When I was just beginning my daily walk to work a few weeks ago, with my hands tucked in the pockets of my black leather coat, I passed by the neighbor's house where there was a tree with about five crows making a terrible racket. They didn't pause even to take a breath; they were just squawking and squawking without letup. They were loud, but I hardly took note of them until I found that when I got to the other end of the block, this avian protest group had moved forward and was soon screeching over my head again as I passed by their new perch. This is weird, I thought, and scenes from Hitchcock's The Birds started playing through my mind, especially the image of whole flocks swooping down and pecking at people. As the same scenario played out again in the third block, and the fourth, I began to wonder, is it my black leather jacket? Are they following me because they think I'm a very large, distant relation who forgot how to fly? By the fifth block I started to quicken my steps and I must have looked ridiculous when I turned my head quickly, thinking that they were coming at me from behind. Their excited jabbering continued the whole way, and they followed me for eight blocks -- all the way to the fine arts building at the college, where I checked on them one last time over my shoulder before entering.
I've heard that crows are highly social and intelligent. I don't have anything against them. Being stalked made me a little jumpy, but I also felt pride in being selected by them for special treatment, and I felt that I had moved up in their estimation from the level of an ignorable life form. This encounter started me thinking about Schubert's Winterreise (Winter's Journey), which I had sung many years ago. Crows figure prominently into the story line of that song cycle. In one movement, the miserable fellow who is the protagonist is harassed by a crow who follows him out of the city and flies around his head. He asks the crow, "Crow, you strange creature, won't you ever leave me? --Do you plan to grab my carcass soon?" He sarcastically thanks the crow for his companionship, and for demonstrating to him an example of faithfulness that extends all the way to the grave.
After having the crows take notice of me, I resolved to relearn Winterreise, and in the last couple of weeks, over the winter break, I've been indulging my Schubert obsession by singing it for three or four hours every day. I have the twenty-four songs roughly memorized now, and I've set up a concert in a couple of months, on February 27. Memorizing a concert-length work like this can be a form of ultra-intense reading. When we read or listen to music, those of us lacking extraordinary mental abilities hold the sound or the lines of poetry in our thoughts for a few moments in order to comprehend it, then the memory soon begins to dissolve. One of the pleasures of knowing a larger work by heart is that you carry the poetry and the melodies with you everywhere, and you can select a playlist from your inner ipod at any moment. I am grateful to have this freedom to pursue a project like this, and I'm acutely aware what a privileged it is to be able to mix labor and leisure so thoroughly. As James Michener said,
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, . . . his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.
I suppose it's an obvious point, but a lot of folks don't really have the option to pursue being "masters in the art of living" as Michener suggests, and to devote hours to developing their inner ipod on a whim, so one ought to at least be thankful.
One thing I love about longer artworks like Winterreise is the feeling of taking the first steps of a long journey, like feeling the first gentle tug of the Amtrak car as you leave the Minneapolis station beginning the 24-hour trip to the mountains of Montana. When you hear the slow, deliberate exposition of one of the long fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, for instance, you get an intriguing intuition of the imposing structure that you are about to have laid out before you, and it tugs you forward -- same thing for the opening to the St. Matthew Passion, or when we read the beginning of this long tale:
Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving its end. Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. . . .
We know this story is going to keep us occupied for a long while; no mere sound bite here. In addition to this elemental journey-pleasure, when those steady, unhurried, repeated minor chords unfold, introducing the first song of Winterreise, we also have a sense that our hero is in some trouble -- trouble being a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for hero status. The hero of The Divine Comedy, by way of comparison, tells us at the outset that he has had some tough times, without giving us much in the way of details: "In the middle of our life's way / I found myself in a wood so dark / That I couldn't tell where the straight path lay." The arduous journey he undertakes is linked to those difficulties, which today we might refer to dismissively as a midlife crisis. The character is younger in Winterreise, than in The Inferno -- too young for a midlife crisis, but there seems to be something of a similar back story to Schubert/ Müller's song cycle, the first line of which is, "Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh ich wieder aus" [As a stranger I came into the world, and as a stranger I'll leave it]. A proviso here regarding art and real life: I don't have a personal resonance with the idea that people in general enter and leave the world as strangers. What a bleak concept. It doesn't take a degree in developmental psych to know that being nurtured, being in relationship with others is vital from the very start; it's just a crucial part of being human. I'm fortunate to have been born into a family that was pretty good to me, so if I were to say, not acting out a character in a story, but as myself, "Fremd bin ich eingezogen," it would be whiney and ridiculously self-absorbed, not to mention false (and pretentious to say it in German). --But this guy doesn't feel good about his childhood, his career prospects, his love life; he's messed up; he feels like an alien. Stories about well-adjusted people are boring. This is going to be good.
