Working tonight on a program note for an old piece of mine – as it happens the final composition I ever wrote, in 1986 – Seven Last Haiku, which will have its premiere by the students in late March this year. One or two pianists are looking at it, and we have a cellist (Bennett is going to help me score a brief, light cello part within the original piano notes), and we'll get one of the young women with a clear, calm speaking voice.
Looking through the book of haiku translations, with their clarity and summary moments and lives, and remembering what I was doing in the 1980s, among so much death and change and so many attempts to become one thing or another, all feels unexpectedly contained – as though the fears and losses and passions and striving of an earlier self are of course not gone, but have somehow shrunk, contained inside a glass globe, on a shelf among others.
This is, then, what it is like to look back on earlier selves – one takes a small globe from a shelf, holds it to the light, shakes it a bit to watch bits of glitter and snow swirl around... and then puts it back in its accustomed place, and walks away.
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