rm | LJ Idol, week 6: Ghosts

Music is math, and so is longing, is the heart, is hope. So is silence. I tell people I used to study guitar with Robert Fripp. That's not really true, but I used to attend Guitar Craft, and that is, more or less.

Robert was the first of so many strange and eternally dissatisfied male creators that helped me decide who to be and how to be, and if I were a better Crafty, as we put it, I would probably never say anything like this at all. We have instructors in Guitar Craft, not teachers. But these are my sins, and I always wanted to be an apprentice.

I discovered Guitar Craft, New Standard Tuning, The League of Crafty Guitarists and so forth through a guy who worked at a Brooklyn cafe. I had a crush on him, and my friend Agnes said he had a face like a carnival. He was a big Fripp fan, and so I -- as I had done in high school with a different boy and a different band -- did my research and tumbled far down a well.

Now, I had studied classical guitar in college, but only because my father owned one and the lessons were free; it had made no sense to do as I wished and rent a cello. So I could play a bit, but it was no great passion, just something I could do and was glad to be able to.

But then there was this sound I found in Fripp's work. Math. Order. Rhythm. This was the construction of the universe by a million metallic ants. And it was perfect.

So, you know, I get on the Internet and Google. And I discover these essays, Robert's aphorisms, and it's all so smart and precise and deadly dry and completely hilarious. And I fell in love, just a little (really, just a little, I swear, even as I'm telling you this, I'm looking at you sidelong). And I thought, this is a hand I could want at the small of my back and that these were sounds I wanted to make, and I Googled some more and discovered that I could.

With a brand new Ovation guitar bought on discount through the course at a small shop in Fredericksburg, I went down to Claymont Court in West Virginia for the Introduction to New Standard Tuning.

I stayed in a room with five other women, and with one exception, the other 30 or so people at the program were men. I slept in a narrow bed with rough, woolen blankets, and, unable to tolerate the freezing cold water that came out of the taps, I bathed by kneeling in an empty claw-foot bathtub, splashing the frigid water on me as I dared.

I don't remember the other women hardly at all. One did Buddhist chants all the time, loud, and with power, and it was through the memory of her I learned to vibrate sound years later. But I recall no one else. What I recall is that I was lonely and that, that was the point.

Guitar Craft functions on a number of principles and suggestions, among them, that we do what is necessary, but also only what is necessary. We do not move the hand excessively on the neck of the instrument, we do not talk when we have nothing to actually say and we do labor when it is needful.

Meals were communal and largely silent, but joyful really, and laughter burst out strangely, often. It was nice, even if I was a hundred types of young and awkward and scared that I was somehow doing it wrong.

Each day we did meditation in the morning, which, I'll be honest, I often slept through. Then we did circles -- Guitar Craft music is largely created through improvisation in circles, and is largely played in circles, and it is, I maintain, a summoning. There was Alexander Technique in the afternoons, and then more playing, late into the night, until 11pm at least.

I haunted the halls after that. My hair was very long then, and I wore floor-length flowing dresses of thick fabric. I didn't seem like a hippie; I seemed like a queen.

There was a man I became friends with, whose name I also don't recall. He looked like a guy I had known in college through the GLBT student group, but this fellow was straight and had children, and we'd sit on the back porch of the mansion at night and talk, and since we did not care whether it was necessary or not, it must have been. No one ever shushed us.

I remember telling him, "I don't care if I'm the worst and least experienced person here, I just want to play. I just want my right to be here acknowledged."

He nodded gravely, but it was a woman's truth, and not one he could do or say any more in response to.

During our breaks in the day, I would wander out onto the back lawn of the mansion, and then down the path to the ruined formal garden that was ostensibly under repairs. It was filled with broken statues and columns and paving stones, and it felt dangerous and wrong. It was a wild place, thick with weeds, and it made me feel easier with the idea that I was full of blood.

Each Guitar Craft seminar features a challenge. Something one must do that one is not prepared to do. Our instructors, experienced students and people that have performed with Robert, with King Crimson even, told us stories from the early days.

"And then this truck pulls up with a recording studio in it. Record an album. You've got 26 hours!"

I wondered so desperately after our surprise, which turned out to be a concert at the mansion which was promoted far and wide (whatever that is for West Virginia).

While I remember writing (a misnomer -- Guitar Craft music is transmitted by habit, not notation) with my group what we eventually performed, I do not remember the performance. What I remember is this:

Flying down the stairs of the mansion with my hair loose in one of my long black canvas dresses, and knowing I looked like I was running to meet a lover and being proud of it.

A song performed by the one experienced female Crafty present at the concert about the sorrows of binary stars.

And me, in slacks, shirt and waistcoat standing on the back lawn looking out at the stars after it was all over, my hands in my pockets as I rocked back and forth from my toes to my heels in my perfect little black Oxfords in the wet grass and wondered at this feeling of having the elegance of men. Finally.

The next day my boyfriend retrieved me and we drove back to his home in DC in his blue pick-up. I didn't know how to speak to him, nor did I wish to relearn. He congratulated me on being made calmer by it all, and I thought with fury and with fire that, that had not been the point.

The point had been to have loved and to have left. I must have mourned.

I wrote about the experience soon after and posted it on my website. I spoke of that feeling of summoning, and I spoke of what it felt like to be in the mansion surrounded by what I termed the ghosts of the not yet dead.

On Elephant Talk, a popular King Crimson discussion board site, I was mocked for my mysticism and my belief in the supernatural. But it was no such thing. I was merely a writer who could see how others had moved and later would move through that house. That I could know their phantoms was a gift, because I could see also that I was not to be one of them, although I did take private lessons after and attended other Guitar Craft seminars in other places too. But those are different stories.

I have a poetry project I talk about but cannot seem to execute on, simply because I am too shy. I call it 100 Gods. 100 poems, 100 unnamed subjects, the pantheon of an only child, a hungry artist, a desirous woman, an ambitious man.

And Robert will always be among them for the precision I taught myself in shy silence and admiration and lust in the midst of everyone else's love songs. I would be someone else without him and gratitude has a long arm.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lilmissmagic71.livejournal.com

I am filled with... envy (on you having had such an experience)... delight (at your imagery, it always resonates with me)... love (I think I fell in love with you a little during your description of running down the stairs)... and an abundance of... WOW.

Excellent post, as always, luv!

From:

a devotion to vanishing things

LJ Idol, week 6: Ghosts

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