Tasteninstrumenten and Psychoanalysis

Yesterday Papa, T., J. and I went to the Musikinstrumentenmuseum at Potsdamer Platz, on the invitation of friends, to attend a guided tour of the keyboard instruments (Tasteninstrumenten) in that museum. We came quite early, so we first wended our way through the display cases and past the pianos lining the walls, and I tried to overcome an absurd nervousness about meeting people by focusing on the musical instruments. There were about twenty people in the tour. It began with a short lecture by a friend of my parents that carefully reviewed the history of Tasteninstrumenten, beginning with Pythagoras's monochord as well as the organ, and ending with the modern Hammerklavier. She described how these instruments worked, too, so that even I could understand (though I was still shaky in my grasp of the concept of registers at the end).

Then we roamed about the first floor of the museum, and a Herr R. played pieces that demonstrated the various properties of the old cembali, clavichords, etc. I like the sound of the early pianos very much, because even though it is metallic it is so fine and delicate and sharp. After all, bells are metal too. There was one early piano, however, that sounded like a barely audible cross between the twanging of an elastic and a guitar; Herr R. played the Fantasia in d minor by Mozart on it, and he really had to hammer down the bottom notes with his little finger in order to even produce a sound, which made it sound still worse. There was also a clavichord or cembalo (perhaps I should have paid still more attention . . .) where the body of the piano rose up above the keyboard in an elegant harp-like shape, which -- as Papa and T. said -- sounded the best of all.

Another nice thing about the early pianos was the painting of their cases. I think that music is greatly added to by atmosphere; I'm sure I could play Mozart much better if I were in the room of a palace built in the eighteenth century, sitting on a bright stool with curvy legs, with a painting by (for instance) Watteau on the wall, and acacias visible through a Neoclassical window -- and also an audience might enjoy it more. Even though, of course, that probably only helps if one intends to give an eighteenth-century-ish interpretation to the music.

Anyway, this morning I learned Russian for fifty minutes, writing a quiz on identifying the genders of nouns (I was tripped up by the animal names; "kangaroo," for instance, is masculine, not neuter -- which is nice, I think), then learning how to write the nominative plural forms of regular singular masculine nouns. This is part of my attempt to learn at home precisely as if I were still at university. If I hadn't woken up so late today the attempt might have succeeded as well as it did yesterday.

At around noon J. and I went to the Volkspark again. It's a sunny day, and the park was quite cheerful. The "Bucheckern" trees have already scattered their funny furry, spiky seed-pods over the ground, and the horse chestnut trees, whose leaves have shrivelled on the branches and turned a rusty colour, are dropping their spiky light green fruit which in their turn open to reveal the earliest chestnuts. Autumn is my favourite time of year, but I hope that summer will continue a while longer -- oddly enough, I think I've always liked autumn especially because it's the beginning of a new school or university year. But the beginning of the academic year is the most pleasant part, I find -- it all goes downhill from there, except if I'm in a class where everyone seems strange and hostile, in which case it generally improves in the course of the year.

At any rate, after I came back I told Papa that I wanted to begin reading about psychoanalysis, because I have the impression that it helps one to think more clearly and, of course, because it's really interesting. Then I asked what I should begin reading (this because I once began Sigmund Freud's Der Witz and I barely understood anything); Papa suggested Das zurückgebliebene Kind und seine Mutter by Maud Mannoni, and Selbsterfahrung in der Therapie: Theorie und Praxis by M. Masud R. Khan (both books being translations). I read the first chapter of the former book, which is about how mothers cope with having children with Down's syndrome (or, perhaps, rather don't cope). It was quite disturbing, because the author describes the deep crisis that the mothers experience, and how this translates into destructive behaviour towards the children and towards themselves. The author also states that a mother goes through her pregnancy expecting her child either to compensate for her own childhood, or to live out a similar childhood. When this child is born with a serious disability, this hope crumbles, and the burden of the mother's past unexpectedly returns in full force at the very time when she must also deal with many other things.

After reading this I wonder if it is possible to have children without seriously harming them because of one's insecurities. If I had children I think I would try to let them live their own lives as much as possible, and try not to emotionally exploit them, but I think that my habit of wallowing in insecurity, and my irregularly developed consciousness, would really make that difficult. But I imagine that an important rule when reading psychoanalysis is not to anticipate a problem, but simply to be able to identify it when it comes up, or else that problem or a similar one may artificially develop.