Tabla

Hi

So, I'm still here and alive and everything. My digestive system is a great devotee of siva, and it destroys itself, liquifies itself, prostrates itself, and is reborn every week. Probiotics are good, they saved me this time.

I've started intensive lessons on the Tabla drums. The tabla is perhaps the most beautiful and intricate percussion instrument ever invented. It consists of two drums, which you play with your fingertips. the left hand drum is the bass, and you can play a scale of seven bass notes, as well as that whump sound (the bass note bending) that everyone associates with Indian music, and the right hand drum is the treble, and can play sixty different notes (not that I can play all those notes). The left hand drum is Shakti, the right hand is Siva; the left is feminine and the right masculine, and the music cannot exist without either one. In indian music, the tabla serves the role of both the drum and the bass in western music. It is played in a 16 beat cycle, four parts of four beats each, which symbolizes the four parts of time: Shanti Yoga, Treta, Duapur, and KaliYoga. My teacher is one of the best musicians in India, also a scholar of philosophy (as everyone here is). He frequently goes on tours of the US playing tabla, and he is very familiar to the western mindset and way of learning. He tells me that tabla is yoga, because in order to play it, you have to relax your entire arm between every beat, that the important part is between the beat, when the hand's job is done and the muscle releases. THis produces a much louder, crisper sound. This takes much practice--usually when I am trying to do something well, I get real tense about it. So it's a good learning process as well as a beautiful result (I hope. It's a hard instrument.)

Anyway, I love india. This place is crazy and amazing, every day it blows my mind anew.