Guest Post: Guy Kettelhack

My New Daniel Salini Violin

Violins are like cat people - they have traits of both species. Like a cat, a violin must come to you; like a person -- more particularly a prospective lover (which a violin must be to anyone who'd dare to play it) -- it requires a delicate powerful balance of dispassionate curiosity and ardent erotic attention.

But that just hints at how to approach them. Working out a relationship with one (violin, cat, person) is  mystifying, sometimes mystical -- though also bluntly pragmatic (keep it warm if it's cold, cool if it's warm - re: temperature and temperament) -- feed it regularly (this means play it if it's a violin, though that's a live feline & human metaphor, too: so many ways to "feed") -- but mainly it's a matter of cultivating that initial passion & dispassion -- that ardor and clarity -- and hoping to Hera and Zeus that the imponderables (tone, purpose, feeling) will somehow bestow themselves through craft, luck and a state of grace for which you can only ever sort of create the basic conditions.

I'm at the beginning here with my Daniel Salini violin (salt lake city fiddle maker) -- s/he (not Daniel, who's presumably a he, but the violin, which is gorgeously multi-gender) blooms at certain touches and recoils from others. S/he absolutely floors me with her/his deep register of the G and D strings -- such gorgeous organ depth and warmth! -- shoots sparks in the upper reaches of the E string -- but we sort of get to a desert on the A string -- a little dry and harsh and barren which I see it is my job to assess & discover how effectively to irrigate -- create an oasis. Already, especiallly muted, in the dawn of our second day with each other, we're managing to coax out the first few small pink flowers on our cacti.

It will be a long and interesting and odd and wonderful love affair. Never far from this blunt fact, put as the first question that matters: what are we without each other? It's a little like my poems and drawings -- each creature in whatever medium is autonomous, certainly, but none can really come to life alone. True, surely, of a violin. It's just a pretty object if it isn't played. But once again, the metaphor is live. So, surely, is a person. I suppose it's always up to us to 'play' each other.

S/he looks nice against dark red velour, don't you think?

Guy Kettelhack has authored, co-authored or contributed to more than 30 nonfiction books. His poetry has appeared in over 25 print and online journals. As of 2009 he’s created hybrid visual/verbal ‘enterprises’ – he creates a drawing & poem (which more or less belong to each other) a day. 32 of his drawings appeared in an art show May – September 2012 at New World Stages (he has a piece in a current show there through January.) He’s been a freelance violinist for the past three decades.
 
He graduated from Middlebury College, went to Juilliard Prep as a kid, New England Conservatory after college, did grad work in English literature at Oxford and the Breadloaf School of English and pursued graduate studies at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in NYC and Brookline Mass.
 
He lives with great gladness in Manhattan, the city of his heart.