Mondegreen Monk

By Jonathan Kumar

How does one prepare himself for a meeting with his destiny?

It wasn’t so much as love at first sight as it was love at first thought for Alan Kirke when he meets what he knows to be the only woman in this world meant for him. Though Alan aspired to courtship and chivalry his entire life, they are new and therefore foreign to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647647223

Book preview

ONE

There’s some indiscernible feeling about being in a room full of beautiful women, and though the odds seem snobbishly and overwhelmingly against you that the attraction would ever be mutual, their silence in withholding the disinterest sustains hope. I admire them more as an aesthete than a philogynist, as I would any great work of art. I remember, it must be approaching twelve years ago now, sitting in a lecture hall on the first day of a Music Literature and Appreciation class. It is a habit of mine to arrive to obligations earlier than the rest, partly out of respect for those expecting me, but mainly due to the boredom of having nothing better to do. Before me on my desk as I waited was the required text I had purchased before the start of the semester. I leafed through it examining the paintings through the epochs that had inspired Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and Ravel, the scenes depicted on them of war and revolution, words from the letters of these famous composers and excerpts of staff paper from their masterpieces.

By the time the class had commenced, I had skimmed the book from beginning to end, lost in my thoughts that had progressed to the debate between evolution and creationism, wondering just what force on heaven or earth could have produced such minds, so vastly superior to the average. It didn’t seem factual that men named Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann had walked on similar soil and were comprised of mortal flesh and blood like me and other ordinary people just a few thousand miles away from where I sat. Maybe they were, in reality, the product of a revisionist’s pen or an author’s imagination. Assuming they had actually lived, surely these composers’ visions were designed from the ethereal itself. Nature alone was too brutish, blind, and uncaring for intelligence that intricate.

In my scan of the text, I had neglected perhaps the most important part of it. Before entering the classroom, the front cover was to me there only to bind and protect the precious pages within it. There was nothing about it that caught my eye as I removed it from its shelf in the school’s bookstore. The color and artwork on it were banal, as was the title, or so I thought. Upon his entrance, our professor, Mr. Doyle, first and foremost brought to the class’s attention the obligatory matters at hand of the contents of the syllabus, the best way to contact him, and a brief overview of what we would be learning over the course of the semester. I listened with feigned interest, reasoning what I was missing was repeated in the packet our teacher had already passed out to us. Then he clapped his hands and held them together, waking my classmates and me from our stupor. A smile came to him, and he said something that gave me pause. Now, before we embark on this musical journey together, I want you to take a moment to consider the name the authors of your text chose as a title. I looked back down at the cover and saw in crimson ink the words I had neglected earlier. Mr. Doyle resumed, Why do you think they decided to label their book ‘The Enjoyment of Music’? Why not ‘The Appreciation of Music’? and along these lines, why is this class called ‘Music Literature and Appreciation’ and not ‘Music Literature and Enjoyment’?

The instructor left this as an open-ended, rhetorical question. He allowed no time for a response, only a brief contemplation before moving to his lecture on Gregorian chant. Mr. Doyle gave me the impression the reason he wasn’t interested in replies was because we wouldn’t know the correct answer until the course had concluded. It was an inquisition I returned to many times as winter turned to spring. Before Mr. Doyle had posed the question to me, I thought appreciation and enjoyment were mere synonyms and could be used interchangeably depending on the speaker’s preference. What was the difference, the unenlightened me would have said, between saying for instance, I enjoyed the concert I attended or I appreciated the concert? Both examples demonstrate gratitude for the experience and the people who made it possible. Then I recalled all the ways I had heard the two words used in everyday speech. People say to someone they feel indebted to, I appreciate everything you do for me but never, I enjoy everything you do for me. I have been told by waiters who placed a delicious plate in front of me to enjoy your meal and by cashiers in cinemas to enjoy the show after I purchased a ticket. Maybe if I had spent the entire day preparing the meal, taste-testing the recipe to precision, or played an integral part on a movie set, they would have told me respectively to appreciate your meal or appreciate the show.

As I completed my final exam of Mr. Doyle’s Music Literature and Appreciation class in early May, I had concluded the difference between the nouns was that enjoyment is connected with a visceral reaction, a response to a desired sensory experience. Enjoyment can be a memorable experience a person seeks out again, but it remains only a superficial awareness, a surface level depth of feeling. Enjoyment doesn’t have the capacity to move one to tears or view another with a newfound awe in light of the knowledge one has acquired. I enjoyed hearing Night on Bald Mountain and Symphony Fantastique the first time Mr. Doyle played us passages from them in February because of the instrumentation and synergy of sounds and the atmosphere the pieces created. Three months later, I had a touch of appreciation for these compositions after I had spent the semester learning theory, harmonies, and scales under the tutelage of Mr. Doyle and my private piano teacher.

My own forays in composing were disastrous. I had discovered the musical language was as foreign to me as the mathematical one. Despite my deepest wishes, I didn’t have the mind to follow in the footsteps of the Romantics and Impressionists. Scrutinizing their works in search of chord progressions and cadences confounded me. How did they know which key to choose? Which time signature? Where to place the accidentals and why the chromaticism was needed? What muse had told them when to modulate and how had they smoothed the transition so seamlessly? Their endower had parceled out the talent of ten men into one vessel, and the cost of their genius was a ruthless pursuit of perfection. It was as George Sand had said of her lover: His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime or it sang in his head during a walk and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now overanalyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again ‘neat’ as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring.

And this was precisely the crux that had plagued me pervasively, this ambivalence toward almost all things in life, the cautious jutting out of one foot over the precipice while others jumped carelessly over the cliff and sought a solution in midair. Is it better to be revered but tormented or footloose but forgotten? It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I had no musical inclination whatsoever. I was impressive at sight-reading, could absorb the principles of theory with relative ease. The application of knowledge was where I struggled. I’ve lived the better part of my life as a jack-of-all-trades and master of one, namely the art of making excuses. I abandoned my instrument after frustration had overtaken inspiration, when I was growing incrementally instead of in leaps and bounds. Now I am left with hindsight’s hypotheticals. What if I had begun playing piano at age eight instead of eighteen? What if I hadn’t sabotaged myself with delusions of grandeur? What if I hadn’t been so impatient? Would my dreams have come to fruition if I hadn’t quit? I had foolishly assumed I had no right to call myself a musician if the craft didn’t come naturally to me. It wasn’t until years afterward when I examined the biographies of my idols in more depth that I realized their works were labors of love, their penchant for musicality refined from years in conservatories guided by great masters.

There were other obsessions to occupy my mind after music and I went our separate ways. I had resumed my love affair with basketball. I was first introduced to the sport in the third grade, playing for pride during recess on elementary- and middle-school blacktops. I had left the game during my indifferent years of high school, found it again shortly after graduation as a refuge from my dissatisfaction of being unable to pursue the fairer sex as my peers were. I witnessed and heard ad nauseum the exploits and conquests of their escapades, what they had done behind closed doors with whom and in what positions. Women were a strange breed to me. I was intimidated by them, didn’t understand them because I had spent so little time in their company. Still I enjoyed being around them, the female form in general, the parts of it that soothed weary knights and wounded warriors throughout the centuries. I was hopeful they could do the same for my outlook. How dull my third-grade year would have been had it not been for the object of my affection greeting me each morning with a radiant smile to melt the frost from the day dawning. If it is possible for a boy of that age to know what it meant to be in love, I was. She was the first person in my life to cause me to blush, to feel faintish, to elevate my mood to poetic heights.

I would have to wait four years to experience those feelings again. That was when happenstance brought to our school a transfer who could throw a baseball faster than the boys, a young lady who wasn’t afraid to roll around in the dirt, yet who could create envy in the hearts of the other girls when she donned a dress and a dusting of rouge. I was taken aback by just how well she cleaned up at the Sadie Hawkins Dance, and though she didn’t ask me to accompany her, she was gracious when we saw each other in the gymnasium. To my astonishment, she told me to save her a dance. I was a nervous wreck as I waited for my turn to come, trying to keep dry my sweaty palms by stuffing them into my pants pockets. When the moment arrived, I remember not if my knees were knocking or how quickly the butterflies were circling inside my stomach, but how my hands wrapped inside of hers felt. It was as though she were a spiritual healer and, through the miracle of a touch, had cured me of my consternation.

Today it is bittersweet when I hear the song we danced to that night, for shortly after, she chose to pursue a relationship with a boy equal to her athletic abilities. I was left with the rite of passage of adolescent angst, spending evenings supine on my bed drying my eyes to lovesick ballads. I fell in love once more my sophomore year when I took a job working part time after school and on the weekends selling concessions to customers at the cinema. She reminded me in many ways of my previous interest. Tomboys, though they possess masculine characteristics, are curiously adept at attracting the opposite sex. I was drawn to a girl I could play catch with or one-on-one against, then convey sensitivity to. A punch in the arm was a peck on the cheek from a gentler counterpart, but I found it adorable. We rendezvoused on the couch of a mutual friend a few fortunate times, my reticence limiting the expression of my affection. I laid clothed beside her, combed her hair as I had done to my mom’s when I was young, hinted at kisses that never materialized. Our courtship was cut short. I bid her a somber farewell as the coming months would alter my life forever.

TWO

I was becoming increasingly anxious midway through middle school. I had developed a generalized fear of the future and attempted to remedy my nervousness by thinking of solutions to every imaginable hypothetical situation, ranging from how I would settle familial differences to how I would support myself financially forty years from then. My homelife was often turbulent, a clash of cultures between my parents being the culprit. Soon my monomania culminated and manifested itself in the avoidance of clocked confinement. It started slowly during seventh grade. I was still able to stay in school for the entire day, but there was an unshakable tension of being unable to concentrate on my studies as my mind was mired on my worries. I lost sleep at night, spent extra time each morning ensuring the house was in order before I left.

Returning to school from summer break the following year, the thought of rotating classes every fifty minutes for eight hours each was unbearable. I pleaded with my parents to let me stay home as often as they would allow, faked sickness and temporized when getting ready. When school was inevitable, I was distrait during lectures. My grades suffered, but that was the least of my concerns. I fought tooth and nail against my teachers to allow me to be dismissed from their rooms so I could telephone home. I feared something terrible was happening out of my reach and vision. Initially my instructors were accommodating enough, granting my requests or I would sneak off to the payphone as my classmates lined up and walked to recess or lunch. Irritation replaced empathy within my teachers as my absences waxed and my effort in class waned. What they viewed as me playing hooky was in actuality my desperate plea to restore order in my crumbling world. To address this miscommunication, my parents and I met with the school’s principal so he could inform his staff of the reason for my peculiar behavior. Special accommodations were made to put my mind at ease, including a signal system wherein I could notify my teachers when I needed to leave and do so without having to ask in the traditional sense. It helped to ease my mind now that all parties involved were on the same page, yet the damage had been done.

My personality had been transformed from this experience and the events leading up to it. I had gone from being footloose to a fault as a child to a rigid and rebellious teenager. Before my neurosis displaced my jocularity, I insisted on being the center of attention among my siblings, parents, and peers. I possessed an altruistic sense of humor and an overwhelming need to make those around me laugh. I cared little for my teachers’ lesson plans and preparations. Class to me was an excitable comedy club, my desk the stage, and, in my fantasy, my instructors played the part of the heckler, frequently removing me from their learning environment. My earliest ambition was to tell jokes professionally or host a late-night talk show, transitioning from monologue to interviews with the stars.

My freshman and sophomore years were relatively uneventful because of my diffidence from being a neophyte and stranger in a new building. I felt as though I had been given a fresh start where teachers and students alike weren’t aware of my history. I had ostensibly outgrown my neurosis that had plagued me the previous two years. My scores and attendance improved during this time, but on the last day of school during my second tarry, my friend and I succumbed to an urge we had been resisting for the better part of the semester. It was easy to skip class now that I had a driver’s license and a vehicle, and so we did the final hour of that final day, stealing away to my car and making the mall our destination. This may seem a simple and harmless act, yet it carried a heavy weight. My literature teacher, a crone, took our affront as a personal insult and notified my parents of my truancy. They were reasonably unconcerned, as this was the first phone call they had received of its kind, and for all intents and purposes, the school year was over. However, this feeling of thrilling independence was responsible for my change in character. I distinctly recall pulling into the school’s parking lot my junior year and being overwhelmed with a feeling of dread. I stood beside my locker waiting for my friend to arrive as the crowd in the hallway gathered. When he appeared, I looked as though I had seen a ghost. My thoughts again had departed drastically from the here and now. Instead of concerning myself with the task immediately at hand, my mind had drifted to the last day of this school year and how far away it seemed. I thought about each day, each hour that stood between me and my deliverance.

It was in that moment that my neurosis returned, only this time it was aggravated by a defiance to authority. We had no war to protest, yet I still had to take a stand against some cause. I decided my teachers were my oppressors. How dare they tell me what time I had to report to each class, how long I had to stay, and what the punishment would be for insubordination. When I was in attendance, I disrupted their class or challenged their pedagogy every chance I had. Our enmity grew, resulting in phone calls home, suspensions, and culminating in me being dragged by my jacket out of a classroom. My relationships were strained at home and school. My parents were at their wit’s end with me after conferring with my teachers and attempting to reason with me had proven unsuccessful. Their ultimatum was the forfeiture of my car they had paid for.

The problem was bigger than a recalcitrant student or son. I was battling futility itself. School was a simulacrum of life. I couldn’t understand the purpose of either. What was the use in matriculating if graduation held no relevance? The question of why does anything matter in life if our death expunges any evidence of our existence was posited to me in my philosophical meanderings. My faith in those days was not nearly strong enough to quell the strain from carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Religion was agreeable and convenient to me in the context of Christmas, Easter, and the miracle of a sunset, but I couldn’t convince myself to grab ahold of its sacred doctrines to actually believe the fables were true.

The afterlife was of no consolation to me; I needed God now. The rescinding of my car wasn’t enough to keep me on campus, for we used my closest friend and confidant’s instead. There were never any pressing matters we needed to attend to. Anything seemed better than sitting in front of a chalkboard, though. We would spend our truancy rounding up our allowances in cheap restaurants, an arcade, or a movie theatre. Sometimes we would go only to the gas station to satisfy my friend’s oral fixation then drive aimlessly in circles, pontificating on life’s big questions. He was intuitive, precocious, and so I listened much more than I talked. He seemed to know the thoughts that were bothering me without me having to verbalize them, or maybe these thoughts were much more common than I imagined. He was particularly insightful with one hand gripping the steering wheel and the other pinching a vanilla cigarillo between its pointer and middle fingers.

Once, when we had been on the road for nearly thirty minutes, he puffed and inhaled the tobacco deeply, held it in his mouth longer than usual, then blew a cloud of smoke in the car’s cabin as though he was exhaling the contents of his mind. Do you know what people want more than anything else? he said. It isn’t money or fame or even love. It’s control. Think about your life and everyone else’s you know. How hard they fight for it and how foolishly they think they have it. They think they are in charge of their destiny because they chose what pants and shirt to wear today, what job to accept, and what car to buy, but in reality these are just reactions to circumstances beyond their control. We wear the clothes we do in response to the weather, take whatever job we are offered so we can make ends meet, drive what we do based on our budget. Our way of life would be drastically different if our income increased, and that is a circumstance most everybody would change if we truly were in control. If you forget everything else about our drives together, remember this because it will bring you peace – you don’t control your life; you adapt to it.

THREE

I was familiar with a dance studio down the road from where my parents lived; I drove by it each morning on my way to the elementary school where I was placed in pursuit of my certification in early education. It was all the while tucked innocently and inconspicuously away in a strip mall. My misapprehension of what awaited me came from a documentary I had once seen following the progress of ballet students. I pictured bespectacled, elderly termagants pacing grimly along a line of their petrified pupils and slapping with a ruler the wrists of a student for the slightest infraction. It didn’t strike me as a place of any particular fun, but I hadn’t come to socialize. I was here to learn the craft of a sacred art that had stood the test of time.

Suddenly on this picturesque July afternoon, this building of discipline appeared to me like an alpenglow, to this climber, weary and cold, fractured from the fall down a slippery mountain. There was something in the cloud formation that day it seemed, how they had congregated around the sun and funneled its rays to spotlight this hallowed ground. Still, my expectations were reasonable. I would take advantage of the complimentary lesson they were offering to new students as part of a promotion, see whether I felt any desire to continue. Who was to say I would have any inclination, capability, or coordination for the art, even if I wanted to pursue it