The Precipice

I stand, within four shivering walls
and their wood plank door,
on top of a mountain,
trembling with fear and promise
at the roar of gushing wind
wrapping its arms around my sticks and plaster, screaming,
demanding everything.
The door rattles its latch, and each thunderclap cracks closer,
coming to claw at walls and proud defenses.
The storm rages nearer, and I stand alone, on top of a mountain,
trembling with fear and promise
under the cold fire of invisible stars.

Tonight, again, the world demands this of me:
that I stand with my whole self bare at the center of the storm
and feel it through to my bones-
that I surrender again and again
and even here, even on the mountaintop,
trembling before the precipice,
be willing to tumble end over end into this life.

Chiesi agli Dei

Several years ago, I began to learn an art song by Vincenzo Bellini called "Malinconia, ninfa gentile", which translates to "Melancholy, gentle nymph". The first verse (the text of which is by the Italian poet Ippolito Pindemonte) is as follows:

Malinconia, ninfa gentile,
la vita mia consacro a te;
i tuoi piaceri chi tiene a vile,
ai piacer veri nato non è.

This translates, quite clearly, to roughly:

Melancholy, gentle nymph,
I dedicate my life to you;
Whoever is afraid of your pleasures
is not born to true pleasures.

It seems to be simply an early emo song. "Life is so painful! I'll embrace pain! Look how dark I am!" And it is, obviously, all sung in a minor key. Whenever I have sung this song, that is the only attitude I have brought to it - Italian hyperbole of suffering. Yet treating the second verse this way has always been a bit of a cop-out. Because the embarrassing truth is that I never really translated the second verse. I had a vague sense of what all the words meant, and I had read others' translations of it, but I had certainly not internalized its meaning. Eighteenth century poetic Italian is not always easy to translate for a non-native speaker like myself, and while reading the translations of others is helpful, I believe that to truly make a song your own, you must bridge the space between the poetic Italian and poetic English yourself.

And the thing that kept bothering me was that, in the middle of the second verse, the key changes to major. "Why does it change?", my voice teacher kept asking me. "You have to decide why if you want to sing this song." But the text just didn't make sense, so I continued to gloss it over, singing notes and words rather than a song.

Here is the text of the second verse:

Fonti e colline chiesi agli Dei;
m'udiro alfine, pago io vivrò,
né mai quel fonte co' desir miei,
né mai quel monte trapasserò.
(Trapasserò, né mai, né mai, co' desir miei,
trapasserò, né mai, né mai, trapasserò,
né mai, né mai, trapasserò.
No, no, mai.)

And here is the sense of the words, with no (or at most vague) meaning, that I had:

Fountains and hills, churchs to the Gods;
I will hear myself at last, I pay I will live,
never that fountain with my desires,
never that mountain I will pass.
(I will pass never, never, with my desires,
I will pass never, never, I will go beyond,
never, never I will pass.
No, no, never.)

Clearly there is some meaning in there, and clearly these words do not capture it. It turns out, of course, that I had made four crucial errors, and with them resolved, it turns out this song is not emo and angsty, but rather Buddhist and paradoxically joyful! (Which I am a big fan of.)

**The following is a detailed, perhaps tedious explanation of what these mistakes were, and how I fixed them. If you aren't interested in languages and translation, feel free to skip the next four paragraphs.**

The first mistake was "chiesi agli Dei". I initially translated it as "churches to the Gods", thinking "chiesi" was the plural of "chiesa", which does mean church. Of course, the plural of "chiesa", a feminine noun, is actually "chiese", and the 'i' at the end in fact turns the word into the first person past tense of "chiedere", which means "to ask". "Agli" is a compound of "a" and "gli", and Italian being a romance language, "a" can actually mean "to", "of", "at", or "in", to name a few. So "chiesi agli Dei" actually means not "churches to the Gods", but "I asked of the Gods".

My second mistake was "m'udiro", a compound of "mi" and "udiro". I did correctly identify "udiro" as a conjugation of "udire", which means "to hear", but thought that it was either the first person present (which is in fact "odo") or the first person future (in fact "udirò"), with the required accent probably accidentally omitted. But with further investigation, I discovered that "udiro" is actually a shortened version of "udirono": the poetic texts of arias and art songs often drop syllables at the beginnings or ends of words to keep a better rhythm. "Udirono" is the third person plural past tense of "udire", and so the phrase is not "I will hear myself", but "they heard me".

The next error was "pago", which I translated as the first person present of "pagare", which it certainly could be. Of course, that makes little sense here, and I luckily discovered that "pago" can also mean "satisfied".

My final mistake was ignoring the "né" of "né mai". "Mai" on its own means "never", and the "né" is indeed important. It means "neither", and is always paired as "né...né...", meaning "neither...nor...". With these tiny words added in, it is possible to parse the second two lines into four phrases rather than two: "'neither never that fountain' 'with my desires' 'nor never that mountain' 'I will go beyond'" - and it is possible to see that the first and third are connected, and the meaning closer to "Neither that fountain nor that mountain I will never go beyond with my desires." And the repeated phrases at the end are more accurately "I will pass neither never nor never, no never."

**Translatophobes start reading again!**

With these flaws fixed, the second verse is now:

Fountains and hills I asked of the Gods;
They heard me at last, I will live satisfied.
My desires will never go beyond that fountain
nor that mountain.

With this translation, I now find incredible depth in the song. In these words I now hear, "I will accept suffering. Those who do not accept suffering cannot experience joy. The beauty of the earth, of the present moment that is a gift from God, is enough. I will not desire more." And in this spirit, the key change finally makes sense.

The change to major happens at the first "né mai", which is certainly strange if the line is interpreted as giving up: "I will never go beyond" as "it will never get better". But with the joy of acceptance, it perfectly supports the deeper meaning of the song: "I will never go beyond" as "this is enough", worthy of a major key, indeed.


One of the things I love about classical music is the incredibly richness of it that can be discovered with persistence and meditation. With some pieces, it only takes minutes to get inside them and get them inside me. With others, it takes years of patience, of coming back again and again to what seems random and unimportant before I can make them my own. But I am learning to trust that every piece of music will give to me what I give to it, and hopefully I in turn will be able to give something of it to others.

Things to Think

by Robert Bly

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Tell No One/Ne le dis a' personne

This past summer, after reading many enthusiastic reviews of the French movie 'Ne le dis a' personne', and being the kind of person who can’t resist a critic-pleasing foreign/independent movie, I went to see it. I was thoroughly happy with my decision, as I found the movie to be engaging and moving. The twists and turns of a well-wrought mystery told a stunning tale of a man’s deep grief and loss, and awesomely redeeming hope.

So when I discovered this weekend (I know, shame on me for not doing my research earlier) that the movie was in fact based on the American novel ‘Tell No One’ by Harlan Coben, and being a fan of mystery novels, I thought I would try giving it a read. I opened it Sunday late in the morning, and read the final sentence on page 370 that night around 9pm. I guess I must have liked it, or at least enjoyed reading it. For the most part the plot was exactly the same as that in the movie – in fact the movie kept a surprisingly high percentage of the original plot’s complexities. Yet the book told a very different story, and I don't mean the slightly different ending.

The book was about secrets and lies, and self-sacrifice, and the consequences of seemingly simple actions as they layer into increasing levels of complexity. The movie, while certainly portraying some of this, was a tale of what it means for hope to return when it has been long abandoned – the terrified melting of a heart that had long ago given up. And in my opinion, it was much more powerful.

While I did prefer (shockingly!) the movie to the book, that in itself is not what I find most striking. What is most fascinating to me is the use of (almost) the exact same plot to tell two very different stories. To me, it speaks to what it means to be an artist. My analogies, of course come mostly from music, and here I think of the plot as being the song, and the story is the artist’s rendering. A song can sound completely different – and have a completely different impact – depending on who is performing it, and how. I think of Jeff Buckley singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Cohen’s original is certainly one that I love, but more as a compelling “plot” than a complete piece of art. Buckley’s cover is powerful and moving in a way that pushes the song into a different league. I feel the same way listening to Billie Holiday sing “The End of a Love Affair.” And hopefully what I will take forward from this is the lesson that art is what we put into it, and just as choosing beautiful songs to sing can’t make up for a lackluster performance, a passionate and honest one can always overcome the most humble of sources. (Wish me luck with conservatory auditions!)

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Ah, the treacherous work of blog maintenance - always seems like a good idea to start, but then to *keep* writing? But I've been very engaged in the book I've been reading lately, so here are some thoughts:

The most shocking thing about reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is realizing how very little we actually think about what we eat. Even I, a vegetarian who spends a relatively large amount of time reflecting on what I eat and why, had never even scratched the surface of the thoughtful investigation and reflection imparted by this book. Pollan emphasizes the fact that we are, quite literally, what we eat, and in an attempt to further discern what that really is, traces foods back through several chains of production to the ground that it comes from. Corn will never be the same after the first section on industrial agriculture. And, quite surprisingly for me, his chapter on "The Ethics of Eating Animals" made me rethink my reasons for my continued vegetarian diet. Not, of course, that I plan to start eating meat, but rather that my strongest reasons are tied more to the production of meat in America than to the actual act of eating an animal.
But the most delightful parts of this book for me were the descriptions of the divine working of farms - not big industrial ones, of course, but the actual incredible mechanisms interacting with each other in the best places, like Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, that allow each entity to thoroughly embody their deepest desires in a way that helps each other entity to more fully express theirs.
Oh how I'll mourn the closing of the farmer's markets this winter...

Happy Earth Day

From Blossoms
Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist

by Jane Hirschfield

Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.

Certain words--these, for instance--
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover's you
or the solipsist's I.
Perhaps the philosopher's willowy it.

The concealment plainly delights.

Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.

Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue.

Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.

And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.