Self Improvement

Article: Self Improvement
by
Owen Hunter

Dear reader, what do you love? Are you a wine connoisseur, a lover of French cuisine or a cheese fiend? Perhaps a stamp collecter, a bootlegger or a mitten-sewer. Or maybe a scholar of history, music or art? And how do you surmise you rose to your level of expertise? Were you born sipping wine, sewing mittens or meditating on Bach? The answer is, of course, a resounding no.

How did the jazz listener discover his love for the syncopated beat? Did he hear one Duke Ellington record to arrive at the conclusion that he must own Miles Davis first prints from the thirties through the sixties? Or maybe he picked up a Xylophone the day after taking the ease off to ‘Pyramid’ by The Modern Jazz Quartet and had to rat-a-tat-tat those scales. Maybe exposure to Alfred Di Meola sent electric through his veins and birthed a smooth guitar god. Hardly.

Here is the story a man who came to like a thing. He liked things, things he knew, things he adored. But one day, suddenly, an urge interrupts him. He is now bored of the things he liked, knew and adored. He still likes, knows and adores them but a cavity has formed somewhere within, he reasons it is his soul, and to save a tumour from occupying this hole he must spawn a new love. He now has to like, know, and dare’ say, adore a new thing. He must choose life over death; movement over stagnation.

Indeed, there were many new things every day. Many ephemeral, some obscure to the sublime and countless were mere mimics to existing things, many of which were his known and loved. So were there bigger things, lasting things with viviparous outgrowths, spawning new sub-things day by day; were there mother-things he could love? Could they be as big or even dwarf his current things – the things he watches day by day balloon and sprout sub-things of itself, such was the greatness and relevance of itself? Could the new thing introduce him - for years to come - to itself in its ever-birthing versions? If so, in old age the man can look back on his life and remember the day he decided to like that new thing, that big thing that was going to last, and that he rode the universe and fed his soul with for many a happy year? Could the new thing reinvigorate his lust for the old things? Could he like the old and new at once and always the twain shall meet? He responded in the affirmative to all of the above, and not through fear of impending emptiness, but of the fullness he anticipated the new thing could bring.

And there you have the story of a lover of classical music, European and Western Colonial history, sea-faring novels and an honest plate of burgundy cheese. He, in retirement, felt the need for new cultural pursuits. He had no idea where to turn. Nothing piqued his interest at 65; he was quite set in his ways. Then one day, in the crispy autumn air as he browsed the window of a thrift shop, floated the mellifluous current of Nat King Cole’s voice singing Big Ballad classic ‘Unforgettable’. How he savoured every note, each gasping breath of the voice that soothed his mind chatter; he quit his meditations on the next frontier in a second, he simply had to name the song and artist.

Once he identified Nat and the signature song, he bought a compilation album ‘King Nat Presents: Best Of’. Upon first listen, he just could not embrace any track but ‘Unforgettable’, and this left him puzzled, troubled. He began sampling the pallet of all organised noise the world had to offer: Ricardo Lemvo - the great fusion artist of Cuban and Central African music; Silver Sun - the band that seemed to straddle the edges of the Britpop scene by updating the Beach Boys songwriting template for a Punk audience; The Smiths, a band that seemed to elevate the mundane through poetry and jangle-happy guitar riffs how Oscar Wilde elevated a stiff, grey statue in a town square and made him a spirit-saint; Bad Brains; Emiliana Torini; Carla Bruni – who he swore he’d encountered in more serious settings. Of course, all of this was unknown to him at the time, and he could not much bear the ‘racket’ as he considered it.

Slumped over his settee, this weary soul began to feel the emptiness of the world. All those pockets of thin air, all that fresh mountain water lips never sipped, the futile cries of an abandoned nest of fledglings, the human lives sacrificed for greater goods that may have been neither great nor good. And all to the point, he felt at poor form to do much about it. He sighed and swigged the last of his bourbon. His eyes grew weary and a half sleep enveloped his slouched frame. ‘King Nat Presents: Best Of’ played without reception in the background; he was almost with the sheep. The track that won his love, ‘Unforgettable’, faintly works its way from the ribbing vinyl, and to the ears of this drifting man. With a wet flutter, his eyes opened and shut in one solid movement. He opened them again. A wry smile spread from his thinning lips; he wondered why no song this side of Benjamin Britton could move him this way. Tears coursed into tributaries down the ever-loving crags of his face, and sleep finally took him for the day.

He woke up the next morning and surveyed his parlour. The record had long since ceased to play thanks to his wife who must have had to tidy up after him; ‘poor thing’ he thought, and he made for the kitchen to rustle up some breakfast. Ten minutes passed, and down came his other half. She sat at the table, grabbed a fork with one hand to tuck into her eggs, and grasped his hand with the other. The ever-loving smile of wisdom was exchanged between the two, and there they sat, pondering the day’s worth and just whatever they would do with themselves.

The old man rose from his chair and set the record player to his new favourite track. He nodded with serene appreciation and lost grip of the present for but three and a half minutes. His temporary ecstasy withered to sadness as the song finished, ‘That you would think that I, Am unforgettable too’. He glanced to the clock, and the dong struck for eleven. His descent into the void was to surely end eleven strikes later into the day, he thought, and that sleep would rescue him from his worldly unrest. He twiddled his thumbs to distraction; scraping dry skin fold over dry skin fold, scratching his nails now and then, clawing at his sideburns every third-dozen seconds. He found himself chuckling, his musical malaise had reduced him to making a coarse skinned instrument of himself, and the result he found catchy.

No more was he to soak up in his bouillon of self-pity, he found an anticipation for newness that had not crossed him for years. He resolved to play the album again and again, avoiding ‘Unforgettable’ on each playthrough. And then there was breakthrough. Dong! Dong! The clock struck for ten at night. The chiming in of bedtime was lost on this transfixed man.

His wife entered the room to take him up to bed only to gasp at the spectacle before her. Her husband of fourty-odd years was a man in awe, for the first time in a decade, of human endeavour. They slow-danced until midnight. A man had come to love a new thing, a big thing with subsets of other things, and from this new passion he cast passion into the eyes of his beloved, and she took the gift whole.

If passion is not a decision, then there is no choice between love and fear, movement and stagnation, nor good and evil. All are born to love, and all are drawn to which they can most love. But love and passion are free from time, aging, movement and space; the gush from the fountain without a source and each can be renewed and can renew, anything, any man or woman.