Leidenschaft
Leidenschaft means "passion" in German. Its a compound "leiden", which means "suffering" or "affliction" (die Leiden is its plural and hence Die Leiden des jungen Werthers = The Sufferings of Young Werther), and "schaft" which comes from the verb "schaffen", which means "to create." Passion is thus to create suffering. What a great word! I used to think that passion had to do with book covers with some Fabio-looking guy on it staring at a woman's heaving breast, but after learning the German term, I made the connection to Bach's oratorios "St. John's Passion" and "St. Matthew Passion," etc. Passion is to suffer, as Christ did. Beautiful.
I have often been described by my friends as a passionate person. I never really liked this description, first of all, because I didn't really know what it meant, and second of all, I knew other people so described and I wasn't sure if I liked any of them. I think I have an idea of what my being passionate means now, and I don't resent it. I am wondering, however, whether or not the description still sticks. Actually, I am afraid that it doesn't. Afraid that I have become bland in the last two years because of the onset of adulthood. Don't get me wrong, I love everything that my community has taught me about myself. It was all the Lord's doing, you see; I really feel that I've become that which I always wanted to be--a bird flying freely through the air, flapping mightily through the wind, singing a beautiful song, with a nice big tree to call home.*
I can't help feeling, however, that I have lost something in the midst of my flight. The reason I think this is because of a couple recent events in which I've been laughing my head off at something and then start crying my eyes out in pain. The first time was a few Saturday mornings ago at our place. We were having the usual M&M Saturday morning, which is M1nho playing Xbox and me not being awake yet. Anyway, I got out of bed and putzed around for a while, then starting going nuts. Some of you know that I have a habit of biting my baby blanket (named Smoosh because I like to smoosh him on my face). When I bite it, I go into crazy mode, which usually entails either 1) Me jumping wildly up and down and attacking whoever it is that's around me (usually M1nho, but it used to be the Zish) with the tickles; or 2) Doing the above but by myself. Well this Saturday in particular, I went a little overboard. I put Smoosh in my mouth, then ran out to the living room and did a cartwheel. Then I started banging my house slipper on the ground and yelling weird things (M1nho sat on the couch, slightly amused at this point--he knows he married a kook**). BUT THEN! Undeterred, I started ripping my clothes off! I threw off my shirt, threw it at M, threw off my pants, threw them at M, who was now laughing his head off and shaking his hand saying, "No, don't do it! Don't do it!" But I had to! I ripped off my pppants and starting doing jumping jacks, COMPLETELY NAKED and then I ran into our room and crashed onto the bed and started crying.
Then came last night. We were hanging with the Cha1s and dcfly was showing us the 5-second versions of popular movies he downloaded from YouTube (see www.dannychai.com/blog/). They were HILARIOUS. M1nho and I were laughing so hard at the Harry Potter one that we were both crying. The Star Wars ones were pretty good, too. Anyway, I started crying and got sad thinking about how The Sorting Hat application on Facebook put me into Ravenclaw and not Gryffindor. I wanted so bad to be a Gryffindor! No one on earth would stop to help someone who fell down in a race, mark my words!*** Anyway, when we went home later that night and started laughing about the 5-second movies again, and I started crying again in earnest. It felt so good to cry, but its pretty sad for M1nho to watch me cry so all in all, crying is a sad happening.
Whenever I cry like this, my thoughts first go to Phattacus. I don't really know why, but they do. I miss him. I miss Mrs. Phattacus, too, but she's so busy all the time and never calls me (as was expected--I LOVE YOU, MRS. PHAT!). I feel a lot of pain thinking of him and all the fun times the M&M's and the Kims all had together. Like for instance, last night. He would have laughed SO HARD at the 5-second movies he totally would have cried, too. He would totally have come with us to Kepler's to get HP7 and balk at all the festivities, esp. the teenagers who were chanting "VOLDEMORT! VOLDEMORT!" He would be all over Facebook if he were here. It makes me sad. Ted was like a big brother to me. He always listened to all my cockamamie ideas about this and that, and would always have something interesting to say. He'd read the books and articles I told him to read and vice versa (AHEM, dcfly! Go to A&L!!!) and would always have an encouraging word for M1nho. He was a bit of a father-figure in a sense, esp. being of the cloth and such. Anyway, we M&M's miss the Phattacusses, and what's there to do about it except cry?
I think I was also crying last night because of Harry Potter. I felt pretty emotionally distant from the 5th film and also a bit while reading DH but still, it had to hit me at some point. And I think it did last night. Its this emotional distance that's getting me worried about my leidenschaftlichkeit. Yup, my passionness. I don't think that I miss the Phattacusses all at once; its probably that I miss them gradually and it gets stored somewhere and then something triggers and it all pours out. Same with Harry. I've stored all my Harryness into a special place and it finally broke through when I saw the 5-sec. movie. Its like I'm holding things in too much and get into danger zone when they're overfull. It happened at "my best friend's" wedding as well. I got through the whole week of activities and I found myself suddenly sobbing after the lights went out and we went to bed. And it was just like one huge sob, like Claire Danes as Juliet in that horrible Baz Luhrmann Romeo & Juliet with none other than Leo as Romeo. Anyway.
So I've somehow learned in the past two years to displace my immediate emotions and experience them through random fits of tears. At times I am happy with this displacement, such as when I read about classical music and or musicians. Now most of you know that classical music has been a big part of my life. I never once thought that it would cease to be a driving factor in my life; I thought I would find my career/spend most of my time in that world. But that hasn't been the case. Music has very little bearing in my day-to-day life. I rarely go to concerts, and I haven't played violin since May of 2003. That's over four years ago. True, I did spend a year studying musicology but I may as well have been asleep that whole year--I have no emotional ties to Stanford at all. I drive by it all the time but there's nothing that comes out of the visuals, even when I actually go onto campus to meet a friend. I never read the musicology books on my bookshelf; I usually just stare at them and think, "I should really just give these to Erinn [my friend from Stanford]." To continue on, I never read any concert reviews or longer articles about the decaying art in magazines, newspapers, etc. I have absolutely no interest.****
C0nnie, "my best friend" from above, is a professional classical musician and its great. We grew up playing music together and she is now a gigger and shaker in her parts. She was at a festival this past week and its like yeah, C0nnie's working this past week. That's what she does, she works. Music has now become her career to me, and not this thing I venerated and worshipped, as if my violin was the sole horcrux through which I existed and I was actually less than a ghost hanging out in Albania with the likes of Wormtail. And I rarely listen to classical music anymore; only in times of dire need to I whip out either Bach's Goldberg variations or the Beethoven's op. 131, the greatest string quartet that ever lived. The fact that I actually listen to KDFC now is even more evidence that classical music is not what it once was in my life.*****
And I can't figure out if the new identiy of music in my life is thinly-veiled contempt or true indifference. They do say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Have I become indifferent to my long lost love? Or maybe my leidenschaftlichkeit had to be ripped out and then mended. If so, I think its mending pretty well, but not without some scarring (hence this blog). I was reading this book on Mozart last month called 1791: Mozart's Last Year****** (totally biographical, not at all musicological) and I kept on noticing all the German words and how beautiful they were. It was like falling in love with German all over again. Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber alles!******* At least I know that my Germanophilia was authentic.
Anyway, so I'm feeling happy/sad/worried about it my old descriptor. In short, I'm suffering for it.
*I think this explains why Hedwig is my favorite character in the HP universe. She might even be my patronus, though I don't like the fact that owls eat rats and dogs. Hopefully Hedwig was a vegan.
**I'm not alone in my kookiness at BL. Other kooks: J1eun Cha1, S0phia 0tt. Kook-in-training: Ab1gail Cha1. S+ewart used to be one but now he's a big kindergardener so who knows what society's done with him.
***You can get sorted yourself if you have a Facebook.
****Though the Joyce Hatto thing was hilarious! Synopsis: Pianist Joyce Hatto, good but not great, dies. Her husband starts selling recordings of her. She gets famous in the classical music version of pitchfork.com for the breadth and depth of her catalogue, people fall in love with her, becomes an indie-classical goddess. Turns out the recordings were old recordings of OTHER PIANISTS repackaged by her husband and sold as Joyce Hatto performances!!!
*****Most music people hate KDFC because it plays only one type of classical music (Baroque-en kind--HA!) . Its usually pretty good after 8pm but that's about it. But these days I'm finding it very pleasant and "soothing"--two descriptors that I fought really hard against back in the day. "Bach is not 'pleasant' or 'soothing,' its REVOLUTIONARY! RHAPSODIC! IT GIVES YOU VISIONS OF DEITY!" Which can be very pleasant and soothing, but you know what I mean.
******Very good read, btw, and totally fine for non-specialists. Its about what really went down with the whole Requiem thing that is the basis of the movie "Amadeus." And no, Salieri didn't kill Mozart, but someone did ask Mozart to write him a Requiem in secret, and not for sinister purposes at all--he was just a music-lover who liked to pretend that pieces he commissioned by famous composers were actually written by him. WTF?!?! Wasn't that exactly what I wrote about Joyce Hatto?!?!
*******"Germany, Germany, over all!"--the chorus of their national anthem. There was a push to change the words after 1945.
I have often been described by my friends as a passionate person. I never really liked this description, first of all, because I didn't really know what it meant, and second of all, I knew other people so described and I wasn't sure if I liked any of them. I think I have an idea of what my being passionate means now, and I don't resent it. I am wondering, however, whether or not the description still sticks. Actually, I am afraid that it doesn't. Afraid that I have become bland in the last two years because of the onset of adulthood. Don't get me wrong, I love everything that my community has taught me about myself. It was all the Lord's doing, you see; I really feel that I've become that which I always wanted to be--a bird flying freely through the air, flapping mightily through the wind, singing a beautiful song, with a nice big tree to call home.*
I can't help feeling, however, that I have lost something in the midst of my flight. The reason I think this is because of a couple recent events in which I've been laughing my head off at something and then start crying my eyes out in pain. The first time was a few Saturday mornings ago at our place. We were having the usual M&M Saturday morning, which is M1nho playing Xbox and me not being awake yet. Anyway, I got out of bed and putzed around for a while, then starting going nuts. Some of you know that I have a habit of biting my baby blanket (named Smoosh because I like to smoosh him on my face). When I bite it, I go into crazy mode, which usually entails either 1) Me jumping wildly up and down and attacking whoever it is that's around me (usually M1nho, but it used to be the Zish) with the tickles; or 2) Doing the above but by myself. Well this Saturday in particular, I went a little overboard. I put Smoosh in my mouth, then ran out to the living room and did a cartwheel. Then I started banging my house slipper on the ground and yelling weird things (M1nho sat on the couch, slightly amused at this point--he knows he married a kook**). BUT THEN! Undeterred, I started ripping my clothes off! I threw off my shirt, threw it at M, threw off my pants, threw them at M, who was now laughing his head off and shaking his hand saying, "No, don't do it! Don't do it!" But I had to! I ripped off my pppants and starting doing jumping jacks, COMPLETELY NAKED and then I ran into our room and crashed onto the bed and started crying.
Then came last night. We were hanging with the Cha1s and dcfly was showing us the 5-second versions of popular movies he downloaded from YouTube (see www.dannychai.com/blog/). They were HILARIOUS. M1nho and I were laughing so hard at the Harry Potter one that we were both crying. The Star Wars ones were pretty good, too. Anyway, I started crying and got sad thinking about how The Sorting Hat application on Facebook put me into Ravenclaw and not Gryffindor. I wanted so bad to be a Gryffindor! No one on earth would stop to help someone who fell down in a race, mark my words!*** Anyway, when we went home later that night and started laughing about the 5-second movies again, and I started crying again in earnest. It felt so good to cry, but its pretty sad for M1nho to watch me cry so all in all, crying is a sad happening.
Whenever I cry like this, my thoughts first go to Phattacus. I don't really know why, but they do. I miss him. I miss Mrs. Phattacus, too, but she's so busy all the time and never calls me (as was expected--I LOVE YOU, MRS. PHAT!). I feel a lot of pain thinking of him and all the fun times the M&M's and the Kims all had together. Like for instance, last night. He would have laughed SO HARD at the 5-second movies he totally would have cried, too. He would totally have come with us to Kepler's to get HP7 and balk at all the festivities, esp. the teenagers who were chanting "VOLDEMORT! VOLDEMORT!" He would be all over Facebook if he were here. It makes me sad. Ted was like a big brother to me. He always listened to all my cockamamie ideas about this and that, and would always have something interesting to say. He'd read the books and articles I told him to read and vice versa (AHEM, dcfly! Go to A&L!!!) and would always have an encouraging word for M1nho. He was a bit of a father-figure in a sense, esp. being of the cloth and such. Anyway, we M&M's miss the Phattacusses, and what's there to do about it except cry?
I think I was also crying last night because of Harry Potter. I felt pretty emotionally distant from the 5th film and also a bit while reading DH but still, it had to hit me at some point. And I think it did last night. Its this emotional distance that's getting me worried about my leidenschaftlichkeit. Yup, my passionness. I don't think that I miss the Phattacusses all at once; its probably that I miss them gradually and it gets stored somewhere and then something triggers and it all pours out. Same with Harry. I've stored all my Harryness into a special place and it finally broke through when I saw the 5-sec. movie. Its like I'm holding things in too much and get into danger zone when they're overfull. It happened at "my best friend's" wedding as well. I got through the whole week of activities and I found myself suddenly sobbing after the lights went out and we went to bed. And it was just like one huge sob, like Claire Danes as Juliet in that horrible Baz Luhrmann Romeo & Juliet with none other than Leo as Romeo. Anyway.
So I've somehow learned in the past two years to displace my immediate emotions and experience them through random fits of tears. At times I am happy with this displacement, such as when I read about classical music and or musicians. Now most of you know that classical music has been a big part of my life. I never once thought that it would cease to be a driving factor in my life; I thought I would find my career/spend most of my time in that world. But that hasn't been the case. Music has very little bearing in my day-to-day life. I rarely go to concerts, and I haven't played violin since May of 2003. That's over four years ago. True, I did spend a year studying musicology but I may as well have been asleep that whole year--I have no emotional ties to Stanford at all. I drive by it all the time but there's nothing that comes out of the visuals, even when I actually go onto campus to meet a friend. I never read the musicology books on my bookshelf; I usually just stare at them and think, "I should really just give these to Erinn [my friend from Stanford]." To continue on, I never read any concert reviews or longer articles about the decaying art in magazines, newspapers, etc. I have absolutely no interest.****
C0nnie, "my best friend" from above, is a professional classical musician and its great. We grew up playing music together and she is now a gigger and shaker in her parts. She was at a festival this past week and its like yeah, C0nnie's working this past week. That's what she does, she works. Music has now become her career to me, and not this thing I venerated and worshipped, as if my violin was the sole horcrux through which I existed and I was actually less than a ghost hanging out in Albania with the likes of Wormtail. And I rarely listen to classical music anymore; only in times of dire need to I whip out either Bach's Goldberg variations or the Beethoven's op. 131, the greatest string quartet that ever lived. The fact that I actually listen to KDFC now is even more evidence that classical music is not what it once was in my life.*****
And I can't figure out if the new identiy of music in my life is thinly-veiled contempt or true indifference. They do say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Have I become indifferent to my long lost love? Or maybe my leidenschaftlichkeit had to be ripped out and then mended. If so, I think its mending pretty well, but not without some scarring (hence this blog). I was reading this book on Mozart last month called 1791: Mozart's Last Year****** (totally biographical, not at all musicological) and I kept on noticing all the German words and how beautiful they were. It was like falling in love with German all over again. Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber alles!******* At least I know that my Germanophilia was authentic.
Anyway, so I'm feeling happy/sad/worried about it my old descriptor. In short, I'm suffering for it.
*I think this explains why Hedwig is my favorite character in the HP universe. She might even be my patronus, though I don't like the fact that owls eat rats and dogs. Hopefully Hedwig was a vegan.
**I'm not alone in my kookiness at BL. Other kooks: J1eun Cha1, S0phia 0tt. Kook-in-training: Ab1gail Cha1. S+ewart used to be one but now he's a big kindergardener so who knows what society's done with him.
***You can get sorted yourself if you have a Facebook.
****Though the Joyce Hatto thing was hilarious! Synopsis: Pianist Joyce Hatto, good but not great, dies. Her husband starts selling recordings of her. She gets famous in the classical music version of pitchfork.com for the breadth and depth of her catalogue, people fall in love with her, becomes an indie-classical goddess. Turns out the recordings were old recordings of OTHER PIANISTS repackaged by her husband and sold as Joyce Hatto performances!!!
*****Most music people hate KDFC because it plays only one type of classical music (Baroque-en kind--HA!) . Its usually pretty good after 8pm but that's about it. But these days I'm finding it very pleasant and "soothing"--two descriptors that I fought really hard against back in the day. "Bach is not 'pleasant' or 'soothing,' its REVOLUTIONARY! RHAPSODIC! IT GIVES YOU VISIONS OF DEITY!" Which can be very pleasant and soothing, but you know what I mean.
******Very good read, btw, and totally fine for non-specialists. Its about what really went down with the whole Requiem thing that is the basis of the movie "Amadeus." And no, Salieri didn't kill Mozart, but someone did ask Mozart to write him a Requiem in secret, and not for sinister purposes at all--he was just a music-lover who liked to pretend that pieces he commissioned by famous composers were actually written by him. WTF?!?! Wasn't that exactly what I wrote about Joyce Hatto?!?!
*******"Germany, Germany, over all!"--the chorus of their national anthem. There was a push to change the words after 1945.
posted by miriamhead at 11:57 AM
2 Comments:
You know, I used to be a GREAT KOOK. Danny and I were talking about it the other day. I've become less and less so, and I kind of went through this oh-no-what-does-that-mean stage. But now, I'm accepting my less-kookiness self. I kind of like being less kooky.
Great entry! Totally heartfelt. I could sense the suffering and passion. And remember that time you were playing piano at my place, and you began to cry? It was because you and Minho both took a breath at the same time before starting, and it reminded you of orchestra. Or something to this effect.
Miri, you're a butterfly now! The coccoon has changed you - you've metamorphed. It's beautiful to see.
Dang this was a really good entry. I dig it Miriam! It made me go Awww... (a Kerouac moment) Keep that passion alive! Be that light, be that roman candle, I feel your creative suffering oozing with freedom, and passion from this entry. It was a wonderful read.
Ciao,
JR
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