Play Me to My Grave

I always meant to play the harmonica. I really did. Somehow the thought of a tiny musical world tucked into a pocket, made ready at a moment's notice excites a profound awakening in me. I am a whistler by nature, genetically and by training, I would say. The simplicity of being able carry a tune on my lips, no need for words—or even vocal chords—is the consummate difference between humming along to the tune and being the mind behind the music. People hum because they don't know the words. Whistlers are unconcerned with words and phrases, brashly showing the world what their bodies can do: it is an act of creation.

But the harmonica? Another step entirely. A ratio of range to portability unrivaled by anything else. Surely a piano outstrips it in versatility. Surely. But who can take a piano on the rails? Or to jail? Jail, my friends. The harmonica is the official instrument of jailbirds the world around, soulful and yet carefree, able to join in a blues improvisation or a drunken riverside revelry with equal ease. Hobos travel, whipping down the shipping corridors in style and grace, belting out tunes on an instrument whose sound is almost synonymous with the lonely whistle of the steam engine. This is like a natural enhancement to the whistling organ: the mouth.

That tiny universe of sound should be mine, but again I run afoul and afraid of that same callous contravention, the baldly diminishing former necessity of mortality. The previous evolutionary necessity, an unavoidable end to life, has become an anchor to a species which proves more and more its ability to have a life outside the physical body. But for all the wants and desires and the art, philosophy and the search for truth, we are still tacked to this temporal limitation. The painted spandrels, thus, give us the search for permanence, the decision of one life over another, specialization and nostalgia.

Indeed, without my fear of a mortal's comeuppance, why wouldn't I take hours out of my day to practice such a thing? It's my understanding of my limitations that makes me put down some dreams in favor of others. This essay, the words in it and the skill of combining them into something that communicates an emotion... that's what I want to do with my time. “My Time.” How horrific is that? The tacit way our language condones this degradation and eventual, abrupt corruption of our bodies, I mean. So inimical and profound a part of the way we live our lives that most wouldn't even think to fight back.

I've said often that the one thing that I will always regret the things I haven't done, no matter how many things I do. I regret all the lives I could not live. I want to hold within me the knowledge of every human life, all separate and self-contained. The accumulated understanding of every human life.

But that's only the perfection. Each extra second, each little memento and moment of prescience is worth paying for. Worth owning. This is why the choice between music and martial arts and poetry is so painful. I want to feel what the musicians feel, and yet my mind does not work quickly enough to do all this at once. I'm bogged down now for reasons of mental acuity, in itself a physical defect. Genetic. Hereditary. A function of the kinds of experiences I had as a child. The way my Jell-O brain settled into its mold, now unshakable. It can wiggle and stretch a little, but it can only be shaped so much before it will break. So I'm stuck being a slow learner.

I feel though, that it has not kept me from an ability of mastery. Perfection. Of course, this only magnifies the injury I feel at my brief time here. Were I to live several centuries, of course I could put down the typepad one day and pick up that harmonica. I could nod at my sweet whistling and fill the trainyards and cages with that sad melody. All the time in the world to perfect the skills that escape me, slowly crafting my physical and mental coordination until all that is left is that perspicacity, a laser width focus on a skill.