Can’t even focus on a coffee cup

This month’s Absolute Write blogchain theme is spring and new beginnings. The responses have been all over the map. So far we have addressed the process of beginning a novel, learning 3d design, rebooting your life, taking breaks, fasting, spring allergies, the wonders of Zyrtec, moving, new beginnings in one’s sex life, and blogging. It’s enough to make my head spin. I hope it isn’t violating chain etiquette to return to the original theme rather than respond directly to my illustrious predecessor, livinsanity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings lately and I’ve come to the decision that I don’t really believe in them, even as I think beginning again and again is utterly necessary in just about every arena of my life. Because every beginning brings with it the ending of something, around and around like the mythical snake, always biting its own tail.

I think some of this feeling comes from my peripatetic childhood. Every time my family would up and move, we would be faced first with the process of disengagement, with resignations and withdrawals, with goodbyes. But once we were underway, I would start to think about the what next. In my next school, I would think, maybe I won’t be the geek. Maybe I’ll be popular. I’ll wear the right clothes and feign ignorance about everything but boys and baking. And then life will be better. Right up until the point I poke a hole through my head out of sheer boredom. And I would get to my new school and I would still be the geek and I would still dress like I didn’t care and I would still be the new girl, the violin-playing girl, the smart girl, the alone girl. But I would be all those things in a new place and I would still be the same person and so none of the labels would touch me. The beginnings and the endings reinforced my independence. There was no question in my mind that I could walk away at any time with no losses at all and I could start over again the next time, somewhere new. And if I really wanted to, I could be someone totally different and no one would ever know.

One time, at one school, though, it was different. That was when my family, instead of moving from state to state, decided to up and move to London. I was enrolled in an American school. I always loved the first day of school. It meant new clothes and clean notebooks and pencils that still had points on them and workbooks with lots of pages to fill in. This year, though, we were in temporary housing in a rented flat in a mews near Harley House, a large block of flats that was mostly inhabited by American expats. A dock strike had held up all our furniture – for months, it would turn out – and the new school clothes were still in transit. We were left with our old ones. On the first day of school, I was met not with distrust or ridicule, but with warmth. My fellow students were all, like me, moving all the time. They new better than to take a friend for granted. You needed as many friends as possible, because people were always leaving, always coming and going. There was no such thing as “the new girl” at this school, because everybody was new and everybody was old. I don’t remember any cliques – no jocks, no geeks, not even boys vs. girls. We roamed around in a huge pack, moving from class to class in solidarity. Even on the playground with its high walls, embedded on top with broken glass to protect us from intruders, we were stronger than all of it.

But although I loved it there, it didn’t last any longer than any of the other places. And a couple of years later, we were packing again, saying goodbyes again, obtaining transcripts and withdrawal certificates and plane tickets and heading back to America, back, in fact, to the town we’d left. This time, though, we were in a new house on a new street, in a new school. It was head and tail at once. It was the whole snake.

I’m a believer in the whole snake. I don’t want to pick heads or tails, beginnings or ends. Despite all of my complaining about winter this year, I would not trade any one of the four seasons. Without them, there wouldn’t be the chance to begin again. I find the cycles comforting, a reminder that there are always second chances. I have a friend who thinks of the seasons as tyrannical. They are, as she says, inescapable. But they also give you the chance to reinvent yourself all over again every year. I need the change to boost me out of the torpor of my comfortable routines.

There is a rondeau by Medieval French composer Guillaume de Machaut that if I were teaching Music 101 this term, I’d probably be playing in class this week. Called “Ma fin est ma commencement” (or “My end is my beginning”), it is the perfect soundtrack for this post. It is one of my favorite examples of the structural artifice of late Medieval song, because its lyrics reveal its form:

Ma fin est mon commencement
Et mon commencement ma fin
Est teneure vraiement
Ma fin est mon commencement.
Mes tiers chans trois fois seulement
Se retrograde et einsi fin.
Ma fin est mon commencement
Et mon commencement ma fin.

Which, for those not well-versed in Medieval French, means:

My end is my beginning
And my beginning [is] my end,
And (this) holds truly,.
My end is my beginning,
My third song only three times
Reverses itself and so ends.
My end is my beginning,
And my beginning [is] my end.

This is a perfect description of the musical form of the piece, which is what is known as a “crab canon” – a piece where the melody is played both forward and backwards at once. It requires a good deal of compositional skill in working out the musical puzzle of creating a melody where this can work. Listening to the piece, you won’t necessarily hear the retrograde as such. What is more apparent is that the piece starts and ends together on one note and the greatest variety is in the middle at the point where the two lines cross over each other and start heading back where they came from, but on opposite tracks. Machaut has written the whole snake, a perfect circle of music with the added joke of the text telling you exactly what it is that he has done. He makes sure that there is no missing the cycle, the elision of beginnings and ends (or, for that matter, Machaut’s own cleverness). But something interesting happens when you flip the beginnings and endings against each other, when the snake is biting firmly on its tail: suddenly, the beginnings and endings aren’t so interesting anymore. All the interesting and exciting stuff is in the middle.

* * * * *

Next up on this wandering blog chain is A Wayward Journey. Please make sure to check out their response (and also their very cool family bike project, which is giving me all kinds of ideas for some new beginnings here at the Spy house).

And don’t forget to check out the rest of the chain:

Auria Cortes

Polenth’s Quill

Unfocused Me

Spittin’ (out words) Like a Llama

Food History

Fantastical Imagination

Life In Scribbletown

For The First Time

Polyamory From the Inside Out

Livininsanity

Spynotes

A Wayward Journey

Virtual Wordsmith