George Szell

In music, one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.

George Szell

Even when you're humming. 

I'm Not Afraid of Anything by Jason Robert Brown

The creation of a character's history:

Jennie and Katie and daddy and mama. Me. David.

The question I have to keep asking myself while singing this song is, What am I afraid of? Because Jennie's afraid of water, Katie's afraid of darkness, daddy's afraid of babies, mama's afraid of crying. And David, well, he's afraid of me. (Why is David afraid of me? Why does he have to be afraid of love?) Perhaps I am afraid of love. Perhaps I am afraid of David being afraid to love me. There is a volta in this song; it is the "intense and tight" part that the music becomes an undercurrent of the A2 chord, drumming a million heartbeats in syncopation. And afterwards I keep singing, David loves me, David loves me, David loves me. Do I love David?

By the end of the song, after the volta, why, of course: yes. I am not afraid of anything or anyone because I love David more than he fears loving me. In the end, love prevails.

But going back to my parenthetical questions about David, I want to ask, why are we afraid of love? Are we not brave enough?

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H."

The Integumentary System

There is no magician's mantle to compare with the skin in its diverse roles of waterproof, overcoat, sunshade, suit of armor and refrigerator, sensitive to the touch of a feather, to temperature, and to pain, withstanding the wear and tear of three score years and ten, and executing its own running repairs.

Lockhart, R.D., Hamilton, G.F., Fyfe, F.W., Anatomy: The Human Body, 1965

A wonderful way to explain the epidermis. There is prose, but there is also poetry in the art of medicine. 

The migraineur

So I come back to Priscilla Long's article "My Brain on My Mind"--particularly because I happen to hit a sudden memory of reading about migraines. I had underlined and circled and densely annotated the part about it--for its scientific information and the poetry behind it, how Long also shares this "profound despair" with me.

When we have a migraine, three hundred times the normal amount of blood rushes to the brain in order to fire neurons in the chaotic electrical brainstorm. This firing neurons secrete an excitatory neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, which constricts cranial blood vessels. But we migraineurs generally have an insufficient supply of norepinephrine, and when it sadly diminishes, dopamine, which counterbalances norepinephrine, distends blood vessels, activating trigeminal nerves. And alas begins the great and overriding despondency of migraine.

I think there is something else in that hour of excruciating pain besides all this. When I'm not suffering a migraine, I am thinking. I try to do the things I won't be able to do when I'm struck by that mean inconvenience. I am thinking about David--the person I am in love with while I sing JRB's "I'm Not Afraid of Anything" although thinking about him might induce a migraine. I can forfeit a fraction of my time for him--because I am trying to find out the history of my character she carries while she sings. Or I think of my own history and my own song I am living.

Prozac for the Planet

Perhaps it comes down to this: In an era of scientific illiteracy, commodity fascism, political shortsightedness, minute attention spans, and hyperactive media, the only overarching narrative about climate change may be, ironically, the weather itself. We may have to wait for truly heinous and bizarre weather to capture public and political attention. The lived, daily experience of global weirding may be what leads to the fraught denouement of geoengineering, which itself will be the beginning of another narrative about who we are, what time is, what the climate means, how nature matters.

Christopher Cokinos, "Prozac for the Planet," The American Scholar

Dr. Cedergren has talked to our AP chemistry class about this viewpoint. That our last resort may lie in that emergency moment of some unexpected and tragic and extraordinary climatic event. Do people really care about the environment? I can almost say, "no." During the summer I volunteered at the Field Museum, a special exhibit called Climate Change opened. It was not popular. Visitors were uninterested and unimpressed. To me it was quite saddening to know this--that perhaps the idea of a greener environment has become trite and palled.