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May 22 - June 22, 2025
Stages implies a progress through time, gives the illusion of linearity—but this is not my experience of grief.
We inhabit simultaneous, concentric timescales: the time line of the past coiled within the immediacy of the present moment unfolding. Memory creates a metonymic congruence between them, melding past with present in such a way that our former selves move forward with us in time.
This is what Bach understood, and made manifest in the Chaconne—all the gravitational aspects of grief, which you experience perpetually in cycle and flashback and variation. You don’t move on from loss so much as move away, further out in time.
To grieve is to experience these painfully expanded moments over and over again, often without warning … to think you’ve gotten away from the past only to awaken to it, to get the wind knocked out of you all over again, to feel the omnipresence of that loss.
I tell myself that my experience at Meadowmount shook that faith, but maybe that’s what happens anyway when you get older and realize it’s all a losing battle. You just don’t want to have to believe anymore.
Isn’t that what you have to accept now—that it won’t be your career, that it won’t be part of your life the way you’d thought or hoped? Yes, all of that you have to come to terms with.… But you also have to accept the opposite, somehow: that it will always be a part of you, that you’ll never be able to quit and have that be that.
If D minor is darkness, then D major is light; it shares the minor’s grandeur but not its sadness. It is radiant, ebullient, sparkling, full of life.
At the still point of the turning world.Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards; at the stillpoint, there the dance is … —T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
Thomas reassured me that I didn’t have to choose one thing over the other, that he’d had the same struggle once and had figured out a way to do both.
It’s almost as though you know what your partner is going to do before they do it. In a way, then, the distinction between leader and follower melts away. You can only follow by anticipating, which is perhaps its own kind of preconscious leading.
“The more you dance, the more this connection will just generate movement. It will produce steps. That is improvisation. It’s like learning to play jazz.”
Entanglement—as theorized in 1964 by the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell—is the theory that quantum particles (particles smaller than atoms) can affect one another’s behavior without acting on one another directly.
Recently, a team at MIT demonstrated that entanglement can act across vast swaths of space-time, between particles that are billions of light-years apart. Theoretically, the connection is both infinite and instantaneous.
The best way that physicists have of describing it, the one that crops up in myriad videos and journal articles and polemical rants in online physics forums, is that the particles somehow “just know.”
the jury is still out on whether entanglement can be extrapolated from the quantum physical to the human and biological, but you can’t escape the feeling that there must exist some kind of instantaneous, unconscious connection between improvising partners.
The only way to keep the dance flowing in time is for each partner to intuit how the other will move, even if you don’t know exactly what you are intuiting: communion without direct communication, intimacy without knowledge; the simultaneous leaping of entangled minds.
Most tangos are structured in sections A-B-A, which are distinguished by their key signatures, major-minor-major or minor-major-minor: happy memories enclosing, or enclosed by, a sad present.
One of the things that’s often quoted is ‘Tango es un pensamiento triste que se baila’* —‘tango is a sad thought that is danced.’” He paused thoughtfully and then modified his translation—“‘that we dance.’”
I wondered if it was possible to feel that instantly: for two bodies and souls to meet and recognize each other for the first time.
1999 lecture entitled “The High Imagination,” on improvisation, drugs, and rock and roll,
Once you’ve acquired the ESP, it becomes almost impossible to commit a major blunder, like playing through a stop or an ending. You can hear a rhythmic punctuation coming at least a beat or two ahead, even if it happens spontaneously.
From there, each musician is responsible for creating the music in time, for unspooling the phrases from the cosmic silence that lies before them. Lenson, quoting Coleridge, described improvisation as “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”
To improvise is to reiterate the momentary again and again, but also to affirm its part in the completeness of things, the continuity of time.
To improvise one must be wholly, almost ecstatically present, and reaffirm that presentness in each moment. To improvise with other people, then, is to share that ecstasy with them.
And this is the kind of partner I love to have, when their musicality is so profound that it changes the way you hear the music, and it changes the way you experience the music.”
I laid my head on his chest only to be terrified by the soft thudding of his heart, how its very continuity seemed a kind of countdown toward something finite and inevitable.
Even the pauses seemed predestined and yet of a moment’s whim—I knew, through her, when the beat was going to stop for a second and then start again, though I couldn’t have told you how. The whole thing lasted about ten seconds, until I started to think again and promptly stepped on her foot.
that miraculous synergy which requires both a certainty and a forgetting when, enlivened by that spontaneous connection to another human being, the body takes over the mind.
In an unimprovised performance, which is what this was supposed to be, anticipation requires memory, and memory enables anticipation: You rely on your knowledge of what comes next in order to think and listen ahead.
I couldn’t decide whether I needed to throw up or pass out, but at that point there wasn’t time for either.
As a player, being with others gives you something to focus on instead of how nervous you feel. “The thing you can do is be with them; to say, whatever happens, I have you, you have me,” Thomas said. He remembers thinking, “This is my way back into music—through tango.”
When someone plays with that kind of deep feeling, it’s almost impossible not to play toward that person, not to send your sound out so that it rises to meet theirs.
I began to feel that I knew, before each note, how it was meant to be played at that particular moment, in that particular performance by Mateo and me.
It’s a strange feeling, beautiful but also eerie: not only that you can step into time’s flow, but that you are the flow itself. I suppose at the heart of that feeling, too, lies the real trouble with time: the terrifying prospect that if time is so subjective, then we are necessarily alone in our unique experience of it.
As for the dance itself, our brief timelessness, I cannot say how long it will last, cannot place it in time—because it is within the stillness of our close embrace that time, at last, ceases to matter.
But for me, writing is a way of continuing to be a musician, and of growing as a musician, because without music I don’t think I would have anything to write about, or at least anything worthwhile to say.
Time, or at least our perception of its passage, is too complicated a subject to examine from either a humanistic or a scientific angle alone. Each needs the other, points inevitably toward the other.
And so somehow our intuition remains that there must be something more, something higher, out there for us to discover; we are left still with our human longing to arrive at the oneness of space, time, and experience across the universe.
The three-dimensionality of space that we perceive may merely be an illusion of depth and reality. Our perception essentially squeezes the universe into a ball, rolls it toward the overwhelming question of whether we are, or are not, as we appear to be on the surface of things.
Indeed, every language, every form of communication or expression, is a way of describing the high-dimensional information of experience via black marks on a page, a condensation of our lived experience of time into that which we can write, record, remember, relive.
For me personally, the book is meant to be a hologram of sorts, too: for all my memories of this thing I loved, that I will both always have and can never have again.
Hawking and Mlodinow wrote that there is no ultimate way of knowing whether reality is what we perceive it to be, in part because “according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history.”
I feel less, now, that I lost or gave up the chance to become a musician; rather that my being a musician was a necessary and wonderful thing, for the time that I was, and that eventually that time had to come to an end.
This is also what makes writing frightening, at least to my mind: the fact that it can change the past so effortlessly, and solidify that change into reality.
