Well, it's over.
And if I'm wiped out, I can't imagine how tired John must be. Or, make that 'must have been', as he's already been in bed for the past hour.
I'm referring to the 'Sacred Music, Sacred Art' concert John conceived and put together, for the folks at Christ Church New Brunswick. For those of you reading these posts sequentially, you know that I spent much of yesterday focused (reluctantly) on issues of stickiness versus the ineluctable pull of gravity. And then left the house this morning, heading for church with a van full of art I had no idea how I would display, while here on the kitchen table sat all the adhesive goodies I'd bought for the task. Fat lot of good they were doing, 25 miles from the venue.
The fact that the choir with which I sing had our turn at leading the service this morning -- singing two anthems, no less -- practically vanished from memory, because all I could think about was my upcoming struggle with (brace yourself) getting things to stick to walls. I made a trip to yet another possible source of miscellaneous household items, and found some stick-on hooks at the super-drug-store up the street. Plus a few other sticky things. None of which, as should be no surprise at all, worked.
Back in the sanctuary, I was able to use an existing wire hook, that was attached to the end of an old gas pipe, to hang the largest of my wall pieces. And I even put some of those sticky things to profitable use, if only to keep this work from listing drunkenly to one side. One down, three to go.
The two lightest pieces refused to stick to anything, no matter what I did. I felt incredibly stupid and unprofessional -- even though, under different circumstance, installing these things would entail drilling one dry-wall screw partway into the wall, and popping the work onto the protruding screw head. Viola, as I like to say. Why didn't I remember to bring my hot glue gun? I was getting desperate.
Then, I discovered that the hook on which that first, easiest piece was hanging had begun to sag, and in a few more minutes would bear no resemblance to a hook at all. I did salvage that near-disaster, even as those two light-weight pieces kept gleefully falling off the walls, no matter how many glue squares I used. And the last piece of all -- which happens to be a particular favorite of mine -- looked so stupid when I tried to hang it, that I was tempted to take it into the parking garage, and run over it with the van. Sometimes I get like that.
I'm not supposed to need help. I'm supposed to have all the answers. I'm supposed to think of everything beforehand. I'm supposed to be professional and capable and clever and in control This afternoon, in a perfectly nice church in New Brunswick, I had signally failed at all of these internalized demands. I was sullen and unpleasant. I don't handle my own failures with much grace at all.
Brian, the sexton, and Pete, the deacon, came over to ask if I needed help with anything. Me? Need help? What an offensive suggestion. Of course I said yes, even though I was sure nothing could be done about any of my stupid problems. They were both looking at the possible future victim of vehicular articide. I was mortally bored with myself. I asked if either of them wanted a cup of coffee, and then I went to Starbux.
Miracle of miracles! All it took, apparently, was for me and my very bad attitude to leave the building, and buy two cups of overprices coffee, and a greasy sausage egg and cheese heart attack pill on a bun. By the time I brought Brian his coffee, he and Pete had successfully, and with total attention to linear balance, etc, installed the piece which had given me such despair. And then -- who would have thought -- where I'd been struggling to pile enough little gooey squares to the wall, to make my work stay put (what's that saying about doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results?) they'd simply wedged two wooden uprights behind a built-in bench under the organ loft. And then, with what I can only say was a truly gratifying simplicity, Pete took his drill and a drywall screw, zipped the screw partway into the wood, and -- viola (I know...) -- the first piece of work slipped right into place. No muss, no fuss, no temper tantrums, no extra adhesive applications. Of course, the second piece was just as easy. I felt so vindicated.
Now, of course, I owe these guys my life, at the very least. Damn it.
Then there was a brief rehearsal with the wonderful three-man stage crew -- bringing my standing works up onto the altar area, applying tape marks as guides for the proper placement during the performance installation. They listened carefully to the few instructions I had. We moved everything back off-stage. By then I really couldn't think of anything else to do, because... there wasn't anything, except to change back into my shirt and tie, and sit around until the program began. I got so comfortable on the sofa in the social room that, if my blood hadn't been 90% caffeine by that point, I would have fallen asleep from sheer relief.
But...
The program was much better than I think I could have imagined. John played an organ prelude, the guest Vox Fidelis choir began to sing, and the audience watched a black curtain rise slowly, uncovering an enormous painting standing in the altar area, by the choir stalls. Details from the painting were projected onto the walls on either side of the altarway arch. We listened to a piece of music once considered so beautiful that, for over a century, it could only be heard in the confines of the Vatican. We heard music from a modern Finnish composer. And so it went, through four 'tableaux', as John styled them. Diana Whitener's painting was the first art focus; my suspended figural works were the second grouping. We heard the Women's Schola sing, while we contemplated the St. Monica icon. And the church's 17th century crucifix was the focus of the final set of musical works.
How apt that Diana's painting -- the first work we saw -- is an aquatic scene, letting us look up through a body of water, at human figures floating, rising, falling, because we as audience members were washed over with a mass of music. And, as I was talking with John about all of this, over the late dinner we almost didn't have (the kitchen crew had five minutes left on their time cards when we walked in. Luckily, we're pretty regular there. Food was made available), I was suddenly struck, not only by the sheer volume of material which all these singers had learned and performed, but also by what I often think of as the 'vector incidences' in out lives.
Sometimes, it is a wonderment to me -- as today's event illustrated so well -- that a piece of music written hundreds of years ago, and thousands of miles away, should form just one part of an arc, intersecting with the life of each performer, the life and the work of each artist, and the life of each member of the audience as well. We become, for a tiny slice of our lives, a mesh of both intention and happenstance, a determined miracle of living effort, a palpable investment of will, attention and the very breathing that each of us must do, whether singing Allegri, or listening to him. As I described this idea to John, drawing with my hands as I sometimes do, I seemed to be sketching a kind of reverse firework chrysanthemum -- in which, especially in events like this, each of us is a single blazing trail of energy, converging with the other humans around us, to become something brighter and higher more intense than any one of us could have been, alone.
Bravo, all.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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