The Sound of Trying
I was in Los Angeles -- enjoying friends, Pacific Coast people-watching, and the rich array of succulent plants. One morning at Cafecito, I spotted an Elon Musk doppelgänger standing in line on the sidewalk while I was perched in the adjacent seating area, enjoying a gluten-free blueberry muffin and a plain old coffee, black. I felt for him: of all the people to resemble, he’s stuck looking like someone who names his child after a bar code and who cites a collapsing birth rate in certain countries as the crux of civilization’s problems.
The guy next to me asked me to watch his stuff and left his table with his journal wide open, as if asking me to peek into his soul. I averted my eyes and watched a pedestrian barefoot on Bellevue Avenue, which was blanketed with fallen fruit – decomposing, squashed, baked by the sun. Gender indistinguishable, this character had a shaved head and a Rajneeshi-inspired ensemble, appeared unwashed, possibly on a psychedelic-compelled mission.
The cashier seemed to have a distorted sense of his own appeal – a 20-something hair farmer in tight black jeans, peacocking and basking in the warm attention of a young woman who bared cleavage in proportion to her insecurity. She worked in casting. The peacock demurred as she urged him to get into commercials. There was a pair of friends, both who I guessed were either actors or therapists – or maybe actors in therapy – based on what I couldn’t help but overhear of their conversation, and from their leaning-in body language. They were adult women, both wearing black patent leather Mary Janes with white socks. Does this trend run alongside shaved eyebrows and drawn-on Raggedy Ann freckles? Does the Supreme Court’s confiscation of women’s bodily autonomy come with dressing ourselves up like ragdolls? I’m confused – maybe because I have nothing but polyester fill between my ears? These are style developments that haven’t yet penetrated the thick fleece barricade that insulates the Denver metropolitan area.
An LA peacock
Most of the other café-goers and street traffic in Silver Lake looked like they rolled up to the nearest Goodwill, grabbed whatever was closest to the door and ran with it. Fashion is fascinating – its inventiveness and aspiration express a lot about our latent and explicit desires. I’m struggling with Crocs-with-socks -- if anyone can help me understand what aspiration that look expresses, I’m all ears. I oscillate between a sort of urban middle-aged Olive Oyl dressed like Daisy Duke, and a fortune teller from central casting; what must this say about my own dreams and thwarted desires?
There’s a parable about Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer and conductor. Stravinsky was approached by the violinist who would play the solo of a new work. The violinist insisted that the passage was too difficult, that no violinist could master it. As the story goes, Stravinsky acknowledged that he knew the piece was unplayable – but that what he was after was the sound of someone trying. I appreciate the wisdom implicit in this statement – whether the story is apocryphal or not; it reflects the understanding that the human experience is messy and experimental – and that there is beauty and value in the striving, even when it doesn’t yield the desired result, or when ‘perfection’ isn’t reached or sustained.
Middle age is an unrelenting master of impermanence. It is a time of reckoning: life’s half-way point forces us to come to terms with finitude, laugh lines, and remaining student loan debt. If we’re lucky enough to make it to middle age, it’s natural to review where we are – to assess which dreams we may have outgrown or relinquished, which are still worth pursuing, and which may have been realized temporarily and subsequently crushed. By this time, we’ve all lost a few things – either explicitly, or just because we chose something else.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope is a loyal wife; her husband Odysseus disappeared at sea and is presumed dead. Nonetheless, Penelope refuses other men’s advances. Instead of starting anew, she spends her days weaving a shroud for her father in-law, and spends her nights unraveling her work. There is presumably some safety and comfort in pursuing a project which she will never complete. Many of us question our own patterns and habits – relational and otherwise - and wonder why they are often so difficult to transform or change. What would we do with a finished shroud? Perhaps the sound of completion is a kind of death. A finished shroud is something worn at a funeral. Perhaps we associate change with a kind of annihilation: the death of what’s known.
George Friedman is a futurologist, something I didn’t even know existed until last week. He’s sort of a geopolitical fortune teller. He predicted that the decade from 2020-2030 would be turbulent and difficult in the United States, based on his study of historic institutional and socioeconomic cycles. While this kind of prediction feeds our desire for certainty, I’m not sure that the past must necessarily be prognostic of the future. If that were the case, why would any of us bother to pursue evolution or change? We would instead blindly follow the archetypes and patterns of the past, of our parents and grandparents. . . and sometimes we do follow their paths, consciously and unconsciously. As ambivalent as we may feel about the prospect of change, the possibility of change is what keeps us going.
The sound of trying is sweet. The sound of trying is the music of our lives.
