How Does It Begin?

How Does It Begin? WHEN I RETURNED HOME FROM THE MEMORIAL SERVICE for my shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) teacher, Masakazu Yoshizawa, and thought of the papers I still had to grade, I did not sit down to mark up essays with that pedantic pen that tells the bewildered student: if you correct this paper, you’ll correct your life. Instead, although dazed and exhausted, I entered my practice room to play my flute, listen to what sounds were stirring inside me, now that the man who taught me how to make those sounds was gone. While warming up, I thought of Rumi’s “The Reed Flute’s Song”: Listen to the story by the reed, of being separated, “Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.” In a sense, I felt “pulled from a source,” the reedbed that was my teacher, and all I could hear now was “this crying sound.” But at the same time, the notes were connecting me to him, and so I played “Tamuke,” a honkyoku (a meditation piece) to help the dead cross over. And though I have played this piece throughout my seventeen years of lessons with Masa, never before had I heard the grief, the tonal vibrato in the notes. Rumi says, “The reed is hurt and salve combining. Intimacy and longing for intimacy, one song.” And I wanted to stay where I was – inside such a pure, hollow note, be nourished and renewed by it everyday. Rumi speaks of “the secrets hidden within the notes,” how the body flows out of spirit, spirit out of body. Is this the secret, I wonder, or the mystery of the secret – that nameless something as though another were with you in the room, this something, this “crying sound” that is both empty and regenerative? The Japanese say that you cannot fill your teacup unless you empty it. And so, too, this Persian mystic poet reminds me that poetry and music are possible only because we’re empty, hollow, “pulled from a source,” and long to return. Is creating language and music, then, a longing for home, a longing to go back to the source that renews the spirit? As a teacher, Masa helped me to do that, but now more than ever his teachings would instill in me the reedbed of creation, the simple act of making something. Sitting with a friend over a bowl of noodles at a small café in Little Tokyo after the service, she asked if I had been doing any writing since that’s been my usual morning routine. “No,” I said, “been too overwhelmed catching up with essay grading, but tomorrow I will.” So as I sat in my practice room, weaving in and out of thoughts of my teacher’s passing, yet thinking how beautiful the morning was, along with the sweet, pure soprano voice of Margaret Price singing the closing aria of Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony, I followed the words to see where they would take me as I sorted out the stimuli and attempted to discover the hidden secrets of t he reedbed. Like the aria, I find as Eliot does, “in my end is my beginning,” that the solo song I must make for myself is a renewal not only of spirit but of all those beginning lessons I learned from my teacher and recorded on discs. For when I listen to them now, it is with the knowledge that he will not be there Saturday (the usual day for my lesson) to correct my pitch, intonation, and rhythm; I have only the voice and sounds on the recording to replay over and over until my listening reaches a more deep and profound level as though I were hearing it all for the very first time. It is this music of instruction that I was thinking of while writing “The Music Goes On”: Waking to a light veil of haze glazing the canyon hills, a sea of clouds beyond as in a Japanese landscape I hear your flute still, your long sustained note, alive as this hour when time falls back and you are sitting beside me showing me how to lift from my lap the shakuhachi, graceful as a Zen practitioner before an altar, how to place the embrasure to my lips, and with that first intake of air blow gently out. For then you are ready, you said, ready as the morning is ready to renew itself with each sound and breath as it enters the trees and sky, every passerby who hears me play Korogi Tsukiyo, Cricket in Moonlight, tonight on my balcony when night song and morning song survive in the memories of our playing side by side in your living room on Kimdale where we sat before a mantel of photographs and instruments – wind chimes and singing bowl echo now like a temple bell calling us home while the music goes on. The secret of this readiness for renewal, I am rediscovering, is entered through listening to “each sound and breath.” This listening became so evident to me when Masa and I collaborated on a CD, a reading of selected poems from my book, Shadow of the Plum, with his music. The title, Shadow of the Bamboo, a duet of poetry and music, was decided on for I felt that my reading, his playing, compositions and arrangements were not just an accompaniment to a reading but a duet, two musical entities – alone but together – communing to create a third presence. I remember the morning I arrived at his house in San Gabriel: the living room was dim as usual, microphone and chair set up for me, and his recording equipment carefully arranged on the floor. I had assumed he was going to play as I read but instead he said, “Let’s test your voice in the mike,” and as he fiddled with knobs, moving levers up and down like a technician in the sound booth, I arranged my poems in the order I was to read them. Later while alone, he listened to my recorded poems and composed the diverse themes like a soundtrack to a film. During the next few days, he would call me asking about a poem, such as who was the “you” in this room. Though Masa’s conversational English was pretty good, this project demanded not only his skills in applying his second language but his interpretive skills in translating literary text, which involved listening to tones, nuances, the various shades of meaning, in order for his music and my words to become one. When he told me he had to read the poems and listen to my prerecorded voice repeatedly to get sense and meaning right for the musical themes and sound effects, I imagined us having late night conversations though each was in our solitary workplace. Two weeks later when I heard the individual tracks, carefully composed to bring out the story and ambience of each poem, I felt three of us there. Though I had written the poems alone and he had composed late into early morning alone, we were together, two spirits renewed by the third, the creation of our collaboration. Collaboration Begins with you taking the clarinet from your black case, assembling the parts, attaching the reed, Stravinsky’s Three Pieces spread on the table. It begins with listening to the haunting moody strains, the words to a poem clicking like ice in two glasses of tea. A few written lines . . . and then your shakuhachi blows past the block in my muse’s heart in the opening of Duet, “Your sweet bamboo should come first, I say, not verse.” And you imagine now . . . the score of an unfinished story. But whose story? Mine, yours – or this other, this meeting between us with a pen and flute composing a different silence, the kind where the image fades into music rising in that measured space, Ma, Japanese call it, and disappearing into a momentary stillness, more felt than heard but impossible without the words, the notes, this sixth sense, you say, this other we are giving voice to today. It wonders who the “you” is “crossing the lawn toward me / with a red rose,” lines from long ago flowing through the bamboo flute like a displaced spirit. When I say it’s a man, not a woman, you hear a door open as though someone has come through, the tone drops a pitch. You say, “I understand.” and add your own inflection of lost love now that the image is yours and this other meeting between us. From endings come beginnings, especially after the passing of someone or something dear to you – a parent, soul mate, spouse, even a pet. Suddenly, you find yourself in solitude either welcomed or imposed. Like May Sarton and so many who depend on the tools of release and re-creation, I know the value of solitude and “one of its values,” she says, “is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within . . . .” So pick up a pen or musical instrument to give shape to that attack within. Out of this sensibility came “Though You Are Gone”: The sound, the breath of bamboo groves, leaves the body for our posterity, new cells and vessels, estuaries to the rivers of our soul, to say death too flows along the watercourse way and air waves, filling the flute with fresh tones, deep and pure as underground springs while spirit fills the diaphragm, eases up and out through the open gate of the throat first sounds, Ajikan, the Japanese say and the shakuhachi player knows while she sits zazen from hour to hour, traveling the uncertain passages of diminuendo and crescendo, for the mapmaker is gone. But we have your teachings to explore like undiscovered treasure embedded in the sea floor of heart and mind, for didn’t you say the fingers remember, liksten to them and not the scribbled notes on the page, they are just memos for the music within. Pitch tone to the spheres, you said, harmonize with the stars; but now as you are a tone in an unnamed constellation, my daily practice reaches for that other dimension where as teacher and student, I am still striving to match my sound with yours. Now when I enter the practice room, it is with this sense of renewal – by listening to his sounds, the resonating shades of nuances, as he so closely listened to my words. For it begins with that first light of healing as strongly felt as the sun blazing through the window like rays of healing after weeks of wind-swept rains, and the music is just right while the white, blank page waits to fill. It is that moment of crossing over between the dreamy state of nothingness, before the world has entered, and that impulse to write first words, rising from the bombardment of stimuli that life hands us to sort out. I often wonder what people do who don’t write or play an instrument, or paint – these tools of release and re-creation. Renewal begins with that first word, first sound, that opening stroke, as in a Japanese painting when a bird is born. By staying open to the journey that first words, first sounds take me on, I will write and play my way back to the source, the reedbed, home. Zen practitioners speak of the importance of having a spiritual practice. Mine continues to be the pen and the shakuhachi. Published in A Chrysalis Reader issue, "Your Turn: Stories of Renewal."