Don't Speak, Memory

There are things we wish to forget, and things we wish to forget but on principle feel the need to remember. One such thing of the latter category is my interpretation of Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess." It is a piece that I had managed to master for my high school senior piano recital, and which has remained in my diminishing repertoire ever since. In the two years that I spent at Willamette, prior to moving to New York, this was a piece I played often; it's one that I could play, unlike the ornamented, cold, and anal retentive finger-ey Baroque ones that my instructor at the time was assigning me to play. I regularly craved the familiarity of "Pavane" during my first two years of college. Until I came out, I could be found at the piano studio nearly every Friday and Saturday night, and I wasn't practicing anything that was assigned; I was liberally interpreting--in the style of David Lanz, or sometimes Jim Brickman (bad)--those pieces that I fancied myself good at, and "Pavane" was one such piece, along with "Claire du Lune" and several selections from Camelot.

So I had at one time perfected "Pavane" as much as any amateur pianist could. I always thought it was a dirge for some beloved, much too young, prematurely deceased, romantic fling from higher orders; actually it's nothing like that, instead aiming to "express a nostalgic enthusiasm for Spanish customs and sensibilities," memorializing not "death," per se, but the liberties of some entitled person's birthright. Regardless, it is an unbelievably gorgeous piece, and one that I played frequently, with extremely liberal interpretive ornamentations and gestures--some of which I actually imagined Ravel himself to posthumously approve of; I pictured him smiling on me, perched from a cloud, or peacefully rolling over in his coffin, towards the corner that was suddenly generating warmth--both during those weekend night sessions and, more importantly, in the immediate aftermath of my mother's death. It's a piece, like Death Be Not Proud or The Year of Magical Thinking or Angels in America Beethoven's Fifth (if you've read The Farewell Symphony) or even Dante, or countless other works of art, that provides solace to the bereaved. Playing "Pavane" was one of the few things that seemed to personally make sense at the time, and I played it often.

I hadn't played that piece--or any piece, really--for about three years until tonight. After a few cocktails, I began working my way through my repertoire and at some point I delved into that one. It caused a weird sensation at first, kind of like deja vu, kind of like emotional warfare. I slowly realized that this was the piece with which I had decided to memorialize my mother. I had said to myself, over three years ago, after a play-through I was especially proud of, "Don't forget this."

And yet I had. How could that be? Obviously I hadn't really wanted to remember, except in instances like this with the intended purpose of salting the wound. How many things, without stimulus, are lost in our brains forever? Perhaps this is the function of emotional memory: not to act as rolodex and to be available for recall at a moment's notice, but to reside invisibly until one's madeline gets dipped into one's hot beverage of choice. It's a little scary to have your vulnerabilities kept hostage like this.