When I was leaking, and enveloped in brain fog, playing piano was both a reassurance and an exercise in implicit memory. Explicit memory is the kind of memory you use when you recall an anecdote, or remember an event that happened to you, or do anything that requires a conscious effort in retrieving information. Implicit memory is the kind of memory you use when you don’t have to think about anything at all: brushing your teeth, washing your face, tying your shoes. Implicit memory doesn’t require conscious, executive control. Implicit memory is what enabled me to walk to the store to run an errand; my CSF leak–induced problems with explicit memory were what prevented me from remembering what I was supposed to buy when I got there. Sitting at the piano and playing through old repertoire when I was leaking involved implicit memory, the muscle memory of years of practice from years before, and it was soothing to be able to play, to know that a part of me was still there, remembering things, able to do some things, even if my executive functioning brain was not explicit enough in its instructions to follow through on others. This new piano therapy I’ve devised is forcing the use of both implicit and explicit memory: the implicit muscle memory of having done these exercises, however haphazardly, at some point in my past studies; and the explicit memory of doing them now, remembering what I discover and learn as I go through the process of doing them now, and applying that knowledge moving forward, whether in the next moment or the next measure, or on the next page or the next day.
I begin to gradually increase my practice time, from ten or fifteen minutes to a full half hour, as my tolerance for sitting increases, and soon I begin to increase my musical scope as well, moving from technique exercises to scales and arpeggios, to the comfortable muscle memory of old repertoire. I find my music books from when I was in high school, and begin to read through pieces I learned when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I recognize my old teacher’s handwriting on the page, indicating tempo, cautioning about problem areas, underlining tricky passages. And more than that, I recognize memories, as I play through these pieces. Most practice sessions over the course of a musician’s life do not involve the kind of high-level focused concentration I’m attempting now—sure, there is focus, and sure, there is concentration, but when you’re practicing six to eight hours per day, it’s just not practical or even possible to be on high alert the entire time. I spent many hours in practice rooms thinking about breakfast while playing Brahms, or letting my mind wander as I meandered through some Mendelssohn, supplying my own off-topic narrative to his Songs Without Words. Playing through this old repertoire from high school—Debussy’s First Arabesque, Scarlatti sonatas, the third movement of the Beethoven Pathetique, which I learned one year for the annual Sonata Competition—I not only remembered the pieces themselves and how they felt in my fingers, I remembered the feeling of practicing them, in some cases, specific thoughts I had working on specific measures on a specific day at a specific moment in my practice time. It was as though in awakening those neural pathways, I gained access to memories that had been long buried there, and were now able to be uncovered, like the snow melting away after months of winter and revealing the sidewalk underneath, along with everything that had been there when the snow first fell. This happened as I moved on through my old repertoire, too: playing through one of the middle-years Beethoven sonatas I’d learned during my first year of music school, I remembered not only the slightly terrifying memory that had always stayed with me, of Mrs. Kim standing behind me in the third-floor practice room where we were, for some reason, having a lesson that day, and physically provoking me, prodding me, pushing my back, poking me with her strong fingers to startle me into a forte sound during an octave passage that was difficult for me to reach; but I also remembered the memory of practicing the page before that passage, and being able to hear the person in the practice room next door practicing the Chopin Fourth Ballade, and thinking about the way the light was coming in through the window to my right, and the way the trees were starting to regain their leaves again, and about how soon I would be able to take a break and knock on the door next door, and wondering if he could hear me as clearly as I could hear him, and whether or not my small hands would be ultimately too small for this piece, wondering whether in the end it would defeat me, but also wondering what I might have for lunch, and whether I might go over to his
