Flashback

Now that Mommie and baby are both here and healthy and happy, I can look back on the harrowing cab ride from Roosevelt Island to the hospital I took when the doctors were worried about Dylan's lack of movement after the last ultrasound.

It was one of those periods of time where everything was raw and surreal - my sense of urgency for getting home and grabbing our things and getting to the hospital was moving at a completely different speed from everyone around me - from the taxi driver to the pedestrians to the traffic cops at the backed up Roosevelt Island Bridge (man was I cursing the fact that I live on an island at that moment!). I instantly had a complete re-ordering of my priorities, and fear manifested itself in every situation I could think of - from the danger of driving on a bridge to the fear of unsympathetic strangers.

It reminds me of David Foster Wallace's description of an "irrational fear of flying", which he correctly rebuttals with the argument that being afraid to fly is actually a completely rational fear, one supported by both anecdotal and (for many people) personal experience (bad turbulence, etc). However, it is the fact that one can rationalize the act of actually boarding a plane at all that speaks so loudly about the way we choose to deal with the world.

Nothing is so clear as when you are thinking about bringing a new life into the world and the amount of potential things that can go wrong. However, when the possibility of tragedy becomes a reality that you have to deal with immediately, all of the surrounding forest can look so black and foreboding, and it is only through proceeding on the road that one can start to see the beautiful light between the trees again.

This moment of fear is what I was experiencing when the "Give Me My Robe" came on my headphones while sitting in the back of the cab. I cannot describe how this music both compounded my deepest fears and at the same time struck me with the image of the beautiful awesome frailty of life - this is the sublime duality of music. I was almost shaking from the was this music so directly matched the feeling I was experincing.

Music can peek into these recesses of life, and remind us of times when we felt life raw and unhinged, and reminding us that the only way to fully to appreciate the sublime moments in life is to embrace their impermanence.

I cannot find the following on Youtube (the version they have up does not have the intro which is inseparable from the aria), and I am not sure how to embed the MP3 here, but you can download it from the link following, and I would suggest you do:

Leontyne Price sings "Give Me My Robe"
from Leontyne Price Sings Barber

CLEOPATRA
Give me my robe,put on my crown,I have
Immortal longings in me.Now no more
The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
(Surreptitiously, Iras plunges her hand into the basket.)
Yare,yare,good Iras:quick,Methinks I hear
Antony call:I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act.
(with increasing intensity)
Husband,I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire,and air;my other elements
I give to baser life.So,have you done?
Come then,and take the last warmth of my lips.
Farewell,kind Charmian,Iras,long farewell.
(She kisses them. Iras falls and dies. Cleopatra and
Charmian bend over Iras' body.)
Have I the aspic on my lips? Dost fall?
(tenderly)
If thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch.
Which hurts,and is desired.