I’m beginning to live with future tense
once more expanding my conjugations
to will and shall and verbs like hope the ones
I’ve been afraid to say out loud no sense
tempting the subjunctive when a sequence
of events in future perfect beckons
besieged still by emotional demons
I wobble precariously the pretense
of the conditional implying that
the ground could give way any minute and
I’d be plummeting through the past again
insecure disillusioned railing at
imperfect while trying to stop and stand
on the crust of could-be despite was-then
MARILYNN MAIR~ of Celebrating a Year is known as the “angel of the tremolo” and “the first lady of mandolin”. Marilynn is Professor of Music at Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island. Her most recent CDs are Meu Bandolim and Enigmatica. Her most recent book is Brazilian Choro – A Method for Mandolin. For more of Marilynn’s story, link HERE. Marilynn Mair is a contributing writer to Into the Bardo.
I think, looking back at my wayward path through the years, that the most valuable life skill one needs to develop in order to succeed, is to learn how to improvise. Life will never be smooth or rosy, except in very small stretches. Opportunities for your skill set may never materialize, love may not be as generous to you as you are to it, life as you planned it will definitely at some point go astray. Set-backs and tragedies await, and if you are to cope, to carry on, you need to be able to take a hard look at the pieces on the board and figure your best way forward. Right where you stand, right where you never expected to be. Imagination helps, optimism is a crucial ingredient even if it seems to have temporarily disappeared. No one teaches us how to do this, we learn from necessity. But it certainly puts jazz in a whole different perspective. And poetry, abstract painting, things most people think they don’t understand. Because, really, we are all just learning how to make life imitate art.
I think that if all we had in life to guide us was this paragraph by Marilynn Mair, we’d be okay. Life is the art of taking the jarring notes, the unlikely word, the unexpected juxtapositions, the odd shadings and turning them into something lovely. Life is the teacher. Art is the text. Creating art is survival, the way we work out understanding and meaning. Jamie Dedes
MARILYNN MAIR~ of Celebrating a Year is known as the “angel of the tremolo” and “the first lady of mandolin”. Marilynn is Professor of Music at Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island. Her most recent CDs are Meu Bandolim and Enigmatica. Her most recent book is Brazilian Choro – A Method for Mandolin. For more of Marilynn’s story, link HERE. Marilynn Mair is a contributing writer to Into the Bardo.
Marilynn Mair – author, world renown mandolinist, and blogger – wrote this beautiful sympathetic villanelle in response to Charles W. Elliot’s piece HERE, “Mindful Steps to the End of Hunger.”
Do we stand to bear witness, or stand to be counted? Is it just because we’re tired of sitting down, or do we feel a real need to step into history? When do we say– no, that’s enough? When does it get to the point where nothing is more important than being there, even our regular lives. I have been there in the past and sometimes I bear witness now, but never to the point of letting everything else go. I watch others stand up today, and wonder if this fight is mine, is ours, or if it’s just the grumbling of a few moderns who suddenly lost their easy-button. In my class the students worry out loud that future generations will forget how to remember since their smartphones always remind them. Or that their younger cousins know about things, but not how to actually do them. Will the Occupy movement have any large-scale effects? No answers here. But I’m thinking a few days in a park actually talking, a few nights in a tent lacking the isolating comforts of home, just might be a good thing for those who perhaps have never before been there.
I am pleased to introduce for the first time here: Marilynn Mair (Celebrating a Year), also known as the “angel of the tremolo” and “the first lady of mandolin”. Marilynn is Professor of Music at Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island, U.S.A. Her most recent CDs are Meu Bandolim and Enigmatica. Her most recent book is Brazilian Choro– A Method for Mandolin. This post and photograph entered here today are from Celebrating a Year. They were posted by Marilynn on October 18 and are re-blogged with her permission. For more of Marilynn’s story, link HERE. Jamie Dedes
_____
“Best known for her performances and recordings of chamber music, Ms. Mair has also, in recent years, become increasingly involved in the field of Brazilian music, performing and recording “choro,” an early-20th-century style of Brazilian jazz that features mandolin. She has researched choro extensively, and her articles on its history and music, published in Mandolin Quarterly and elsewhere, are some of the most complete available in English.” Max McCullough (Mandozine)
I’m beginning to live with future tense
The BeZine 