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.