Trials and Tribulations of Learning Keyboard

 

To learn the keyboard is to conduct a subtle inquisition upon one’s own fingers — to coax, berate, seduce them into unnatural alliances. The black and white teeth of the instrument grin with patient malice, offering endless permutations of beauty and cacophony, while your hands, traitorous appendages, stammer and collapse like drunken spiders across the octaves. Each note becomes an interrogation: why this hesitation, this shameful stumble, this limp approach to a C minor? You whisper assurances, promise progress, but deep within, the ghost of a knowing smirk stirs — practice is a euphemism, after all, for exquisite, deliberate failure.

The music one plays badly has its own awful majesty. Every flubbed scale, every fumbled transition, each octave misstep forms a sort of tragic counterpoint to the imagined music — that impossible, glimmering mirage which you chase, panting, through thickets of repetition. Time becomes elastic in this pursuit. There is no “progress” as such, only recurrence. The same measure, the same bar, looping with the maddening inescapability of a carousel playing a melody you used to love until it began to rot.

A certain synthetic anthem haunts this process: that glib, glinting dirge of mechanical heartbreak, repeating itself into delirium. Its pulse mimics the maddening tick of a metronome, its lyrical descent into mistake and repetition mirroring your own rites of hesitation. There is a sterile purity to its beat, like a disco inferno in a padded cell. One recognizes, in its squelch and throb, the ritual humiliation of aspiring to grace and falling short by a semitone. “Everybody makes mistakes,” it assures you — a slogan suitable for embroidered pillows in the waiting rooms of personal disasters.

To study the keyboard is to live in a cathedral of minor disappointments — but ah, what light slants sometimes through the stained-glass failures! A chord blossoms cleanly, as if your fingers remembered being birds. A passage, once thorny and cruel, slips like silk under your touch. For a moment — a flash, a flicker, a phosphene in the temple of sound — you play. Not practice, not grope, not approximate. Play.

And the music — the actual music — sidles up, wary and wild-eyed, perhaps to stay a moment longer this time. Then it’s gone, and you’re left again with your squinting hands and that smug little machine blinking 70 BPM in your face. But you’ve tasted it. The current has passed through you. What follows is not triumph, exactly, but a stubborn ache of desire — to touch that live wire again.

Such are the tribulations: not obstacles, but rites. Scars shaped like arpeggios. A suffering that, properly endured, begins to shimmer with something perilously close to joy.