You searched the categories for: 'silence',
Motor memory
8 months of silence: the muscles decline, and I feared the physical remembrance imprinted into the mechanical action of my limbs and fingers would be gone. How long is a motor memory?
And why might it be so hard to return to an activity which has always been such a non-negotiable part of what makes me, me? At first it was innocent - a broken thumbnail. But then we head into the depths of winter, exacerbated as never before by depression and paralysis, and the guitar becomes a rebuke: it laughs at me hollowly, taunts my ever dreaming that I might be a musician; the necessary soul is - in me - mere performance; the performance, demotic; my vernacular, hackneyed. Music, it seemed to say, is the only transcendental phenomenon in the world, and what laughable hubris, what tragic arrogance, to think I might have any pretence to accomplishment in the only practice that has any claim to true beauty and truth.
But as ever, spring brings hope - or at least, I am persuaded to be stubborn, and to persist, in the face of all evidence; to believe that to no-one, not even me, is some access to the magic of music denied. Painstakingly, ignore the doubts, and retune withered muscles. Eventually, I discovered the motor memory was every bit there - it was adapted, malleable, and I can see how it might - left long enough - degrade and dissolve. But for now it remains.
