounded like the voice of a hysteric who warbles between pledges of undying love and threats of suicide. Minor struggles become catastrophes, hopes bubble into delusions, and blame turns to vengeance, ending with someone’s ancestral home being burned to the ground. This music would have been ideal for accompanying the moods of my mother.
And then, about fifteen years ago, I fell in love with Rachmaninoff’s music. I found it hard to believe I had ever found fault with it. Age probably had much to do with my changing musical tastes. Over the years, I’ve accumulated plenty to reflect on: chest-ripping joy, strange fortune, disembowelment by betrayal, and love cratered deeper by the loss of far too many, including my mother. Rachmaninoff’s music has become a wonderfully sympathetic companion. My fingers remain still. I am the listener, ready to take the emotional path into a story.
I used to think that everyone saw stories in music. But when I learned this was not true, it was like discovering that people don’t see a story when they read words, that it is only mental understanding. I’m not saying that music should contain story narratives. It’s more that I can’t stop them from emerging freely, which, sad to say, is not what normally happens when I write novels. Writing requires conscious crafting, and the more conscious I am of how I write, the clumsier my sentences come out. The more effort I expend, the less imagination is available. In contrast, when I experience stories in music, it’s effortless—and that’s because I am not composing. I’m simply the listener, and through my imagination I can wander far into a field of sound. The experience is fun, even exhilarating, but I could never use either the process or the output for a novel. My imagination is oblivious to craftsmanship and focus. The story may have holes and inconsistencies. The character may morph several times. The storyline may be chaotic, predictable, or even maudlin. But I can’t improve this spontaneous story any more than I could adjust the weirdness of dreams during sleep. They are simply what my mind went to in the moment—the freely formed melodic reveries guided by the emotions I feel in music.
In recent years, I’ve noticed an increasing need for reverie for some portion of the day. I feel this most acutely when I am on book tour and must talk, answer questions, and be a scintillating conversationalist from morning to night. I reach a point when my mind no longer wants to hear myself talk nor monitor the intelligence or truth of what I’m saying. It wants to take leave of orderly thoughts and the common sense to not mention sex and drugs in front of a general audience with young children. If I ignore the need to silence myself, I eventually feel mentally claustrophobic, as if I’m on a crowded elevator that stops at no floor.
I find reverie in drawing, or sitting in the garden on a sunny day when birds are hopping about. I find reverie in watching fish in an aquarium. And there are also melodic reveries, which are slightly different from other forms. The stories I see in music allow my mind to stretch—much in the same way one might stretch a muscle that is cramped. By allowing my imagination to run with the music, it acts as a purgative in clearing my mind of cluttered thoughts. No matter where I am in the world, music is the bringer of reverie. It is not simply pleasure. It is essential.
I don’t see full stories with every piece of music. If the song is only a page or two, a scene and mood may appear, but when the music stops, the scene will, too. That’s the case with Schumann’s songs in Scenes from Childhood, which I played when I was eleven or so. Now, just as then, the songs evoke a scene, a child, and her moods. “Pleading Child” was a girl pouting and tugging at her mother’s skirt to buy her a doll. “Perfectly Contented” was the same child, dancing with her new doll. I liked the songs well enough, mostly because they were easy to learn, but I did not identify with the conniving child. Only one song from that album felt true to the way I felt: “Traumerei,” which simply means “dreaming” in German. I grew up thinking it meant “trauma,” or “tragedy,” and that the song expressed perpetual heartache. That is still the way I hear “Traumerei.” If “Pleading Child” had been followed by “Traumerei,” I would have imagined not just the girl trying to wangle a doll from her mother but also the transformational event that followed: a mother and father kneeling at the bedside of their recently deceased child, who is now holding her coveted doll, posthumously given. The emotions in “Traumerei” signaled the end of childhood, and at age eleven, when preadolescent hormones were kicking in, that song was perfect for me.
Larger pieces—sonatas, symphonies, fantasias, concertos, and the like—are long enough to carry me into a narrative covering the vicissitudes of life. The stories they evoke are harrowing. They follow bad maps and sudden hairpin turns. Happiness, hard work, and Christian intentions go plummeting off cliffs. These turbulent melodic stories don’t reflect my current life. I’m a fairly happy person. I worry only a bit out of habit, which is why I make lists. I’m prone to petty irritations, like everyone, and only occasionally do I wish I knew voodoo to make certain people wake up mooing like cows. Yet the music I choose for melodic stories are not what I would characterize as happy. They are dramatic and strong enough in emotion to knock loose self-control. The composers whose music provides that emotional range are the “Romantics”—from Beethoven, Shubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann to Chopin, Mahler, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Rimsky-Korsakov, early Stravinsky, and, of course, Rachmaninoff. The romanticism of their music should not be confused with tunes suitable for marriage proposals. The music I am the most drawn to is more freely driven by the story, and comes with full orchestrations and dynamic extremes, which impart the emotional sweep I love by literally sweeping from one section of the orchestra to another, violins to cellos, to woodwinds, to percussion, and onward. The dark mood in music serves as momentum. You see dark clouds and sense rain may come, and it does, with gale force winds. The narrative moves forward in bad weather. People run for cover to escape lightning. If it’s sunny and people are happy, less happens. People sit down for a picnic, followed by a long nap.
When the music is played with the full orchestra, I experience the story omnisciently. But the point of view is fluid and can switch to a first-person narrator when the melody takes on the voice of a solo instrument. And the instrument I love most is the piano. It can hold the world in two hands and evoke practically anything, from landscapes, battles, and county fairs, to parishioners in a large church or a single penitent praying on calloused knees for love or mercy.
The time period and setting in the story is anchored to the nationality of the composer and the period in which the music was composed. With Rachmaninoff’s music, for example, the story location is what you would find in a folktale in a pre-Bolshevik Russia. My imagination is peevishly stubborn about the time and the parameters of setting. Opera directors are able to relocate nineteenth-century operas into twenty-first-century parking lots and Laundromats, while also freshening up the social or political context. My conscious attempt to change that setting would be as successful as my contriving a novel about a family of athletes in Greenland. Forcing a different context would take me off reverie and into the conscious role of a writer. If I have to push my mind to go in a certain direction that is not intuitive, it can no longer imagine freely. It’s more like a committee throwing out ideas for a whiteboard marketing strategy.
As the listener, I don’t have to work, but I am not passive either. It is similar to what happens when I read. Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story. So it is with music, except that, unlike reading, the melodic story is not precast. It is suggested by mood. I have found