A Boatload of 'Orare' and the Girl with Flaxen Hair

TODAY (Saturday) I decided not to go on a tour of a graveyard, which morbid but most likely pleasing activity is one of many offerings in the frame of a Mendelssohn descendants' family reunion being held in Berlin over this past week. I slept into the afternoon, that being the contingency that clinched it. Last evening, however, we went to a reception, which I intend to post about soon(er or later), with some two hundred other relations and, of course, the immediate family.

WHERE university is concerned, I took the day off. In my Islamic Studies seminar my group is preparing for a presentation, and I personally am beginning to prepare for the essay to be handed in much later. Then I have done extracurricular thingies for Greek and for Latin I have resolved to get all the noun declensions and verb conjugations and so on straight, which is an absurd enterprise but one which I feel is demanded of us.

The absurdity of this enterprise was particularly perceptible when I decided to write down all the tables for 'orāre,' taking 'amāre' as set out in my dual purpose Latin dictionary/grammar for my handy paradigm. The further I leafed in this dictionary and wrote out ōrō, orās, orat, orāmus, orātis, orant; orāre; orābam, orābās, orābat, orābāmus, orābātis, orābant; orābō, orābis, orābit, orābimus, orābitis, orābunt; oram, orēs, oret, orēmus, orētis, orent; orāvī, orāvistī, orāvit, orāvimus, orāvistis, orāvērunt; orāveram, orāverās, orāverat, orāverāmus, orāverātis, orāverant; orāverō, orāveris, orāverit, orāverimus, orāveritis, orāverint; oror, orāris, orātur, orāmur, orāminī, orantur; orābar, orābāris, orābātur, orābāmur, orābāminī, orābantur; orābor, orāberis, orābitur, orābimur, orābiminī, orābuntur; orārem, orārēs, orāret, orārēmus, orārētis, orārent; orer, orēris, orētur, orēmur, orēminī, orentur; orārer, orārēris, orārētur, orārēmur, orārēminī, orārentur [N.B. Apologies for any transcription errors; I wasn't feeling enterprising enough to doublecheck all my handwritten verb tables against the dictionary's.] — the more moods and tenses sprang out of the woodwork. Having reached the subjunctive pluperfect passive I had it 'up to here.' Much inclined to shoot the dictionary out to sea from a cannon, I closed it instead and haven't attempted to review further until now. In hindsight, though, we haven't looked at all of these mood-tense combinations; so I might be off the hook.

SINCE, at any rate, I wasn't going to be doing any of that, I looked through more photos in a Flickr account which has proven rather addictive, especially the abandoned train yards and sheds and signage and so on — "Forest Pines". Besides, having begun to watch physics lectures on YouTube and having found, much to my surprise, that watching them feels uncommonly relaxing and enjoyable, I watched more of the third.

The key to enjoying these videos is that I don't expect to understand everything, or anything at all. Instead I piece together what I can and either drop or ask about the rest. In the absence of this pressure to understand everything, physics are a sort of thrilling new field; and when I have questions, Papa can answer them quite easily and point me to the relevant books.

For example, I was wondering why an electric charge isn't transferred to a capacitor at a steady rate; rather the charge rushes over to it at first but then slows down. Papa explained that the electrons are being 'pushed' to a degree by their repulsion from each other; and that just as people fill an U-Bahn train easily when it is relatively empty, a crowded train is an entirely different matter.

One resource Papa recommends highly is the online lectures of Richard Feynmann, and the books written by the same; I intend to look at these when I'm done with these other lectures, but I'd rather have dipped my toe into the discipline properly first.

These videos point, I think, to the potency of well-chosen language. Finding precise nouns and verbs which suggest precisely the associations and the meanings which one intends to convey, economically, is, I think, not only useful in instructing students in the sciences, but in many other areas as well.

WHAT I also like is that sciences are relatively 'truthful.' In the humanities, bad research and weak premises and thoughtlessness seem much easier to cover up. Lies, opinion and unverifiable statements are presented without cautionary labels, and where there are no sound observations to give them an empirical underpinning one can't even redeem the occasion by coming up with a better interpretation. Political Science is the absolute worst in this regard. I may hate it when someone misses the point in an analysis of Jane Austen, but no one is carpet-bombed as a result. So I think that while it may not be in the power of humans to know Truth absolutely — and in this respect I'd like to dust off Pope's maxim, "Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man." — our approach to truth and to applying the truth are very important.

BESIDES I completed the grand feat of reversing a jam jar so that the jam is wedged into the top half. I proudly announced that I had 'defeated gravity,' to a mixed reception from the family, which was assembled for the repast of pancakes where this occurred. The scenario seemed familiar to me, and I realized later that one of the websites I visit now and then, Boing Boing, had an article about hover-jelly a long time ago.

LASTLY, I played a boatload of Chopin and excerpts of our score of Die Zauberflöte transcribed for the piano. Among the Chopin there was the Polonaise Héroïque, still a long slog and an unlikely prospect for pleasing the neighbours; and the Military Polonaise, in which the tempo is still a trifle irregular; and a nocturne or two, which I still can't do very much with. I've complained about them before, but I think that these nocturnes are like TV musicians whose glossy appearance, soulful air, elaborate gestures and sentimental flourishes are (as far as I can tell) cynically gauged to sucker in people to presume that their music expresses honesty, profundity, broad understanding and sensitivity. Thankfully I am very fond of everything else in the volume which contains these nocturnes, so I have no real bone to pick with Chopin generally.

I did think when I was younger that playing his waltzes and nocturnes were deleterious to one's fibre as a musician, because of their extraordinary indulgence, which is also something that annoyed me a bit with Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. But counteracting the very ease with which one can make these songs sound expressive is my anxiety not to fall prey to this lazy route and instead to work against the grain of the music and find irregularities and nuances in it. So, for instance, the only way I use rubato is if my tempo is faulty, and I already resolved nine or ten years ago to only insert rubato when I have reached some dignified age and have learned to play the piece properly without. Even rubato has, I think, its rules; and whether rightly or wrongly I have heard or read that it should be like an elastic which is expanded but also relaxed again — so every slowing down should be followed by a proportionate speeding up.

What I didn't play today is Debussy's "Fille aux cheveux de lin," which is kind of familiar because I used to listen to Jacques Thibaud's recording on the violin. I think I understand intellectually what Debussy was going for, but I haven't really transferred it to the keyboard yet; the jazz and Javanese(?) influences are obviously there, though, and I have to learn to do justice to them. As for a mental image, I thought of a kind of dainty 19th-century mock castle hidden in the treetops in Fontainebleau — the realm of the impressionists — wherein a vaguely blotted face of a lady stands in the tower window with her long Rapunzel-esque tresses flowing over the stonework. And that the man who sees this picture in his fantasy has imbibed or smoked a little of something frowned upon by the police. I have no idea if this is close to what inspired Debussy, but I'll keep that image in mind until it no longer serves a purpose.

Generally I think I'd have absolutely nothing in common with Debussy if I'd ever met him, but it is sort of fun to try to clear one's mind and to play him without bias. It demands that one step out of one's accustomed zone and rely on intuition, and especially since I want to do this sincerely and unselfconsciously (without any arrière-pensée as the French might say, or Hintergedanke as the Germans do), it feels kind of like acting. Much like Chopin, though, I think one obstacle is that I haven't concentrated so much on removing shortcomings of technique that the facility which the composers expect of their music exists.