Demise or desired destination?

I'm coming back to Cookie Mueller today (aptly but I shan't explain why) because she put a quote in one of her loveliest and indeed, tiniest books which has intrigued me for a long time and seems so relevant today.  Facetiously or otherwise, it is merely attributed to "Dr. Peebles, a nineteenth century Scottish doctor" and it reads,

"It is important that you recognise that there is no experience that comes into your life that is below your dignity."

Compare this then, with my usual, persistent principle, encapsulated so well by Jean Sarment: 

"One's integrity is no greater than the numbers of compromises one makes with oneself."

How can you reconcile the two?  It is useful to have general values and principles I suppose, but it's when you're faced with truly unfamiliar situations that these can be tested and perhaps found wanting.  I have a sense of changing my usual means of rebellion at the moment, evolving into a version of me I wasn't sure I was capable of.  It isn't necessarily progress, as we all know that constant progress is not the natural way of things.  There are always fallow periods and regressions.  Perhaps I'm going in reverse because I missed out on following the usual conventions befitting someone in their teens or twenties.

One particular case in point happened at a certain 'Čajovna' (teashop) not far from a street called 'Veverka' (meaning 'squirrel') where they do serve tea eventually, but you get the feeling that this isn't their main line of business.  As Brooklyn had its 'cleaning service', so Prague has its little 'Čajovna' where you sit on cushions and at tiny tables and feel like you've been transported into a scene from 'Gas Food and Lodging' or a similar American art house film, and await a pot of tea you're not sure will ever arrive.  The waitress looks like she only reads Sylvia Plath or pretends to, while sidelining in soft drug-dealing to hapless visitors who only came here because it was a retro-cool place to hang out.  They couldn't care less about the tea.  And when someone orders cake, she reacts as though they have broken an unspoken rule of the house, but makes a note of it anyway.  (Whether it will ever be brought to the table is quite another matter.)

I sit dutifully on a cushion and stretch out my legs to the faint sounds of 60s and 70s folk-rock songs (until they incongruously play rock and roll) and wonder how the close proximity to others will affect my opportunity to observe people.  What a fascinating place.  It isn't difficult to blend in with this student-filled crowd, especially seeing as I never progressed from that level of poverty and still wear the same kind of clothes.  No-one notices just how much I'm taking in.  

And yet I cannot concentrate.  I have another distraction.

And so I find myself, 5 days later, wondering who I've become and if it really is so far from me.  The borders I thought I'd struggle to cross have been remarkably easy and I'm still in shock.  Perhaps this was what the acting training was for.  Or maybe this is just what you do when your confidence has been shattered and you have to build yourself back up from jumbled and broken pieces.  It could be like some sort of genetic re-arrangement, like in a sci-fi film.  In picking up the pieces, I might have mixed up the order and emerged as a different creature.  I'm just not sure.  Visibly, I'm the same person, but internally, mentally, emotionally?  I have no idea.  And I can't put a time limit on this because I don't know where it's headed.  Demise or desired destination?

I have even acquired a new piece of clothing.  A red fleece jacket.  And a few other things.  I have been away for two nights but I'm back home now.  Back in my grey frilly boots, lying on my bed on my stomach with my feet in the air and thinking, thinking, thinking.  A desire to sing at full volume to favourite songs has gripped me ever since I got back.  My singing ability is crawling forward, trying to return.  I feel like I have gone back in time, but the language spoken around me begs to alter that perception.  Still, I've bought English language magazines today, and I had a luxurious bath with a glass of red wine and enjoyed my own bathroom like never before.  

Is this what it is to 'move on'?

Bolero: A tale of the night of 18th January 2011

It's been over four months since I first got here and I've made, perhaps, one friend.  A fortnightly coffee friend.  But tonight I'm out at a concert, a first full orchestra concert in Prague, a first evening out in central Prague since moving here and a first social occasion with one of my "meet-ees".  

I'd known ahead of time about the Dvořák and the Mozart (I was looking forward to the former, not so much the latter) and we were sitting in our surprisingly positioned, dead-centre seats.  He handed me the programme, to read either in Czech or German. German still being the easier for me to understand, unfortunately.  But there's no linguistic skill required to read that the final piece in the programme is Ravel's 'Bolero'.  

It is a very ambivalent feeling, the like of which I'm not sure I've ever felt, to know that I am trapped here to listen to a live orchestra play a series of pieces, culminating in Bolero.  Why must it be Bolero and why here?  Why now?  Of all the pieces I've always wanted to hear live, Bolero has to be in my top 5.  And yet now is such a searingly painful time to inadvertently run into it.  Why must it be forced upon me like this?

I know I'm going to have to go through with it.  I also know there is no way I'll be able to get through it without crying.  A piece my former partner, the only partner of my whole life, used to collect numerous performances of on CD.  (I had helped him to acquire more.)  But having left my musician-life behind, having had to come here as my only means of living alone, having had to accept that he'd moved on to someone better suited to him and while the isolation and longing for a true friend is beginning to fully burn away at my insides, I am being expected to survive this?

My poor 'meet-ee'!  What is he to think?  What will he do if he sees the tears that will inevitably pour down my cheeks?

As the piece begins, I am already on the verge of tears due to my acute sense of entrapment in this.  I try to see it for the wonderful, extraordinary experience it is, and watch and listen like a conductor, while I tap my foot along with the tempo and look to see which beats the cellos are doing their pizzicati on.  I distract myself with trying to sense when the double basses will join in and I compare the beats they play, when they do, with the violins.  Some of these come in and out of playing over a number of permutations of the main motif.

But once the strings are all bowing their notes, I feel my life is being reflected in the unstoppable build-up to a finale I cannot escape.  It's like watching all the things I have lost over the last five years and seeing each and every bit in sharp, mocking detail, knowing the outcome of every precise turn of the dagger in my heart.  I feel like someone has purposely placed me here for some kind of Orwellian punishment.

However, as the final stage begins with the rupture of the main motif into the high note and following distorted melody, I feel almost delirious to hear it go through its mutations to its inevitable end, but wish I could end along with it.  Couldn't it simply make me expire with the last note?  It twists and turns to the conclusion I know so well and I count along with the beat how many bars it is until the final discordant notes and ultimate percussive full-stop.

And at that full-stop, the audience applauds and I begin my 'mopping-up and concealment act' with tissues and the back of my hand and hope that the pain of this will never be with me again.  Unless it is prepared to do a deal with me to promise that next time it will ensure my ultimate demise as certainly as the proud bow of the conductor and the orchestra's shuffling exit from the stage.