Mumble-mumble years ago, my birthday fell on a Friday, like it does today. I was sitting in a class called Long-Term Melodic Memory, thinking about what gifts I had given myself since my last birthday. Foremost in my mind was taking Joe Maneri’s Microtones class. Joe Maneri was like a fairy godfather for kids who wanted to make weird music. He had this class that would often run longer than 4 hours, in which he’d hold forth, play, have us play, sometimes kind of dance from the chair he was ensconced in. It was a magical class. Problem was, that was first semester, and here it was second semester and I had to take this ear-training class for my new added-on major (I was doing two degrees in 3 years), so I couldn’t take Joe’s class. I wrote him a note, telling him that it was my birthday and I was taking stock of the past year, and so grateful to have met him. My pen was a roller-ball and the ink was still a little drippy on the paper, but I folded it up anyway. His class was around the corner, so I put the note in my pocket and told Mr. Sandvik I had to go to the bathroom. (Poor Mr. Sandvik probably had a lot of us improvisers who were unhappy about missing Maneri’s class…). I went to the door of Joe’s class. He was holding forth, as he would do, with his eyes closed. I opened the door a smidge. “She wrote me a note,” he was saying. “And the ink is still wet.” I almost audibly gasped. I snuck up to the desk and dropped the note on it, making as little eye contact with my friends in the class as possible.
The thing about Joe was that he was always talking about telepathy. He said he practiced it with 3 friends who lived around the world- one in Germany, one in South Korea, I forget where the other one was. They’d send each other colors at a predetermined time every week, then check in to see if they’d guessed, or received, correctly. Joe said, “If we, as humans, spent as much time trying to evolve our brains as we do our technology, just think where we’d be.” That always stuck with me. It was a course on deep listening— he divided the octave into 72 microtones!!— as well as improvisation, so his emphasis on developing intuition made sense in that context. It was just so mind-blowing when you’d see his actually kick in.
I tend to think of birthdays as times to make resolutions, more than new years. Yesterday I took a walk while the boys were playing frisbee in the piazza, and felt weirdly chill. This whole trip I’ve been hoping to have some grand move forward in my career or in my self-image, either way asking a lot of my bandwidth while we’re traveling and homeschooling! As we’re heading into our last month or so, I’m letting that stress go.
The boys just gave me a Calvino book in Italian- Invisible Cities, the one in which Marco Polo describes all these fantastical places to Kublai Khan. What a perfect book to have on this crazy journey. I don’t have any elegant way to tie this into thoughts of Joe Maneri, except for that at a certain point in my life, 20+ years ago, Calvino was my fairy godfather. I read everything I could get my hands on by him. I love how he could take a very artificial challenge- say, “Write a book based on the arcana of the tarot card deck,” or “Write a book about physics equations talking to each other” and make it into this very silly, lovely, absolutely readable, life-filled book. I think it comes back to intuition, so I’ll say that’s the thread.
