Revolution by Inches

At last, the maelstrom of graduate school applications has passed, and I'm left with an uncharacteristically large chunk of spare time. Uncluttered schedules have never agreed with me, as they lure my latent laziness and depressive tendencies out of hiding. It's only been four days, and I can feel my brain cells evaporating by the minute. To combat further mental decay, I've compiled a list of post-app goals. Consider these belated new year's resolutions:

1. Refrain from throwing things at and/or punching strangers in the wake of Republican victory in Massachusetts. As a hardened pessimist, it's hard for me not to see Brown's win as the death of health care reform, but other ways to pass legislation do exist. Fuming and moping never accomplished anything. It's time to deepen my understanding of the issues and to participate in any local efforts to influence senators and representatives.

2. Actually compose an original song, and pursue it to completion rather than giving up halfway through. Andrew Bird and Owen Pallett have a monopoly on the violinist songwriter trade, and rightly so, but sometimes I forget that I can play the instrument, too. If I resurrect my practicing routine and conjure some violin licks to combine with guitar progressions, maybe something interesting will emerge. Plus, I'd love to attempt writing lyrics again, if only to cancel out the horrendous emo dreck I wrote in high school.

3. Regularly update this blog. No, seriously. I'll start the trend with what comes easiest: writing about music. Lately, I've been rediscovering certain songs on my iPod and am aching to articulate exactly why I find them so memorable. I'm not yet sure what to call this project; it'll debut once I think of an appropriate title.

4. Not have a panic attack about grad school admissions. Easier said than done.

Anyhow in a corner.

Whenever death grazes the edges of my life, I think of Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

That "human position," the cataclysmically shocking and yet utterly natural event that is the cessation of a life, renders mortality a singularly unsettling notion. The poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts," describes a painting, Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," in which life in a seaside village proceeds as normal while the titular character, a mere pair of flailing legs, drowns almost unnoticed in the lower right-hand corner.

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Last week's devastating news threw these sentiments into sharp relief. An acquaintance returned home to find a loved one gone too soon; meanwhile, I rode my horse, unaware of the devastation unfolding a few miles away. Consumers consumed. Traffic lights changed. Cars zipped toward destinations. Some drivers may have passed the newly grieving house and questioned the presence of emergency vehicles before quickly reverting to their previous trains of thought.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The sun set that day and rose the next, as it had to. The world continues, as it has to. Now, however, more souls mourn and rage against yet another undeserved tragedy. When we ask why, life answers by simply providing us time to attempt to heal.

Though I feel uncomfortable revealing any details, I ask that those who read this post keep the bereaved in mind. Their situation is one no family should have to endure.