Day 13 : Blood Moon

Day 13 : Blood Moon

I woke up around 5 but laid in bed for almost an hour before deciding to get up.  I was trying to get perhaps one more hour of sleep.  I drank a few beers last night & was now regretting that I had.   Ophelia stirs & then settles back in her place.  She’s the only dog I’ve ever known to sleep in & never wants a walk before noon.  I realize in my background thoughts that I have been constructing clever contrivances for this morning’s piano practice:  

What if I just sit at the paino & try not to move at for as long as I can?  Hold still certain playing poses on the keyboard & pedals.  The journal entry could be titled: Stillness

I should shower & dress before practice.  No.  Shower & then get back into my pajamas.  I think about the specific forms of oppression involved in & around tuxedos.  In an around blue jeans.

Remi stirs, lets out single ‘mama’ & settles himself.

I decide to get up.  I find Oreo sitting on the sofa next to the front door, waiting to be let out.  He lets out a single meow as he sees me emerge from the bedroom hall.  On the rare nights he sleeps inside he usually likes to go out before breakfast.  He’s never used a litter box except during a hurricane or when we moved here two years ago.  I was told not to let him outside for the two weeks it would take him to lose the impulse to run back to the street he was born on.  I wonder how long it will take Remi.

I open my front door to let Oreo out & there is the blood moon; hanging low, slowly becoming eclipsed by the earth.  All my plans evaporate.

I put on the pair of worn out high tops that I say I keep around to mow the lawn, but in truth are my favorite, & follow Oreo outside.

Oreo & I stand in the driveway of our home & watch the eclipse.  The moon going from silver to a dark rusty orange (Fa becoming ~Re).

Practice Begins.

I walk to a spot in our lawn that I know (from many other nights & early mornings spent looking up) to be a sort of strategic hole in the neighborhood light pollution.  Oreo follows me there.

I take a few photos as the last sliver of straight moonlight disappears at 6.  It was both six o’clock on its clock face & 6:00am my phone’s digital clock.  I put my phone away & bend down a little to scratch Oreo behind his ears.  I stand up again refix my eyes on the blood moon.  Oreo celebrates by tracing two of his black/white lemniscatus runs around my high tops, flicking his black tail agains my pajama pants.  

It’s a slow process & takes probably about a quarter of an hour to go full-orange.  I take one more picture.  I realize, from the change in its position relative to some tall palms, that in addition to being totally eclipsed, the moon is also setting, & quite quickly.  

I watched the blood moon set low behind the flat western horizon as, in the east the sunrise grew more undeniable.  The two essentially trading places at opposite edges of the sky.

Oreo disappeared into the bushes. I went inside & sat down at the day-lit Vose.

I acknowledge with solemn gratitude the two weeks or so that the Vose & I have left in this space.  In this house, on this street of such incredible human character.  

I center my hands & feet.

I inhale & bring my hands to the great white ocean of the key surface.  Pushing the hands forward through the inhale I ask, where are we?  What do we have at center? 

The black keys remind me: In the left you have Ti.  In the right you have Fa.

My thumb & index fingers meet in the piano’s center Atlantic.  The four tips coming to form a single point, the itsy bitsy spider, tracing the gulf stream. Froward & back, In & out, from the mouth of the cave to the lip’s edge.

The middle fingers find their rivers.  The left pinky & ring cluster in the first Pacific left of center.  Both pinkies trace the international datelines bounding to the left & to the right this center.

In the daylight I can see as well as feel that at center each hand’s wrist floats in vertical alignment with the knee-ankle axes.  Thumbs & indexes gently fused.  No muscle is required to hold this pose beyond the minimal restful poise of posture. 

I work the work the pedals in alternating slow quarter breath pulses, noting the lift on the back half of the beat: ‘Left & Right & Left & Right &’. I try to not engage muscles for the &’s; try to let the mechanism simply push up as each foot briefly rests before reengaging the cycle.  

This studio was originally the house’s open air car port.  The glass was added to connect its 3-foot exposed brick walls to the roof overhang forming a room.  This work was most likely done before I was born & will be demolished before this year is through.  

Because Remi moves the piano bench for his own purposes, I find that I need to reposition each morning.  I have also found just recently that the position which I find to be optimal is just shy of exactly how back the space allows me to go.  The immovable Vose is setup so that the player faces into the studio, backed into a corner made of windows which I have decorated using rectangular plastic color sheets.  The decoration is based on an idea I had when I first set foot in this room, accompanied by the then 82 year old realtor & Miami native, George Cadman III.  The first time I entered this room it was completely empty.  I saw the south wall opposite the entry door was made up of 5 rows of 12 x 1’ square windows.  Perfect, I thought, transparent 5 string fretboard.  A week later I went on Amazon & purchased the colored translucent sheets.  I usually don’t point out that this long wall displays the colored solfege pattern in both scale order (left to right) & functional order (circle of 4ths represented vertically).  A person either sees it, or they don’t.  If i try to explain it, I come off like a crazy person who’s convinced himself that he is clever.  

When the two corners of the bench are just about a finger width from coming in contact with the concrete bricks, the bench edge is in the right place for my sits bones to hook at the edge, knees over ankles, big toes under each thumb, when the hands are centered.  I can’t go any further back.  Luckily i don’t think i need to.  The piano was the first item placed in this room, by a team of 3 large professional piano movers who placed the piano here for a fee of $800.  I knew at the time that placing the piano here was the right place, the guitar stands, bookshelves, desk & the rest of the choices for this room came as a result of this first immovable choice.  (see attached photos) 

In between the back-forth motion of the hands on the central key surface, I add an arm motion which sends each hand out to the extreme keys on its side.  This exercise times perfectly with the song Itsy Bitzy Spider:

INHALE : CENTER, FORWARD : “The Itsy bitsy spider, went up the waterspout”

EHALE :  BACK, OUT : “Down came the rain, & washed the spider out”  

INHALE : CENTER, FORWARD : “Out came the sun & 

EXHALE : BACK, OUT : “Dried up all the rain & ”

INHALE : CENTER, FORWARD : “The itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again”

EXHALE : BACK, OUT : reflection space before repeat.

I realize that the Una Corda mechanism is not working properly.  Most notably because the pedal is squeaking every time I press down my left toe.  

I think about pausing practice to go & get the WD-40.  Wouldn’t that be practice too after all?  I anticipate the LLM response to notice how cleverly i was able to solve this mechanical problem at exactly this the right time.  Everyone is worried about Ai musicians.  No one discusses how well the ai can already simulate the audience.

Listening to the squeaks I can tell that they each hold a discernible pitch.  They make a little sing song to the rise & fall of the left foot.  They are not unison.  Using the instrument before me I confirm that they are in fact a perfect 5th.  Specifically the one the colonized call F & C.  I press record on my phone & document as my right hand singing along with my squeaky left foot.  Alto range?  Soprano?  Here on day 14 changing registers with eyes open feels like cheating.  

I hold my head up which puts the hands & keyboard at my lower peripheral when I look straight ahead.  Even this blurry edge info is so much more confirmation than i need, but helpful nonetheless now.

Still not fully convinced whether I am at unison or octaves with the squeaks, I let my right hand go all the way out, beyond soprano, to the final F & C.  The C being the highest sounding key of all. The F sounds right.  The highest C just clacks down on the keybed.  During one of the hundreds of times I removed the action I accidentally snapped the hammer head off that high C.  Its the kind of thing that would take me 30minutes to fix.  The broken hammer has in fact been sitting on my desk for over a year (see attached photo).  

For now I audiate the broken highest C.  The highest F is enough evidence.  It is confirmed.     

I press stop on my audio recording.  (See attached audio recording)

I pause the motion of my left foot, & the squeaking stops.  I continue keeping 4 beats per breath phase with my right toe.

The hands continuing their long L shaped runs alternating forward & back at center with recurring excursions out to the sides. 

When the hands fly out to the sides, they mostly stay out over the ocean.  I run my thumbs over the lip from center to each edge.  Then I do this with my index fingers, middle, ring, even pinkies.  The first run for each is awkward.  By the third run there are no alarms, no surprises, its just a move i now make sometimes. 

When the hands return to center I try to prepare them to form back into the spider shape before going forward up into the black key line.  When I bring the curved indexes together while the thumbs are hyperextended, the hands form heart-shaped box forms at the center.  (see photo).     

I repeatedly split & reunify the heart-shaped box, just like a $5 pewter necklace I bought my first girlfriend.  As the halved heart shapes travel across the oceans & back, I  trace the broken line of black keys with each finger tip.  Like running fingers across a comb or a chain link fence.  I not the asymmetry of this middle edge.  The 3 : 2 pattern is blurry at first, especially using both hands simultaneously, which from center start out of phase.  I limit the outward motion of the hands to just one half cycle.  Asking each half-hearted index & thumb to just find me the next Pacific.

RRrip, the Left team tallies 2 black.  While simultaneously RRRrip, the Right team reports 3 black.  I do this for several breaths metered by foot pulses.  It’s an odd rhythm, but musicality rises to this occasion & it locks in.   I think about how in music 1 & 0 (Re, ~Re), become 2 & 3 (Do, Sol), become 4 & 6 (La, Mi), become something we cognize as that which requires leap of faith (Ti, Fa).   This seems like more evidence of a hard limit which shapes the nature of human cognition (to 7 degrees). 

I look at the clock & realize all the above (which has taken me over 2 hours to only roughly outline) has happened in the span of about 20 minutes.

Practice ends.