Ftrain, by Paul Ford

New York is buried under snow, the State of the Union is going on, I’m rattling with anxiety as emails pile up, and I need to practice piano.

I have, in the manner of the true dilettante, secreted keyboards about the house. I’m a huge nerd, I needed something to fill my brain, I did well in life, and so I have a genuinely glorious little studio, bundles of wires running thick as a large man’s wrist, modules, keyboards. It requires constant configuration. I have 150 “songs” in a folder but I’d call them...tones. I only recently learned to extend an idea for sixteen full measures. It’s an expensive little hobby—but emphasis on little; I’ve spent the equivalent of two fancy watches and managed to get nearly a thousand knobs in the bargain, and if you count virtual knobs, well. I have to use blur heavily in video calls but it’s worth it. And breathe easy, I’ve given away 20 times more than I spent on knobs to causes so quixotic that a communist would blush. Absolutely unfundable stuff, stuff no philanthropist would imagine, semi-doomed music, dance, political journalism that would welcome me personally to guillotine, immigration, climate, political action. Anyway I’m very happy here. My piano teacher has no idea how many synths I own and I keep it that way. He sends me pianos to buy off Facebook and I can’t tell him how much I want that but also I can’t tell him how much eighty eight proper keys would lead to contact microphones running from piano soundboards into resonators and through my massive and wonderful eight voice Doepfer monolith then out to a DAW for processing, or through my absolutely delightful Workshop System, all to make a single key sound for five droning minutes. I would trade the kingdom of heaven for that one perfect knob. Anyway. One day I will have a small hut in the woods with no Internet and a decrepit piano that I will watch YouTube videos to learn to tune, and spend two years really learning, truly intuiting, probably with psilocybin assistance, the deep and Pythagorean complexities inherent in the equal temperament tones of the C major scale, or as I prefer to call them, the big naturals.

So I load up the overpriced but remarkable piano emulator (we’ll have a long conversation about this one day, and VSTs in general, and the spiritual anxieties of virtual analogue—because my heart tells me that exploring that tension, between an oscillator oscillating and a CPU calculating, has something to say about the state of anxiety in which we all find ourselves). Then I turn from this computer to the heavy, glorified MIDI controller to my right, made by a really kind of wonderful French brand, and I go through my pieces.

A miracle this week—I played the first part of the first Bach Minuet for the five or six thousandth time, and my left hand was in steady communication with my right hand. And there I was in the middle. Guys! I said. I didn’t know you’d ever met! They said nothing. But it felt like a miracle. All progress feels like a miracle. The State of the Union is probably still going as I type this. But over here a tiny, infinitesimal bit of progress. Something getting better. Don’t knock it.

Across the hall my wife prints whistles on a 3D printer. Different music. It hums and whirrs.

My left hand is normally a lumbering, grumbling donkey clambering up a mountain path, dragged along by my bouncy, energetic right hand. Piano teachers call this the Onan conundrum. But tonight they were dancing together like witches around a fire. Eventually I ran out of measures and reverted to failure mode, but now I know how it should feel. My teacher likes to say that your hands are in a band, which—I’ve never been in a band, he’s been in so many, it’s a normal thing for him, to have talent and share it and collaborate, and make a unified sound instead of one sound. I wonder if that’s what I’m most jealous of, that ability to trust another person enough to disappear into a collaboration, in real time. Then again, just thinking about subordinating myself to that degree makes me want to crouch under a desk with a knife in my teeth. I think this might be the curse of writers—that desire for control when all real coolness is in calm and openhearted collaboration. Sadly all my fantasies are of forest huts.

Suddenly I’m imagining my nursing home in 2060: “Since so many of you grew up in the Philadelphia and D.C. region we have a very special enrichment today, we’re going to record and cut a hardcore 7 inch on white vinyl. Now who wants to play this LTD Surveyor 87?”

All of which is to say, I bought, in Philadelphia, at this huge bookstore with a cat that I can’t remember the name of (store/cat), the Norton Anthology of Western Music or whatever, in two volumes, and I gotta tell you, now that I can read music (both clefs!) the idea of picking up some song from 1250 and just plinking it out, it’s a delight. So tonight I learned “Robins m’aime,” a French song by the 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle. I need to work on my sight reading and why not be medieval? But also it’s magical. Over time language becomes inscrutable. Accents fade. Countries come and go. But a dude writes a song for Marion to sing about her guy Robin, and I can just pick that up, read the notes, and it’s back in the world, the same song.

Robin bought me a surcote grand
Of scarlet cloth fine and bonny
Gown and kirtle gay as any.
I will have it!

A song about a man treating you right. Like a million such today. Now look. Do I despair that consciousness doesn’t evolve? Yes! See the psilocybin meditations on tone. Éliane Radigue just passed, and my god. Imagine hearing Trilogie de Mort in your head, having that there, in your brain, then making it real. What a freaking consciousness that was. If you don’t know it book three hours of your life, because you are about to learn what communicating with aliens will be like. I’m going to listen to it right now.

Like I said: Imagine having that in your head, but not yet recording it. I really do love that moment when an idea is just your own. You know you have to share it. It might die upon release. But the joy of it, of just containing something that feels new, before it must become actualized. The little inner motions of thought. We’ve shared too much, lately. I want to be back there, deep inside. The further in the better. My shrink wants me to trip.

Anyway. You can, if you work at it for a few years, sit down and play haltingly a medieval song, just with your own eyes and fingers. No one can stop you. You can wear headphones and sing the song of Marion in 1250, and to hell with that interloping knight, because Robin is the man for me, he got me a kirtle.

And by the way my hands are friends now. The world can be out there, pissing all over itself, and you can log off. You don’t even have to put a picture on the top of the blog post. Because the real ones will get to the end of the post even knowing there won’t be toy surprise. Just because it’s good to be alive together. Boring each other to death. We can suck as bad as we need to, to get through this bullshit, and maybe one day we’ll play Christmas Carols together, or murmur along with Ava Maria at the funeral mass, or pick up the bass in the nursing home Nation of Ulysses cover band. It’s good to talk about love in an age of fear and death.