Now Playing: "The Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd-Weber. Disc 2, Track 3, "Journey to the Cemetery". (courtesy of the Gamgees--thanks!) I love this track--it starts out with that desperate, sad, passionate theme for Raoul, then moves to Christine singing purely, simply, and at last opens up to a Gothic climax as you see the creepy, snowy cemetery with Christine's carriage and its spectre of a driver. Enough to give you shivers, dying away with the dismal tolling of distant church bells.
Let's see....
Rachel and I ate breakfast together this morning. We talked about the book by "Catullus" which made me so mad. It had angered her, as well, though we could both agree that later chapters were interesting, with their discussion of creativity in relation to the mind and also in relation to Greek myths about Apollo and Delphi (it was that first chapter that was incredibly offensive).
I practiced my flute after breakfast: chromatic scales, then long tones, working largely on trying to achieve a good pianissimo that doesn't sound pinched. It may appear easy, but it's really quite difficult to convince the flute to produce a soft sound without squeaking as though the flute had been transformed into a mouse. Scales came next, and some phrasing exercises which Dr. Gr assigned for studio class this Saturday, by Marcel Moyse. Moyse was one of the "fathers of the modern flute"--he was one of the first flutists to be a soloist, instead of simply playing in an ensemble. He fled France for America during World War II. After exercises came the Karg-Elert etude Dr. Gr assigned me at the end of last semester. For some reason, he's never had time to hear it, so (I think) I've actually had time to get it to sound decent. Finally, I practiced the first movement of the Poulenc sonata, which is also progressing. There are still a couple of spots where a phrase ends on a high eighth note, a note that should be sweet, like the flick of a cardinal's wing--somehow, though, I always manage to crack those notes. Also, the piece has a repeated theme that runs throughout. The first note of the theme is high E, an unstable note on the flute, and I have difficulty maintaining that note, even for a brief time, so that it rings, without falling flat. And, of course, there are the inevitable trills and double-tonguing spots that are tricky. My double-tonguing has been rightly accused of sounding like a machine gun, when it should be more like a ballerina floating around on pointe--which may give you an idea of how far I've progressed on
that. *sigh*
I spent the hour-and-forty-five minutes until RBL reading Wordsworth and Coleridge and sending e-mails to people.
To start class today, Dr. A, the professor of RBL, asked if anyone had any questions from last time. There was a dead silence. "No questions?" she asked, throatily, looking around and blinking cheerfully, as she always does. I couldn't help remembering my nagging question of the entire Romantic philosophy, and, more out of impertinence than anything else, raised my hand. "Yes, Evelyn?" Dr. A said. "Well, I'm not sure I understand this Romantic idea that they could find fulfillment in incompleteness. That doesn't make sense to me. How could they be content with imperfection, with seeing the journey as the goal and not having a real goal?" I asked. Of course, the answer was quite plain to me: they were fallen, and rejected God, and looked in every other place they possibly could to find something to shield themselves from Him. But Dr. A said, "Well, I guess that's one of the paradoxes of the movement. They just did." She motioned to another student, a Philosophy major, as it turned out, and the Philosophy major proceeded to give a homily on the excitement of the search for Truth as better than Truth itself. "There's the search for Truth, and there's Truth. You can't
do anything with Truth--it's just there. But the search for Truth--ah, now that's much more interesting," she said. I growled inwardly, but outwardly smiled as placidly as I could (though I couldn't get rid of the little perplexed frown), and just let the professor take over with her lecture.
Next came the First Seminar class, what I've been calling an "orientation" class. It's the class I had to read "Catullus"'s book for. Dr. A kindly let us out fifteen minutes early, so I had time to dash over to the cafeteria and pick up some lunch to eat in the classroom. The cafeteria had thick chicken-and-dumpling soup today, which was so heavy with flour and meat and celery that I could spoon it into my little foam "doggie bag" and carry it off without much trouble.
Rachel and I were the first ones to enter the classroom. Some previous class had obviously done exercises in desk art: many of the desks were covered with bright, color pen illustrations (some of them not very pleasant). The one I liked best was the portrait of a blond-headed boy, done in vivid reds and golds and purples, staring straight out of the desk with a little serious smile on his face. I hurriedly slurped down my soup, but not in time to finish before the professor entered.
Today the professor gave us an in-class project. He had asked one of the boys in the class to bring two bricks to class. The professor, Dr. T, then passed the bricks around to everyone. He invited us to make notes on its weight, size, color, shape, smell, taste ("Only don't gnaw on it!") in our sketchbooks (we're not allowed to use notebooks because we "might write on the lines" *shocks and horrors!* *cough*). Then he told us to make conceptual drawings of how we might support the brick on two pieces of paper. Some people had interesting ideas: folding the paper into accordion folds, or rolling it into cylinders. Once he'd heard our ideas, he gave us a little speech on "not being judgmental" and on "thinking way, way outside the Newtonian box" and on how we should not "take the world at its worth" but "always think of things differently". So he told us to come up with more ideas, ideas without limitation. Some of them were pretty nutty, I'll tell you: throwing the brick into outer space, or having aliens suspend it in their transporter beam (that was mine, with a laugh and a nod to Henry's "Star Trek" episodes), or simply telling it that it didn't exist.
Once we'd been through all this, Dr. T gave us a break, in which Rachel and I finished our lunches. I had a pecan-and-chocolate-chip cookie to finish--it was good. After the break (at two o'clock or so--this class runs from 12:30 to 3:15), he told us to use our ideas and support the brick on two pieces of paper. He divided the fifteen people in the class into two groups. My group sat around, pondering the possibilities, and hefting our brick, while bits of the fashionable "distressing" mortar on it flaked off in our hands (you know how people like to make their houses and clothes look older than they are--well, these bricks had had whitish-green mortar daubed onto them to make them look used). The other team rolled one of its pieces of paper into a lengthwise cylinder and managed to balance their brick on its end on top of the cylinder so that, in the end, the top of the brick was about eighteen inches or so in the air. We glanced over at them in despair, but continued to fiddle with our paper until we figured out that our brick was made lopsided so that, no matter how many balancing acts we attempted, we could never get it to stay positioned without the paper buckling.
Next, Dr. T gave us this assignment. He split us up into groups of four (Rachel and myself were one group of three, with a young man). Two people were supposed to talk, while the other practiced taking "organic" notes (cluster notes, like the highschool writing techniques book my mother used on us taught). Rachel and I talked about our papers while the young man took notes. She told me that Dr. G has been working with her to revise her final paper from last semester. Then the young man and I tried to talk. He was a very taciturn, unwilling personage. I managed to get him to tell me that he's a Psychology major who has lived in New York. He doesn't much like the pace of life "out here" because it's so "slow and conservative". I asked him what drew him to Psychology, and he said that he thought it was important to understand the human mind, which (he said) is the highest thing there is. "Oh, so you think that there isn't anything beyond what the human mind can perceive?" I asked. "No," he said. I was all set to start pressing him, but then recollected and told myself that this was a bad place and time to start arguing with someone. I must admit that I was rather intimidated by the young man, who was about three times my size and about as communicative as a sleepy elephant who's being pestered by a young parakeet.
When class ended, Dr. T assigned us each to watch thirty minutes of TV (or a movie) this week, and to take "organic" notes on it. I was in despair (despite the fact that he kept making sly, jolly comments about how easy it would be), since I have no TV and no desire to watch TV. However, the movie option is much more welcoming. With a glint of mischief, I thought of trying to take "organic" notes on a "Three Stooges" episode, but I think Rachel and I may end up borrowing one of Syneva's DVDs and watching that together, or something.
After class, Rachel and I walked outside and laughed. I flung my arms out in gladness to be outside. The gloomy clouds which had persisted this morning had blown over, giving way to a gloriously luminous sky, living blue behind the trees--like a sheet of rippling blue glass, with golden light glowing behind it.
Rachel and I walked back to the Honors House together. She told me about the paper she's been working on. Dr. G has gotten her to think of it more as a speech than a paper, which has changed some of her stylistic problems. In the Honors House, she showed me the common room (there was no one hanging out in it, as usual, so we were safe). On one wall was a mural depicting jumbled scenes: Athena standing under a tree, a city built of towers shaped like fountain-pen nibs, Greek helmets, a dark sky, and the words, "Leo is here", in reference to the ghost that supposedly haunts the Honors House. Here's the tale: Before the building became the Honors House, it was a fraternity (it is, after all on frat row). One night, some of the fraternity boys were playing around and they put Leo, one of their pals, between a couple of mattresses. They started to jump up and down, horseplaying, and in the midst of their merriment, they accidentally broke Leo's back, thereby killing him. The fraternity lost its commission, and the building was renovated so that it could be the Honors House. But it's said that the ghost of Leo still haunts the Honors House--supposedly, he was killed in the very room where Rachel lives.
As we looked around the common room, I noticed a shining grand piano standing in one corner, with a dusty green drumset scattered underneath it. "That doesn't work," Rachel informed me, "but that one does," gesturing to a battered upright propped against the opposite wall. "Is that a hymn book?" I asked, spotting a worn red hymnal perched on the music shelf of the upright. "Yes, but I've never heard them play hymns. I think it's just useful to hold up other music," Rachel said. "That's right--everyone supports their ideas by Christianity, but they never speak about it," I growled. She glanced at me in surprise.
She invited me upstairs and loaned me a copy of C.S. Lewis's
Miracles. We stood talking about Lewis for a little while--how, though we don't always agree with him, he's still useful and thought-provoking. I looked at the Escher sketches on her walls till they made me laugh and cross my eyes, and she told me a story that someone had written about a pair of characters that go into one of Escher's drawings--rather like an
Alice in Wonderland adventure. It's a drawing of a bunch of lizards that slither up over a stack of books and down into a piece of paper with geometric designs resembling their two-dimensional outlines, and then they slither back out of the two-dimensional design and into the third dimension.
I spent the afternoon rereading Wordsworth for RBL and e-mailing people. I ran in the gym. There were lots of interesting people to watch, which was rather distracting. One chap loped past me who was white as a peeled switch, even to his shaved head. Another hairy young man sprinted past, huffing and puffing like a jet warming up on the tarmac. A couple of girls flounced past, their ponytails wagging, giggling in whispers and tossing slant-eyed glances at everyone. A very tall, muscular man and a very short, thin young boy walked side-by-side. I showered after. Ate a late supper, though not alone--Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimil were busy talking on the slag heap outside Isengard, discussing their adventures from
The Two Towers.
And now it's "Uranus, the Magician" from Holst's "The Planets"--romping, unpredictable, as though all the magician's spells and spirits had escaped from his tomes and coffers and test tubes to go frolicking and romping around his lair.
Off to RUF.
