Objects at Rest and In Motion

This is a post about a piano and whether objects have souls. Mileage may vary.

Mostly, this post is about a piano. But it begs the question, do things have souls? Most of us think people do, whether you call it a spirit, a soul, an intellect or some sort of numinous ‘over and above’ that we can’t touch or measure. When a person dies, it goes missing. Many of us believe out of principle or sentiment that animals have souls too. When animals die, we see sense the same sudden lack, a departure . But how large does an animal have to be? Or how animate? Do rocks have souls? They do in the film Everything Everywhere All At Once? In Hymn To The Universe, Teilhard de Chardin wrote of a ‘God who can be touched - and I do indeed touch him, this God, over the surface of the whole world.’ Emma Restall Orr’s book The Wakeful World takes a deep dive into the possibility of spirit in matter, examining our place in the universe from animism’s point of view. She asserts (read her book for the full, sophisticated picture) that everything in nature is awake, reacts, but with the caveat that this is not the same as everything being conscious. So, no, then. Things don’t have souls. But can they acquire them? Or have souls thrust upon them?

Once upon a time, a factory in Camden made a piano. It was probably about 120 years ago. The factory made a lot of pianos. They weren’t expensive - they were churned out by the tens of thousands the way cheap ghetto blasters with lots of flashing lights and big looking speakers were mass-produced out in the 70s and 80s or Bluetooth speakers are exported from all over the planet  by the container-shipload today. This particular piano was made by Morton Bros & Co or, at any rate, that’s the name on the cast iron bar screwed across the top of the three quarter frame. The frame itself might have been made in Germany - the British piano industry was already on the skids by the early 20^th century and importing a lot of its parts.

This piano ended up in in a house at the bottom of our street quite a few years ago. By this point, it was already rather battered and the soft pedal (which simply clamped a moth-eaten strip of felt across the harp) hardly made any difference. It gradually moved from house to house as different generations of children tried the piano and either gave up or graduated to a ‘proper’ instrument. That is, one where you could tell the difference when the sustain pedal was held down and which had the now standard 88 keys (as opposed to 85). Eventually, the son of the family down the street passed his grade five and they decided they needed to invest in a proper instrument. They offered it to anyone who could take it away over the street WhatsApp. Our daughter was keen on moving from flute to keyboard so we went down to have a look.

All the keys worked, thanks to the enthusiasm of the mother who’d repaired broken hammers by hand and tried to tune it herself. It felt like a good starter piano to see if our own 11yo would want to take it seriously or not. The previous owner’s (or caregiver’s) two sons helped us wrestle our ‘new’ instrument down the street and it took up occupancy against the only non-party wall available.

I had, secretly, always had my eye on that space as a nice spot for a piano, if we ever managed to afford one. Inside, I was triumphant. We were a family with a piano! This psychology (or the psychopathology) behind that is a subject for another day.

We levered a rug underneath it to damp down the sound a little and I went off to look for a teacher.

It was (going back through old photos) March 9, 2019. The world had no idea what was coming.

I asked around and found a piano teacher through a friend who’d worked as a sound engineer. The tuner showed up on a bicycle. I still have no real idea exactly how good he was but he played some lovely blues and pronounced (perhaps tactfully) that our new family member had ”a lot of soul”. We still use him - pianos are never really in tune but every time he visits, the piano somehow sounds a little more celestial for a few weeks.

11yo wanted a teacher. I rang a few, including a woman who’d only take students in person at her house. She mostly taught adults and teens - at 11, our daughter sounded a little young for her style of teaching, especially if she was a beginner. She didn’t sound a good fit for our daughter but I suddenly thought, “Hey - I could take lessons.”

So I did. I’m still with the same teacher 5 years on.

Meanwhile, 11y went through a number of teachers and ups and downs in enthusiasm. Covid happened. I started to get serious and wondered about exams. My own teacher began to hint more and more heavily that my own playing really needed a better instrument. Apparently, the shortcomings of our hand-me-down were clearly audible even over Zoom. During the second lockdown, my wife began to talk more seriously about a dog. We struck a bargain. If she got a dog, I could upgrade the piano (provided I got a raise).

She got a dog. I got a raise and, in due course, acquired a respectable Kemble from the early seventies in beautiful condition.

This left us wondering what to do with the old piano. It had, remember, a lot of soul. I’d spent more time communing with it over the previous couple of years than most of my friends and family. We literally live at the end of our street. There were no more families left to inherit an increasingly erratic ‘starter instrument’. But I couldn’t help thinking I owed this battered old warhorse a debt and paying someone to take it away to whatever the piano equivalent of a knacker’s yard might be felt wrong. So we moved it into the garden. One morning I quietly went out with an incense stick and thanked it and set its little piano spirit free. I committed it to the care of that same larger spirit that looks after the hamsters and cats we’ve loved and lost. And there it has stayed, in our back yard, covered in plants and pots and gradually returning to its component elements, though its bodily remains will most likely outlast our own. It was a good piano. It served hundreds of people and and this is where its story ends.

Because all good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.

So I suppose the truth of whether things, like pianos, have souls is largely irrelevant. What mattered was the choice I made to act as if it did. I could write a long, pious moral at this point but I hate stories with morals.