The Only Life You Have

Parable on Piano

There was a time when I could not see someone else playing the piano without imagining myself playing it, with all the classical technique I never mastered.  That was something that ended around age 19.  After that, I was not a kid anymore.  I would never make up for the discipline I lacked as a child.  That was when I made the shift from aspirant to spectator.  Except that the shift never really happened, at least not in my head.  By the time I watched Brad Mehldau at Carnegie Hall playing jazz riffs on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, I was 42 years old.  I looked at Mehldau, a little older than me, more august than me, someone who had done everything with a piano and to a piano as anyone I’d seen, and I had seen everyone I could see—even Cecil Taylor practically destroying one.  Some people think this is all about technique, but I can feel it all, in all its beauty and pain, and as someone who plays the piano as well as I do, I imagine what it must be like to do that, to be that. I saw Mehldau play a duo with the great Charlie Haden, and Haden said that Mehldau, who was around 30 at the time, was the greatest musician he had ever worked with. Maybe the maestro was being generous, but something must have been shaken him up. This was someone who had anchored Ornette Coleman and the Shape of Jazz to Come, and something inspired this hyperbole. Coming from Haden, it could not just be hype.  

There was, it should be called The Brad Mehldau Effect: hand over hand, as if each finger was a fist.  He played standards, he played originals, and he played rock songs, but he played them like they were written for a classical virtuoso, but one that felt it all and never condescended.  That night at Carnegie Hall, along with the variations on Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, he included “Pinball Wizard” by The Who and “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” by Neil Young.  Mozart and Beethoven learned on Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, and I was learning, too.   I first saw Mehldau at the beginning of 1999, when I got my MS diagnosis and I didn’t know how long I’d be able to play.  “I’m just holding on to nothing, see how long nothing lasts,” sang Beck.  Holding onto nothing also meant clinging to those ivories and experiencing someone who was way ahead of me.

The more I watched Mehldau, the more I could feel the burden of it.   I could inhabit what those keys must feel like, with titanic strength and the delicacy of the muses.   The more I could see the blur of hands well beyond the speed of sound, where I would have to imagine in slo-mo what the hell he was really doing to make that piano speak, or cry out for help.  And the more he kept playing Radiohead’s “Exit Music,” the more obsessively he pounded those chords like he was Steve Reich on 88 keys.  He was grounding those keys deeper into the piano’s wood with methodical precision.  I could never, ever do what he was doing. And thank God.  As a younger man, I would have envied it.  Now, in the middle of my life, from a good seat at Carnegie Hall, I thought, thank God.  I am giving my mind and soul to music, but I cannot even pretend to give my body, not like that.  Thank God.  But I can feel what that is.   I hear it.   And if I listen too closely, I see those keys, and imagine all the pain and regret and anger that must be pummeling them.  There must be a lot of ache there, the kind that drove Glenn Gould to pills and Bill Evans to junk.  Gould died at 50, Evans died at 51.  Brad Mehldau is 51, still on the road, heading for another joint. 

I listen in awe, but with no envy.  To play that, I would have to be that.  I had the piano before me, using the instruction manual for Mozart and Beethoven, with the audacity of improvisation on top of it.  I can’t be this, I can’t delude myself I can be it, but I can possess it.  “Be the ball,” said Chevy Chase in Caddyshack.  I can’t be the ball here.  I can hear it, I can feel it, I can write about it, but I am not coterminous with it.  Franz Kafka wrote about the distinction between following the parables and being the parables.    

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.

We already know that we can’t really know, but we can still be astonished.  When Kafka wrote about Gregor Samsa becoming transformed into a gigantic insect, the moment we know he’s still human is when he can still love the sound of his sister playing the violin.  If you can still be moved, no matter what has happened to you, you’re still human.  It could be the first thing you remember, and it could be the thing that lingers the longest. 

Kafka wrote that to follow the parable, you become that parable.  But then, he wrote, I f you win in parable, you lose in reality.  The only life we have, wrote Kafka.  Bill Evans lost in reality after he was running out of veins for smack, and started shooting between his fingers, which somehow did not diminish his pianism in the slightest.  Brad Mehldau hated hearing things like this.  He talked to my friend about his youthful heroin habit for The New Yorker, then was furious to see it in print, then was reluctant to ever talk to the press again.  (When I was writing about him, he gave me the brush-off in the Village Vanguard dressing room.)  Who needs to talk to the parable of piano?  What is there to say that’s not there?  Those performances have the weight of the world on them.  I play in my head with the other spectators.  I am grateful that he is doing it, and I am not.  That piano can only do that with somebody else. 

Do you find that you are just on repeat?  Have you already decided what you like and don’t like?  Is it all about the music of your wild youth and everything else sounds like noise?  Or are you always moving the needle?  Or are things reappearing from your childhood and you’re completely messed up?  I’m grateful whenever this happens.  It’s a sign that it’s not over yet.  I am amused by grumpy people who have heard it all and say it’s all been done.  We need that, too, because they are often correct.  But once in a while, something will come along to startle you and make you feel like someone is reaching you with a sound that you have not quite heard before.  It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s a gift.

There are 88 keys on the piano, and the combination about what can be done on it, to it, with it, has not been exhausted.  “But play you must, a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,” wrote Wallace Stevens.  This is beyond me, yet it is me.   Are you in search of yourself? Do you still want more?       

Live through it.  Call it at its bluff.  This is the only life you have.