New Mexico Mercury

Curator’s note by Stevie Olson: This week, the Mercury is proud to feature two pieces from Elizabeth Stebbins. Both pieces are thoughtfully-constructed, beautiful vignettes of life. Elizabeth’s grasp of language allows her execute poetic paragraphs which draw the reader into her observations and narratives. Liz is a wildly talented artist. As you’ll find out reading her pieces, she is a piano player, a budding philosopher, and gifted wordsmith. We wish Elizabeth a wonderful coming fall semester.

Lucidity

Whenever it rains, I am alone.

Most days when I wake up on my island, the sun is beating down and the trees are alive with sound. I walk to the ocean and meet my friends. I am not sure how they came to be here. I am not sure of their composition. It was never just I on this island; it has always been us. We never run out of things to do here because this island is vast and we will never discover all of its secrets. Its power is unknowable.

Every few months a boat will reach our shores and we go to meet it. I am offered passage away from this island. I do love this place, but at times it can be rather secluded. Whenever I look to my friends to come with me I find they have disappeared. They can be rather shy at times. However, I get tired of this as it happens every time a boat comes. Every time I must shake my head at the sailor, because I cannot leave without my friends.

Some days on the island it is overcast. These days are the most terrifying. I turn to look at my friends and they are half there. They are transparent. I can see through them. It is times like these when I think straighter and I realize that my friends are fading in and out. Whenever it is overcast I walk around the island by myself.

During the night animals will prowl around where I am sleeping, and it is then when I can count on my friends to keep them out.

Whenever it rains, however, I am alone. I wake up to the thrumming percussion of rain. The tap-tap-tap cadence of rain on coconut palm leaves, the soft continuous thudding of the water hitting the sand, and the hollow beats as the rain hits the ocean. The ocean. The waves are high and white-crested, curling and rolling in frightening curves. I turn to my friends for solace but find that they have faded away, like a mirage. A mirage–that is what they are. On the days when it rains I am able to see. The droplets wash the film from my eyes and I am truly alone.

When it rains, I am alone.

Piano Lessons

When I sit down at the piano to prepare for my lessons, I’m usually not thrilled. I get bored filling out a theory book on the chords and scales I’ve been studying since I was a child.  They don’t stick in my brain like a chord progression that I hear on the radio.  I could tell you how to play the theme from Titanic in a second, but still need to count the lines in a bass clef to identify a note in a book.

Sitting down at the piano to play is a completely different story.  What I consider my real “art” isn’t completing a ten-page Brahms Rhapsody and playing it for judges in a classroom. I love to just touch the keys and let my hands take it from there. For me, playing piano is more than black and white notes on a printed piece of paper; the music comes from a place that isn’t purely physical or simply intellectual. Music is a bridge that crosses and connects two parts of me and leads them into the abstract world.

When I play, my hands are positioned in a supportive arch and my fingertips press the chipped keys past that first hitch to release a hammer that then strikes a string. That’s what physically happens when I play middle C, but what goes on in my mind is a million different songs spreading out from that one note – a hymn, a pop song, a creation that mirrors thousands of other songs but also embodies what I feel. My left hand finds the bass: an octave, maybe, or a chord. My right hand finds an arpeggio or flits around, searching for something that sounds good. I don’t find that perfect note by reviewing my notebook and realizing – “Oh! G would sound complimentary here because it’s the fifth note in the scale!”  My mind – or some part of it, anyway – knows exactly what it wants to hear without me thinking or deciding anything. My hands are like puppets led by some invisible master hovering next to me on the bench – a part of me that only comes out when I play.

I play what I find beautiful, but I can’t define what is deep or striking in music because my taste is all over the place.   I love rap, catchy pop, Bollywood, classical, rock, and folk.  My love for the piano is simply a force in my brain that sleeps soundly most of the time but awakens at the touch of a key.

I wish I were one of those prodigies who can look at a sheet of complex music, interpret those dots on the lines, and come out with amazing music right on the spot. I wish I could compose melodies to jazz beats.  I am not one of those people: my music isn’t spectacularly difficult or complicated, but it is a source of pure joy for me.  It is a state of being in which I allow myself to enjoy that the keys are black and white and the feeling is anything but.

(Photos: Island by Don McCullough; Piano keys by Team Dalog.)