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Tomorrow I turn fifty-one. Better than the alternative, as a chum is wont to say.
This year could turn out interestingly.
As a recap of 'where I am' as our psychologically-minded chums might say, I took time to analyse the changes to my aims and ambitions that the past few years have wrought. The big underlying thing is, of course, that my niche in the music business died some years ago (session guitarist of the second rank, though I was, ahem, climbing, as the word is; and was 'First Call' at Tin Pan Alley Studios, if that means anything to anybody).
I thought that I still might have something to say with the instrument. That at what I was especially good, I could carve myself some small space within which to work, and gather a small audience who might just 'get' what I was doing: rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically. Though until Henry came along this ambition seemed modest, post son-and-heir arriving on the scene, I find that even this is fantastically beyond my ability to achieve. There are some apt lines from Eliot (aren't there always)
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
You shed things. Things you thought never to let go. I am shedding technique with every passing day spent away from the guitar. When I reach for difficult but once comfortably achievable things, I approximate rather than nail them. Things fall apart without the constant discipline of practice. Entropy devours the fine honed sense, and eventually when we have sloughed off all of our hard learned abilities we shall resemble amoeba inchoate in response and understanding. I suppose this is why Dylan Thomas urged his father in particular, and the rest of us in general, to rage against the dying of the light.
But for me, I just want to nurture The Boy (and any other potential offspring) and to assist him in attempting to go one better than his old man, in whatever field of Henry's pleasure. But this means I must recognise that I have lost my personal and artistic ambitions. And I wonder is this a function or consequence of older fatherhood?
It's all selfish genes and all that, of course, dammit: almost resembles that there Determinism. Bah.
This year could turn out interestingly.
As a recap of 'where I am' as our psychologically-minded chums might say, I took time to analyse the changes to my aims and ambitions that the past few years have wrought. The big underlying thing is, of course, that my niche in the music business died some years ago (session guitarist of the second rank, though I was, ahem, climbing, as the word is; and was 'First Call' at Tin Pan Alley Studios, if that means anything to anybody).
I thought that I still might have something to say with the instrument. That at what I was especially good, I could carve myself some small space within which to work, and gather a small audience who might just 'get' what I was doing: rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically. Though until Henry came along this ambition seemed modest, post son-and-heir arriving on the scene, I find that even this is fantastically beyond my ability to achieve. There are some apt lines from Eliot (aren't there always)
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
You shed things. Things you thought never to let go. I am shedding technique with every passing day spent away from the guitar. When I reach for difficult but once comfortably achievable things, I approximate rather than nail them. Things fall apart without the constant discipline of practice. Entropy devours the fine honed sense, and eventually when we have sloughed off all of our hard learned abilities we shall resemble amoeba inchoate in response and understanding. I suppose this is why Dylan Thomas urged his father in particular, and the rest of us in general, to rage against the dying of the light.
But for me, I just want to nurture The Boy (and any other potential offspring) and to assist him in attempting to go one better than his old man, in whatever field of Henry's pleasure. But this means I must recognise that I have lost my personal and artistic ambitions. And I wonder is this a function or consequence of older fatherhood?
It's all selfish genes and all that, of course, dammit: almost resembles that there Determinism. Bah.
