practice makes permanent

Post 70 of 90.

The level of persistent tension in my body when I try to play at faster tempos is frustrating. It seems like no-tempo work has helped a little, but at some point, when you've figured out how to walk, you need to figure out how to run. I still don't quite know how to run. I begin flailing about in all sorts of ways.

I occasionally think about how Jerry Garcia had a pronounced shake in his left hand when fretting chords. At one point, I thought it was due to some kind of drug-induced neurological damage, since it was evident in his movements in his latter twilight years when I was going to Grateful Dead concerts. But then I saw footage of him playing guitar as a young folkie in the early 60s, and the exact same shake was there, so I can only guess he somehow got in that habit when he was first learning to play and it persisted for the rest of his life.

When I saw Richard Lloyd at Southgate House several years ago, I was struck by how the way he held the guitar and physically related to it was exactly the same as when he was a young man in Television in the 70s. I had this experience where the image of the young Richard Lloyd in my mind was transposed onto the middle-aged man standing in front of me in real time. The relationship between them was clear--the small effects of time and ravage had accumulated during an unbroken continuity leading from the young man to the older man--but it was also disorienting. Everything was different, but everything was the same. His playing was masterful, but also clearly an outgrowth or outcropping of habits he had established many years ago as a beginner. His relationship to the guitar was exactly the same, just more so.

Which leads me to a favorite Dwight Eisenhower quote (which I have not fact-checked, but still admire, even if it's a hoax, for its uncanny resemblance to a Zen koan):

"Things are more like they are now than they have been at any time in the past."

Could it be the accumulated neurological-physical-linguistic habits of a person are the person?

I sometimes wonder about this in the context of Alexander Technique and the sort of confrontation you experience with your physical self. And as I write that, I wonder about my choice of "confrontation," as if my physical self is other and is not me, and I must conquer "it."

The way I play guitar now and relate to the instrument is very different from how I used to play. It's not a total discontinuity, I suppose, but when I've occasionally stapped on the strat and slung it low as an experiment, it's like there's a different person and a different way of feeling and experiencing waiting there for me, always present but dormant. He's right there where I left him. He hasn't gone anywhere.