By James
M. Lang '91
After years of toil and struggle at my craft, I became a rock
star last month.
Well, maybe not a star. But I did play a college gig with a
local rock band, banging out perfect chords on my state-of-the-art
keyboard to a vocal and enthusiastic crowd.
"Rock band" might be an overstated description of the
two friends of mine who play cover songs on acoustic guitar at
local venues. And we happened to be playing at the college where
I teach -- I helped my friends get the gig, so they took pity
on me and let me sit in on their show with a keyboard I borrowed
from the college. And while the crowd was vocal and enthusiastic,
it was also about a dozen strong, the majority of whom were our
friends. By the time we took the stage, after an opening band
of students warmed up the crowd, most of that crowd had decided
to head out to the bars.
I did bang out chords, though -- that part is true. Most rock
songs consist of a three- or four-chord sequence that is played
over and over again, sometimes with variations during the chorus
or the bridge of the song. So for some of the songs we played,
such as Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London," my job consisted
of playing the same three chords over and over again for three
minutes: Chord--"I saw a werewolf" -- chord -- "with a Chinese
menu" -- chord -- "in his hand." Repeat same three chords for
every line of the verse and chorus throughout the entire song.
Even limiting myself to chords, I made mistakes. A couple of
times I got lost when we were transitioning from one chord sequence
to the next in a song and just pulled my hands off the keyboard
and waited until I could figure out where we were. In another
song, the guitarists were soloing, and I was blissfully playing
the chords, congratulating myself on holding down the melody while
the more skillful musicians exercised their talents. In the middle
of his solo, one of the guitarists turned around and called out
to me that I was playing the chord sequence from the wrong part
of the song.
By the time we called it quits, at 12:45 a.m., the only members
of the crowd remaining were the manager of the pub, two of my
friends and the wife of one of the guitar players.
Afterward I went home and couldn't sleep. The adrenaline that
keyed me up for the performance still was surging its way through
my body, and it took several glasses of wine before I finally
drifted off. This, despite knowing that I was due up with our
6-month-old twins in just a few more hours.
It wasn't just the adrenaline, though. It was also the satisfaction
of having begun a new story in my life. It's one I have been wanting
to tell almost since the moment when we bought a piano two-and-a-half
years ago, and I slowly retaught myself to play, aided only by
my sketchy memories from the two years of piano lessons I had
in elementary school.
We bought the piano so my older daughters could take lessons
on it, but I still play more than anyone else in the household.
I find both learning and playing songs deeply satisfying, and
a pleasing and sharp contrast to my two other professional vocations
-- teaching and writing.
I'm a stubborn person. So I can master any song I set my mind
to learning, as long as I am willing to play it over and over
and over again. It sometimes takes hundreds of times. Eventually,
I figure it out.
And in that moment of figuring it out -- the first time I can
play the song through without mistakes, usually from memory --
I sense a small change in the state of the universe. In that moment
I have seized something from the void: I have stolen a piece of
certainty from an uncertain world, a certainty I can sit down
and conjure from the silence whenever I feel a creative urge pulse
through my system.
With my writing and my teaching, by contrast, I have nothing
so brief and measurable. Both writing and teaching are extended
processes, ones that have no sheet music on which I can rely and
which may fail each time I put pen to paper or step into a classroom.
I frequently begin essays and book projects that sputter into
blank space or work out lesson plans that bomb in the classroom.
I'm sure that writing music, or playing it at advanced levels,
contains this same level of experimentation and uncertainty that
I find in the teaching and writing processes. But at my level
of simple performance, my musical experiences are a measured space
in which I can find an easy form of intellectual, emotional --
and even spiritual -- satisfaction.
The spiritual nature of my musical performances -- whether they
play out beneath the glaring lights of the stage, or alone at
the piano at midnight, while my wife and five children are sleeping
upstairs, so accustomed to my late-night fumblings that they no
longer hear them -- stems from this realization that, as I pass
into the latter half of my 30s, I have new stories yet to live
in my life.
Like most of us who approach middle age in a career path, I
know I'm probably not going anywhere professionally that I can't
foresee. I have a good job, a wife whom I love very much, and
five happy and healthy children. I won't be chucking it all and
heading to Alaska to spend a year on a fishing boat; Harvard won't
come recruiting me for their English department; I probably won't
write the next Da Vinci Code. I have a pretty clear idea
of how my professional stories will play out, even allowing for
unexpected turns of events and tragedies and triumphs along the
way.
But part of me always seems to be hungering for a new story,
one that has no set endpoint, one that will lead me to new experiences
or perspectives on my life.
We all pick up new stories along the way -- taking vacations,
having children, moving, starting new jobs. But the story of my
burgeoning musical career is an open-ended one, one that may lead
to an infinite variety of conclusions. And I believe that some
part of our human nature wants to believe that we always remain
capable of living new stories. We want to believe that we have
not yet exhausted all of our possibilities.
And that seems to me like a profoundly spiritual lesson -- one
that has a lot to tell us about hope, grace and redemption.
This link between new stories and our spiritual selves struck
me as one of the most crucial themes from Mel Gibson's controversial
movie The Passion of the Christ: the enlisting of Simon
of Cyrene to help Christ carry the cross.
In his film, Gibson takes this brief vignette from the passion
narrative and makes it significant. He depicts Simon as an uninterested
passerby, doing his best to be inconspicuous as Christ stumbles
beneath his cross on the path to his execution. Much to Simon's
surprise and dismay, a Roman soldier points to him and commands
him to help Christ carry his cross.
Simon protests vigorously, even going so far as to announce
to the crowd that he is an innocent man forced to help a criminal.
He takes up Christ's cross reluctantly and resentfully. As he
helps Christ along, though, and Simon sees the torture that Christ
has been enduring, he is overtaken by compassion. By the time
they reach the place of execution, Simon is carrying both the
cross and Christ.
This scene seems to me the exemplary instance of a man who,
unexpectedly even to him, begins a new story in his life. The
film symbolizes Simon's leap into a new story with the loss of
his yarmulke; he enters the Christian story in that moment, one
that has just begun and has no foreseeable conclusion for him.
The lesson is clear: No matter where we stand on the path of
life, no matter what is happening with us at any particular moment,
new stories remain open to us. We are not yet fully formed.
I don't claim my musical debut as profound a story as the one
Simon tells in his moment of redemption. But I do believe both
our experiences spring from a deeply spiritual and human longing:
the desire to see our lives as at least partially open stories,
stories in which we yet remain capable of surprising ourselves
and those around us. Stories in which we may become Christians
for the first time. Or in which we may discover or rediscover
compassion, or hope or love. Ones in which we may happen on a
potential moment of grace or redemption and seize upon it. Ones
in which we may stumble upon longings or capacities in ourselves
that we never knew existed.
Or, maybe, ones in which we become rock stars.
My friends play at least once a week at venues around town.
They don't need a keyboardist, but I'm going to beg them to let
me sit in on occasion. I had my taste of performing in public
and performing with other musicians, and I loved it. I'm not ready
for this story to end. We won't be going on a national tour --
they have kids and jobs, too -- but this story has just begun
for me, and I'm curious to see what I'll find in the next chapter.
Maybe I'll try my hand at musical composition, writing songs
of my own. Or maybe a shared interest in music will bring me closer
to my children or will inspire them to artistic creation; maybe
it will offer me new roles to play in my family, my church or
my college.
However this story plays out, it has taught me an important
lesson: Like Simon, I am not yet fully formed. I have new stories
yet to tell.
* * *
James M. Lang, an assistant professor of English at Assumption
College in Worcester, Massachusetts, is the author of Life
on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2005).
(April 2006)
