Warmup

Back in the heyday of deconstruction, when Charles Moore was throwing up broken pediments and you could take a seminar on Derrida and feel more or less completely contemporary, I had a suitemate who began a paper with the phrase, 'Openings are always difficult.' But he didn't stop there, with the written assertion: he actually stapled the paper on all four corners, making the physical form of the essay into a demonstration of its opening line.

I suppose that you could say that, in doing so, John was employing an ancient idea: the idea, common to Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, that beginnings are struggles. Momentum is hard to gather; muses need to be invoked. But I like to think, too, that he was also ahead of his time, in another sense. In the years after 1989, a number of hip-hop artists began to include rather brief meditative opening tracks as preludes to albums; these short tracks, never meant to be released as singles, were more a matter of gathering energy, or finding one's voice. I think, for instance, of "Genesis," on Nas' seminal Illmatic, which offers - with its sample of an elevated train, and soft voiceover of two men arguing - a hint of the singer's urban roots, a taste of the beginnings of his career, and a chance for him to establish a mood, a beat, a tone, before launching into the rest of the album. Or put on Jill Scott's wonderful 2000 album, Who is Jill Scott?, and listen to the short Jilltro, at the outset: you'll hear the flickering registers of a series of radio stations, as though the singer is flipping through options, before settling on her own style.

All of which has little, and everything, to do with Cleo. Cleo's never written an epic poem; never laid down a hip-hop track. She's stapled once or twice, but never with a clever conceit in mind. And yet, when she wakes up, and pads down the hall to our room, she's always faced, be it at 5:09 or 6:36, with the same problem that confronted my friend John, and the poet Milton, and the rapper Nas. How to begin? And, some days, it takes a few moments: Cleo simply breathes, heavily, at the door. On other days, she confidently strides in, announcing that she was thinking that maybe she'd like some warm milk. Or, recently, she's asked if she could climb into bed with us for a few minutes, before beginning her day.

Openings may not always be difficult, on one level (after all, how hard is warm milk, really?). But they always involve choices, and they define, in their way, the rest of the day. Toddler, rapper: a first sound is a getting started, a launching, a mark in the world.

Attention must be paid

It's Arthur Miller's famous line, but I'll appropriate it for the moment, because it more or less summarizes an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy that washed over me as I drove home a few minutes ago. I'd been at the gym, trying to shake off the scrim of a week of lethargy and trying to rejoin the adult world, at least momentarily, after a day spent with Cleo. I turned on the local classical radio station and heard the clean, exact brilliance of a composition that could only be Haydn or Mozart. Yes, confirmed the host a few minutes later: Mozart's sixth serenade, played by the Academy of Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields. But wait, I thought. I'd enjoyed hearing, entirely at random, the piece, which I didn't know. But the thought that such works -such works of worth and value - are constantly playing, for the 23 hours and change when I don't happen to have the radio on, suddenly seemed overwhelming. We refer to the corpus of classical music, as thought it were a single body, or individual: someone, or something, we could know. In reality, though, the world of interesting classical music sprawls, and includes thousands upon thousands of works. It's a body, all right: but one composed of legions of cells, rather than one familiar face.

And that, in turn, reminded me of my day with Cleo. With L. back at work, the nursery closed, and my semester not yet begun, I got the rare chance to spend a full Wednesday with my local toddler. For the most part, it was much fun: her Santa hat drew smiles wherever we went, and she shared her applesauce at lunch, like a true lady. But by 4 p.m., she still hadn't napped, and I was wishing for a few minutes of my own: a breather, in which I could clean up, check my e-mail, and try the next page of my new graded Arabic reader. I put out glue, and tape, and paper, for her, and asked her if she'd like to make a collage - and headed for the kitchen sink, and its pile of dirty dishes. And within three minutes, I heard a little voice, from the next room: Daddy! You're not paying attention to me.

I didn't even know she knew the phrase - and certainly didn't imagine that she'd level such a charge. Hadn't I just paid attention to her for eight consecutive hours? And yet, now I know just what she meant. Each moment is its own. You may have read, this very morning, the complete series of Laura Numeroff books to your toddler - but she's moved on, and wants to show you something now. Likewise, you may have enjoyed that serenade that was just broadcast - but now there's Smetana on, and he deserves your attention, as well.

The current is unrelenting, the well unfathomably deep, the animals voracious. Your attention may be limited, but it's in infinite demand.

Mimesis

In one of Cleo's current favorite books, Angelina Ballerina, Mrs. Mouseling comes upon Angelina in front of a mirror, trying on her mother's hats and making various faces, while checking out her reflection. It's actually a rather interesting moment in the book's narrative arc, because it feels like a moment of pure, private vanity - but then becomes, we discover, a rather important part of the girl's training, which pays off when she ends up on the big stage. What seems like self-indulgent play, in other words, is actually useful practice, directed toward a specific end.

Because, after all - let's face it - all artists dissemble. The cave painter pretends, and asks us to pretend, that the ochre on the wall is actually the living, pulsing hide of a beast. The bluesman pretends, night after sweaty night, that his baby has just done left him. And the film editor, cooped up in a dark room, enables us, through a splicing of shots and countershots, to imagine that we are peering over the shoulders of the lead actor and actress. And why such dissembling? It's a necessary part, I suppose, of the project of mimesis - of the basic goal of so much Western art since Plato first used the term. Those violinists, with their bows hopping on their instrument bridges while playing Debussy's La Mer? They're doing their best to recreate, in our minds, the tremble of the sea - and, in the process, pretending that wooden curves are frothy waves.

And so, along the way, every child learns the process, as well. Perhaps they stand in front of a mirror, and try on costumes. Or perhaps they begin to sketch, with chalk or crayon. Or maybe, as Cleo did this week, they begin to mimic countenances associated with various moods. So, for your consideration: above is Cleo, asked to do a happy face. And below, Cleo again, imitating crazy and sad faces. Sure, it's simple fun. But when Angelina makes a career of her interest, it then seems like more than mere fun, as well.

Order and chaos

Two nights ago, on a balmy December evening, L. and I walked Cleo up to the Homewood House, the stately villa that was built by the locally important Carroll family in the early 1800s, and that now stands at the middle of the Johns Hopkins campus. The building's a museum now, and it was tricked out, on Monday, in its holiday best: glass-enclosed candles lined the front walk, a wreath colored the door, and a number of volunteers offered brief tours of the interior.

So much space, so much order, so much clarity. One gets the sense, in such preserved spaces, that our wealthier forefathers lived in a world that was not unlike that of Le Corbusier's clean dreams. A bed, a bedpan, a dresser - and no scattered clothes, or dust motes. A central table in the dining room, with a crystalline array of silver - and no half-finished magazines, or misplaced sippy cups, or CD jewel cases. It's as though such people lived in an environment that was simply not yet overwhelmed by the surfeit of things that's now so familiar to all of us: that the harp in the drawing room was significant precisely because it was one of a mere handful of made objects that could be used for entertainment.

Perhaps, perhaps. And images from earlier centuries only confirm such a hunch: the insistently moral interiors in De Hooch's paintings, for instance, suggest that the 17th century, as well, was simply a cleaner, simpler time. But the historian in me wonders, nonetheless: mightn't this have been, to an extent, a curated impression, or an editor's decision? De Hooch worked for clients who wanted to project an air of Calvinist propriety, and no doubt unseemly complexities were thus eliminated in the final painting. Indeed, doesn't something similar happen in the pages of a modern architectural journal like Dwell? We admire the clean lines and immaculate surfaces even as we recognize, simultaneously, that a cleaning crew likely worked to produce such a look, moments before the shoot.

And yet, as we wandered through the Homewood House, we encountered a piece of evidence that suggested that pure, geometric simplicity has in fact always been, and will always be, at hand. In a small chamber a quartet from the Peabody Institute played the final movement of a composition by Haydn. Drawn by the dynamic, energetic sounds, we stepped into the room and took seats in the back, and allowed the music to wash over us. Ascending motifs, competing lines and complementary passages - but all of it arranged, it seemed to me, in strict accordance with a deep, abiding respect for mathematics and ideal symmetry.

The music, I want to say, cut through me. The rougher, more ambiguous contours of the day dissolved; all seemed cleaner, more precise, more obvious. And so, refreshed, we moved back into the rest of the house and its precise, ordered rooms, before leaving, a few minutes later, and driving home. But even when we opened the door to our own house, and entered a more densely populated world of plastic toys and CD jewel cases, Haydn's lesson persisted. Played live or heard in reproduction, the music bears a powerful reminder. Beneath the scrim there are deeper and more elegant tides.

Relax

As I type this, I'm listening to an 8-minute composition by Marconi Union that I saw mentioned in Time a couple of weeks ago. Called 'Weightless,' it's garnered a reputation for being incredibly relaxing - indeed, it was apparently written in conjunction with a panel of 'sound therapists,' and was found to be, in a study commissioned by a bubble bath company, more relaxing than a cup of tea or a massage.

In other words, it's dangerous territory for this dad, who was up at 5:50, who swam against the current of the Towson Christmas traffic today, and who just read his daughter a pair of nighttime books, including one that ended with Olivia, a pig, being tucked in. If 'Weightless' is soporific, it's merely overkill, at this point: I was yawning deeply with Olivia. Adding a tune forged by sound therapists, at this point, is like downing a valium after reading for four hours, in front of a fire.

My larger point, though? It's simply this. In a country that offers vast ranges of products that can keep you awake - from Red Bull to No-Doz - and that can put you to sleep - Nyquil, anyone? - it may still hold true that in fact the most reliable stimulants and relaxants are packaged in the same convenient container that they've occupied for years. Yeah, I'm thinking of your common toddler. At least, when I hear Cleo's labored breathing and surprisingly heavy footsteps coming down the hall, something in me leaps awake: on an almost animal plane, I become alert. At least, I'm temporarily alert. But by the same token, later in the day, when Cleo manufactures pretend cupcakes in her pretend oven, and spends time delicately arranging the baking tray while giving a murmuring commentary, I tend to think that nothing could be more relaxing, more satisfying.

Not even, I think, if you consulted an entire army of sound therapists.