The metronome
it clicks contentedly. the pace directed by the lead weight. slide it up, it goes to largo, allegro, adagio slide it down- presto, scherzo.
the frowning bust of Ludwig, frightens, threatens. as it should. no room for error on this piece. he was never a tolerant man.
i sometimes think he wasn’t a man. maybe an alien? maybe the little finger of god, sprouted with hands and feet and a froun, composing what can never be communicated in words.
the good and the bad.
the ticking, hammers in my head. and though i stop, it does not. sequencing my failure. i take a break, try running scales. on the left hand, you need to ‘jump’ the index going up. it works. but i fail to do so going down, with the forefinger instead.
Ludwig frowns some more. he scorns my efforts. he knows what i know. i am not ready for this sonata. i took more than i could possibly chew.
now for the question , posed by the wise tiger, is it nature that prevents me from getting better or nurture?
so: i am incompetent, a dilletant. my fingers are fat, and i have a slow response time and bad hand-to-eye coordination. these are both physical and mental hurdles.
it’s a nice mix, of course. a perfect storm to crush you.
i would say, and mock me for my ignorance, that it's more nurture though. i can blame the chair being too hard, the tick of the metronome being too ‘hammery’. i could excuse the failure as some apriori neurological shortcoming, that i acquired back in the radioactive swamp. i can blame my chubby digits for being too short. but that too , will miss the mark. michelle petrochianni, had short fingers and he was amazing. long spidery fingers are a requisit for only a few things. you must have them for guitar, which i dont bother trying...
i fail mostly because i have a shitty attitude. i let convenince rule over necessity. i abandone the joy if acheivment i will possibly feel with the mild , bitter comfort of ‘at least i tried’.
the metronome does not stop. it’s function is uninterrupted. the piano needs a tune, but it works well.
my physical preconditions are not bad enough to prohibit success.
it was like this all my life.
i let excuses and irrelevant tidbits distract me. it was not that i was born with some failing, i was adaquatly built. my fingers had no problem to manipulate the candybar, my mind had no hindrence coming up with lies to tell itself.
all that caused this mess is how i came to think of ‘easy’ rather than ‘better’.
i don't think that as a baby, i already was a lost cause. there are not a lot of baby-level piano sonatas. but i functioned well enough. it all went to a mess later on.
if it was physical, a ‘nature’ thing. i wouldn’t be able to learn the basics. i wouldn’t even be intetested in music, possibly.
but as my mind developed, and i drank in the mix of experiences of this world, i learned to favor some things over others. i came to be a lazy incompetant shit.
and so i remain.