What it's like

Well, if you read the last post, then you know some of my current hesitations about blogging. Calls for permanence and indelible records be damned: there should be a spot in our hearts for the brief, the fleeting, the ephemeral, as well. Take, for instance, the popular website Incredibox, which allows you combine various beats, musical motifs, and effects to create a tune that is, within certain parameters, all your own. It's a fun, flexible tool - and, Cleo, you're just about ready to give it a whirl. But notice, while you're busy dropping beats, that there's no save function. The music you make here is as music always was, before the advent of recording technology: a product of the moment in which it is made, and no more.

Again, though, I'm also sympathetic to calls for some permanent records of our graceful moments. We're the better, you might say, for being able to hear Maria Callas' voice, even if we can't see her live. And I remember a remarkable wall in an old family home on the Eastern Shore, on which the evolving heights of a gaggle of sons and daughters and cousins were marked in pencil, until the whole surface was a dense network of lines and dates: a cumulative reminder of a family's growth.

This blog is not that wall, quite. But it can be, and occasionally should be, a helpful record of sorts. And so, Cleo, here's a condensed summary of some of the patterns that currently govern our lives, as you take the turn from four and a half towards four and three quarters:

Your day usually begins at about 5:45. We can hear you sing and babble briefly, and then you often put a CD on, and take your pull-up off (and deposit it in the trash can: thanks!). You generally show considerable patience, too, in waiting until 6, which is when you're allowed to wake us up (although a couple of days ago you wandered into our room, asking, loudly, "Is 55 7 much before 6?"). We then wander downstairs, make you a blanket chair, and settle in for your only video of the day: typically, these days, a 25-minute stretch of a movie such as Ratatouille, or The Lorax. Then it's time for your breakfast, which generally means yogurt and honey, and your homemade granola with milk. You can get yourself dressed, and today I found you laying out clothes and remarking on how you would look, in a given combination, like a maiden. And by 7:50 we're out the door.

What do you do at school? It's largely a mystery to me. There's circle time, and you've clearly learned some songs there; Miss Winnie likes to call you a super listener, as well. I suppose that you typically play some princess games with Justice and Nia, and perhaps you also draw alongside Forrest, Jasper (who has been sending you roughly drawn missives every few days), or Mo. In this cold, your class doesn't tend to go out, but there are rotating stations, and when I pick you up I usually find you at an art station, drawing and writing (as today, when you designed a handsome card for Mom), or busily changing into a costume in dress-ups.

Then, of course, it's home, unless we stop for a bagel at Charmington's. It's a 13-minute drive to get Mom, and about 12 minutes from there - meaning that you can get through about half of one of your Classical Kids CDs. At home, you like to eat a few nuts and to play with a toy or two, before asking for a story. We chat as we get dinner ready, and tonight we also executed a Lite Brite pattern of a shark. And then, since you've been up for about 13 hours, you've been getting tired, suddenly and visibly, at about 6:45. We brush; you shed a tear or two but hold up; you wriggle into warm pajamas. A story or two - or, recently, a mere fraction of a graphic novel such as How Mirka Got Her Sword - and it's lights out.

Until we get up and do it all over again, with variations.

Knowing how way

So, yeah, we seem to have been abruptly transported from Baltimore to some spot distinctly north of Edmonton: for the past week, we've only poked our heads above freezing once, and falling veils of snow have been about as frequent as brief bursts of sun. The wind chill tonight is forecast to be around -18, and buckling straps or undoing Cleo's car seat often requires some hand blowing, where it might have been unthinking just ten days ago. But that didn't prevent us from having a relatively nice weekend. Indeed, we had good reason to move Cleo's car seat, as L. organized a trip with friends to the Visionary Art Museum, and also took Cleo to a JHU women's basketball game, to Bonjour, our neighborhood French bakery, and to swelling, bustling Harbor East. As a result of her creativity and energy, I had time to do some real reading, and read both avidly and widely: from Plutarch's life of Pericles, for instance, to a portion of Sherry Turkle's widely discussed Alone Together.

Turkle's book is certainly interesting, and provocative: deeply concerned about our increasing reliance on robotics, and troubled by what she sees as a further corrosive reliance upon hand-held technologies, she offers something of a manifesto, in which she documents the shifting behaviors of American teens and yearns for what she terms authenticity. But of course that term is problematic, and in fact many of her assertions, while memorable, seem to unravel when placed under even slight pressure.

Take, for instance, Turkle's claim that "The digital is only ephemeral if you don't take the time to make it permanent." The sentence appears in a section of the book that describes her rediscovery of a series of letters that she wrote to, and received from, her mother when in college: a real treasure, argues Turkle, of the sort that will simply evaporate in this era of texts and Tweets. On one level, I concur: there is an obvious and abiding beauty in documents composed in the past, especially if they involve handwritten sentiments. At the same time, though, her plaintive tone seems almost naive. After all, it's clear that digital data quickly forms a record in its own right: I've talked to two lawyers who have had clients exonerated due to their passive digital traces, and you've probably read stories about Facebook walls that prove troublingly durable, rather than evanescent. Indeed, embarrassing circulated JPGs and video files are constantly reminding us of the potential inevitable permanence of digital data. Remember Romney, speaking in what he thought was an unrecorded setting about the 47 percent? Savvy citizens of the digital world usually assume, unlike Turkle, that they are always being recorded - not that they have to take the time to record themselves.

At the same time, though, there are the complex ethical questions that surround any attempt to record life. Turkle admits to occasionally snapping surreptitious screen shots of her daughter as they converse on Skype - but, in so doing, she's arguably violating a basic principle of recording. The core issue has long interested photographers and musicians, but is now more generally applicable: do we have a right to record, without the consent of a subject, his or her actions? This blog, of course, isn't the place in which to answer such an issue, but it's clear that many people feel less nostalgic, and more ambivalent, than Turkle does about the potential value of creating lasting records. Even as we sense that we are likely being filmed by security cameras, and even as we know that our movements are being recorded by cell phone towers, we can still forge a personal ethic that moves beyond a merely self-interested series of stolen photos.

Again, this blog is not really an appropriate forum for such a discussion. But in one sense, of course, it is also the perfect exemplum of the quandary in which we now find ourselves. Closer to Turkle than to Cleo in age, I've done exactly what she is recommending, in fashioning this blog: it's the result of time invested, with the partial goal of rendering the transient permanent. (Indeed, over the years L. has given me five hardbound volumes of posts from this blog: standing on the bookshelf, they form a resolute proof of our interest in permanence). And yet, at the same time I worry about the lack of Cleo's consent in all of this. Will she mind, someday, that her childhood habits and comings and goings were made potentially permanent, or globally visible? Or will she, like Turkle, leaf through the books with a warm sense of appreciation and nostalgia?

I don't know. Perhaps both. Which feels appropriate today, as the momentary sun looks down on snow that has covered our city for days, but that will eventually give way, inevitably, to a greater warmth and to a basic law: the fact, that is, that everything, viewed broadly, is transient.

Pandora's box

Do you know about Pandora? Not the Greek antiheroine, mind you, but the website: a music site that allows you to enter the name of a band, or composer, or tune - Chopin, say, or Megadeth - and that then plays an infinite playlist of roughly comparable pieces of music. You're into Bebel Gilberto? Pandora will play her for you, along with some equally cool-cat pieces by Stan Getz and Nara Leao.

Here at halfstep, we've known about Pandora for the better part of a decade - since a hip art school student told us about it, in fact, as we fumbled through YouTube before a lecture in search of some vaguely atmospheric music. But it's really only in the last few months that we've begun to take our relationship with Pandora seriously. We've come to love, of late, the surprising associations that she draws (is Tom Petty really in the same genre as Bruce Springsteen? We like learning new tunes, and, to that end, we also like how Pandora always gives us the artist and title. She's no reticent d.j., that Pandora. And let's be honest: since L. linked a tablet up to our gourd speakers, ceding our musical curating to Pandora is as easy as pie. Plain and simple, we're hooked.

But I think that there's also a more basic reason that Pandora has made especial sense of late, and it's that our play rhythms often now approximate her apparent selection strategy. I don't mean that too ambitiously, for in fact the folks at Pandora are almost laughably specific in discussing their "Music Genome Project," the fruit of the work of a "team of musician-analysts"), where our approach to play with Cleo is, if anything, studiously anarchic. But I do think that there's often a loosely comparable associative logic in the order of activities that lead us from afternoon to evening in the pink house. Take today, for instance: on a snowy day, I picked Cleo up at 1, and we trundled home, stopping for a brownie and then imagining that we could take magically light footsteps that left no trace in the snow. When we arrived at home, it was time for a couple of Greek myths: not Pandora, today, but Apollo's conquest of Delphi and Orpheus' visit to the underworld. That gave way, in turn, to some wrestling of almost mythological proportions, as L. and Cleo tackled, grappled, and played. But the gods and the heroes, of course, are only part of the equation, and in the next hour we played with a doll house and Cleo then assumed the role of house mother, putting me to sleep and encouraging L. to do her home work. Finally, L. had the bright idea of playing charades, and we enacted zebras, snakes, and cows on the play room floor. And now they're making jambalaya, as I type away.

There's nothing consciously scientific about such a process of play, and indeed I suppose you could fairly doubt that there's really any process of pattern at all. But as we moved through a wide arc of imaginative activities that ranged from physical to recumbent and from active to passive, it did feel as though there was some semblance of an underlying thread. And yet, at the same time, we never knew what was coming next. Sometimes, it simply seems to happen, based on the whims and needs of three involved players.

After all, the monsters in Pandora's box were not unrelated. They may have been chaotic and diverse, but they belonged to a common species. As do our games, and the music that sometimes accompanies them.

And sometimes...

...little is needed, in the way of frame, or conceit, or external effort. Last night, at 7:30, Yo-Yo Ma played Bach's cello suites on our speakers as L., Cleo and I finished a round of Crazy Eights and then slowly shuffled upstairs, where we brushed and flossed Cleo's teeth, quietly ushered her into a pull-up, and then read a handsomely illustrated version of Rapunzel. The clear, resonant intelligence of Bach; the alert, sensitive hands of Yo-Yo; the slowly melting body of Cleo, losing consciousness, beside me. What larger narrative is needed?

And so, too, in West Virginia over the weekend. During a walk in the woods with Cleo's classmate Jasper and his family, we came across two beams, laid across a creek bed. Balance beams! And so the children traversed, in various fashions and at varied paces, as we watched, sympathetically swaying our own bodies as they balanced, and re-balanced, themselves. They seemed both young and old, at once - but above all, they seemed right, engaged in a basic challenge that has interested kids for generations, if not centuries.

Play on, cello. Climb on, children.

A second post...

...in which I think slightly differently, but in an arguably comparably melancholic manner, about the passage of time.

On our way to and from W.V. this weekend, Cleo listened to another one one of her Classical Kids CDs: Mr. Bach Comes to Call, that is, in which the great composer manages to traverse time and space so that he can chat with and encourage American children frustrated with their own progress on the piano.

Such a synopsis sounds corny, of course, but in fact the plot is driven by a timeless question: how do we communicate with others, who may be distant or lodged in some unimaginable future? Indeed, it's a question that faced the designers of the two Voyager spacecraft that were launched into space in 1977. Their answer, in part, took the shape of the legendary Golden Record: a disc that was engraved with a variety of motifs and pieces of information that might be of interest to anyone who found, wherever and whenever they might be, the spacecraft. And, not coincidentally, that record featured recordings of three works by Bach.

Of course, there are other, less exotic ways of aiming at the same end. One could, say, compose a concerto - so that the score might be used as a basis for performances in future halls, before future audiences. Or one could write a blog, so that readers in sunny Vanuatu might read the events of a winter's day in Baltimore. Or, finally, one could press one's face into the soft pins of an exhibit at the Maryland Science Center, so that the details emerge on the other side, abstracted but nevertheless essentially recognizable. That's the path that Cleo took, and that I recorded on my phone, and it's the course that you, wherever and whenever you are reading this, can now enjoy, as well:

Jotted lines

You look at the page of lyrics, and it's hard to shake the feeling of amazement: there's Lennon, feeling his way almost without apparent hesitation toward a string of lyrics that would soon become virtually canonical. It never fails, really: that frisson that we get from seeing inspired spontaneity pour out onto the page, where it immediately hardens in turn into something public, permanent, and significant. Most of us struggle, over the course of long lives, to attain even a fraction of such broad significance: how amazing to do it in the course of a few moments, on a piece of notebook paper, or on a cocktail napkin.

Not that we need, of course, to aim at a public significance. Sometimes, more private meaning suffices: a jotted note to a lover or rapidly rendered equation on a chalkboard can fit the bill, even if it never enters the collection of the British Library. And so we sketch, and scrawl, and improvise: indeed, yesterday morning found the three of us at the Berkeley Springs, WV McDonald's, oatmeal in front of us and pens out, trying our hands at of-the-cuff comic strips. It's far from simple, it turns out, to produce such a compressed visual narrative of lasting import - and yet it was fun nonetheless to try to get Cleo to guess the implied arc, or to smile at the implications. Admittedly, that smile could be slightly bemused, as in her response to my story of a hamburger eaten by a grateful alien:

But, still, it was fun, and we ultimately spent more than an hour jotting down ideas and competing in games that soon filled the margins of the Sunday Post.

Clearly, I don't have any special abilities when it comes to cartooning. If anything, I'm even more hopeless than your average doodler: in the example above, the images are crude, and the story almost nonsensical. But if one tries, and keeps trying, then the sheer accumulation of efforts can perhaps become meaningful in its own right. I recently dug up the rather detailed journal that I kept in 1992-3, while living abroad, and while I am often embarrassed by the prose (with its over-reliance on Kerouac) and by the sentiments on display (consumed by friendships, I was rarely observant in any meaningful sense regarding the broader social and physical world that surrounded me), I also find it riveting. Forged on the fly, often composed at moments of exhaustion or partial distraction, it's revealing, even as it's also limited. It's a fair window into a space that no longer exists.

As is this blog. And although this blog's entries are, rather like the cartoon above, often reductive, crudely rendered, and written in a relative hurry, they also represent something simple, and simply honest: a portrait of the author, and of his thoughts about his daughter, over the course of five years. Again, it's no document of general value, but it has served, I think, a useful personal purpose.

And, in that sense, has perhaps almost run its course. Cleo's fifth birthday is now on the distant horizon, and as she makes weekly strides in reading and writing, I think increasingly that soon she will be able to tell her own story. Thoughts of mathematical balance, too, intrude: around her fifth birthday, I'll make my 500th post, and the blog will attract its 20,000th view. Might that be a reasonably time to end the writing?

Lennon, who could scrawl a timeless hit within the span of a few minutes, likely might have chuckled at such a thought. But the few revisions in his rendering, above, imply that he faced a similar question nonetheless: when are we done writing, and re-writing, the story that we want to tell? After all, even when we put the pen down, and cease writing about those whom we love, we often stop and think about them.

Freedom

So, no, I can't say I've read all of James Masterton's Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult. In fact, I can't even claim to have read more than a fraction of a page of it. But, still, as I flipped through it a passage stood out to me. On page 222, a frustrated male, wondering about his sexual identity, suddenly remarks that "The only time I feel free is when I'm cooking or playing the saxophone."

Which is interesting for all sorts of reasons, I suppose, but of course what I want to point to here is the sense that playing music can make one feel liberated. On a general level, that's hardly a rare sensation. And in fact it's not even unique in its details; you could actually build a small database of men who have claimed to have felt that sense of freedom while playing on the sax. (For instance, in Half and Half, a series of essays by bi-racial authors, James McBride asserts that "Music is my escape, because when I pick up the saxophone and play, the horn doesn't care what color am. Whatever's inside comes out, and I feel free.").

So to each his own. For Cleo's part, it's not necessarily the sax that does it, but rather a good romp. And on a recent cold Wednesday, I took her to Kiddie Crusoe, an indoor playground in Timonium that features a range of environments and a full collection of inflatable bounce castles and slides. And no doubt: Cleo was ready for it. After about an hour trying on princess dresses and scrambling through tunnels, she came up to me, and said: "I feel like a servant girl that has just been freed and she is playing on the playground."

In other words, she felt free - and didn't even need a saxophone. But, truth be told, she did bake a chocolate cake with her babysitter the very next evening. Romping, playing the sax, or cooking: freedom may come in many forms, but it inevitably tastes delicious.

Dancing to architecture

A cold January Friday morning, glazed with a thin veneer of ice: pedestrians slip and slide as they navigate suddenly treacherous sidewalks, and seek shelter under the scrim of buildings and overhangs. A perfect time, in other words, to read up on Paleolithic cave art. Over a cup of coffee, then, I hunkered down with David Whitley's Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit, an engrossing defense of shamanistic interpretations of ancient rock imagery - and was delighted to see him quote, in a passage on the difficulty of writing about spiritual transformation, Thelonius Monk. "Writing about music," Monk once said, in an attempt to convey his disenchantment with music criticism, "is like dancing to architecture."

That's a memorable phrase - and yet even its abrupt logic can't quite convince many of us of the futility of trying, at least, to render one art in the terms of another. In fact, Whitley himself blithely disregards Monk's warning: on page 75, he gets interested in the tonal contrast between the paintings at Chauvet and those at Lascaux, and ultimately settles on a musical analog: Lascaux, he contends, "is a Beethoven symphony that wraps you up in its power and controls your emotions, moving you by its volume and force and majesty. The other is that single, flawless woman's voice singing a simply melody that you hear inadvertently." Well, then - take that, Monk. Whitley can read paintings in terms of music, and can then describe that relation in writing.

But, still, there's obviously some merit to Monk's contention. Critics have always wondered about the distances between the various arts, and artists have often proclaimed those gulfs to be untraversable (When Balanchine was asked what a new dance of his was "about," he supposedly liked to respond that "It is about 28 minutes"). Dances don't mean, in other words, in the same way that sentences do. And, in turn, one could surely say the same thing about parenting, and learning from one's child. This blog is based on an unspoken assumption that my relationship with Cleo can be somehow converted, effectively, into words and photos. If examined at all closely, though, such a pretense quickly begins to unravel.

And yet, at times I'm struck by the way in which our fragile marks - letters; numbers; symbols - can in fact convey experience in a deep and rich manner. A couple of weeks ago, on an equally wet day, I took Cleo to the Maryland Science Center. In the main play room, she was riveted by the pneumatic message tube, which allows kids to send brief messages or pictures of their own creation to a sibling or a parent (or to, as the case may be, a total stranger) at the othe end of the system. Again and again, Cleo drew delicate hearts and brief, emphatic messages of affection (Cleo [heart] you), and fired them off in my direction. And while I honestly felt, in opening the capsule each time, a rush of excitement and affection, I think that I also felt a true version of the sheer happiness that she was experiencing, as the sender. As a semiotician might say, the referent was passed from sender to recipient with little in the way of semantic degradation.

And so perhaps it's not all quite as futile as Monk imagined. Indeed, on a day like today, as we really do skate and skitter and unintentionally dance beneath the archiecture that looms above us, it almost seems as if it's possible to write about music, and parenthood, and even love with something more that total futility. 

True originals

Changes can be - well, among other things, they can be challenging. Think of the students at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1913, enraged by the avant-garde experiments in the Armory Show and burning Matisse in effigy. Or, in the same year, the audience at the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, reportedly dividing itself into pro and anti factions and coming to blows. Or think, perhaps, of Marie-Anne de Cupis de Camargo, a controversial 18th-century ballet dancer who was better known as La Camargo and who became infamous for her short skirts, which revealed her calves, and her virtuosic footwork. Such a gesture, notes Jennifer Homans in her terrific history of ballet, raised eyebrows, and was widely seen as immodest.

Immodest might be one way to describe a relatively recent change in Cleo's behavior, too. Why does the girl pick her nose with such constant and focused attentiveness? It's not that L. and I form an anti faction, exactly - but we are surprised by a behavior that seems so, um, un-princess-like. But then, we're surprised by all sorts of things, when it comes to our 4-year-old. Did she really read herself to sleep this evening, poring over words in a Richard Scarry anthology and then lying down on a pillow and under a blanket? She did. And did she really use the word shortening correctly the other day? She did - as a way of making sure that the Storyboard P. dance I was showing her on the computer wouldn't cut into her allotted 25 minutes of Monsters U. Is this shortening the time for my video? No, Cleo, it's not - but, more importantly, when exactly did you learn to speak so ambitiously?

So at times we can be - we all can be - taken aback by change. And yet, of course, changes are what make innovation and development possible. Despite the controversies and shocked speculations that swirled around La Camargo, her desire to foreground her brilliant technical skills soon altered the basic landscape of ballet: as Homans notes, she "inadvertently shifted the course of ballet and pointed it toward the nineteenth century, when the ballerina would eventually replace the danseur as the summit of the art."

That said, I'm still not sure how a suddenly tenacious regime of nose-picking will shift the course of anything. But, given that I don't want to burn another Matisse in effigy, I suppose that I would be a fool to mock such a turn. So dig deep, Cleo, and read on, until you're so tired that you want to lie down. Keep trying new things, and don't listen to the nags in the back rows. I promise, in turn, that even your boldest new efforts won't shorten your time with Mike and Sully, unless you want them to, by a single minute.

What would it be?

Snow. And lots of it. If you live in the Northeast today, you know what I mean: a carpet, a layer, a thick 16-inch sediment. It started coming down during rush hour last evening, and by morning had left the world fully transformed. Trees sparkle; pedestrian boundaries are obscured. The city is largely still.

But not entirely. Smoke rises from our neighbor's chimney; another neighbor valiantly begins to shovel her walk. A municipal truck slowly ambles up our tiny road, spraying salt, and pausing before navigating the turn into the alley.

And, inside our pink home, Cleo is an excited dervish. By 7, we had made biscuits; by 7:30, a loaf of French bread was rising, and she quietly painting, in acrylics. And by 8:30, she had organized a generous play picnic, over which she presided, distributing wooden slices of orange and mock cupcakes to L. and me.

But the highlight came a few moments after that, when, the picnic having run its imaginary course, Cleo made her way over to her toy mount, Wonder Horse, and climbed confidently into the saddle. Next to a window, she could peer out into the crystalline white world as she rocked back and forth. And soon enough, she began to sing, making up words in a lilting two-note melody that seemed both naively simple and deeply profound. In fact, given that I managed to write down a part of her improvised song, I'll step aside, and let Cleo sing:

What would it be
To be out in that snow covered world?
What would it be
To be in that white world?
What would it be
If I were a tree?
Would would it be
If I were in a stocking?
Would would it be
If I was outside in that cold weather?
What would it be
If I was the wind?
If I was building a fire
But the snow covered it?
What would it be
For Wonder Horse to be out in the snow?
What would it be
If I was the sun?

Deeply touched, I listened with an eagerness that was almost raw. But what I liked most, perhaps, was the way in which her imagery toggled back and forth, from the world of the home to the world at large. Clearly, some of the words were simply drawn from objects that she saw. And yet, the whole song seemed, in sum, a sort of mental flirtation: a flitting into the world of white, cold possibility that was offset by, or secured by, a regular cadence of returns to the familiar, or the given. What would it be if her toy stood in the snow? And yet it didn't: the toy stood resolutely next to the radiator. And so the hypothetical timbre of the song seemed, on one level, like a metaphor for imagination itself.

Or perhaps it was merely the literalization of a metaphor. As the sun rose, the salt did its work, and our neighbor shoveled, familiar contours began to re-emerge. What would it be to be out in that world? We found out soon enough: indeed, an hour later, we were outside, getting ready for a half-day at school and the office. 

But even there, we were somehow still transformed - by snow, and by a song.