A friend was kind enough to check in, just to make sure this wasn’t me. < That link will take you to a story about a pantsless man found dead at Calvary Cemetery with a cowbell near his body. UPDATE, MARCH 28, 2012: ACCORDING TO RELIABLE-SEEMING SOURCES NO COWBELL WAS FOUND. It was not I, though my friend who checked in with me knows of my long-time love affair with Calvary Cemetery. I am not much for cowbells or public pantslessness, but Calvary is a place I like to visit sometimes. I think this hobby intertwines my lapsed Catholicism with a hunger for the obscurities of epitaphs.

The remote chance that anyone saw that story and connected it with me seems reason enough to check in at this place I seem to have abandoned, just to make sure it is known that I am A-Okay, even as I feel I have nothing much to say.

Just rambling notes, then:

I like half-surprising myself with forgotten notes and obscured detritus. I leave coins around town so I can check back a year later to see if they are still where I left them. On my desk presently is a quarter I left on Review Avenue, atop a stone on the wall outside Calvary Cemetery. The coin is grey and weathered, as expected.

That wall of stones on Review Avenue is enormous but my interest in it narrowed to a single spot to which I could guide you at any time. The single stone on that massive wall is the only one I could find with a reachable, nearly-flat surface on which I could place coins and possibly other objects, such as keys. The coins have survived well over a year of the elements without moving. The elements include wind, rain, and the encroaching clutter of plants and weeds that slowly crawl across the wall during the warmer months. I never placed keys there but I imagine doing so as part of a disaster-plan, or a scavenger hunt.

I also leave coins in the metal notches found inside some payphone enclosures. Those type of notched payphone enclosures are not commonly found (and I don’t know why the notches exist as they serve no obvious purpose) but I have stuffed coins and other things inside them. I left a wadded-up copy of a poem I wrote inside one of these notches. The coins and the poems I leave in those payphone enclosures all get found, found by who I do not know, but it seems others share my habit of poking their fingers into these strange little spaces in search of hidden things.

I am not a physical hoarder like the kind exploited on TV. I do not have colonies of rabbits living in my bookcases or piles of boxes with unknown contents stacked to a mostly-invisible ceiling. But I do accumulate and retain things more avidly than I purge this space of un-needed items.

Something in my mind thinks this is a positive thing. Somewhere in my synapses I imagine my piles of stuff to be a foundation, and a resource for future growth. In some cases that’s actually proven to be true. My collection of hundreds of copies of “The Etude” magazine moldered away on my shelves for 20 years before I commenced the long-imagined project of scanning them and converting the text to useful, well-edited web pages. 20 years of hoarding and about 15 years of “planning” might seem like a long time to begin any project, but this simply had to wait until hardware needed for the endeavor became affordable and the OCR software reached a credible level of quality.

Based on the correspondences I’ve received the project has proven useful to researchers and musicologists. The majority of people with an interest in those old magazines, however, only want to know how much money their copies are worth. (In most cases the answer is disappointingly simple: not much.)

“The Etude” hoarding proved valuable enough, but what of my shelf full of LP records, and the shelves of CDs? Why keep those LPs when the relatively laborious bother of listening to them subsumes any nostalgia I have for the vinyl format? And then there is the digital hoarding. Thousands of photographs, millions of files, quadrillion gigabytes of crap which, at the very least, takes up limited physical space. It is the space of my mind that it overwhelms.

In the twilight of these contemplations of the physical objects that become one’s mental furniture one eventually asks, timidly: What will any of it be worth without me, without my curatorial presence over the stuff?

I was struck by this seemingly mean-spirited obituary from the May, 1909, issue of “The Etude”:

The death is recorded of Mr. E. Silas. He was born in Amsterdam, 1817, trained in Paris, and later went to England. He was regarded as a coming force by musicians of his day. His compositions were full of graceful fancy, but he never came to anything. His later years were mainly spent in the British Museum, London, where he was a familiar figure in the reading room. He always appeared very busy with piles of books around him, but there was never any outcome of his learning. Such figures are not uncommon, and many grey-haired human derelicts foregather in this wonderful storehouse of knowledge, and end their days in peaceful—and often quite useless—research. (Link)

I poked around the public Internet for mentions of E. Silas. Sure enough, a number of references to a seemingly industrious life in music appear throughout the musical publications of his time, with no shortage of glowing reviews and praise. Clicking around the World Wide Web I find that his full name was Edouard Silas (his first name sometimes spelled “Edward”), and that the august editors of “The Etude”, in their zeal to use Mr. Silas as an example, got his year of birth wrong. Born in Amsterdam in 1827 (not 1817) the music of Edouard Silas is today represented on the public Internet by a sprinkling of sound samples from commercial recordings of his works and a couple of public domain scores. From the IMSLP.org site I downloaded and played Silas’ “Enid’s Song” (a vocal setting of Tennyson’s “Turn, Fortune, Turn Thy Wheel”). On first pass the piece seems pedestrian. A second, more sympathetic playing finds a little more to recommend it. The third time through I didn’t make it to page 3. “Enid’s Song” is probably not E. Silas’ most representative work.

WorldCat shows “223 works in 305 publications in 5 languages and 554 library holdings” under the name of Edouard Silas.

The editors of “The Etude” sent out a more salutatory reference to the then-still-living Mr. Silas a few years before his passage:

“A few musicians living at the present time link us with the great names of the past. A notable instance is Mr. Edward Silas, organist and composer, of London, who knew Berlioz well and was intimately connected with him when the latter came to London in 1852 to direct the concerts of the newly organized Philharmonic Society. Mr. Silas is seventy-six years old, and is still in active work, being professor of composition at the Guildhall School of Music.”

(From the “World of Music” column in the February, 1904, issue of “The Etude”.)

I don’t know that “The Etude” maintained a consistent editorial voice over the years but as with the 1909 obituary this shout-out is empty of praise for Mr. Silas, self-servingly titillating itself with a mercurial connection to real greatness.

The final word on E. Silas burns, yet its truth and its applicability to other contexts cannot be denied: “many grey-haired human derelicts foregather in this wonderful storehouse of knowledge, and end their days in peaceful—and often quite useless—research.” E. Silas was a mental hoarder, a knowledge-stacker. As with those who curate mountains of physical objects, the past, present and future value of E. Silas’ intellectual accumulations evaporated with his death.

It seems the failure of others is a constant pre-occupation of the living. Comments like those regarding E. Silas might have been more potent in the days of limited editorial control over the reporting of such stories. Today comments like these epidemic and of less value. Armchair critics who flood Internet comment boards with their casual, cynical backwash have become an expected refrain to virtually any piece of content found on the public Web, even obituaries and stories of ghastly crimes.

I had been pretty happy with my life until about a year ago. No signal turning point changed anything abruptly — although nothing was ever the same for me after the big server blowout of 2010, but that’s another story. I’ve just grown tired of doing what I do, and of the false sense of satisfaction that my little web projects bring to me. I’ve been directionless for about a year now, maybe longer. That’s not to say I am ambitionless or unmotivated. I am simply over-extended and at times overwhelmed by things. When technical issues like hardware failures or software annoyances intercept my attempts at productivity (as happens almost hourly) I surrender to the machines and move on to another task. At times my pursuits seem futile, and a gripping sense of collapse undercuts my gut, threatening whatever support that part of my body provides to the rest of me. At other times I am inspired to greatness by the infinite possibilities of this new-fangled multimedia Internet thing with its HTML/CSS/XML/XSLT/PHP/LAMP/H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-Peeee open standards. But that inspiration does not last long any more. I return to what I know best, which is playing the piano and writing. These are the pursuits where I feel I have the most control over things, but now they make me feel lost.