I’m practicing again on this instrument I couldn’t wait to quit playing. At the age of nine I mentioned I might like to play it, at a performance of Peter Pan where we sat close to the orchestra pit and the strings wafted upward like Mary Martin. It seemed like almost the next week my younger sister and I were taking violin lessons from Mr. Berman, a professional violinist in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Unfortunately, he used phrases like “You stink” and held his nose when we played. He would become one of many teachers over a period that now stretches sixty years, give or take the ten or twenty when I was raising my three children and teaching humanities classes in the evenings.

Our parents wouldn’t let us quit the violin until we graduated from high school. Upon graduation, I stopped playing the instrument, and my sister went on to get a degree from Peabody in violin—specifically, music education. She had to stop playing due to tendonitis, and took up the piano, which is what she always wanted to play. And now one of my gifts has been the use of her French violin, a Claude Pierray, circa 1735.

When you practice, you get to hear yourself. The violin is a loud, difficult, unforgiving instrument. It’s a demanding mistress, to use a cliché. It turns out, however, that playing music activates the vagus nerve, part of the paras ympathetic nervous system (PNS), which can alleviate depression. I suffer from anxiety, depression, and chronic pain—a nasty cocktail. The vagus nerve plays a role in calming the body.*

So, if I play a three octave G scale, sawing away at each note slowly, the soothing effect of “rest and digest, due to the vagus nerve’s proximity to the ear and vibrations of sound through the ear drum, begins its calming magic.

It is similar to counting beats with one’s fingers while writing a sonnet or other piece of formal verse. I like to drum my fingers on my desk to get a five-beat line and listen for what comes next. What rhymes or half rhymes? What word is unexpected, concrete, sensory, and evocative?

Or take visual art, which I’ve enjoyed doing off and on as well. The scent of paint is almost as elevating as the feeling of a sable brush on canvas. What emerges can, at times, seem secondary at the time of applying the medium. Though of course, there is a plan. There is always a plan.

To go back to when I was young, and even into middle-age, I would no sooner pick up the violin than have the kernel of a poem propel me into my chair. This is no longer the case. The muse has become reclusive. Perhaps the two-level lumbar fusion I underwent five years ago have taken her voice away. Sitting is painful. Going to and giving poetry readings is not as appealing. It’s more soothing to settle back on the sofa and read a dog-eared book, or observe my cat as he grooms his incredibly Bengal-like fur.

There is so much to master in learning any instrument. They say “practice makes perfect,” but now that I am seventy, the proverbial three score and ten-year life span of a human being, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that there is no perfection.

Take the right hand. There is a specific way to hold the bow between your pinky and index finger. You find a balance point in the middle of the right hand as your thumb and second finger make a “ring of power” at the frog. Frog, tip, eye. When the brazilwood stick was first placed in my hand by a teacher, I recall feeling the impossibility of wielding it to make a sound.

If anything, bowing has become more difficult. It is unnatural. The attention I have to pay to angles when crossing strings has become conscious. I lift my arm as if shading the sun to get to the G string. That grating sound? Better prepare to switch while on the E string, Lift the elbow, anticipate a level change, and without losing momentum, move to string A. Do this over again until sound is seamless. Any similarities to the craft aspect of writing verse are no mystery.

Take the left hand. On a fretless instrument, there is the hand frame. Ideally, you want to keep the shape of the hand in this position no matter where you go. When you shift, spaces between notes diminish, so getting the feel of the third and fifth position is important. Finding the interval between two notes is similar to finding a lyrical flow. This can be likened to the feeling you get when one line of poetry follows another line associatively, subconsciously, without a lot of “thought”.

In this way, music and writing are inextricably entwined. Language is music; music is a universal language. The Greek philosopher Epictetus told us to control what we can and let go of the rest. Playing an instrument, you must go all in with that. You have to make your mistakes loudly and not be afraid. Divide the bow into thirds and use the middle when playing piano or pianissimo. Find the sounding point, vibrate, produce tone. Don’t think about a listener, because that will distract from the mission, which is to play a particular piece of music and recreate the feeling the composer had when s/he wrote it. Just as when writing or painting, unless it is a commission, you don’t think about the audience.

I am learning slowly to slow down. For instance, just because a piece is played softly doesn’t mean the melody should get lost. Tone is important, just as a persona’s voice is important to a poem. When I attempt spiccato or marcato it’s like taking a stab at a new form of verse. Intensity resides in the body for both writing and music. Playing Loch Lomond, I might begin to cry. Writing from my body, I might also cry, because emotions live in memory, which is the stuff of poems. “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader,” an anonymous someone said at a workshop. Does AI feel these emotions? No, because so far they haven’t given ChatGPT a soul.

Well, here I go again, short fingers landing sharp or flat on an unfretted ebony fingerboard, bow arm flailing to hit strings with croaks, chirps and hoots. The more often I play, the more in control I get to feel. The less I play, the more witchy sounds. But there are times when life intervenes, or you (or I) just don’t feel like making the effort. And just as I am aware that many would-be poems will end up not being read, I have learned that writing, like playing making visual art and music, is about the process, not the product.

* "It turns out that many of the activities that we associate with calmness—things like deep breathing, meditation, massage and even the experience of awe—effect changes in the brain, in part, through increasing vagus nerve activity” (https://www.cedars-sinai.org/blog/stimulating-the-vagus-nerve.html).

Judith Skillman’s poems have appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. She has received awards from Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. Oscar the Misanthropist won the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her recent collection is Subterranean Address, New & Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions 2023. Visit www.judithskillman.com