First, Third, Fifth and Seventh

Finding the notes of your chord, to bring your disciplines to life in a song all your own.

Photo by Diego Catto

This morning I was beset by an almost manic sense of satisfaction, of joy with my peculiar state of being, which only twenty four hours ago, was satisfied, pleased, but not exactly enraptured with the state of things. Driving my kids to their music lesson, I wondered what on Earth prompted such a state. I’d had a great morning, I knew that much. I’d risen at six, actually responding to the call of my alarm. I worked on my novel, which has been a sporadic work of the last five years or so. The writing went well, better than it had for some time. I’d done my morning prayer. Managed to fit in a couple of coffees and some breakfast. The tone of the household was peaceful, if lively, as always.

Late last night, I traced my way down to the garage to work out, which has also been a rare discipline of late, recovering from an injured shoulder and some kind of a sprained forearm. I’d slept well, which has been a recent development, no doubt. But it wasn’t any one of those things; it was every one of them. In the car, listening to Bill Evans, the song Peace Piece, I thought of a chord and how each note took on a new life, a new form, when played in unison with the others. I thought of a seventh chord, based around a root note being played with the third, fifth and seventh note in the scale.

Alone, they served their purpose, a disparate tone that found life and meaning in their place amongst the others. Played together, in a seventh chord, they sang out with a presence and a story that was altogether something else. I pondered the notes that drew together to form the chord I was carrying, the chord I was playing, being, at that point in time. What was my root note? It was prayer, which as a Carmelite, was a deep longing, a fundamental way of being, that remained when all else fell away. Even when life interrupted lauds, or matins, it was there as a silent longing, a yearning deep in my bones, that had taken hold of me and kept me alive, present, devoted and accountable.

My fifth note? This was the writing. The damn writing, which I abandon, reconcile with, shift around to the morning, the evening, any other point in the day which is different to that in practice now. What I’m doing now won’t work at all, I tell myself. It was well intentioned, but flawed, destined to die away. I tried the evenings, which worked for a while, but have now returned to the mornings. And I promise you, it won’t last. For some reason, it won’t survive beyond the next few weeks. Last time it was undone by absolutely awful nights with the kids, in which I was woken five to ten times each night. I spent the mornings trying to recoup what sleep was lost, utterly unable to respond to the alarm, no matter how ambitious or well intentioned I was. But right now, the mornings work, so well that it upsets me to think of time lost, which I know is ridiculous. But without doubt, the writing is my fifth note.

I can’t explain why writing makes it easier to pray, and the prayer makes it easier to write. There is a shift that takes place, in that perhaps both draw my attention and my being away from the noise, the colourful and inconsequential distraction of life beyond the immediate needs of my family and my soul. But the prayer and the writing work together, and as such, the writing is the fifth. Right now, I’ve hit about a thousand words for the day, which for me is remarkable. With words on the page, I felt as though I’d shifted gears, hitting a a deep, low, satisfying rumble that tore away the labouring noise of the gear that had preceded it. When I write, my thinking is focused, deliberate, whilst paradoxically open, sparse and free. Oddly enough, it feels like an expansion, a physical sensation that spills forth in my skull, so different to the resistance, closure, reactive agitation that stems from the uncurated assault of notion and noise from an unforgiving and unrelenting world. The prayer and the writing. The first and the fifth.

The third note, which sings along with the writing and prayer, to form the triad. This is music. A God given consolation that once again, tears me away from the vicissitude of the conscious self. I’ve played guitar for over twenty years now. I don’t play like a guitarist of twenty years, but I play, and I love it. It’s difficult to express just how peaceful, therapeutic I find the act of playing, but knowing that in some sweet way it shuts off deliberate, conscious thought and allows me to lose myself in colours, tones, patterns and sequences, gives me a state of expression, of being, of a silence of its own, that has once again, saved me more than once in my life. Last night I pulled out the guitar for the first time in weeks, and even holding the damn thing gives a sense of peace that is halfway to playing, thanks to the familiar, tender weight of the timber, the smell of the strings, the maple, the mahogany. There’s a desperation and a vulnerability in the music, in the love of the instrument, which has granted me a deep wellspring of peace, silence, solitude, that little else in the world has. Music was my silence, before I discovered silence. It’s still an anodyne of sorts, and sings as the third note in my seventh chord, without doubt.

The seventh note, is the physical discipline. Years ago, before seven children brought our home to life in their own inimitable way (through a gradual process, a fulfilment of life and love in the grace of marriage), I would rise at 5:30am to train before work. I was diligent, relentless and felt damn well alive. I was also stupid and proud, but that was another story. Now, with the demands of family, I can’t quite pull of such a feat, but I do make a habit of sneaking down late at night, while all else are sleeping, for a quick workout that is taxing enough to test me, but brief enough not to impinge greatly upon my other joys, disciplines and duties.

Making it down there can feel like a victimless crime, for some strange reason, but I burn some incense and lift some weight and carry a wonderful, aching sense of life and love around with me, granting another note, another grace, that brings my chord to life. It’s no longer so much about pride and vanity, but necessity, as hitting my mid-thirties has only made clearer the injury and ailment that accompanies weakness and complacency. My knees complain when I’m not training. I stiffen up and slacken and kick myself when I fail to make time, knowing now more than ever, I need to burden my body in order to keep it alive. Oddly enough, and rarely discussed, is the physicality of fatherhood, which demands a degree of strength and health that takes deliberate, active effort. If you hobble with aches and pains in the eyes of your sons, well before your sixties, you need to act, you need to work, you need to do more. And as I’ve written before, you need to use habit and routine to make any absence an aberration. You cannot normalise your moments of complacency, of lukewarmness, in anything. Accept it when you cannot change it, but labour to ensure that these instances are rarities.

So my root note, prayer; my fifth, writing; my third, music; and my seventh note is my physical discipline. They are the particular chord I carry, the chord that sings, in my blood, my bones, bringing light and life to my eyes in the face of challenges and setbacks that can be considerable, demanding and exacting. They bring a wonderful, deliberate tonality to the the way I live and breathe. They work in unison to help form me as a husband, a father, a teacher, a brother, a son. I urge you to consider the notes that constitute your chord. When I fail to hold a string down properly against the rosewood of the guitar’s neck, the note is dully muted, ugly, discordant. The chord fails, struggles, without every element that gives it it’s own particular expression.

So find your notes. Hold the chord firmly, but tenderly. Let it sing out in its own sweet way. Carry yourself on the song that it grants you and only you, in an expression of life, grace and art that is all yours, in the service of the world around you.

By Gaetano Carcarello