Ftrain, by Paul Ford

New York is buried under snow, the State of the Union is going on, I'm rattling with anxiety as emails pile up, and I need to practice piano.

I have, in the manner of the true dilettante, secreted keyboards about the house. I'm a huge nerd, I needed something to fill my brain, I did well in life, and so I have a genuinely glorious little studio, bundles of wires running thick as a large man's wrist, modules, keyboards. It requires constant configuration. I would trade the kingdom of heaven for that one perfect knob. Anyway. One day I will have a small hut in the woods with no Internet and a decrepit piano that I will watch YouTube videos to learn to tune, and spend two years really learning, truly intuiting, probably with psilocybin assistance, the deep and Pythagorean complexities inherent in the equal temperament tones of the C major scale, or as I prefer to call them, the big naturals.

So I turn from this computer to the heavy, glorified MIDI controller to my right, made by a really kind of wonderful French brand, and I go through my pieces.

A miracle this week—I played the first part of the first Bach Minuet for the five or six thousandth time, and my left hand was in steady communication with my right hand. And there I was in the middle. Guys! I said. I didn't know you'd ever met! They said nothing.

All progress feels like a miracle. The State of the Union is probably still going as I type this. But over here a tiny, infinitesimal bit of progress. Something getting better. Don't knock it.

Across the hall my wife prints whistles on a 3D printer. Different music.

My left hand is normally a lumbering, grumbling donkey clambering up a mountain path, dragged along by my bouncy, energetic right hand. Piano teachers call this the Onan conundrum. But tonight they were dancing together like witches around a fire. Eventually I ran out of measures and reverted to failure mode, but now I know how it should feel. My teacher likes to say that your hands are in a band, which—I've never been in a band, he's been in so many, it's a normal thing for him. I wish I understood.

I bought, in Philadelphia, at this huge bookstore with a cat that I can't remember the name of (store/cat), the Norton Anthology of Western Music or whatever, in two volumes, and I gotta tell you, now that I can read music (both clefs!) the idea of picking up some song from 1250 and just plinking it out, it's a delight. So tonight I learned “Robins m'aime,” a French song by the 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle. I need to work on my sight reading and why not be medieval? But also it's magical. Over time language becomes inscrutable. Accents fade. Countries come and go. But a dude writes a song for Marion to sing about her guy Robin, and I can just pick that up, read the notes, and it's back in the world, the same song.

Robin bought me a surcote grand
Of scarlet cloth fine and bonny
Gown and kirtle gay as any.
I will have it!

A song about a man treating you right. Like a million such today. Do I despair that consciousness doesn't evolve? Yes! See the psilocybin meditations on tone. Éliane Radigue just passed, and my god. Imagine hearing Trilogie de Mort in your head, having that there, in your brain, then making it real. What a freaking consciousness that was. If you don't know it book three hours of your life, because you are about to learn what communicating with aliens will be like. I'm going to listen to it right now.

Like I said: Imagine having that in your head, but not yet recording it. I really do love that moment when an idea is just your own. You know you have to share it. It might die upon release. But the joy of it, of just containing something that feels new, before it must become actualized. The little inner motions of thought.

Anyway. You can, if you work at it for a few years, sit down and play haltingly a medieval song, just with your own eyes and fingers. No one can stop you. You can wear headphones and sing the song of Marion in 1250, and to hell with that interloping knight, because Robin is the man for me, he got me a kirtle.

And my hands are friends now. The world can be out there, pissing all over itself, and you can log off. You don't even have to put a picture on the top of the blog post. Because the real ones will get to the end of the post even knowing there won't be toy surprise. Just because it's good to be alive together. Boring each other to death. We can suck as bad as we need to, to get through this bullshit, and maybe one day we'll play Christmas Carols together, or murmur along with Ava Maria at the funeral mass, or pick up the bass in the nursing home Nation of Ulysses cover band. It's good to talk about love in an age of fear and death.

We went to Boston. I don't know why my children wanted to go in February. It was their idea. I wanted to see a friend while there but all I did was beg my 14 year olds to get off their phones and ask them if they could please get ready to go. The apartment we had for three days was nice. It had that view out the back.

We saw a bunch of Boston things but the one I most wanted to see was the Mapparium, which is a big stained-glass globe inside the large Christian Science Library and center, across the plaza from the Mother Church. The Library looks like this:

And the Mapparium looks like this:

Go to a place, look at a thing. The real reason I wanted to go was to just be around the Mother Church, because a mentor and dear friend was a Christian Scientist. I loved him. He passed a decade ago. He took me to Amiga user group meetings.

I could tell you why he was special to me but I actually wrote about it at length when he passed. Some of the videos have faded away on the post, alas. Many animations don’t work. The eternal work of archiving.

I know you might have strong feelings about Christian Science but I see it as part of an East Coast Protestant continuum. I've been reading up on the various planned communities and socialist-Christian towns that sprung up on the East Coast in the 1800s. In some ways I feel that I grew up in their shadow. I took trombone lessons in the former meeting room of the Theosophist society. The books were there but I truly don't know if any Theosophists remained.

I keep looking in on these big cultural religious spaces—literally just stopping outside a church or mosque and staring—because of the continuity they offer and the frameworks they provide for stability in the midst of chaos. The mechanisms of faith are often the same: A large, central building. Guidance as to dress and voice. A large book filled with rules. And usually three or four core beliefs that are absolutely bonkers to anyone outside the group. You need one absolutely over-the-top thing to believe in. It needs to start literally, and then be open to interpretation by subsequent generations of interpreters, who seek to rationalize the faith with the flow of the world. It’s a rigid platform but malleable at the edges. The best bet today, I think, would be for a kind of simulationism, maybe a mix of psychedelics and digital thinking with some AI in the mix. But it has to be fervent and orthodox. LessWrong comes close. You get that just right and then people spend the next 2,000 years explaining it as a metaphor. From there you just need a dome. Maybe you don't even have a holy book; you just feed the same golden prompts to an LLM and follow what it tells you to do. Chatarianism.

On the way out there were little slips of paper you could fill out with testament to your gratitude (or other positive emotions). I wrote how grateful I was for Tom, how loving and generous he had been. I had to hurry to finish it because my family was grumbling and tapping their toes. They don't care about the rich resonance of the Christian Science Mother Church as it flows into the large currents of the Protestant experience and the connected history of non-violent and Emersonian thought. I mean does anyone? Actually Harvard is right there so actually people who care about exactly that were extremely close and could be summoned in an emergency.

So much of my life right now is people who can't wait one more minute, who just want to be on their phone, who are ready to get to the next thing, always hungry and ready to stomp. I'm one of them too, I know. We're so impatient with each other, bored and fractious. Yet no one will stand more than a foot away, no matter how often you ask, and we love each other too, and pet each other on the head. The combined attraction-repulsion of a family moving together through space, a single molecule bouncing between museums. As all this was going on I was trying to edit and fact-check an article for NYT OpEd, from my phone, on the #1 bus to Cambridge, on the Green and Orange lines, and also at one point leaving an escape room to confirm final edits. Then going right back in. It is process that the writer does not truly control (both OpEd and family outings). Also we went to MIT and I saw Claude Shannon's automata, and piles of gray snow.