Feeling, Disease, and Anxiety

I have been feeling exceptionally well for a couple of weeks. The treatments for my multiple myeloma have pushed the level of cancer in my system way down, and though I sometimes feel a little bit tired (particularly when I do not have the "assistance" of steroids), I have been feeling rather normal.

Hot flashes and night sweats have returned with regularity, but the intense need to drink great amounts of water all day and all night have subsided. I have the occasional age-appropriate ache and pain, which I had trouble noticing when I had intense pain caused by the (now dead) tumor on my sacrum, and my regular doses of steroids and other anti-cancer medications.

Now, with the exception of a daily aspirin and thrice-daily doses of a drug that protects me from getting shingles, it is just me in my body for the rest of May. Then I have to inject myself with human growth hormone to prepare for next week's festivities: the harvest of stem cells for my bone marrow transplant at the end of June.

After the "harvest" my major task is to show up at the hospital for a big dose of chemotherapy to wipe out my (still a wee bit cancerous) bone marrow, and then build up my immune system after my harvested (and I guess cleared of cancer) stem cells get poured back into my system.

During the past few days I have noticed a kind of free-flowing anxiety surging through my system: anxiety about being in the right place at the right time, anxiety about packing everything I need for my time in the hospital and my time near the hospital, anxiety about cleaning, and anxiety about recovery.

I have also noticed that when I practice music that allows me to release emotional energy, I feel better. During the past six months or so, since cancer-related circumstances started taking over my life, I went through a period of relative emotional numbness that I found was relived by music. When I was playing, I felt alive. The feeling lasted for a while after playing, as long as I was thinking about the music I had been playing.

I also noticed that I could become emotionally connected to prose passages, people, and circumstances in the books I was reading.

This (now pretty much under control since I have been able to talk about it) anxiety could be happening because my body is no longer in a constant combat mode. I now have the leisure to feel, which I like to think of as a good thing.

Practicing now seems to be a little bit different from the way it felt a few weeks ago. I can think about the "how" of making a phrase sound better with more objectivity, which is something that makes practicing more productive than simply playing because I need some emotional relief.

Knowing where to be in the bow, for example, is something I can only accomplish through focused practice. And when I am in the anxiety-informed state of performing, the practicing I have done allows me to enter a more free-flowing and expressive state than I would be in if I hadn't practiced properly.

Creative Energy

I would say that in my sixty-seven years of life I have spent at least fifty years of it being filled with restless creative energy. Like most people, I spent the first decade and a half of it doing the work of growing and learning. I grew in social, mental, physical, and musical ways, and was fortunate to grow up in a place (Newton, Massachusetts), where I was stimulated by my friends and my teachers. I was also stimulated by adults in the musical community, and was fortunate (in some ways) to have had a great deal of freedom to explore my interests on my own.

In my young adulthood, which was riddled with and rattled by circumstances that were beyond my control, I became increasing restless. Even when life circumstances became safe and stable by marrying Michael and raising our (now grown-up) children, that restlessness found its way into my head in the form of creative energy that needed to be expressed.

Practicing and playing music wasn't enough. Learning a new instrument from "scratch" wasn't enough. But writing music was just the ticket. And doing it every day gave me a way of turning my restless energy into productive energy, and allowed me to write satisfying music that I found beautiful to share and to hear played.

Now that I have this cancer occuping my body and my mind, I have been filling my days with things to distract me from the reality of being sick. I practice violin and piano every day, and have found that I now have more technique on the piano and more control on the violin than I ever imagined I would have.

I can even sometimes play the piano fluently, and that makes me feel me feel stimulated and satisfied.

I do not, however, feel restless. And for the first time in decades I do not feel compelled develop musical ideas that might pop into my head into pieces of music. Maybe it is because I have written enough, or maybe there isn't room in my coping mechanism for the restlessness that kept me so full of creative musical energy for so many years.

After I recover from my upcoming (June 30th) bone marrow transplant, which will take some time, I wonder if the creative energy and restlessness that once fueled my writing will return. And if it does, I wonder how my new-found piano skills and deeper physical understanding of piano music might inform what comes out.

Emmanuel Pahud

Last night Michael and I watched Lumière, Le Cinéma!, a 2024 film that stitches together several dozen fifty-second-long Lumière Brothers films from the late nineteenth century, covers the product with informative narration, and underscores it with music by Gabriel Fauré. Included in the underscore was the first part of the Fantasie for Flute and Piano. The performance was so beautiful, so deeply original, and so perfectly of the period (late nineteenth-century France), that I couldn't imagine it would have been anyone other than Emmanuel Pahud playing. I was correct. It was his recording with Eric Le Sage.

I first heard Emmanuel Pahud in 1995 when I was working as a CD reviewer for the American Record Guide. The recording was of sonatas by Carl Maria von Weber. The review was never published. Perhaps the recording label (Valois) was too small, or the editor didn't think it was important enough music to include in the magazine. In those pre-email days we used to send three-inch discs with reviews typed in Word Perfect in the mail to the magazine, and that was that. I did not keep a copy of my review.

The flute playing on the Weber recording was remarkable. Pahud had, even at the beginning of his career, found a path towards musical infinity with the flute. Though I aspired at one point to make my way in music through the flute, I knew that the flute wasn't the instrument that could take me where I wanted to go.

But what a joy it is to listen to Emmanuel Pahud play the flute.

Here's the Fauré: