Late at night I’m listening to music. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. I’m not searching authors and literary awards. I’m not thinking about how to approach my next story—what story should be told, what it means to me, why it matters.
I’m listening to music. The oldest of the music that changed me forever, made me want to cling for dear life to whatever I knew, whatever I had at the time to understand why the life I live would mean something to myself and others who would share my oxygen.
I went two years without listening to music. The sound of it, the sound—sound—hurt too much. That thing that I had learned for decades how to channel. Sound being more than what ears hear, but what minds crave. When my mind, because of music, escaped me, sound began to destroy me. Not music, but sound all by itself begging to be organized into something that could speak.
And now that I write, sound is all I can form into sentences. Words have started to escape me yet hold me hostage. I wanted words to free me and now all I can write is harmony. What does it sound like, is all I can ask when I write a sentence. What does it sound like?
I remember when sound eviscerated me, scraped my insides down to only blood vessels, no organs to pump my blood. Sound made me weak—more than weak: skeletal. I was defeated, humiliated, dehumanized by what I had for years waged war against and conquered.
Now—right now—and also the now of so many nights past, I yearn, sacrifice on the altar for my ability to hear the words that form in my skeletal psyche. I gain all control then lose it over and over again when a sound sizzles and steams above my consciousness. It doesn’t need me anymore; it waits for me to come to it, slows down for me to catch it, reach for it, slam it down under my palms and stomp it under my feet.
And I do. I do trample it. I shatter it into shards reflecting slices of myself sharp on every edge, prickling my skin at the touch of them with barely visible sprinkles of blood where the callouses on my hands once formed.
Words are for speaking. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Late at night, I want to sit still. I want to listen.
I hardly spoke to him the last year. When the news came, I scrambled through my messages to find out the last time we had spoke, the last words he had said to me.
“I’m never going to stop hounding you to talk to me. I know sometimes I say the inappropriate but I’m a writer. I do hope that I haven’t distanced you with words. I love you so much it makes me cry. You have helped me get through personal anguish…and are my best friend.”
When I read it out loud the weekend he went further, my voice cracked, then shook; the tears rolled out of my mouth. The first time I read it, I squinted my eyes and slightly lifted the right corner of my top lip. The second time, this time, I choked, tripped over my panic, and fell.
He had emotions never repressed enough to go unnoticed and never small enough to be forgotten after they had passed. Whether filled with love and affection or bitter cruelty, they were all of the same grotesque nature that frightened me. I’d hold my breath until I could tiptoe away as delicately and quietly as possible, then go months without talking to him.
I didn’t respond that time. I didn’t talk to him for four months and would have kept not talking to him, but he died. He killed himself, slowly, drinking alcohol. He had chances. He’d been to the hospital a few times to be patched together, his booboos kissed and patted gently before getting all the information needed about his dying body in order to live. He’d always stop drinking and try his hand at living, but eventually he’d start trying to die again.
I spent the last year of his death hiding from what killed him: those God-Forsaking Emotions. I cried harder because I understood him too well; the lost music, the bruised writing, the un-beautiful drawing and always the disasters. Our lives were just so disastrous. I had had my own binges while visiting him, cocaine and peyote in the night, alcohol and marijuana throughout the day, cigarettes at all times. He only watched, only sipping alcohol throughout, but I wouldn’t (not couldn’t) notice that he only drank alcohol, all day, all night, even when I had come off a binge and was laying low.
The same thing killing him was killing me, too.
“Yeah I just spent two days doing research on bipolar and I have all the characteristics. You’re brilliant. Now I’m well again.”
Nothing I said before or after, but that’s how he’d write direct messages, like he’s in the middle of a very detailed conversation. Two months after researching what was killing him, he died. I knew it was killing him for years when I figured it out for myself–when I saw how alone I really was, looking at myself like I was watching a TV show–but only told him six months before. Remorse for not responding much, regret for not visiting more, but guilt for not telling him what mattered. He should have known, but I didn’t tell him. In the end, he helped me live and I had helped him die.
Shon always took the time to tell me that my life was worth living and needed to be lived as if he had it scheduled on his calendar. When words; music; life decided me repugnant, an email would appear in my inbox with a paragraph of nonsense, a noise clanging, mp3 file, or just three words. You are brilliant or You are beautiful or, and mostly, I love you.
“Sometimes you have to collect. Follow the sun and moon. Put your ear to the ground, taste the wind, play in the dirt, bathe in the ocean, scream loud onto the universe, Look at Saturn and watch the rings. Then write!”
Shon told me that he wrote everyday which is why he wrote a lot of crap. He didn’t mind producing thirty-eight hideous stories just to arrive at the one. He didn’t agonize over every word he wrote: words didn’t enslave him the way they demean me. It’s not all to his credit; words have meaning, and Shon didn’t always take that seriously, if at all. It’s why he could be completely wrong, hateful, hurtful, vulnerable, exposed, sordid, stuck, or even trapped. He sometimes was caught off guard by how much his words gave him away because he didn’t seize the meaning before he let them go.
He had to apologize a lot. But he always did; he always knew how. It came so easily to him that it made me think it was possible to apologize at any moment that an apology proved necessary. I always sort of thought apologies were like money: valuable, secretive, improper to talk about in public, tucked away in savings and stored away for the future, always the future. Used improperly, an apology would be openly vaunted, thrown around needlessly, carelessly, used always for the present moment to satisfy momentary desires–that’s how often Shon apologized to me. He always meant them. They were scrupulously sincere. I hated that he never gave me a chance to be unforgiving.
He allowed himself the freedom to write the same way he banged on the piano. He could smash words together, pile them up just to topple them over, color them with paint or splash them in mud, even smear them in his own blood if he needed them to cry out in agony. Shon enslaved words and tortured them into generational submission. Almost every single thing he sent me I couldn’t read or didn’t know how to read and would stop trying because it hurt my head and sometimes my feet, but when he, or the words, or both, were finally ready, he’d send me a masterpiece that would smother me in illustrations so vivid, story lines so thick, characters so alive and miraculous that I’d either drown in self-loathing for my utter incapability to write the way he could or I’d fly above hope, above talent, above reason with a soaring belief that I can write, too, simply by gripping Shon’s authority.
His work, whether luminous or despairing, inflicted a grotesque burning of the emotions, searing the flesh. And so was his presence, which is why I almost always struggled to be around him even while relishing his asymmetry.
Shon was apprehensive. Not of the bad, but of the good. If he were here in the void of 2020, vindication would be his. It was the joy, the present, the everlasting-ness of love that he didn’t fight for and wouldn’t take the time to see, to understand that the good wasn’t settled in goodness, but in the trying.
The trying part of his life was playing his creature; his guitar. Shon, the most miserably enthusiastic person I oftentimes wished I’d never grown so close to, had an improvising mind that metamorphosed his guitar, splitting the seven strings he had on that creature he called a guitar into two dozen more. It grew legs every time he touched it. Sometimes it breathed fire.
It was the only trying part of his life that could have kept him alive if he just played it without thinking he ever needed anybody else to do it. All those musicians who were never worthy of him helped kill Shon, too. He never should have started needing them.
And that’s how he always talked to me. Like he needed me, like he couldn’t create without me. It was never true, but he made it true. He forced it into truthfulness.
He must have told me he loves me more than anyone ever has–and taught me how to say it, too
I write the forced truth now because Shon would hate me all the way down deep in the pitch darkness and rotting flesh of his grave if I didn’t. He wrote his own eulogy and told me to read it at his funeral. The last sentences of the eulogy: “He is not resting in peace because that would be a huge tragedy; so don’t wish him a peaceful rest. That pisses him off.”
Since Shon already wrote his own closing, I don’t need to close for him:
“He is not gone, he has just gone further, and that takes balls…He chose the loneliest path because he followed his heart, perhaps into immanent doom, but knowingly. When the final day came there was no sense of human understanding. He knew it. It challenged him through vivid imagination and plagued him all of his life….So he decided to die. Yesterday never ended for him. There always was that sort of contrast of now against memory and that is what took away his tomorrow. Yes, we cannot, and will not live in the past, but there are dreams of a war that could’ve been fought a little harder. Instead of sleeping with defeat, struggling with the now, and all of time, he decided to belong to nothing.”
Pianissimo. Relax. It must be barely audible, but fully heard. My body wants to be invisible and yet I’m seen. My fingers and wrists are doing their best, trying to make me disappear, but each hiccup rips my invisibility cloak open. Four hours I spend, five, six because it isn’t smooth yet. The tension in my hands won’t release—the tension in my mind clings to each rough burst of mezzo-forte in a snare drum roll that should be smoother than silk, thinner than cotton candy, less audible to the human ear than a dog whistle. My arms grow heavier by the millisecond, my mind tightens like it’s testing my blood pressure, constricting the steady flow of a drum roll that should sound as though it never began or will ever end. Hour seven approaches as I realize I have been holding my breath for the last six. No wonder I’m feeling light-headed. The drum roll of anticipation that should have preceded a great announcement has flattened the arrival of any triumph. My hands hurt, the joints in my fingers have to be forced open, slowly, through pain, and then cracked to straighten completely. Hour eight and I’ve stopped, but the tension saturates my psyche.
When I try to consider rhythm merely as timing, I always fail. I fall into the gaps of space I didn’t know were there–or maybe I knew, but didn’t gauge how big they were, or are, or will be (because time is in all space, even if it isn’t always real). But if I knew twenty years ago when I was learning my first five-stroke roll that space and time are important for relationship more than for rhythm, I wouldn’t have played percussion. I would have focused on drawing or sports or writing or nothing at all because my mind, the complexity of my mind and my relationship to it has changed too much to tune to those pitches of an unchanging relationship.
The intersections of time and space: accepting a job offer and committing to spend half of every day in one place, time shooting forward without hardly any movement. Getting married and committing all the time left in my life along with all the space I will ever have. Picking a major at college, unaware that some, most, or all of the time that is to come is being chosen for me before I’ve even conceptualized what space(s) I occupy in the world.
When it comes to rhythm, there’s something about dividing time and seeing its division in space. Sometimes I physically see it in the space around me and other times I feel it in the space I’m physically in, which makes it different depending on where I am. Bigger rooms create more complex divisions of time where I can imagine the space between or in rhythms; smaller rooms allow more precise divisions of time where I must repress space to avoid the conflict of needing or using more space than is available. The more space available for time to divide itself and travel audibly, the harder it is to hear, but the more interesting it becomes to see.
The speed of light is a measurement of how much time it takes to travel a distance. The speed of light never changes no matter what mechanism is used to shoot the light. A laser beam won’t shoot light any faster than a car headlight. The only thing that can change are the measurements of distance (how big the room is) and the time (how big the spaces are between each rhythm), but the relationship between space and time won’t doesn’t change. If I move slowly through space, playing so slow that that the silence between each note hurts, more time passes. But if I speed through rhythms–leaving no space between notes, hardly any time passes.
Movies make it seem like it’s really cool when musicians can see what they’re playing, when notes are certain colors, when sounds are certain feelings. When it first started happening my first year in college, it just hurt. It began to keep me up at night, every. single. night. until 5 and 6 in the morning and the only way I knew how to cope was to practice, non-stop, sometimes 10 hours at a time in the exact same space. 10 hours in the same room. Stuck. Then it started clouding my thoughts and taking over my ability to think. I could read music, listen to sentences, and watch a conductor with all the learned knowledge I needed, but then I’d fall in the gaps of space between notes, between words, between beats. That’s when I started losing time, when I’d wake up wondering not what happened yesterday, but why the week skipped yesterday, not understanding why it’s Thursday today when yesterday was Tuesday. Or when a friend from college recounts a prominent event that I have no recollection of, or what happened between ages 19 and 24, 24 and 26, 26 and 31. But most times, it’s just me counting to a certain measure, watching the conductor bring me to that measure, spacing each beat and preparing to play, then not knowing why the very moment I was to play disappeared from the music. The moment disappears and then moments later I just…wake back up…and I’m standing there on stage looking around…and the conductor is still going…and the musicians are still playing…and I just ask over and over, “where did everyone go? how did they get back here? am I still here?”
A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it
Time and space cross, overlap, join together with chemical bonds in an electromagnetic field, and then vanish. I don’t know when I left the stage, how I got back on it, or where the time in the music went. Every concert. Every public performance. No nerves or anxiety about stepping on stage, no self-doubt about how well I’ll play–just black holes, one after the other. It’s why parts of me dissolved and dissolve when I play the drums. Is this the part of Einstein’s theory of relativity that they forgot to teach me at the conservatory?
While stepping off the stage, I could only feel disappointment. That note–that one very loud and very wrong note right at the top of the pyramid–robbing me of all performance pleasure, ensuring that I hear no praise of admiration, no smiles and nods of approval, paralyzing my senses.
Then she rushes up to me with an unnecessary urgency (because I’m not really going anywhere) and exclaims how appropriately I have performed Bach, saying it was “just right,” how certain phrases were played “exactly as they were supposed to be played”.
“Thank you, thank you very much, thank you”, is all I can numbly repeat as she bombards my space with compliments that were only partly for me. All the while, I simply want to ask, “Who the hell is Bach?”
I don’t know who this man is. I never met him. I certainly don’t understand what I’ve heard about him. A lot of facts and dates that don’t amount to me talking with the man, seeing how he would hem and haw between thoughts or observing what would capture him in a long gaze. Something beautiful, perhaps? In its physicality? Or in its meaning? I wouldn’t know. Why, then, would I be able to play anything he composed the way it was supposed to be played…exactly…right?
My emotional interpretation of this music is overdone. Bach’s prowess for dismantling a chord progression, even just one scale, creates a mesmerizing, addicting irony. Seven notes that cannot be broken down are cracked into dozens of pieces, and then stacked into layers. The layers I unfold in performance aren’t symbiotic with Bach, nor symbolic of him, which makes it personal for me. She didn’t see me though.
I am weary of our idolization of artists, the divinity that we imbue on those who capture emotional expression and spectacularly funnel it through an artistic medium. We’re given an opportunity to experience a moment in time, complete with the emotional, mental, and physical implications of the world in which it was created, through the lens of the body that created it. Then we liken that creation to the artist and declare him creator. Not artist–but creator. Bach didn’t create the sounds that are organized into music, the human mechanisms that allow us to hear it in a myriad of ways, the scales, instruments, or even the wood that is used to make the instruments.
And so she credits Bach with the creation of my performance, of my emotive interpretation, of my climax and denouement, of me.
Bach established the schema, yes, but not the pyramid.
I tend to find music distracting. Thought processes break as particular phrases or chord changes emerge more interesting than my current train of thought or that of someone else. While music can be largely considered therapeutic, empowering, emotionally stabilizing and comforting, the last 7 years have proved otherwise for me. So imagine my surprise when listening to Mahler, Saint-Saens, and Ravel brought me to feelings/states of grandiosity, elation, and dream-like precociousness.
Thinking leads to the emotions. Then the emotions shut me down. But once aware of thoughts, I can discard them. The only factor in throwing them away is how strong I am (or feel) when they arrive. On a good day, the memories are abandoned after they get out the taxi, before their luggage can hit the floor. And on my best days, they can’t even find the house. Listening not wrought with thought liberates my interaction with music.
But do I really want to be a thoughtless musician? Or a musician who is in fear of feeling the emotion that music provokes?
I remember one of the first few times I stopped thinking. Performing the tune You Don’t Know What Love Is with my first boyfriend sitting in one of the front rows of the concert hall. As the featured soloist for a group that included a beautiful, soulful player who my boyfriend compared me to: “She played with emotion,” he said. “Why can’t you?”
Almost through tear-filled eyes, I played without registering what my chord progressions were. Not so much because of the comparison, although I admit to sinking into sadness because of it, but because of the intensely prominent realization of not knowing what love is and persisting in a relationship that reminded me of this every day.
This is when music started to scare me. When music became penetrative to a dangerous core of me that had not yet been diagnosed.
Some music is a dream, where I’m safer listening. So I hear familiar percussion excerpts and before I am consciously aware of doing so, I’m thinking about taking auditions and how to prepare excerpts out of the mere elation that the music creates within me. And those thoughts leave me vulnerable, elation contorting to deflation as something (or is it someone?) reminds me that I never could play orchestral excerpts very well; “why on earth would you be able to do it now?”
In seconds, I’m tempted to turn the music off along with its gone pleasure.
Then something (or is it someone?) turns off the descension. A consciousness stands up to say, “You’re letting past memories kill the joy of this musical dream,” and then sits back down.
1:50 pm Friday, April 15th, 2016
So the dream continues. The pleasure resurfaces. But I know in the back of my mind that it can’t all stay a dream for too much longer.
“…the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their [sound] waves.”
When the volume is high, I both hear everything and hear nothing. All noise, but no sound. The sound noise waves fill my ears and I am confronted with my worst of enemies; the enemy who wishes me dead and lifeless. Afraid and cold. Lonely and afraid.
“I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.” Deserted and abandoned.
I hear it. Like I hear melodies and harmonies. And people ask me, “why do you only play songs of melancholy?” So I speed the tempo, lifting the beat, and major chords reverberate in the room, but not in my ears…not in my head.
Long gone are the comments of “just smile. You use more muscles frowning than to smile.” Or even better: “being happy is a choice. You have to choose to be happy.”
“Choice?” My mind asks. “Is that what they said? It’s too loud in here. I can’t hear.”
“Yes,” is my reply. “They said choice. It’s your choice.”
and we both smile. Then the volume goes up.
The truth is that sometimes we get along, my mind and I. As I press forward in the thick mud, feeling the weariness of my thigh muscles and sometimes stepping out barefoot when my shoes get stuck, it’s my mind that urges me to “keep trying, keep moving, don’t give up. You’ll be able to rest soon. I promise.”
“you promise? I know that’s a promise you can’t keep.”
“I know,” it replies with a little edginess, “but can I hope? Can we hope?”
And then there are times when I carry the weight. Spirit. That spirit that isn’t in my mind, or even in my body: He who “on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty [sound] waves of the sea.” Mightier than the noise: unorganized sound form melodies and harmonies without any effort from me. The times when I go to work, greet people, go to the gym, read, write, clean, cook, bathe, and exist without my mind. Those blog posts you read that are scattered, those classes I teach that are jumbled, those conversations you have with me that are dull, those gym workouts that did not challenge my body, those books I read that I don’t remember. My mind was present, but working against me. So I couldn’t take it out. I bring my mind along though–sometimes dragging it behind me–because to lose it completely would be worse. And sometimes I’m kind. I’ll pack it up in a nice basket with a soft pillow and let it cling to my teddy bear throughout the day.
Oh, how we would all love to depend on our minds! The beauty therein! The complexity and depth! The nuances and shades, personality and growth!
But….
what happens when it doesn’t identify you? When it doesn’t say, “Hi. I’m Donna.” What happens when memories reduce your world to the five minutes before and five minutes after? Or when there are no minutes at all?
Perhaps the most grueling task to date: not just the emergence of thoughts, but the recognition, observance, and immersion in them. Playing music can be both fantastical and soul crushing.
But not at the same time.
The elevation draws you into the fantasy–a high, so to speak, before sending you soaring far down into the dismal pit of reality. The achievement comes from experiencing shifts, being disappointed by it, then going to face it again.
Maybe this is all too vague. Let me just be straight.
I’m practicing again. Hoorah is in order. But now I have to face what I have been able to separately, but (somewhat) safely co-exist with: myself. My childhood is so tightly intertwined with my musical upbringing that practicing and playing music is no longer simple or therapeutic. So as I turn my attention to music, my mind loses focus.
One moment is hopefully forward, the next, desperately dreary. And my mind likes it that way. Since eighth grade, I’d spend 5 or more hours each day focused on the musical trajectory…of music. Not myself. Why take any attention away from the only thing that mattered?
Today I pay for it as my own mind suffocates me with my own thoughts, angry that it never got the time to develop nor the effort to be realized, and demanding that it be paid attention. I concede because, really, what options do I have? As it has proven that I cannot survive without it, I delicately step back when it roars, waiting patiently until it has had its time to prowl. I’ve learned not to cower in fear, but most times, while I look it squarely in the eye with broad shoulders, I internally feel like prey.
Only in the practice room am I so exposed. Vulnerable. Weak. I won’t get stronger until I face it.
Look: Evolve 