All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What We think, We Become. - Buddha
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Archive for November, 2007 Page 2 of 6
…about those days when I wanted nothing more than to be a concert pianist playing fifty concerts a year around the world…..
I was fourteen. And, some how playing those virtuosic pieces with all the sentimentality that was brimming out of my teenage self, I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I played those pieces composed centuries, decades ago with all my heart and passion, like no one else had. I played it my way. I brought listeners to tears. And a couple days after I turned sixteen, I left for London to music school. I thought that my life was made.
Technique, technique, technique… The physical-ness of being a musician. It really is identical to that of being a sportsman. Without the genes that guarantees height for a basketball-er, or the thighs and long calves of that of a sprinter, it doesn’t matter if you know at the bottom of your heart that your soul was meant to do what your body couldn’t do. I practiced nine hours a day, but I never had the fingers of some of my school mates who could rattle Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky without needing to practice more than an hour a day. After three years of doing all I could, literally breaking myself on the wall each day and night, I knew that what my heart sang and what I could do well were drastically different. I ended up in university majoring in Economics, some thing I could do with my eyes closed. I received top honors, but yet it was and still is a huge struggle to come to terms with the fact that what I love and excel in are two different things.
I treated myself to an iPod video today. As I was downloading music into this new iPod, I came across some of my old recordings of more than thirteen years. My heart was all there. It is another reality. Perhaps one that I have had hidden for too long but yet I am unable to revive. That memory is the silent part of my existence that will only be known to me and only me.
Bunny
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Many times I was about to sit and write a very personal memory: about my father; but every time something stopped me from doing that.
Death underlines life. If life is the sum of our memories and experiencies, where should be total. My first teacher taught me how to do it in primary school. Write numbers you want to add right under each other. When you put them all, draw a line and add numbers in each column. Under the line there will be one number, “total”. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do when it comes to a life of somebody you know well. It’s amazing, actually, how scarce my memories are. He was a very kind and simple man. What I remember is just little things: my father caught just in his underwear on his way to toilet late in the night; his shaking hands when he hold my newborn son for the first time; he is sleeping on a sofa in living room, covering his face with a newspaper. Little, random and unsignificant memories. I remember him reading me his poems impromptu, or running around our house in a search for a pen. He would write his poems on anything: old receipts, shits of paper, newspaper clippings… he would leave them anywhere: you could find them in the kitchen, in the toilet, under the bed, on TV, on the floor, between book pages… He was a hardworking man, killing himself with a hell of a job (that was my first impression of it, when he took me there: hell, as he worked on a metal plant. Fumes, dirt, unbearable heat and red liquid metall running under the overpass he had to stay on long shifts). But he would always say: I’m a poet. Indeed, he was. I never was fond of his poems and everybody in my family annoyed by them, though. He, probably, didn’t have a talent, but there was no shortage of enthusiasm and commitment. He stuffed with his poems a pillow case, and then few shoeboxes, and then plastic shopping bags when he ran out of boxes. Nobody wanted to listen to him. Continue reading ‘Father’
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Maybe it all happens because I leave things unfinished, in the middle. My interest wonders from subject to subject, as a lost cow wonders between trees of a small forest. A bit of grass here, a bit there. I really started to understand with the course of time how concentration is important.
Unfortunetaly, things like this you recognize also with the course of time; so life in a way is a race between our physical and virtual time, race with no winners in my case. Getting older means to drop attachment first to things, and then to friends and places, which are also friends in their own right: my best friend so far was Babylondon.
Learning it’s streets was like learning a woman. London as a big mixed race Lilith: love from the first sight.
Now imagine leaving your love behind.
There are other ways to understand what you become older. Looking in the mirror or at the old photos should be most obvious one. It doesn’t work well with me: I look in the mirror and don’t recall myself anymore. Every time I look at photos, I see a frozen reflection of another person.
I understand what I’m getting older by little things: most tracks and albums I have became a bit dated. Two teeth are missing there was one. I feel like I saw everything billion times and lived for billions years. 6.523.647 or 6.523.652 do not make big difference. At dentist’s yesterday it took me some time to calculate: 2007AD minus 1975AD. Tell me quickly, how much is it. He asked me 3 more questions: 1.How long do you want to stay in Thaland?/I don’t know. 2.Does it depend on job?/No, on feelings. …5 minutes later: 3.Why are you smiling?(while trying hard to pull out my tooth)/No response : )
It’s easier to get lost in the trees too.I think I’m in the beginning of the next step. Losing attachment to myself. Loosing Myself. I half anticipated yet another thing unfinished: this post, but I changed tracks. “Moon over Tokyo” (Japanese Folk) calls back to the concentration.
Concentration is a very important thing. It always brings results. Concentration on nothing, for instance, will make you nothing. I concentrated my mind on Absolute for a while. So here it is. The formula of Absolute.
0>1=1>0, I think.
Boris Kislitsin
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