Musical Nectar

Heart rate slightly elevated, I dragged it inside. I had work to do and know myself well enough to know that once I'd opened it, that would be it for work, so I left it there in its shipping box. It stood there like a sarcophagus in the mudroom, silent, with only boots and gravel to welcome it. Back upstairs I trudged to work. But I knew it was down there, waiting.

In my exceedingly strange storytelling profession I fly around America with musical instruments. Mostly guitars of various sorts, for scoring stories. Every time they turn the curve on the conveyor belt into the maw of luggage handling, I worry about my instruments. Which TSA person will pry my cases open this time? Leave a little calling card? This bag has been inspected. Which luggage handler will choose to ignore my Fragile stickers?

So I tell myself--Look, Bodkin, these aren't Stradivari, after all. They're not priceless. They're guitars. Good ones, but production guitars. True, I maintain intense creative relationships with all of them. But the relationship is not so much with any individual guitar as it is with the species known as guitar. Once I bought an airplane seat for my Celtic harp. Worldly advice for the would-be harp traveler: don't bother buying a seat for it. It won't fit unless you beg for a bulkhead seat. Now presenters rent harps for me. No more flying with the harp.

I doubt I'll do much flying with this new instrument either. It'll take two years just to explore it and feel confident enough to score a tale from the Mahabharata. When my wife Mil saw it unpacked that evening, she exclaimed, "Good grief, it looks like a starship." Which it does, particularly with the second resonator gourd attached along the neck.

The instruction book that came with my new Indian sitar is a dandy example of globalization. Literally typeset by hand, with little off-kilter name strips pasted as captions beneath the photos, the manual was printed in New Delhi. The sitar-starship itself was handmade in Howrah, India. Man and woman, the manual instructs, are expected to hold the instrument differently while playing it. I suppose that's the musical version of riding sidesaddle. I also learned that during the British Raj, Indian ragas--long, semi-extemporized musical musings--were considered little more than ignorant peasant tinkerings next to British edifices like The Pirates of Penzance. At least that's what the British thought.
Then again, they never thought Ghandi would toss them out, either.

I'm of a different opinion with regard to Indian music, of course. Ever since I heard Yehudi Menhuin and Ravi Shankar's album of great East/West extemporizations, I've been a listener to and admirer of Indian ragas, and India's sublime solo instrument, the sitar. Studying my manual to try to figure out how to tune it, I read that music comes not only from the Human Kingdom, but from the Vegetation Kingdom as well. Perhaps that refers to the gourds, I'm not quite sure.

Joe, the world music dealer in Florida who sold me the instrument says it's of slightly higher quality than the bargain basement sitar I was originally slated to buy. Mine is hand-built--which I can certainly attest to, judging by its irregularities--and probably hurriedly. But not so hurriedly that Mr. Rosul, the sitar-luthier, neglected to add the hand-carved tuning bead in the shape of a bird. With tiny red dots for eyes.

My son Christopher found my sitar on eBay, asked if I wanted it, bid, then forgot his password and being fifteen, didn't know how to pay. We logged off and played more ping-pong. He has finally learned to beat me consistently, much to his delight and ardor to play more. Two days later, however, after he went back to school, I started hearing barks from eBay in the form of emails, informing my web address that Chris Bodkin had bid but no money had been paid and I'd better pay otherwise I was in some sort of deep cyber doodoo.

I first saw a sitar the night in 1969 Tom Burke and I crested the hill at Max Yasgur's farm after our twelve-mile walk from where the bus could go no further. I was sixteen. It was dusk. We were moving in an ocean of people. The fences had apparently been flung wide after a certain point, because nobody ever asked for our tickets to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Three days of peace, love and music. And there--just a little pink light at the bottom of a vast amphitheater of humanity--onstage, sat Ravi Shankar, playing his sitar.

I've been a fan of Pandit Ravi Shankar ever since. For years, every time I went to New York, I'd head down to Lexington Avenue in the twenties where the Indian food shops pour fragrances out their doors. One can buy Ravi Shankar cassettes in such places, along with chili pickle and incense. I have a collection of such cassettes. The unexpected intervals, rhythms, and especially microtones of classical Indian music have always charmed and mesmerized me. So now, after thirty-five years of curiosity and twenty-three years of professional story performance work, scads of guitars and a Celtic harp along the way, I finally sprang for a sitar.

I have planted it in the garden of long-stemmed stringed instruments that rises around the potted palm by my window. There sits the cutaway twelve-string and Svetlana, my Gibson SG electric. With by far the longest stem now, the sitar leans in the black naugahide miracle-massage chair, because none of my guitar stands will hold it up, frankly.

Creating music is right up there among the top joys of life, at least for me. So there's work to be done, joyous work. It will stretch out for years, but hey, I have nothing better to do with my life. I think of Kafka's story, Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa woke up as a giant insect in his bed. Me, well, I feel that I, too, am about to metamorphose into some strange, winged thing somehow. But instead of waking up on my back, I'll hover up the stem of Mr. Rosul's sitar each day, sniffing for the musical nectar that I know is hidden there, if only I have the will to find it.