Part Six: Handpan

I was in my fourth year of university the first time I heard one, walking through the center of the city. A man was playing in the street — bent over a steel shell held in his lap, striking it with his fingers — and the sound that came out of it was unlike anything I had heard. I did not know what the thing was. I stopped, and listened, and could not place the sound: round, and soft, and ringing, somewhere between a bell and a drum. When I got home I searched online until I found its name, and learned that it cost a great deal more money than I had.

So I made myself a promise. One day I would own one, and I would learn it.

Then I did with that promise what people usually do. I finished my degree, went to work in computers, and put the promise in the drawer where you keep the things you will get to later — when there is time, when there is money, when the real business of a life has been seen to. Seventeen years passed, and I never bought the instrument I had promised myself I would learn.

The fire was real. It was not a passing want; it waited seventeen years in a drawer and did not go out. But a real fire can still be given nothing. I never gave mine so much as an instrument to come out through. And a promise endlessly deferred is one of the quietest ways of giving the fire nothing.

This past winter there was a festival in the city where I now live, and in one of its tents a couple were selling musical instruments — singing bowls, mostly, and others from far-off places. There was no handpan out on the table, but I asked anyway whether they had one. One of them went into the back, reached up to a high shelf, and brought it down and set it in my hands.

The handpan was heavier than I had imagined, a solid and serious thing. I had no idea how to play it. My first strikes were uncertain, almost timid. A grown man who had wanted this instrument for years was suddenly holding one in a tent among strangers, excited and self-conscious at once.

This was the instrument I had heard in the street and promised myself. I had told myself a story across all those years — about later, about time I did not yet have. The story held as long as the instrument was somewhere else. Now it was in my hands, a thing people sell in a tent at a festival. The story came apart, and under it was this: I had taken a fire I genuinely had and let it sit in a drawer for seventeen years, and called that patience.

I decided in the tent that I would buy one as soon as I could and begin — no more later, no more reasons why not. And this time I did.

Learning to play from scratch was very hard, and I made it harder, because I began by doing exactly what the stories before this one should have taught me not to do.

Long before that, a friend had tried to teach me guitar. He taught me the way beginners are often taught: here are the chords to a song you like, go and learn them, then the chords to another song, and another. I learned a couple of chords, made my fingers ache, produced nothing I wanted to hear, and quietly gave the guitar up — having decided, the way I had once decided about drawing, that it was simply not in me.

And now, with the handpan in my hands at last, I reached for that very method again. I found patterns on the internet and set about learning them. A pattern is a fixed sequence of strikes: this finger, then that one, in a set order. When the first pattern finally came together under my hands I was pleased with myself. A start had been made, I thought. Learn enough patterns and one day you are a musician.

I practiced twice a day, an hour each time. I would warm up my hands. Then a rhythm drill someone had recommended in a video — strike the full rhythm, then the half, then the quarter, then change which fingers were striking and run it through again. Then the patterns I already knew, one after another. Then, at the end, a new pattern to learn. All of it was dull and tiring, and I believed the dullness was the price of progress, because by then I knew that the dull repeated work is what digs the riverbed, in any art.

By the end of the first month I knew the feeling in the room. I had felt it at an easel, and on a mat: the road that has quietly become a circle while you were still driving it. I was doing the drills and learning the patterns, and the patterns were not adding up to anything. I had a growing pile of them and no idea what I was meant to do with the pile — how any of it turned into music. I had lost the sense of going anywhere, and with it the sense of what I even wanted from the instrument.

I went looking for real help, and the free courses I found all gave me the same thing: more patterns, more rhythm drills, more striking technique. Every course was a piece of something larger — and not one of them ever said a word about the larger thing it was a piece of. So I began, slowly, to set the instrument down. My sessions got shorter. Twice a day became once a day, and once a day became every other day, and the interest thinned out toward nothing.

One thing here makes this loop different from the two I have shown you before. There was no teacher in this room. No one laid a hand on top of my work, and no one ran me through a dead lesson. I built this loop myself, out of a wrong idea about what learning an art is. The courses I reached for offered me, in good faith, more of exactly the same, and nobody meant me any harm. A loop does not need someone else’s mistake to run you; your own is enough. It only needs a beginner who believes an art is the sum of its patterns — and enough material to keep him collecting them. I was that beginner, and I came very near to putting the fire out myself, before I ever found the person who showed me the way out.

By chance I came across the website of a teacher who had built his own method for teaching the handpan. I had sat through a few courses by then and expected nothing; I signed up for his free introduction only because it was free.

From his first lessons I could see he was doing something the others did not. He did not begin with patterns, or techniques, or drills. He began with the thing behind them — his whole way of seeing the music, what the technique was in service of. He set out what music is made of: rhythm, harmony, melody, and how the three hold together. Different notes, and different pairings of them, he said, create a different mood in the listener, and the musician chooses which one. It was the something larger that every other course had been a piece of and had never once named. He covered the instrument too — how it is built, and how it asks to be struck. But he did not count that as the main thing: the main thing was getting to know the instrument itself, and it began with a strange task.

“Set aside a little time every day,” he said, “and simply get to know your instrument. Ten minutes, twenty. Play the notes with no plan and no goal. Listen to the instrument — and listen to what each note makes you feel.”

That was the whole of it. Not a pattern to master. Not a composition to learn. Sit with the thing and listen to it, and to yourself.

I took the task seriously. In each session I began setting aside the time he had asked for, and I struck the notes, and I listened.

At first the task seemed pointless. I was hitting notes and waiting for something to happen and nothing was. But I kept at it, because he had asked me to, and after a while the listening changed. I stopped waiting for a result and started attending to the thing in front of me. What this note did in me, and how it differed from that one. What a particular pairing of notes opened up. What happened in the small place where one note crossed over into the next. And somewhere in there, with no arranging on my part, something woke that had not been in the room before.

It was curiosity. A plain wish to find out what was in the instrument — what it could do, what was around the next note.

Early in this book I said the fire is the heat in a person that makes them reach toward the world and refuse to leave it alone. What woke in me at the instrument was that same heat, turned now on a single thing. Nothing new had arrived from outside. It was the fire itself, finally reaching. Because a fire can burn for seventeen years and never once reach for anything, and that is exactly what mine had done. For all those years it had been a held wish — I want to own one, I want to learn it. That is a real heat, but a heat fixed on an outcome: on having the instrument, on having learned it. It pointed at a destination, not into the thing itself. Then for a month a duty stood in for it — grind the patterns, the dullness is the price — and the duty pointed nowhere at all. What the listening did was turn the fire toward the instrument itself, the thing in my hands, and let it begin to reach into it. What does this note do. What is around the next one. What happens if… That reaching is the one thing fire is for, and it had been missing the whole time I collected patterns — which is exactly why the patterns led nowhere. I had been building a hand with no fire reaching through it to give it a direction. The first thing the teacher gave me was not a technique. It was the condition the fire needed before it could reach for the instrument at all.

I finished the free introduction and bought the next course, the one for beginners, and there the teacher went further into his way of seeing the music. In one lesson he said a single sentence, and a composition stopped being, for me, something written in advance and learned by heart: all my compositions are improvisations. And then he set out, plainly, how he built them — the principles underneath an improvisation, how a person goes about making one of his own.

From that point I rebuilt my practice, gradually. There were fewer drills and less pattern-repetition, and more time getting to know the instrument and trying to improvise, until the drills were gone from it altogether.

At first what came out of the improvising was a mess. A heap of unrelated sounds with no shape to any of it — real cacophony, and I heard every ugly second of it. But the curiosity that had woken would not let me stop, and it asked the question that mattered most: is there anything in this noise worth keeping? So I went hunting, in the heap, for something good. And one day, without intending it, I struck a run of notes that was a melody — a small, real, lovely thing that had not existed a moment before. Then, another day, another. I recorded them on my phone so I could find them again and learn them. After a few weeks I had gathered so many that I stopped recording them, and stopped trying to keep them, and just played — going looking, each time, for something new. And now it was often there.

What had happened arrived in disguise, as it frequently does.

That was the release. The hand that had only copied until then was beginning at last to do what I meant — finding the music in the moment instead of reciting it back; the fire reaching through a channel finally deep enough to carry it. I had reached for exactly this once before, on a dance floor, and strangled it — bearing down, planning the next figure, reaching for the release with the very grip that makes it impossible. Here I did the opposite, and I did it without knowing I was doing it. I was not trying to play well. I was not trying to produce a good composition. I was only following the curiosity through the noise to see whether anything beautiful was hiding in there — and in the space that opened when I stopped reaching for a result, the result came on its own.

I told you near the start of this book that the release is the moment the watching self goes quiet and steps out of the room, and the hand proceeds without it. On the dance floor I had kept that self planted in the room, gripping, refusing to leave. Here, busy and curious and listening for something good in a pile of noise, I forgot to keep watch — and the watching self stepped out, and the playing happened without it. I did not let go on purpose. I got interested in something else, and the letting-go happened behind my back, which may be the only way it ever really happens.

That was when I understood what the instrument was for.

I already had one daily practice. Each morning I sit with a singing bowl — a round bronze bowl of the kind that gives out a single sustained tone. I run the mallet around its rim and listen to the tone rise and slowly fade. That is my morning meditation. I do not play the bowl to make music. The sound is a place to rest my attention; in the quiet underneath it I can hear my own mind, which is the entire point of the sitting. The music, such as it is, is a by-product. The listening is the thing.

I began to see that the handpan had quietly become the same kind of instrument for me. Yes, it makes music and the bowl barely does — but the music was not the point of my playing either. When I sat and improvised, I was listening, the way I listen in the morning; and what I was listening to was myself. The melody that came out under my hands was telling me what I felt, what mood I was in, sometimes what I wanted and had not known I wanted. The teacher had a name for it: music is the language of feelings. Each note is a word — except a word carries a meaning, and a note carries a feeling, and a phrase of them carries something you could not have said any other way. Improvising was not cramming a heap of new words by rote, the way the patterns had been. It was learning, slowly, to speak the language — and to speak it first of all to myself.

The teacher said that a musician ought to perform, so I played a few times for friends, and they liked it. But doing it, I noticed that their approval did not reach the part of me that cared. That was another thing he had said: music is not a way to impress people; it is a way to express yourself. So now I mostly play alone. Somewhere along the way I had stopped wanting to learn to play well — to be good — and I had not even felt the wanting go. The beautiful composition, when it comes, is welcome. But it is a by-product. The thing itself is the listening: hearing yourself, hearing the instrument, being able to speak in this language to a listener, or to no one but yourself.

By then the playing had become a meditation — the second one in my day, the evening twin of the morning bowl. That word is the only exact one here. When I am far enough down into the playing, the same quiet comes that comes over the bowl: the talking, planning, judging part of me goes still. Once I was lucky enough to be at a concert my teacher gave. When he had finished playing, he said it was hard to start thinking and speaking again, having been so far down inside the music. I knew exactly what he meant. I feel it too — not every time, and never on demand, but only when the playing suddenly carries me deeper than I expected.

My day cannot quite begin without the bowl or end without the handpan, and in between, whenever a free minute turns up — when I am waiting for something — I pick the handpan up and play. What started as a task to get through twice a day has slowly become a thing that simply happens, that could not not happen, woven through the day like breathing. It is an entirely different relationship with the instrument than the one I began with.

Playing the handpan is what finally showed me, in my own hands, the union the first pages of this book could only describe.

When I first began to improvise I had a great deal of fire — the curiosity was burning hard by then — and very little technique. The fire was pouring through me, the hand was too small, and what came out was cacophony: the same heap of unrelated sounds I have already described. I told you, at the very beginning, that a fire with no hand to carry it can go mute — the melody that dies in the throat because the fingers cannot find it. It can go mute two ways. It can fail to reach the instrument at all, which is what mine did for seventeen years: the fire sat in a drawer and made not a sound. Or it can reach the instrument, hear the ugliness of its own first noises, and pull back.

Mine did not pull back. It reached the instrument and stayed, and a fire that stays does not go mute — it floods. The channel cannot hold what has poured into it, and the whole of it spills past the banks at once: what arrives is a churn instead of a current. That flood was my cacophony.

I had the flood exactly backward, and the mistake cost me weeks. The flood is not the failure. The flood is the fire already at work, inside the channel, before the channel is deep enough to carry it — which means the hardest part is already behind you: the fire reached the instrument and stayed. Silence is the thing to fear. The chaos coming out of my hands felt like proof that I had no business with this instrument; it was the opposite. It was the proof that I had finally begun.

For a while I handled the flood the only way I knew, which was to hold the fire back — to rein in my own surges and emotions by force of will, so that what got through was small enough for my hand to shape. And that works a little, as a stopgap. But it works by hiding the problem: a fire held back never overruns the hand, so you stop seeing how small the hand still is, and you stop building it. Holding the fire back turns the hand into a leash. And the hand is not a leash. The solution is the opposite. If your fire is too big for your hand, the solution is not a smaller fire. The solution is a bigger hand.

So I went back, on purpose, to the technique I had left behind — not as patterns to collect this time, but as a channel to deepen, so that a fire I was no longer willing to shrink would have something wide enough to move through. I took the teacher’s next course and worked at the technique of the instrument, and it did precisely what technique is for: it let me say cleanly the things that had come out as noise before. The fire did not get smaller. The hand got bigger, and the same heat that had been a flood became a current: far more fire was coming through the channel than in the weeks when I had rationed myself down to a trickle.

That is what the instrument taught me. The fire and the hand are not rivals, and the hand is not a brake on the fire. They have to grow each other — which is why the two of them stand side by side in the title of this book. A larger fire needs a larger hand to carry it without spilling; a larger hand makes room for a larger fire to come through clean. You build the one to free the other. And then the freed other asks for more of the first. When practice goes as it should, it is just that exchange: each turn of it leaves the hand larger and more of the fire coming through.

And then a strange thing happened — the most hopeful thing I know about any art. Partway through that course, I stopped taking it. Not out of discouragement — the opposite. I stopped because I no longer needed it. The instrument itself had begun to teach me more than the lessons could. I had been walked far enough into the art that the art itself had taken over. The handpan in my hands was showing me things no person had told me, because I was at last far enough inside it to hear what it was saying.

I told you, early on, that the teacher’s real work is to walk you in and then step back — to hand you over to the art itself and disappear, so that the art can become the teacher. I said it then as a hope. Here it stopped being a hope. The teacher did his whole job, and the proof that he did it is that I do not need him anymore. The instrument took his place. There was no one left in the room but me and the thing I was playing, and the thing I was playing was enough.

So where it has all come to rest is here: I do not know whether I play the handpan well or badly.

I genuinely do not know. And here is what is strange: I do not care. One question drove that whole first month, underneath all the patterns: am I becoming a good musician? It has quietly fallen away, and nothing in me misses it. I play to hear myself, not to make music. I play to set the day down at its end the way the bowl picks it up at its start. When there is someone to listen I am glad of them; when there is no one, I am enough. Whether the playing is good is a question for somebody else, and I have stopped attending to it, and since then the fire has come through the channel more cleanly.

This is the only art in all these stories where the thing the book is about happened to me fully — where the fire was large, and the hand grew to meet it, and the release came and went on coming. I had learned a craft once before, at a computer, and learned it well — but a craft like that has a right answer waiting at the end, and an art has none, and crossing into the country of art is a different thing entirely. But look at how it came. It did not come because I bore down and reached for it; I tried that, on a dance floor, and it does not work. It came when I got curious, and let the watching self step out of the room. That is not the report of a master. It is the report of a man who finally stopped trying to become one, and found the door standing open the moment he did.

I have been playing for about eight months. By any ordinary measure I am a beginner. That door did not open at the far end of some mastery; it opened a few months in, for a beginner who stopped trying to be good. If it opened only for masters it would be no use to you. But it does not. Look for it not at the far end of a long road but near its beginning: stop reaching for the result, and follow the curiosity instead.