The Homunculus

Tanya Kalmanovitch

This is what it took for me to get out of Alberta.

I was born in a remote northern Canadian mining town, Fort McMurray. If the map went up that far, it went to a blank space. The kind of place people still call “the middle of nowhere,” as though there’s nothing, or nobody up there.

My mother was born on a farm in the middle of another nowhere. She married who she had to, then did what she could to ensure that my brother and I had better options. She put us in music lessons as soon as she could: not to become musicians, but to become educated. To become literate in beauty.

No one expected me to seize the violin and bow and embark on a bull-headed, heroic, Joan of Arc, teenaged quest to get good enough to get out.

I started playing the violin when I was three. I progressed through the volumes of the Suzuki Violin Method: Twinkle to Judas Maccabeus, the Gavottes and Minuets and Bourrées. From group lessons to a private teacher; from the private teacher close to my house to the private teacher I took two busses to reach. At 14, I switched to viola. I played the Bach and Schumann and Brahms. At 17, I started at Juilliard. I was an unlikely candidate for admission. I defied the expectations of geography, gender, and social class. I believed I was unstoppable.

***

When I went back to university—this time to be a psychologist—I found a strange picture in one of my textbooks. It was a homunculus: a representation of a man with the parts of his body scaled to indicate the amount of cerebral cortex dedicated to controlling their movement. The homunculus had enormous hands, bigger than all of the rest of him put together. They were attached to his shoulders by arms no thicker than pipe cleaners. His legs and torso were a stalk supporting his massive head, which was tilted back: thick lips forced open by an enormous tongue, eyes perpetually open. He looked like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings crossed with the logo for the Rolling Stones.

A little man was inside my mind. A monster, controlling all my movements.

Our professor explained that the hands and tongue of the homunculus were large because of the intricate movements of touch and speech, and that any one part of his odd body could be bigger or smaller according to patterns of activity. For example, a violinist’s homunculus might have greater representation for the fingers of the left hand, which were charged with knowing their way precisely around pitch and position: leaping to high notes, trilling, vibrating, contorting into double and triple and quadruple stops, running up and down the fingerboard for scales and arpeggios.

At 22 I quit music, and at 23 I was taken with the idea that the instruments I had played had bent my brain to their image. Music was taking up more space on my cerebral cortex than normal. Music made me somebody other than who I was destined to be. It warped me. If I closed my eyes, I could visualize string quartets and symphonies, my fingers twitching around their movements. I could not hear certain pieces of classical music on the radio without an involuntary physical convulsion. When I heard a violin or a viola being played, I could place myself directly into the player’s hands, knowing exactly where they were on the fingerboard.

I already knew the instruments had bent my body.

Even now, if I place my hands together, line up my thumbs, and fan my fingers out as far as they will go, my left pinky will outreach my right by an inch. The year I quit, I stopped being able to turn my head to look over my left shoulder. A chiropractor took an X-ray and pointed to the place where my skull canted forward by 30 degrees and to the left by 20. The muscles I once used to hold the instrument were overdeveloped. Now, in the atrophy of their non-musical life, they were collapsing and pulling my head and shoulders around a ghost instrument.

There are faint grooves in the tips of the fingers of my left hand, and a callus under my left mandible. String players call it a ‘hickey’: it marks the point of contact between chin rest, nut and flesh. Mine didn’t get pitted and abscessed like others’, but you can still see it if you know where to look.

I have carried an instrument with me all my life. To rehearsals and gigs, obviously. On work trips and holidays and visits to my mother in Florida. It feels wrong to leave town without it, so I carry it with me even when I know I won’t play.

***

I quit playing when I said to myself, “I’m not going to spend the next ten years of my life trying to get back to where I was when I was 22.” The voice in my head had a tone that sounded like a caricature of the men of my childhood: a real chauvinist draining the beer bottle, putting his foot down, throwing the last inch of his cigarette into the dirt and grinding it in with the heel of his boot to make his point. My voice was kind of an asshole.

I was angry. Music had made promises to me. All those hours of practice. All that progress. I was good, I was getting better.

When I was 16 or 17 the homunculus was restive. It was growing. It shaped me to my purpose. It let me think that I was in charge.

My mother was worried about my staking my future on music. She will rarely name her poverty, but it bent her parenting to its direction. She asked my viola teacher for his expert opinion: did I have what it would take to succeed? He told her I didn’t. I forget if he told her I was “talented, but not gifted,” or that I was “gifted, but not talented.” Either way, I remember the message.

Weeks later, my teacher found an opportunity to sequester me in his room. In an escalating fury, he explained to me how my being accepted to Juilliard was an insult. How my success defied his judgment. How he would not be proven wrong by me. He was principal viola of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. He was the conductor of the Calgary Youth Orchestra. Who was I? He could have made a neat pivot, saving face by claiming credit for my success. I don’t understand why he didn’t. Maybe he had his own homunculus; he’d been a young English man who left the town of Grimsby, UK for the provinces. This is Canada—the stain of colonialism still runs deep.

In precise, clinical terms, he explained how even if I did manage to succeed, he would do everything in his power to ensure that I would never work as a musician.

The dreams and the discipline, the ambition and agency. The thrilling transgressions of geography, gender, and class. No one told how I would be trespassing if I mistook myself for a member, and not a guest.

Four years later, I graduated from Juilliard into a three-month trial for a brass ring of a job in a professional string quartet. There were red velvet curtains in soft-seater auditoriums, a booking agent and airplane tickets, green rooms and reviews, and one morning at the gate in the Burbank airport, a conversation where two of the men in the group explained to me, “We don’t want to work with a woman.”

I flew home and moved back into my mother’s home.  

I did what you are supposed to do. I made the rounds of local musicians. I asked for lessons; I asked about work. Everyone was polite. Everyone said they wished they could help. They were very polite, but firm. There was no work, and they wished me the best.

Two years later I learned that my old teacher told everyone not to offer me work. He made good on his promise. Maybe he did what he thought he had to do. Maybe he thought I was a horrible person who had to be stopped. Maybe he thought he shouldered the responsibility of defending the distinction between the Crown and the colony. Maybe he was a sadist. Maybe he was a misogynist. This was before Me Too, when Me Too was simply the way things could be if you were a woman.  

***

When I quit, the homunculus was quiet.

I drove for a restaurant delivery service. At the start of each shift, I clamped a CB radio antenna to the roof of my car and pushed off into perpetual motion. I was part of a swarm of men, a chorus of fuzzed-out, cracked voices trading our clipped one-liners for instructions from Dispatch. We fanned out over the city to ferry our burdens—pizza and Chinese, cases of beer, cartons of smokes—to the doors of offices, motel rooms, and suburban homes. At the end of the shift we crowded back to base, turned in our radios, and dissolved back to our private lives.

I didn’t really quit. I switched to a job driving courier; a fixed route from base to the far south-east suburbs and back. I made a delivery to a neighborhood music shop with a help wanted sign for a violin teacher. This place was in a suburban strip mall, far from the concert hall, and beneath my old teacher’s consideration.

The teaching job led to a gig in a Country and Western cover band playing “B room” bars in small towns in southern Alberta. Farther still. It was easy money on a Friday night. It was driving down 22X, to Black Diamond, with the slanted evening sun and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on my right shoulder.

The bar at the Black Diamond Hotel was a hotbed of angry cattle farmers and gas well workers. It was an old building by local standards, built in 1929 to serve the oil and gas boom that eclipsed the coal mines that gave the town its name. There was a stage set up in a corner, a heavy wooden bar with brass accents, and pool tables and Video Lottery Terminals.

I would throw back a Big Rock beer and a shot of rye, and climb the steps to the stage to play fiddle with a cigarette wedged between the middle fingers of my bow hand.

On breaks, drunks would stagger and seize at me.

“Can you play The Devil Went Down to Georgia?”

“Hey! Hey! Play the Orange Blossom Special!”

If they were especially aggressive, I told them to fuck off. Everyone loved a fiddle. It was glorious.

***

I went into psychology because in my junior year at Juilliard, I asked myself what I would do if I were to break both my arms and couldn’t play anymore. I thought that I might like to be a counselling psychologist; a therapist. I thought I would like to help people work with their own stories. But when I got into school, we didn’t work with stories. We worked to learn the discipline. 

I learned I disliked psychology. Its defensive preoccupation with being seen as a real science; the neuroscience labs in the basement with rats and cats in cages with caps of wires plugged into their brains like nauseating top hats; the categories of sensation and perception; cognition, learning and memory; developmental psychology; personality psychology; social psychology — everything marching up the scala naturae, everything neatly reduced along the diagnostic axes of the DSM-IV; everything revolving around the prediction and control of human behavior. Even the path to understanding psychopathology—the thrilling and terrifying transgressions of the code of normal behavior—was lit by the brilliant, sanitizing light of pharmaceutical treatment.

I took an honors seminar in theoretical psychology. Hunched into a black leather biker jacket I asked questions that expressed my genuine confusion: “Why is psychology preoccupied with calling itself a science?” and “Why does a science of human mental experience use animals as subjects?” and “How do we know ‘mental illness’ is a medical condition?”

Mostly, my classmates resented my intrusions. Most of them were already professionalized; they were priming themselves for jobs in the oil industry or they were already stationed as officers at the Canadian Forces Base. Mostly, they wanted their certifications. I didn’t know what I wanted, but the professor told me I had an aptitude for critical theory and that’s how I decided to write history.

I wrote about animals as experimental subjects.

I wrote about rats in cages; rats in mazes; panopticons and prisons; infant monkeys clinging to wire mothers with ticking clock heartbeats and terry cloth fur; the precise voltage at which a mother rat must determine whether she will save her own life over those of her babies. I wrote about animals genetically bred for compliance; brown rats made white to match laboratory coats; animal anatomies mechanized; animals atomized, alone in their laboratory cages, yielding their secrets to science.

I published my research in the American Psychologist. My professor said it was a great distinction. He said I could go to any PhD program I wanted, but I lacked the means to understand what that could represent. A PhD in psychology didn’t really interest me. I’d made a few friends in the country band—my tribe, for better or worse—and I wanted to try being a musician again.

***

Sometimes, my instrument will spark a conversation with a stranger, for example, when I am boarding an airplane and color or the shape of its case catches a fellow passenger’s eye. We cycle through the answers to common questions. Yes, I play for a living. Yes, it’s possible. No, I probably don’t play with anyone you’ve ever heard of. The stranger might catch a note of weariness that I try to conceal. The stranger will try to speak to that note.

“But you love what you do!”

The stranger wants a sunny report from the road less travelled. They don’t understand that love for a musical instrument might be as fraught, or complex, as that for any family member. Once you’ve spent that much time at it, you’ve got a homunculus, your own greedy little monster in your mind, calling the shots.

I work evenings and weekends. I miss peoples’ weddings and New Years’ and birthdays and holidays and Sunday dinners. If you and I make plans and I later get called for a gig, I will accept the gig and cancel our plans.

I’ve spent so many nights marking other people’s life cycle events that I’ve lost track of my own. Sometimes it seems to me that I gave up a marriage for music; a child or a house or a dog for music. I know that some musicians build lives that can accommodate all of those things, but the kind of music I thought I knew was jealous and single-minded. It made me think that there was only one good way to play music and that was to give your life over to it.

Most of the time, I don’t mind. When I work, it’s clear what I’m doing, and where I am meant to be and why it is that I am there. It’s easy to understand because the evidence is tangible. On stage or in rehearsal I am performing surgery. It is exacting and absorbing. There is no question of the value of this work.

It’s when I come off the stage that I wonder, “What is the point?”

The instruments carved their image in my brain, and I bent my life to their shape. My career carves tracks into the planet.

I travel. Some years I traveled more than I was home. Schiphol, Heathrow, Gatwick. 95,  278, 87, 495. Route 4, Route 17, the Palisades. I fly to Boston and back each week, a trail of metric tons of carbon dioxide in my wake.

At any point in time there is an army of musicians, fanned out over the globe. Sometimes we cross paths in transit. At the airport gate, in a hotel lobby, at the coffee stand at the Sonoco station in Englewood Cliffs. We are used to being alone, and we are careful of our psychological sovereignty. We exchange phatic pleasantries then retreat to our seats and books and headphones.  

Am I doing what I love? At this point we are so worn into one another—music, me, the instrument—that it hardly makes a difference. I am ambivalent about being “a musician,” but it is a fact. It is what I am. About music itself, I am private, but unequivocal. I might never say it so plainly as this, so let me say it now: I love music. It is a mute and wordless love. It remains one of the few true things upon which I can rely.

***

When I think about what it took to get out of Alberta, I think about how being exceptional (better than, braver than, more talented than, cooler than, smarter than, more powerful than) was an existential matter. Meaning, I had to get out. Meaning, I did what I had to do. Meaning, if I had stayed in Alberta, I would have gnawed my own arm off.

It’s useful to be exceptional when there’s danger, or when the stakes are high. It’s less useful in daily life. When you are exceptional, you don’t learn how to survive being ordinary. Instead, ordinariness—the thing that might save you—is what tears you down.

It’s hard to tell the difference between me and my homunculus; my monster, my hero.

Now I am a teacher. I teach my students the things I need to know in order to survive. I need to learn them over again, and anyway, the context is always changing. In the theatre of a classroom, we dissect the anatomy of the professional musician. We tease apart music from money, and life from livelihood. We isolate and remove the structures of patronage and privilege, the better to think precisely about their functions; the better to know what pathologies arise from their malfunction. It is this kind of patient examination that allows me to advance a spatial and tactile appreciation of a musical truth. That they are all, already, good musicians. That there is a sound that only they can make; and that they need no one’s permission to make it; and that much depends on their making it. That the best musicians are not professional musicians or “successful” musicians, but the musicians who struggle to deepen and strengthen their voice. The ones who have a voice that knows “here” and “this” and “now” and “when” and “not yet.” I tell them that none of this is easy, and much of the time, it just looks like struggle, and sometimes it looks like nothing at all.  

Most of the time, the struggle doesn’t seem heroic. It’s ordinary.

Music can be ordinary. The homunculus is adaptable. Scientists say that the little man depends on what we do. He “changes to conform to the current needs and experiences of the individual.”[1] It’s the ordinariness of music—what you do from day to day—that shapes him. It is dipping your voice into a song when you’re happy, or because you want to become happy. Because you know the song, and you are the singer, and that’s what songs can be for.

Not being “a musician,” but just playing music. Not being the best, but just being.

Tanya Kalmanovitch (www.tanyakalmanovitch.com) is a violist, ethnomusicologist, and Associate Professor at The New School.

[1] In string players, the amount of cortical reorganization in the representation of the fingers of the left hand is largest for people who began playing earliest. Source: Elbert, T., Pantev, C. Wienbruch C., Rockstroh, B., and Taub, E. “Increased cortical representation of the fingers of the left hand in string players,” Science 270(5234): 305–8 (1995). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7569982/