Facts rattling around inside my head need stillness to grow into something useful. When I can’t run anymore, I’m forced to stop. Oddly, only then does that fleeting “knowledge” become part of me.
My piano professor once told me, “You have to learn all the notes, and then forget them.” She was talking about a particularly difficult passage (as in, many many little black notes in small print filling one beat of music) in what I believe was a work of Mendelssohn. (I practiced that passage, oh, I don’t know, a thousand times?) She was right. But I did not understand what she meant until I actually forgot. I turned away from that piece of music out of frustration. I didn’t play it for weeks. Then, one day, I sat down and played the piece with fluidity like I’d never known. That rush, that moment of pure freedom, pure joy, that clarity, came from no source I can pinpoint.
I’ve discovered that feeling with wine. Ninety-nine percent of the time I would say, “Don’t ever ask me to do a blind tasting and make any sense of it.” But there’s always that one percent chance, right? One day, having lunch by myself while anxiously reading papers from work, an acquaintance at the restaurant quietly offered me a glass of wine. Who was I to say no? I don’t normally (like, really, ever) drink anything alcoholic during the work day (it’s not good for my productivity — although, given the nature of this post, perhaps I should rethink that). But it was a kind offer. I took it. A red wine. I knew nothing about it. My only clues were that it was red and that it was wine. That narrows it down a bit, eh? Upon the first taste, I thought “zinfandel.” I was right. Now, for all you winos out there, this is nothing spectacular, but for me, it was a surprise. I correctly, blindly, identified the variety of grape. But being able to identify it as a zinfandel was something I never truly learned during my wine tasting class. Too much information, too much wine (if that’s possible), too many aromas and flavors. (Don’t get me wrong. I loved the class. I just felt overwhelmed. And I have probably forgotten more than I learned. Not my teacher’s fault — my mind is like a sieve.) Then I realized that I had (perhaps unwittingly) been learning about the nature of zinfandel simply by tasting so many different zinfandels, a “task” I undertook because, well, that was the wine I loved (craved?) at the moment. (Actually, my love of zinfandels has not diminished.) I learn more about a wine by experiencing it, over time. At that moment, I had put my wine class learnin’ away and simply tasted while I was doing something else of a much more pedantic nature. I forgot, and then I knew. What silly joy.
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