Conquest of the Horde

Quote:

I Hear Music.

Reconciliation floats in the pool of lesser talent.

By Cat Baab

I leave work and drive home, Mendelssohn coming through my Ford's crackly speakers. It's his Octet in E-flat major, a movement that in it that I particularly love. Even going 70, I am still held by it. The afternoon heat leans on my car; I look up and notice the trees along the highway are that full-leafed, summery green, finally, and a phrase takes shape in my mind. I say it out loud, over the music: I'm not in my right body.

It's any day of the week. Or weekend. Judging by the looks I get in record stores, I should be some nondescript, middle-aged man, a Nick Hornby type, or better yet, a tattooed hipster. I'd look the part then. As it is, I dress as if I just walked out of Old Navy -- I can't seem to help it -- and my manners and expressions are more middle class than aloof: non-nonchalant. I look awkward flipping through a heavy stack of LPs. I can't play anything, can't even skulk properly around the stacks. I love music but I have no musical talent, not even an elementary understanding of notes, scales, keys, pitch, things like that. I just desperately wish I did.

The only aptitude I seem to have is for imagining what it would be like to have musical talent, how much different and better and hot and exotic and rich and wise and useful my life would be if I had it. I'd be a badass and I'd be more refined, too. In lipstick and satin gloves, I'd cover obscure old Philadelphia soul (like the Sapphires' "Who Do You Love.") After the show, I'd linger on, drinking and talking with all the musicians who'd accept me, naturally, as one of their own. Later, dressed in velvet so black it absorbs light, seated among the players of the Richmond Symphony, I'd strike a perfect note on my cello. This note would stop time and even my own anxious mind. It would suspend everything, like an elegant jelly.

These are a graceless person's fantasies. I don't care about the gloves and roadies so much -- what I want is the instrument, this extension of myself that I can operate expertly. Imagine a body that you didn't just get, but chose and claimed for yourself, and understood and could work. Wouldn't that body have so many more choices and ways to be?

From the cheap seats, the third balcony, the back of the club, I contemplate that body. On stage are the singers, the musicians and their instruments: sleek violins, massive upright basses. There are people who can do that thing I long to do, who have that thing I love to have. And this is the part in the essay when the writer turns and urges acceptance, portraying acceptance as a kind of ballast, a welcome hunk of reality. But I'll never make first chair with an attitude like that, not that I'll ever make first chair at all. Besides, what has reality got to do with longing?

What I can accept, even feel grateful for, is this very small measure of control that allows me, talent or no, to insist that music be part of my experience. No one would call that enough, but as always, the alternative is having less of what you love, not more of it. I'll take what I've got.