Week #10 of My Liquid Diet: Resistance Training in C Minor

Practice makes imperfect.

Three tools of resistance: dumbbell, oboe, stretchy band.

Descending scales:

• Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.

• Weight at start of Week #2: 222

• Weight at start of Week #3: 218.4

• Weight at start of Week #4: 215.3

• Weight at start of Week #5: 215.1

• Weight at start of Week #6: 211.2

• Weight at start of Week #7: 208.1

• Weight at start of Week #8: 204.3

• Weight at Start of Week #9: 201.9

• Weight at Start of Week #10: 199

• Weight at Start of Week #11 (current week): 196.8

Total weight loss so far: 33.2 lbs.

Twenty weeks to go.

---

The facilitator of my diet-program cohort, in our weekly Zoom meetings and in her emails, has been emphasizing the importance of resistance training, so our muscles don’t waste away along with the fat. The recommended equipment usually consists of weights and stretchy bands. I take her point — and I have been pumping iron on the regular. But there’s another kind of resistance training that I’ve added to the regimen: practicing my oboe.

When you play the oboe, you encounter a huge amount of resistance. This has a lot to do with the tiny double-reed. No matter how much you may exert yourself, only a smidgeon of air will be able to make its way through. As a result, the further along you get in a piece of music, the more unexpelled air will build up in your lungs — a very uncomfortable feeling. When you watch someone play the oboe, you are, quite literally, watching them asphyxiate. In addition, to sustain a full, rounded tone, you need to keep pushing hard from your diaphragm, so the airflow never flags. And on top of all that, your lip muscles — which form your embouchure — need to be rock-solid to hold the reed securely, while at the same time supple enough to make subtle adjustments, often from one note to the next. Playing the oboe is a workout!

But when you get to play something truly sublime, like J.S. Bach’s Oboe and Violin Concerto in C Minor, it can all feel like it’s been worth it. And amazingly, it looks like I’ll have the chance to do just that — because recently, I was invited by the Really Terrible String Orchestra to join them at an upcoming concert. This has me utterly terrified — and not just because I suspect that the musicians in the Really Terrible String Orchestra are actually Really Quite Good. I’m totally out of shape! With my lack of breathing stamina and my rubbery embouchure, right now I can barely play for 10 minutes straight. It’s a good thing that this concert won’t be happening till the fall of 2024. This gives me a full year to practice. The problem is, going back to my younger days, I’ve never had the self-discipline to practice regularly.

I don’t mean to toot my own horn (especially when I’ve just told you how difficult that is!), but I’ve always had a knack for giving up. As I’m writing this post on Yom Kippur, I’m especially mindful of the time, a little over a decade ago, when I tried — and failed — to do the ritual fast on this day. It was evening, and I was coming back from a Berkeley synagogue, Congregation Netivot Shalom, where Rabbi Menachem Creditor had just delivered one of his bravura sermons — while wearing brightly colored sneakers, so he could run back and forth between this shul and the church across the street that had been made available for the overflow crowd of worshippers.

I’d gotten to know Rabbi Creditor while working on a solo piece I’d been commissioned to do, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, about 10 portraits that Warhol had done of famous 20th-century Jews. One of the portrait subjects was the theologian Martin Buber — the author, most famously, of I and Thou — and I’d first contacted Rabbi Creditor to get some insight into the guy. In our first meeting, the rabbi surprised and delighted me with his own definition of God: “the collective potential of the human imagination.” That’s it? I asked him. No, like, big bearded guy up in the sky? No, he said — just “the collective potential of the human imagination.” I told him that this was very close to something my Communist father had once said to me when I was a boy.

A poster for my Warhol show. I had better hair in those days.

Dad and I were in the 81st Street subway station in Manhattan, having just come from the Hayden Planetarium. Still imbued with the sense of awe that the planetarium’s dazzling projected stars could instill in a kid who’d spent his whole life in a smog-shrouded city, I asked him, “Do you think there’s a God?” My father, a no-doubt atheist, was surprisingly thoughtful in his response. “Well,” he said, “I’d have to say that, if there is a God, then God is what all the human beings on Earth could do, if they all worked together.” I remember absorbing this, as our mighty train rumbled into the station — thrilled at the intimation of a future that might somehow, through concerted human effort, bring relief to the suffering that was all around us.

Decades later, coming back from the Berkeley synagogue that evening, I was feeling jazzed about beginning my first Yom Kippur fast. If nothing else, it would be intense! And then I passed a pizzeria. As if guided by a hidden hand, I went in and ordered a pizza to go — and not just any pizza: one with mushrooms and … sausage (which is, um, trayf). And I went home and ate a few slices. And nothing smote me.

The next year, I actually followed through with the Yom Kippur fast — and it was intense, and I did find the experience meaningful. Though afterwards, I rushed across the street from the temple to a Thai restaurant and broke the fast with a big bowl of pad see ew with pork. (Are you noticing a pattern here?)

I haven’t kept up with the organized-religion stuff — but I do believe in the spiritual, and practical, power of practice. I think one way I’ve always gotten hung up in my oboe-practicing is by aiming for perfection. Which, of course, is impossible —especially if, like me, you’re only a mildly talented musician. But sticking to this rather arduous diet has started to instill in me the idea that maybe, at long last, I can let go of the idea that, when it comes to certain challenging things, I’ll always give up. And in a way, my newfound optimism comes back to Martin Buber.

Martin Buber

Buber believed that there were essentially two kinds of relationships. One he called “I-It.” If you and I are in an “I-It” relationship, I see you as an object — someone (or even something) to change, or to dominate. Most relationships, Buber felt, were “I-It.” But every once in a while, an “I-Thou” relationship might arise. In an “I-Thou” encounter, I see you not as an object but as another subject — a partner in a dialogue between equals: we are affecting, possibly even transforming, each other. And each time we engage in an “I-Thou” relationship, Buber said, we are also entering into a dialogue with God. God, who to me is the possibility of change through sustained cooperative effort — God, who to me is a subway train of hope.

The slow second movement of Bach’s Oboe and Violin Concerto is a sinuously interweaving dialogue between two musical equals. Listening to a recording the other day, I found myself thinking back to a glorious moment I once shared with Sara during one of our birding adventures — watching a pair of Clark’s Grebes do their balletic courtship display.

Clark’s Grebes canoodling. (Photo by Sara)

When Sara first introduced me to birding, a couple of years ago, I had some resistance there as well. The world of birds seemed so vast, so complex, that I feared it might be futile to begin exploring it at this relatively late stage of my life. But over time, as I accompanied her on these outings, I was won over to birding. (Maybe one thing that helped inspire my love of shorebirds, in particular, is the fact that in Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, which I listened to repeatedly as a child, the oboe plays the part of the duck.)

If I can work through my resistance to getting into birding, maybe I can also undo my self-created identity as an oboe non-practicer — and, in general, as a serial giver-upper. I think a key might be to accept the resistance, rather than, well, resisting it. Playing the oboe is hard, and achieving perfection is impossible. But this is my new plan, moving forward: I want to reframe the task as a continual returning into dialogue. The oboe and the violin. Lutheran J.S. Bach and secular Jewish me. Today’s imperfections and tomorrow’s. And — of course, dear reader! — I and Thou.