Work, Violin and Sybaritic Fragrances

It was the last day of the new week, and as two colleagues were missing in the little team I am in, it was quiet. I congregated at the lunch table again, which was at least more sociable. There was an amusing and edifying exchange when two colleagues pretended to greet each other extremely rudely, and a third colleague took it seriously. He said in a dignified (but not obnoxious) way that perhaps they should 'express their respect for each other in other terms,' like a school teacher. I was grinning broadly at the whole dialogue, while secretly worried that the fact I wasn't shocked at the play-rudeness earlier indicated that I was made of a less fine fibre than the third colleague.

Later in the day I had a grand inspiration of ordering my teammates to be 'king for a week' of the team. Otherwise I fear I will never loosen the reins of power enough for them to see the whole spectrum of tasks that the full team does, and for example tasks of mine which someone else will need to do if I am ever absent for more than a day. My brother, the present king, has already shown a few simplifications that can save time in the way these tasks are done... Underlining the idea that if there is a slow and stupid way to do something, I will invariably bite down on it like a dog bites down on a bone, then latch onto it and keep trying to chew through until it is pried loose from my jaws. (Not the best simile.)

*

I am reading Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy hastily so that I can stop wallowing through it day after day. But there was a passage that evinced signs of 'empathy' and 'physically experiencing the world outside one's library' that, to be honest, was so shocking that I haven't fully recovered from my dumbfoundedness yet. Thankfully there's lots of condescending nonsense mixed in after that, to re-ground me in familiar reality.

*

I recorded myself playing the violin during the weekend, with my desktop computer. Partly the recording technology is at fault, maybe. But the tone was rustic, though not so unsophisticated when I managed to get in the swing of things. Although I've moved past a few quirks left over from my infant years learning the instrument, I definitely need to have a listener point out faults that are glaringly evident to an audience. Rather than beg my uncle (because he has suffered through violin pedagogy enough, I imagine) to give me a crash course, I wrote an email to the music school this evening, asking to join a group lesson before the summer school holidays. That said, I really hope that lessons, with the self-consciousness due to public playing and analytical thinking, as well as the mechanical approach of being drilled, won't ruin the enjoyment I've been getting out of the violin practice.  — E.g. out of Kreutzer études, even when (or, especially if?) I find out I've been playing them in the wrong key after minutes of intense squeaking.

But I am continuing my private practice schedule, not as religiously when it comes to reading up on technique, admittedly. It includes more listening to violin recordings. I doubt it's solid reasoning, but I've been listening to Yehudi Menuhin recordings particularly because I presume he has fewer quirks that I would be likely to badly imitate. It's easy to put a lot of 'colour' in to one's intonation, for example, but difficult to take it back out again; and I'm anxious enough for correctness and for cold perfection to want to know how to keep it restrained.

*

I am becoming irritated at the continuing winter. But during the weekend I went on a luxury shopping trip that cheered me up. I still consider Kadewe as a locus of seamy decadence; and feel out of place in it because I am such a Before in any 'makeover' scenario.

But I came back with a French scented berry candle (it smells like roses rather than berries, I think, and it catapults me forward into June despite the dim February light and draughts) and perfume samples, as well as a pale green moringa scent I'm not entirely sure about. The candles and perfumes are like having spring and summer flowers in one's room.

A Boring Girly Paragraph That No One Is Forced To Read:
I decided to celebrate some of this false spring at work today. I sprayed some perfume on my sweatshirt at arm's length this morning, gingerly because I've had terrible mistakes with over-dousing. Also, I wore the first lipstick I ever bought for myself at work. It is almost invisible, and I want to use it before it expires. I am glad that make-up isn't de rigueur in Germany as it was in Canada. But I want to learn the lesson not to care about make-up either way, and wearing it in the first place and seeing that it is not a big deal (except insofar as it is an enormous pain in the neck to use it refinedly) should be helpful. That said, my lipstick barely helps with this training of character; it is tasteful and subtle, both optically and weight-wise. ('A colour that won't scare you when you look in the mirror,' as the make-up counter saleslady endearingly put it, after I explained that I have rarely worn make-up.) Lastly, as honesty compels me to admit, the lipstick has a rather fake raspberry fragrance that reminds me of candy; wearing it is far more enjoyable for that reason than it ought to be for a grown woman.

From Tikal to The Wall: Sunday Documentary Films

Last night I spent hours watching documentary films on the website of Arte, the German-French broadcaster that was bought by Germany's largest media channels a few years ago and hasn't been as independent-spirited since. That said, the films that I watched, about Mayan cities up to the 17th century, the urban development of New York and London and Amsterdam from the Gold Age or to the present, Mont St. Michel at the border of modern Brittany and Normandy, Nadia Comaneci, and the experiences of border guards at the Berlin Wall from the 1960s to 1989, were all (it seemed) generously funded and broadly researched and interesting.

There are stages in history I thought I knew, but that after watching the documentaries I knew I didn't. The exceedingly gruesome chapter of prisons in 18th and 19th century France, for instance. I had gathered from other reading that cruel and unusual punishment were genuinely and consistently frowned upon in the Revolution, although not during the Terror; and that Napoleon's laws cemented this tolerant attitude in law. Instead, Mont St. Michel in the 1860s was still apparently a place where people were thrown into dark stone cells in awful conditions.

And I knew about the Great Stink that encouraged the British government to embark on building a proper London sewage system in the mid-19th century. But I didn't remember reading anything about the steam ship Princess Alice that sank in the Thames, terribly polluted and the source of the Stink, at the loss of over six hundred lives.

The metamorphosis of Manhattan from a pastoral island of farms and less than four-story-tall brick buildings, modest even when the Brooklyn Bridge was built (when the bridge looked far larger than anything else in sight); a metamorphosis driven especially because of all of the property speculation by e.g. John Jacob Astor; makes me think again of the quotation from Sophocles:

Πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κ' οὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
('Many are the great/terrible things, but none is greater/more terrible than man.')
I'd never seen this line before in Friedrich Hölderlin's translation into German, and I think his whole translation of the passage is worth quoting:

Ungeheuer ist viel. Doch nichts 
ungeheurer als der Mensch. 
Denn der, über die Nacht 
des Meeres, wenn gegen den Winter weht 
der Südwind, fährt er aus 
in geflügelten, wogenumrauschten Häusern. 
Und der Himmlischen erhabene Erde, 
die unverderbliche, unermüdete 
reibt er auf; mit dem strebenden Pfluge, 
von Jahr zu Jahr, 
bricht er sie um mit dem Rossegeschlecht. 
Leichtträumender Vögel Welt 
bestrickt er, und jagt sie, 
und wilder Tiere Zug, 
und des Meeres salzbelebte Natur 
mit gesponnenen Netzen, 
der kundige Mann. 
Und fängt mit Künsten das Wild, 
das auf Bergen übernachtet und schweift. 
Und dem rauhmähnigen Rosse wirft er um 
den Nacken das Joch, und dem Berge 
bewandelnden unbezähmten Stier.*

*From "Liste griechischer Phrasen/Pi" on Wikipedia (DE), here

I think that in the New York-London-Amsterdam documentaries there was a sub-thesis about Industrialization and Capital, carried on mostly through the musical score and contradicting the narration of the documentary itself. The sub-thesis cast these two forces as unfeeling juggernauts that trampled everyone in their path. The way that the lavish art and public philanthropy of Gilded Age New York were all the peculiar fruits of the hardest exploitation of labour and capital and the utter degradation of the tenement-dwelling needy, reminds me (perhaps arbitrarily) of another quotation:

                                                  adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head

I was really in the wrong frame of mind to watch these documentaries, though, as I was on the point of shedding tears every time a new hardship arose. (The lachrymose mood reminded me of the cartoon about an overly empathetic paleontologist who laments, at the sight of a freshly excavated dinosaur skeleton, 'We've arrived too late, again!'.) These hardships are, of course, hard to avoid in history.

But finally I went to sleep in a different mood, i.e. a thoroughly disgusted one, after watching the Berlin Wall documentary. I felt it was an unedifying series of tales about how self-righteously a German individual can betray his fellow citizens, their rights, and every worthwhile ideal that has ever existed. I don't much like the habit of some internet commenters in the US of saying, every time a policeman shoots and kills someone, that this person must have 'not been obeying the instructions.' In their words, impromptu capital punishment is an 'inevitability' in these cases; and any discussion of or resistance to misapplied authority is not a civil right or a duty, but lawlessness and 'stupidity,' for which the dead person is as much to blame as if he had personally requested his own execution. Professionalism and coolheadedness in a police force seems like such an unpatriotic concept that no American citizen should dare to imagine its existence. But it appears that this delightful train of reasoning is by no means present in the US alone; it was also common in East Germany, and it was applied by the government and the propaganda to unarmed Germans who were trying to flee East Berlin.

On Squeaking, and Arnold's Questionable Sweetness and Light

Yesterday I slept well and practiced scales, played 'stock' pieces that I memorized as a child, and *cough* 'exploring' the first and second Kreutzer études on the violin before I went to work. Admittedly there's a problem with playing the E on the A string, presumably because my pinky finger is not strong enough to hold down the note properly. It is generally quite off-pitch. And since that seems to be largely the point of learning the second étude, it is another puncture to the balloon of my ego.

Last evening I had another happily dazed YouTube session: this time I 'rediscovered' the performance of Mendelssohn's violin concerto with Yehudi Menuhin, and Antal Dorati as the conductor. I heard a weird militaristic strain in the orchestral part, which repelled me at times; but Menuhin himself was fantastic, and made me ashamed of my lackadaisical approach to the violin. He seems so terribly convinced in the superpowers of his instrument, if that makes sense. And I've been watching bits of his 'violin tutorial' filmed for the BBC; I find it pedagogically vague but personally charming. He seems a little flustered, and very proper — proper even when he upends himself into a yoga pose in the middle of the proceedings, as his pullovered young pupils, an ornate-looking side table, and four ascetic blank walls encircle (or should I say, ensquare) him.

Today the work day was not as stressful as it's been in the past weeks, and at the same time I think the hyperactive state into which the workload has pushed me is persisting. I still feel like beginning a hundred new projects at once. It's also as if my brain is rarely turned off, even if it isn't running at its finest quality.

But I was thinking of ending Culture and Anarchy as my U-Bahn reading. I've been worried about being a snob all my life, and yet this book is a consolation. All my pettiest and most fastidious moments are puny infantile efforts in the face of the author's supreme patronizing disdain toward such large masses of British, American and Continental society, that so far only Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt and his own illustrious self have apparently survived the selection process.

His tendency to glowingly picture a world where everyone wears a Matthew Arnold intellectual and theological straitjacket or sleeps in Matthew Arnold's Procrustean bed — witness his insistence that everyone in Britain should really be an Anglican (or Catholic, or Jew, just not a Dissenter, whom he persists in considering as Anglicans manqués) — is truly bizarre in a grown man.

So when I stepped into the U-Bahn this morning, I wasn't feeling too bad. But when I stepped out again, having read this balderdash, I felt like I was frowning sourly enough to curdle milk. And I tried to avoid making eye contact with passersby for fear of burning figurative holes through them with my fiery gaze.

When Unwise Sleeping Hours Succeed

Early this morning I decided to watch the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice series on YouTube. I sped up the episodes, and they were abridged episodes, so that in the end it was before 5 a.m. when I went to sleep. But it was a lovely experience: I was feeling woozy but happy as a clam; and I soaked up the music*, the historic details, the acting, the scenery, the scripting, and the recollections of first seeing it with my sister and brothers as a ten-year-old(?), when it appeared on television in Canada, and being excited for the next episodes — like a sponge.

And, despite the sleeplessness, I was actually cheerful at work.

I even managed to wake up promptly enough to have a shower, pass on a telephone message, remember to pack my ballet clothing and slippers, and practice the violin again! And I did do my work, go grocery shopping, clear up the work kitchen a little, read and fume over more Culture and Anarchy, dance ballet, and go on a 10-or-longer minute walk through 1°C temperatures at nighttime, so it was a well-rounded day.

* (It struck me more than usual.)

Springtime in Embryo

Today I was an ingrate. The weather, despite it being the month of February, was not too bad. It was still daylight, dry, and cold but not so cold that my down jacket wasn't snuggly enough. Two of my brothers and I went to the Volkspark for a long promenade. But the light emphasized, perhaps rather like the morning light in a messy room when the evening before it hadn't looked so bad in the gloaming, how bare and wintry everything still is.

At the Rathaus Schöneberg I saw one pale pink rose on the bushes. In the park itself, there was English ivy, boxwood and yew and snowberries, and a few sprays of leaves on the bushes, and tiny spears of daffodil and hyacinth and tulip leaves perhaps as tall as my pinky finger. Ice lay on a few of the puddles and groundwater pools that disappear later in the summer, and the undergrowth had died away so much that one could see through almost any forested area.

At least hundreds of neighbours were on the go. There were joggers, of course; the soccer court was full of players, and the children's playgrounds were full of families; and birds were hopping along branches and railings. So it wasn't a wasteland. Many years ago I read that William Blake wrote in a poem, 'Where man is not, nature is barren.' I thought, given the realities of modern ecology, that this was tosh — man makes nature barren; but now perhaps I understand what he meant.

In Wilmersdorf we saw miniature stands of snowdrops and infinitesimal huddles of yellow winter aconites, looking (to be brutally frank) like the most pitiful assemblage of spring flowers I remember seeing in my life.

But Japanese quince blossoms were peeking out on one bush, and beautiful lion's-manes of yellow flowers were decorating some variety of hazel, that were more or less a respectable size.

And it snowed on the way home from the park. When we reached a staircase with an intimidating tuft of funereal yew at the top, it had a Narnia feeling to it. There was also metallic red heart confetti that was likely left over from a wedding ceremony at the Schöneberg city hall, and seemed less than biodegradable.

Later at home, Gi. made crêpes that were tender and thin and delicious; I made incredibly healthy beluga lentils that had the nice peppery taste I like; and although we were back from the walk late, we still ate oat cookies and almonds and dates (the latter two a present from an aunt) together with uncles M. and Wi., who were visiting.

If it weren't for the thronged, rush-hour like traffic stream that we crossed on the way back to the apartment, and all of these irritatingly critical observations of mine, it would have been an ideal Sunday!