My unsung collaborator (“My private collaborator” Updated)

RESTING ON stands beside my writing table are two guitars, a regular-sized, steel-stringed acoustic and a smaller, nylon-stringed, acoustic-electric. A third guitar—”the baby,” “the junior,” “the little one,” as I lovingly call it—has been taken away for rehabilitation by my son, Paolo; being the smallest, it is the handiest, and it performs the most service—my baby is my most active collaborator.

Yes, the guitar is a collaborator, although not in the sense that it is in Paolo’s case: he sings with his guitar—professionally; I, on the other hand, write professionally and never, for all the uniqueness of the idea, to any guitar accompaniment. If writing and guitar come together at all in that sense, it does so—must do so—subliminally.

When a paragraph won’t go on my computer, I go to my baby or either of its fuller-fledged fellows, and after a short while the paragraph gets sorted out. I don’t know how it works, but it does work—it always does. That’s why I give my guitars more and more quality time—time that is theirs alone, with no paragraphs intruding.

As everyone else is presumed to do it, I sit down to write and remain seated writing. (I recall E. B. White’s imagined exchange with the formula-writing author Rudolf Flesch. “Why are you sitting down to write?” asks Flesch. “Because, sir,” replies White, “it is more comfortable than standing up.”) Anyway, for the rigors that writing demands professionally, I try to do it with every aid I can get—dictionaries of all sorts,grammar and usage texts, books on writing as well as writings on relevant disciplines, masterworks for both instruction and inspiration.

But on my guitar I don’t work things the way I work words,not, at any rate, with any professional discipline or purpose. For all its richly rewarding relationship to my writing, guitar is something I do by ear. I can’t read music and neither any representations of it(symbolic or alphabetical or numerical); and tablature, which takes each of your fingers (represented on the notation by dots) and sets it on the proper string and fret,takes away the excitement of self-discovery for me.

But don’t for a moment think I hold my guitar in less serious regard than it deserves. If (as, again, E. B. White, an absolute favorite of mine, says, quoting an unnamed “elderly practitioner”), “writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar,” guitar playing is to me nothing less. When I take my baby in my arms for time alone, all extraneous thoughts are banished, and that’s when I do real playing—purposeful, heartfelt, still by ear, but definitely as an act of faith.Is it any good? Never mind wondering, you’re extraneous yourself, a non-factor. It’s just me and my guitar.

I take a tune and put my guitar to it, the two of us more singing together than one accompanying the other, neither one second fiddle to the other. I do the tune my way, my guitar does it its way, singing along in a jazzy, bluesy dissonance—chords venturing close to the brink, to that point where they seem to teeter somewhat but don’t quite go over, where they sound audacious but still interesting. Me and my guitar—ours is a most exciting private affair.

Meanwhile, it’s my paragraphs’ turn to complain: On my guitar’s account, I’ve had a really late start on this piece.