Tuning is a function of time

It's a bit strange to see all your belongings that you've lived with for the last year in either one suitcase or a big garbage bag for secondhand clothing, which is to say, most of my clothes. Not to mention, they will definitely go over the weight limit, probably charging me an extra $300 that I don't have, as well as trying to carry on two laptops, a guitar, and a violin. I'm going to wear a suit, if that counts for anything. Mostly, because I don't want it to get too wrinkled and smelly in the suitcase, but secretly because I want people to take me seriously when I'm trying to check a half dozen bags, or rather carry on two instruments.

Anyway, travel is the least of my worries, primarily because it should be over by the end of tomorrow. I spent all day today having coffee or Guinness with friends, just saying goodbyes and trying to keep in touch. It's tough to tell, at this short time, who I will or won't see again. It's tough also, then, to avoid turning inward once I realize that there are, in fact, fairly important people that will become consistently less and less important as time goes by. But there's something to be said for sealing people in a particular place and time, and whether or not I see them again they will still be distinct entities apart from their 2007/2008 selves.

I remember some essay by John Cage, or Louis Andriessen, or La Monte Young or someone, saying that, in music, we can control pitch, rhythm, volume, timbre, or anything else except for time. The one constant element of music is time: linear, continuous, and inexorable (beware, this is a paraphrase of I don't know whom). Or the composer Morton Feldman, who wrote four-hour string quartets, and who said that he never repeats himself because, even if he did (which he does), it is now different, because it's happening at a different moment in time.

Well, let's cut the allegory short and get to bed, because it will be an early morning, and although I'm leaving some of you I'm going back to others of you. But this will be my last (substantial) post here; I may add something linking to a new site, probably something fancier, probably something with another black-and-white picture of me with a sheet of composition paper or an Apple laptop. For now, though, it's time to move on. Most bars in the U.S. don't serve anything on nitrogen.