Tag: purpose

Things of Little Importance

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 02:06

Imagine, if you can, a time before apps that identify music instantly; go back and remember, if you can, a time before radio stations needed websites, before algorithms reiterated music you already definitely like. If you can’t imagine such far-away times, you can Google them.

During the wild, grungy and flannel-filled years known as the 90s, I came across one of these idiosyncratic pieces of music you love so suddenly and incredibly that you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard it. 

I was in college in San Francisco, reading philosophy in a computer lab. The song passed on through the radio without my knowing its name. And it didn’t have lyrics, because it was a classical song. I should have acted resourcefully and written down the timestamp and just called the radio station, but as I mentioned, I was in college, and I was studying philosophy.

Back then, we had Netscape, but that was only a browser; it wasn’t a Google. No YouTube. No Shazam. No Spotify. (Imagine!) I couldn’t figure out the song, its name, its composer. All I knew was that there was a clarinet and a piano. And I loved that clarinet.

During quiet or elapsed moments while drinking water or waiting in the car, wonder about the clarinet would sneak up on me, and then I would wonder about me still wondering about the clarinet. 

For years this went on. Friends would ask me about (what happened to) the nice guy I’d been seeing, and I’d wonder about the clarinet. I’d be in the grocery store figuring which garbage bags were cheapest, pondering the stupidity of people buying garbage bags to line garbage cans at all, and deciding that we should all just line our garbage cans with dollar bills instead. And then I’d wonder about the clarinet.

Like I said, this went on.

Six, maybe seven years later, when San Francisco still had a classical radio station (and people were still riding around in wicker carriages drawn by horses, obvs), the radio is on, and there are the opening notes of the Prelude. I’m uncertain for a few measures, but then yes. There is the piano! The clarinet! And this is when I come to know Gerald Finzi’s “5 Bagatelles for Clarinet & Piano.” 

The very definition of bagatelle is ‘a thing of little importance.’ It’s a trifle, a trinket, something purely decorative, like a bauble or knickknack. Like the way we treat wonder and remembering and old things in a world apparently very busy with its progress, its purpose, its diet.

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Things are Hard to Name (and Hard Things to Name)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though
Read Time: 02:23

There are two reasons I write.  

First: a dream I don’t remember now, but one I did write down. The record of this dream is a torn, half-scrap of paper in the box labeled “Most Important.” It reads: “I cut myself to write with blood I had no ink. Who is a philosopher has gold in his bones.”

Second: also from the “Most Important” box, a newspaper clip from the New York Times, June 17, 2018, with the title, “What Kept Me from Killing Myself.” The article is written by a recovering alcoholic and Iraq veteran, and the first sentence is, “Books saved my life.” The author is unnamed.

***

Five years ago, I wrote a real nice, blowhardy essay about ‘Why I Write.’ Most every writer—especially if you have an ISBN number and a black and white photo with your dog on the back sleeve of your book—feels the need to make such a statement of purpose.

Time has a way of eroding things and changing us, and sometimes we better understand what is simple, smooth, essential and good only after some time has passed. This is to say that reading ‘why I write’ from five years ago was annoying—annoying like the black and white author/dog pictures. (Use the word armchair, here. It fits, and is super annoying.) 

The honest-to-goodness care with which I wrote the piece feels juvenile. It is a delightful piece in many ways, but perhaps too hopeful. The perfect title for it, if I could re-choose, is already in use by another author, Durga Chew-Bose: Too Much and Not the Mood.

(Cf. Why I Write: 1. Because if I don’t write it, other people will)

I do not have a ISBN number and I have never had a dog, and yet at one point I answered ‘why I write’ with alarming alacrity. I was finally able to tell you, reader. I was excited for you to know. I was finally able to elucidate each ‘why’ and I numbered them one through seven. I wrote this in 2014, and it is in many ways a love letter to you, reader. A love letter I never delivered. I never published it anywhere at all. 

Of course there’s a whole different world of ‘why’ behind that failing, and the ‘why’ of failure and love is especially hard to name for uncountably many reasons. When we touch things like failure and love with precise language, it makes the experience decidedly real, completely palpable and totally true. The starkness of language which names and talks openly about love and failure is at first humiliating and then, much later, if we don’t die of that humiliation, healing.

***

Five years ago, I made a definite statement regarding ‘Why I Write,’ using seven illustrated points with reasons and references (move the armchair over here).

Now I have only two reasons, and though they are immutable derivations of the original ‘why’, they are also far less exact, the movement of a cloud formation you once knew the name of.

 

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