Bob Wiseman

A musician standing outside an office, accidentally overheard another musician being interviewed for a teaching position. Walls were thin. At first he had no intention of eavesdropping but trapped by circumstance he heard enough to form an opinion. The candidate sounded excellent. A sense of philosophy behind the teaching. Not just technique, but actual understanding of what learning is supposed to do to a person, yet the interviewer seemed unimpressed. Dismissive in the cool institutional way people become when they mistake their preferences for standards. Every answer the candidate gave was met with another question designed not to explore but to expose. The interviewer did not seem interested in whether the person could teach. He seemed interested in whether the person resembled his own idea of a teacher.

There were moments when he was playing, where everything aligned. Decisions made sense, listening guided action and nothing felt forced. Then there were other moments, he seemed to operate on automatic pilot programmed by incomplete information. Both were him. The difference, he began to suspect, was not intelligence, but attention. When he was paying attention, he was less stupid. When he wasn’t, he was reliably so. This did not solve anything. Still the same kinds of mistakes. Still things forgot. Still misunderstood. Still spoke too soon. But now, when it happened, there was an additional layer. Recognition. He would catch himself in the act, or just after.

“Oh,” he would think, almost with admiration.
“That’s impressive.”

Impressive in its ability to appear even after years of experience, after all the reading, all the playing, all the thinking. It suggested something he had not wanted to admit. That stupidity was not a flaw to be eliminated. It was a condition to be observed. He began to treat it that way. Not indulging it, but not pretending it would disappear. Not building an identity around it, but not denying its presence. Just noticing. And occasionally, when the timing was right, laughing. Which, he found, reduced its power slightly. Not completely. But enough.

He was a very good trumpet player. He spent years learning how to put air into metal and get admiration for it. This worked....until someone wrote a sentence. Not even a particularly mean sentence. I was something like, “technically strong, though occasionally uneven.” A perfectly normal sentence by a music critic. Should pass through the air, and disappear. It did not disappear. It set up in his nervous system. He reread it. Reread it again, as if it might confess something worse if checked under pressure. He circled the word uneven the way a Sherlock Holmes would circle a suspect.

“Uneven,” he said out loud, alone in his apartment, like the word should feel ashamed of itself.

From then on, he collected the words. Not the praise. Praise is too easy. He collected the splinters and treated them like crimes. And he wrote long letters. He explained himself, which is a thing no one has ever successfully done in writing. The reviewers did not reply. So it goes. His friends told him, relax.

“Reviews don’t matter.”

This is something people say when reviews are not currently attacking their sense of existence. Onstage, he played beautifully. Offstage, he was a surveillance system monitoring conversations for signs of doubt. He corrected any type of inaccuracy with great urgency.

Then he became a father. This was not part of his artistic plan and the child did not care about reviews. The child did not care about tone or the correct use of breath. The child cared about being held, being fed, and screaming for reasons that could not be located using logic or musical theory. At first, he analyzed. Adjusted. Tried to control the variables. The child ignored all of it, cried. Turns out babies are just interested in being alive.

One afternoon, after hours of unsuccessful soothing, he sat there holding the small, loud creature and realized something deeply inconvenient. This kid was not storing grievances. He thought about his own behavior. About the sentences he had preserved. The words he inflated into judgments. The energy defending himself seemed inefficient.

He returned to the trumpet. The sound was the same. Air, metal, vibration. The usual miracle. But a shift in his relationship. The words landed when he read a review, but they no longer built structures inside him. Sometimes he even agreed. Sometimes he laughed, which a good sign. He wrote again to a reviewer. Not a long letter this time. A small note.

“Thanks for listening,” he wrote.

Some lessons arrive from art. Others arrive from a small human who screams at you until you realize you are not the center of the universe.