...and I quote

Over the past couple days, Cleo's surprised me twice, and pleasantly, with some rather interestingly phrased compliments. On Thursday, I took her to Towson Town Commons, where we split a fruit smoothie, chatted about Snow White, and tried on some shirts. When I donned one rich purple button-down, I asked her what she thought. "You look handsome and dignified," came the response. And then, the next morning, when Cleo strolled into our bedroom at 5:55, she happily climbed under our covers for a few minutes - and then told me that I smelled like "warm toast, with a good deal of butter on it."

Kind words, no? But were they really hers? Well, not quite, or not simply. Her first compliment, for instance, was a direct appropriation of an assessment offered by Martha, a hippo, when she sees her friend George, in James Marshall's wonderful series of stories. George had fallen, and lost his tooth, but Martha responds - as she usually does - like a true friend. And now Cleo was perpetuating the act of kindness.

And the reference to toast? Well, that's a bit more obscure, but it was drawn, too, from a story on Cleo's shelves: or, rather, from a series detailing the adventures of a pig named Mercy Watson. Mercy loves, above everything, toast - or, to be more specific, generously buttered toast. Happily, her stories usually begin and end with toast. And so once again, Cleo was borrowing words, but was also quoting a context associated specifically with kindness, or happiness.

Which is, to finish the thought, more than some of her role models do. She's currently wrapped up in the 1991 Disney film Beauty and the Beast, lent to her by a fellow Yellowbird. In that film's climactic scene, the insufferable Gaston - a narcissistic musclehead who desires the affections of the intelligent Belle, and is thus dismayed to see Belle beginning to admire the noble Beast - inspires a mob of villagers to take up torches and to hunt the Beast. Here's a portion of the so-called Mob Song:

Gaston: We'll rid the village of this Beast. Who's with me?
Mob: I am! I am! I am!
Mob: Light your torch! Mount your horse!
Gaston: Screw your courage to the sticking place!

And so on. Cleo, I suspect, doesn't quite understand the line about the sticking place. And of course she doesn't know that it's a quotation of a line originally spoken by Lady Macbeth. But perhaps she does pick up on the fact that Gaston is urging a horrible deed - and maybe she even senses that he's speaking in words that are not entirely his own. We quote - Gaston quotes - to particular ends.

And so does Cleo. Borrow a phrase from a gentle, tender moment in a book, and you can retain some of that tenderness, even while warming your dad's heart in the present tense.

At ease

In Forever Liesl: A Memoir of the Sound of Music, the autobiography, of Charmian Carr (the singer and actress who played the elder Von Trapp girl in the film version of the classic film), Carr spends a paragraph explaining the origins of her rather unusual first name. It's Shakespearean, she points out, and it was her dad who chose it; he'd been struck by a similarly named sister of a friend, and loved the sound of the name: shar-mee-an. But while that sound was clear enough to him, it certainly wasn't always obvious to those who met, or ran into, Carr over the course of her career. "Everyone always mispronounced it," she explained, "calling me Char-mane, as if I was some kind of dish at a Chinese restaurant."

Well. Here at Halfstep, we've got nothing against either permutation. But we do want to point out that even mispronunciations can have their charm. On our recent five-day spring break trip to Ohio, for instance, I was repeatedly impressed by Cleo's vocabulary (in a game of Mad Libs, I asked her for two body parts, and was quickly rewarded with womb and anus) and syntax. Every now and then, however, she can still show traces of an earlier era, when longish words were simply insurmountable. For instance, she wondered at one point what we might be eating for brea-fakst. Breafakst? Charmian? I smiled, briefly, but of course I knew what she meant, and replied in kind. Because words are, among other things, simple tools of communication. Their backgrounds may be richly allusive, but their immediate functions are more mundane. And so, even when they fail to resemble the precise dish we're expecting, they can fill us nonetheless.

Masterworks in calligraphy!

The composer Richard Wagner is known, of course, for many things - but his writings make it clear that he wanted to be known especially for the neatness of his scores and handwriting. As Henry Finck observed, in his 1907 book Wagner and his Works, "never were there such neat-looking orchestral scores as Wagner's," and Wagner's pride in his penmanship manifests itself in a letter he wrote to Franz Liszt:

"You need not get me a copyist. Mme Wesendonck has made me a present of a gold pen - everlasting - which has made a calligraphic pedant of me again. These scores will be my most finished masterworks in calligraphy! One cannot escape one's fate!"

Indeed. When it comes to neatness, we are guided by larger logics. And, much as Wagner claimed that he was destined to write neat scores just as long as he lived, Cleo seems also fated to produce - if rather less self-consciously than Wagner, for the moment - tidy little compositions of her own. When she sits down to play, she often places her two shoes next to one another in a lovely little pair on the edge of a rug, or against a wall. Sure, she sometimes leaves blocks in a crumbling pile, or puzzles unfinished, but more commonly her wake consists as well of books stacked in stable columns, or plastic jewelry thoughtfully set back into boxes. Want proof? I'll simply point to the picture above, which documents the residue of twenty minutes of play at the Towson Public Library. After ransacking the toy kitchen and preparing a pretend feast, Cleo offhandedly arranged some of the plastic foods in the pattern above: an expanding, fanning series of curves that contain basic coloristic alternations, and that reminded me, distantly, of the punctilious autographs of a composer from a much earlier composer.

Amour, Part II

One other thing that struck us about Amour: that caring for an aging spouse is remarkably like caring for an infant or a toddler, with perhaps an added dose of mortification, and an accompanying sense of loss. It's a truism, I suppose, that old age is a second childhood. But we'd rarely seen the point made so obviously, so visually. Leaning over, to support someone who can barely walk? Hey, we've been there, and not too long ago. Changing a diaper? Hundreds of times. Trying to prod a spoonful of food into an unwilling mouth? Yes, yes again. Of course, one parents with an eye towards an expanding future, and one nurses an aging patient, I presume, with a sense of contraction. But the gestures, the liturgy, are superficially identical.

Might one say something similar about our relationships with music? We teach our children largely through music: through rhymes, through melodies, and through ditties. Cleo, today, surprised me by singing a version of The Ants Go Marching; this evening she gestures vigorously as she participated in a round of The Wheels on the Bus. And now music is being used with elderly patients suffering from dementia, as well; Oliver Sacks and others have argued that it has a unique ability to spark recall, or to evoke buried emotions. Familiar and popular songs seem to stir, in young and old, warm reactions. It's only that those reactions gain in intensity, depth, and even pathos when they are backed by decades of active memories, rather than hopes for years to come.

On a rote level, children eat, and listen, like the elderly. But the same basic actions are colored by different valences.

Amour

A rather embarrassing meteorological gaffe - a forecast calling for a foot of snow, prompting the closure of Baltimore city schools, museums, and libraries, yielded nothing but a mild drizzle - made this Wednesday an especially odd one. Hopkins was closed, and MICA followed suit, but since Cleo's nursery nobly opened its doors at 10, L. and I treated Cleo to a late-morning hot chocolate and then dropped our daughter off at 11 and set out for an unplanned but welcome midday date. Among the list of long-deferred pleasures: Amour, the Oscar-nominated film that studies the relationship of an elderly Parisian couple whose health begins to deteriorate.

The film opens with a destruction of conventional boundaries, a dissolution of divisions: a door is forcibly thrown open and windows swung wide; we peer at a concert audience from the stage, eliminating the so-called fourth wall of the concert hall. Over the course of the film, we're nudged to think of such erosions of privacy as metaphorical: they are redolent of the losses of privacy that characterize old age, of the loss of strength and autonomy, of a reliance upon generic nurses. A wife can no longer support herself, and must lean clumsily on her husband; the physical distinction between spouses gives way. The husband forgets to close windows, and a pigeon flits into the apartment; the physical distinction between inside and outside, and between human and animal, also gives way.

But at the same time, we're also encouraged to see the aging, failing body as a sort of barrier, or impediment. The same wife, having suffered a stroke, can no longer gesture meaningfully with her right hand, and can no longer enunciate clearly. She tightly purses her mouth, when her husband tries to feed her. Her body hurts, in ways that it cannot usefully articulate. Bodies, as they fail, can thus amplify our isolation - even as they also ironically heighten our dependence upon others.

How to reconcile this push and pull? The film has its own answers, and some of them are dramatic. One of the gentler insinuations, though, seems to involve music. Throughout the film, which is generally solemn and filled only with diegetic sound, there are references to classical music and to its performance: to Schubert, to Beethoven, to Bach. And, repeatedly, these musical allusions carry with them an air of vibrant health. While still healthy, the couple attends and enjoys a recital; they later host an embarrassingly hale pianist, and, as the wife's health disintegrates, she loses the capacity, or will, to listen to such music. Music, the film, suggests is the domain of the living; our passage to death is unscored.

Perhaps. But music only matters, of course, when it's embodied. A score, a page of notes, is music imagined; it is a possibility; it is Platonic. It becomes something else, however, when the foot rests on the sustain pedal, and the fingers depress the keys; when the ear perceives the first note. Of course, it's at that point that error, or subjectivity, may be introduced; the played melody may not be that intended, precisely, by the composer, and the heard melody may be discerned in unpredictable, mortal manners. But it's also at that point that, we might say, the piece is completed, or fully authored. Our bodies vary, and they are fallible; we can never all hear Schubert in the same way. But our bodies also allow us to complete the transaction, to act socially; to traverse the spaces between us, or between us and the 19th century.

The composed score may be timeless, and it is always in a sense free of error. But it is nothing without the contemporary listener. Open windows effect chaos - but also possibility. The hand that cradles the lover's cheek is also the one that slaps the cheek. Which is, in turn, the hand that presses Play on the CD player - and then, later in the evening, presses Stop.

Lobetanz

Cleo, like any 3-year-old, is a rather complex little gal. She likes peanut butter but not almond butter, can read the word and but not the word sand, and prefers tights to jeans. She loves princesses, sure, but she also likes stories about Frankenstein, and now, too, tales about the first manned mission to the moon. And then there's the fact that she's often, of all things, slightly melancholy; living with her can be something like living with a Romantic poet, as she periodically announces, in a world-weary voice, that she is especially sad today because she misses... well, it could be almost anything. West Virginia? Her friend Sukie? Mom? The sense of heavy lack, defined against a deep implied love, consistently colors her mood.

In that sense, I suppose that she might be compared to one princess in particular: to the princess in Ludwig Thielle's 1898 musical play 'Lobetanz,' which was first performed in New York in 1911. The play focuses upon an especially melancholy princess who simply cannot be roused from her depression. A number of local musicians compete, in an effort to lighten her mood, but they fail - only to then watch as a melody from the fiddle of an itinerant musician named Lobetanz plunges her into unconsciousness (or what Cleo, a fan of Snow White's, would call the sleep of death). Lobetanz then falls asleep in a linden tree that had once acted as the princess's favorite seat, and is apprehended. About to be hanged, he's allowed to play one last tune - and, of course, that melody brings color back into the princess's cheeks; she recovers fully, begins to dance, and soon marries Lobetanz.

Princess, marriage; a touching, redeeming sadness: several elements of the plot catch my eye. But so, too, does the notion of a young woman's favorite seat. For just this weekend, while Cleo and I sat in front of the wood stove in our West Virginia cabin and watched the strong fire burn, she suddenly said this: "This is my one favorite place, just watching it dance for me."

Perhaps we are all, occasionally, unconscious, and roused only periodically by melodies of especial beauty.