Yesterday evening Ge. had (with a little help) made an enormous lasagne, and we drank the bottle of Spanish red wine with it that I had received as a Christmas present from work. There was still lasagne and wine left today, although I ate the last of the lasagne.
I have been drawing pictures again lately, and after using different media have ended up using mostly coloured inks alongside coloured 'leads.' There is black india ink, but also blue, yellow, green and brown, and they have a more vibrant colour than the pencil crayons and aquarelle crayons I first used. I meant to use watercolour paint, too; and started a collage; but we shall see how that goes.
It has been cold and drafty, so we have needed the coal stove a lot. It was still warm enough that I could sit at the other side of the corner room from the stove, and draw without getting cold feet. I've tended not to watch crime shows and mysteries much in recent years, but yesterday there was an episode of Midsomer Murders that wasn't disagreeable, so I watched and listened to it with half an eye and ear as I was working on the pictures yesterday.
As far as music goes, I've played the violin lately because I felt that I needed a new challenge of sorts. The rudiments are going reasonably badly, which makes sense since I haven't had lessons since I was seven or eight. But after being able to play through the canzonetta movement of Tchaikovsky's violin concert — which is like flying before I can walk, of course —, I am quite pleased. The rest of my proper repertoire, for lack of a more modest word, is Bach's first violin sonata, which I've never played all the way through; and his concert in E major, which is the same situation. But they are intuitive to play and sound good even without a vibrato or many other subtleties of colour that one would need for other composers. (Just like I think that Mozart's easiest opera arias are good to sing in a non-operatic way because they work well if one sings them 'purely,' instead of adopting vocal mannerisms.)
I took the afternoon off of work on December 6th, to celebrate St. Nicholas Day, and played the violin then. I do play simplified versions of other familiar pieces like Dvorak's Humoresque. But yesterday I mostly played Christmas songs, and as far as possible a movement from Bach's Cello suites, from memory; and a Canadian folk song or two that was part of the routine when I was very little. The question is how much the neighbours suffer when I play, but I don't worry about it to a morbid degree, because a beginner's violin practice has certain objective qualities that require a little empathy for one's human environment.
On the piano, I have been trying the beginning of Albéniz's La Vega, but I feel like I'm trying poorly to play jazz. Grieg's piano version of his Dance in the Hall of the Mountain King? has baffled me for a while; it sounds far better when an orchestra plays it than when I try to play it. In fact I gave up on it for a while. I generally slaughter Brahms's first ten Hungarian Dances, too, or at least feel as if I were; but they are such great compositions, in their perhaps excessive, mid-19th-century-esque grandeur, that I've sometimes felt that other music is flat when I turn away from them. The Rachmaninoff C sharp minor prelude that I played yesterday felt, perhaps creepily, dark; but it's not necessarily out of keeping. Part of it is logistically a struggle to play; but it is so brief and compelling that I rarely feel remotely tempted to break it off in the middle. The g minor prelude that I played in 2008 around the time I travelled to New York went better than it did before; I finally have incipient ideas about the phrasing and atmosphere. Beethoven's last sonata, movements one and a bit of two, felt experimental but also better than before, too, when I tried it for the first time in months today.
Trying to play Chopin has not gone better than usual lately. But when I turned from his mazurkas (which I mostly love but can't always do much justice, because my technique is clumsy and besides it's very challenging to infuse intelligence and imagination into pieces which it is easy to play in an elegant but shallow way) to the Heroic Polonaise, it was a nice experience. The rumbling and repetitive octaves, which the left hand plays in a part of the polonaise, remind me of a steam-powered locomotive, which takes me out of the atmosphere. But perhaps ever since I watched the black and white film of young Martha Argerich flinging it off with a tongue-in-cheek air at the Chopin competition, I've felt that the piece calls for a degree of humour and parody. Chopin's 'militaristic' works make me uncomfortable in any case, if one were to take them seriously, especially because I played his pieces to try to work through my feelings about a war a few years ago. They are not abstract entertainment, but a piece of perhaps troubling social/cultural history — but maybe relevant more specifically perhaps to the wars over Poland and nationalist stirrings before the late 19th century, than to every other war or nationalist stirring in history before or since. We do have books of Christmas carols that I also played.
In the U-Bahn, I've finished reading Molière's Tartuffe, and have read instead a part of Alexander Pope's Essay On Man. Where does man stand in the order of animals, humanity, and God? Etc. It sounds very Leibnizian and deist so far to me. (Now I see that the Wikipedia article also mentions Leibniz, so that was obviously a new and far-fetched insight I had!)
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
is one of my favourite quotations. I believe that it is all right to disclaim belief in God, so long as one doesn't believe one is a secular God one's self while being so petty and disagreeable in one's ideas, perceptions and aims, that it's clear that one has no reason other than egotism to pretend greater insight or virtue than any other ordinary human being. (I believe quite strongly in my own religion, though, although uncomfortable questions do arise from time to time about how reasonable and good it really is, so this is hardly an impartial view.) But the problems with the reasoning of the poem, and in fact the ideas behind it altogether — when I last read the poem, it was in search for witticisms rather than in order to wade through Pope's ideas in any persistent fashion, so I didn't begin to think of them — seem numerous and striking.
It's cheeky for a thirty-one-year-old, like me, to say this. But his Leibnizian tendency reflects the kind of buoyancy that does not take into account physical and mental illness, the terrible vulnerabilities (inescapable poverty, defenselessness against cruelty, etc.), and a consciousness of one's own flaws and one's disappointing inability to translate theoretical principles into consistent real practice, that must lastingly wreck one's belief in the perfection of the universe's order at some point in one's life. To be a little clearer about the consciousness of flaws, every now and then it becomes clear to me that I have genuinely terrible aspects to my personality; they can be papered over like cracks in a wall, and maybe I never enter them, but in certain circumstances they gape. And there have been things that I have done that will have seemed cold and cruel to outsiders, although they had an internal logic. It is not false modesty to say this; but just that as a child I didn't quite imagine what it is like to have a grown up personality, where one grows quite a bit in a lot of directions, some less nice than others. Not that I was a perfectly saintly child, but I guess the imperfections were less sophisticated. That said, Pope never seems to have had an easy life, so who knows how much subtlety there was — after all — in his early worldview?
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