Attainment

Perhaps it comes to you, if you're like Beethoven, as you're walking through the woods and the thickets near Heiligenstadt. Beethoven's best ideas, according to the biographer George Fischer, came to him as he walked; "at such times his mind became serene and he would attain that degree of abstraction from the world which enabled him to develop his musical ideas." And did the ideas come as hints, or as fragments, or as full motifs? In any event, Beethoven made a habit of carrying notebooks, and jotted down thoughts as they came to him. When he got home, he then developed the ideas, working them into shape. A whisper, in a grove, developed into a full idea, and then given physical form, in a score.

Or perhaps it comes to you, if you're like Cleo, as you swing. Perhaps, suddenly, the sound dog is no longer simply a noise, an abstraction, but it now actually seems to mean. And so, this Sunday past, when your daddy asks you what noise a dog makes, you arc back and forth in your bucket swing, and think, and then say, as quietly and as deliberately as any dog worth his salt would be loud and spontaneous, oof. Your first word, of a sort.

And, two days later, as you concentratedly play with a gate in the Towson library, perhaps your body simply finally understands its own logic, and its own potential. And, with your daddy a few feet away, you fold your hands together, momentarily done with the gate, and totter over to him, unaccompanied, for your first five steps.

Who can describe the arrival of babies' firsts? Do they start in deep sleep, with a whisper of a thought? Do they come, as with Beethoven, during a stroll through the woods, in a backpack, on a shoulder? Do they suddenly arrive, as fully formed thoughts?

I don't know. But at least I can provide, in this case, the notebook.