It’s raining in Syracuse, New York where I make my living teaching university courses about disability and the arts. Later today the rain will turn to snow. Of the grayness I’m fond of saying I’m a Finn and it can’t phase me. Yet these last few weeks have opened a portal and the grayness is seeping in. This is the gray stain where a portrait once hung; the lithic gray of the imagination trying to picture the future. Poetry is helpful. Mozart piano sonatas are good. I admire Mozart’s speed and cheer in the face of death which was everywhere in his world.
Speed and cheer.
Now you’re getting somewhere Kuusisto.
Cheer is a funny word. It comes to English via old French chiere which meant face. It’s a mask, a disguise, a pose. In a very real sense cheer is stoicism. The British stiff upper lip.
But if that was all there was to it cheer would be a social lie and of course it isn’t.
Cheer is motion. It is “going further” than wasting one’s time talking to sinister capitalists.
It’s knowing you’ll derive from this planet something something you needed to take with you on your way.
That is why Mozart’s piano fast or slow is so tender.
Planet of the Blind 