The Rationality of Music
I grew up thinking music wasn't all that important in my family.
It wasn't pervasive like the argumentative silence-- the constant grudge that was held against communication and creativity in general. But I was wrong. Impressions leave a mark, and they are only half-truths, empty indentations, before the long paragraph that would follow as explanation.
Music was part of our myth, after all; the Polyphemus, kneeling, before sound.
I grew up believing I wasn't musical, and competitive as is my nature, I was determined to make up for that deficit. I asked Mother for a flute one year. The year before they would have selected openings for Band. I was eight.
Flute, sax, clarinet, trumpet, or drums. Those were the options for tutoring.
"Ask your grandfather," was the monotone answer behind the magazine, after a long sip of homemade latte. Mother liked a little coffee with her heavy cream, between the lazy trailings of her red tipped dragon companion. Newports.
Her father, Bruno, with deference, was one step from church and God Almighty--
he was Bank.
Promptly, my grandparents returned from a trip to Europe with a lovely hand carved wooden recorder. (Flute, sax, clarinet, trumpet or drums, remember? unless trying out for string orchestra.) Sigh. I was disappointed. I had no natural ear; otherwise maybe I'd be already mimicking bits of Mozart... with all humility, I knew I needed lessons.
Mother played the piano; and refused to teach us. The basics, to me and my sister. Finger positions, chords...
"I'm not good enough," she sighed pushing some junk mail from side to side.
I persisted.
I wanted a flute. For a very specific pragmatic reason.
It's odd the way things metaphorically distort mentally, in the eye. Stress. They say children lose their distance-vision as a defensive response--to things they fear to see or wish to shut out of their lives.
Listening intently to the inside.
I don't condemn them for it, philosophically. Our parents refused to get us glasses, though both my sister and I "clearly needed" them by mid-elementary years. The admonishment was that the crutch of lenses would make the myopic condition irreversible.
As might be imagined, it made school difficult-- not seeing the board, or math problems, or oncoming persons, or gym balls, etc., etcetera.
I strategized that a flute would secure the comfortable "convincing" distance I'd need to actually see the music sheets, and discretely learn the notes, in sound and name, and the corresponding finger positionings... Music is dynamic like that...
The Bank, reconsidered.
And gave me a beautiful, old, imported Stradivarius.
It was gorgeous. Red carved and lacquered wood with requisite horsehair bow and an amber block of intoxicating pine-scented rosin. They immediately encouraged me to take it out of its ornate case and hold it, under the chin proper, with arms extended... my nine-year-old heart breaking at every silent punctuation of the natural dimensions required.
No, I could not see the music sheet to save my life.
Not only did I have no natural talent to "play by ear," but now with musical notation in front of my face, I was a certified idiot.
I was just awful. Mrs. Bobiak all but said so.
I practiced of course, at home, at odd angles, to memorize the songs so as not to mortify myself, in front of peers, but time and time again, if asked to start at some arbitrary point (on paper) I was at a loss... f*k if I knew what note was what where, and somehow Mrs. Bobiak never grasped that I could not see the sheet...
My sister, on our Father's insistence for fairness, was also given a Stradivarius, the subsequent year; to her bewilderment; and she took the thing with emotional distance. She never saw the issue. She was musical, and voice was her preferred instrument.
As for the violin, she seldom practiced.
To wrap this part of the torturous history, a brief stint in foster care, as well as court appointed healthcare, landed us both in unfashionable, but functional eyeglasses. My sister made rapid progress. Mrs. Bobiak said so and smiled politely at my continued ineptitude.
I continued to grow up believing my family really didn't care for music...
All the perquisites were there, but surrealistically misplaced.
Father, on his part, had recorded with a band of his own devising (...Ciche Mnichi, meaning The Silent Monks) in which he played Banjo. Our family house had a modest collection of unplayed vinyl with the standby labels and titles, Elvis, Roy, Aretha, Beatles, etc... here respectability shattered... the expensive stereo was as if permanently transfixed to a leaky corner of the living room, where water seeped from the cathedral ceiling and made it semi-operable... and upstairs in the library closet, audio cassettes number in the 100's including four sometimes five copies of identical albums... maniacally... still sealed in cellophane, and those hard plastic wrap around handles designed to prevent theft....
And the greatest treasures, of lyric and instrumentals, were bootleg. Wojtek Mlynarski. Maciej Zembaty, Edith Piaf, Leonard Cohen, among others. And some that got transferred over, and over to fresh blanks... Like ABBA and 100 of the World's Most Beautiful Melodies...
As it turned out, Father cared so much for music that he would rather play it in his memory, than suffer a washed-out reality over poor equipment or disintegrated copy. He told me, when he could not suffer another note by Aula Babdul (*on poor mix tape containing the otherwise esteemed Paula Abdul).
Which explains, in part, why music was listened to primarily in the car...
It was Mother who surprised me most, years later... when she met my husband, music fanatic Bunny Villaire, and it turned out they spoke as if the same language, like veritable encyclopedias, referencing fairly obscure gems of music recording...
Mother even voiced the title on his mind an hour before our wedding as he searched his files for just tune as I descended the stairs...
"...play the Power of Love," she suggest. "Perfect," he answered, setting the needle.
I understand now that love of music is kept locked, close to the heart, and emerges at times, spiritually like Gospel or Jazz, improv.
And it is beautiful to take part in Song, whatever the genre; and its counterpart.
The track that comes to mind, as haunting my music experience:
https://youtu.be/qYS0EeaAUMw?si=Yn0rNy6gHhh_JQHR
To Hold a Candle
Can I begin to convey adequately the significance of the lit candle in the dimensions of imagination if you cannot already relate, in some way, to what it means to take heart from a struck match...?
I'll sit us there, if you're willing, for a moment.
It's a bright incandescent rhombus, a square turned-- perfect. A diamond. That is the surface of the lighted table. It floats in an otherwise seemingly borderless space. It might be said to be literature unmade, a meandering mess, reaching for oxygen. The way a book is closed, and the cover glares.
A darkness on so many levels. Lit.
We seldom eat here, though there is a freezer-fridge. It functions entirely as a closet, unplugged. We keep our cash in a pickle jar on the center wire rack. It is the kitchen in name still, and the wood table itself is like a plain slice of bread. Lightly warm toast. It's spread with books, and papers, and dotted with the Holy Bible in the center, and anchored by a pair of brass candlesticks.
We're dressed like we're going out.
I mean in padded pants and jackets. Hood, hats, layers on layers, and the kind of gloves "real artists" wear-- with no fingers. We cut them off ourselves in frustration, then splurged, and bought a couple of $4 pairs pre-made. Whether we're slowly sipping the second pressing of a shared teabag, or reading aloud in a near whisper, or silently writing and sketching some quixotic idea, the thing that keeps us glued and heartened, is the tiny glow of the eyes of two candles.
The poverty of less would demoralize.
Of course we can share, one. But two represents us better, each burning at the wick, at astonishingly even tempo. It is a kind of understated miracle the way household emergency grade wax melts at a fairly predictable rate. We know we have about two hours. I speculate that it's the extra chill of our surroundings that keeps these candles hardened.
Each should only last an hour-- according to the package.
मलम्
The World as Word.
I look at the word.
Stoicism.
Stoa, the Greek root. It reminds me of extensions, in various languages, even code, where the stoi makes hidden figures...
I understand the etymology stems from the "hall" where orators stood or sat, and contemplated aloud after sitting long; in silence, looking in.
Stoic reminds me of stołek [St'Oh'EK] and stoł [St'ew] meaning footstool, and table, respectively, as translated in Polish and in other slight variants of Slovik languages.
That seat, and table, kitchen and workbench like, remind me of Sanskrit texts, heavy with the notion of action in inaction. It has in my interpretation much to do with living through consequences, without actually enacting them. Painting a moving picture with the most dynamic, sophisticated, and time sensitive media, of the mind: while sitting, and doing nothing.
https://youtu.be/FDmPcSWE0WU?si=FRLhlzqyVV9hg8Vw
It reminds, how we carry so much more, inside, than our hands ever will and that through mental exercise muscles in our arms and legs are somehow fortified to endure what, little, by comparison, is allotted... knowing it could be so much heavier, for us, and, or, for others.
Stoicism is perhaps the natural disposition of thinking man. It is why it is felt as tao, a way of life much like Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are neither philosophy, nor religion, yet nevertheless there is the element of Faith.
I can't help but wonder whether those who succumb to "art" of any sort, are in a way rent stoics, having been unable to hold their internal load, pouring it out instead, in visual, auditory or kinesthetic form. I can't write failed, though that is the term that comes to mind. I write rend, in past tense, as a borrowing of life from Life.
Seeing how the World is ever in that precarious balance of making and unmaking.
The hallmark of the Stoic is to seldom talk, and when silence is broken, the thoughts are drawn from a reservoir of contemplation, a wealth of deep passion and internal suffering. The holy indifference, that whatever is, is as if one step removed from us. The little that is said, emerges like a boa, from the knot in the tree, internally... Slides around the shoulders like a warm muffler, curling about the throat, with tacit acknowledgement that any false movement may result in fatal constriction....
So, it is best perhaps, to sit, still, remembering we will slip from the manacle, soon enough, from one unknown, to another.
We don’t Know.
That is the most honest thing to say.
I made a pact with someone passed, that whichever of us should go first, we would show a sign, if there were some means of communicating from the other side. When the fatal moment arrived, I thought surely, I would be haunted to the end of my life.
Contrawise. Though, I had this strange sensation of absorbing the passing spirit that night--waking in a baptismal kind of sweat through every pore of my body.
The cut, since then, has been as if final. God knows I am all too adept at making shit up. What do we call it? --"self-gaslighting"---?!
No such thing. Perhaps I have failed to see. Maybe the timing is not right, for a sign. Maybe that Individual consciousness is still alive and knows that it would harm more than comfort, if sighted.
Or maybe, the door is barred. Or there really is, Nothing at all...
We just don't know.
The Death of a Content Creator
We met in 2019, a summer excursion.
I admit I was on the outset reluctant to go. Though, interested and supportive, on subcutaneous, surfacing, level I sensed instinctively that it would be hard. Emotional.
(Ericc Tascott, April 20, 1952 - March 13, 2024)
My husband had told me about him, with great fervor and esteem; how much he had learned from the man, and how he valued living and apprenticing together, creating and selling painted sculptures. Tasting the bohemian artist life, as it were, feeling Ericc had opened a door to a possible life he didn't believe could be made real-- to live solely off of one's artwork.
It's difficult, near impossible, to write on, without giving the impression of arrogance, presumption. To know. And yet...
The foundation, cracking, the traces of art before the stoop, the circle of familiar cats, the apologetic disarray on entry--- The scent of death is not new.
It's in the smell of glue, and paint, and varnish; in the finished and unfinished wood and clay; in the very pulp of paper, once dampened and now dried. It's not a sometimes thing; occasional; or project based. I'd been to other studios. I've lived one. It's a very visceral thing, sensitive, beyond object curiosity. It permeates everything. And I maintain that the working artist knows the lingering smell of Death.
To the art appreciator, those paintings, photos, sculptures, and other tangibles, take on a Life on closure. To the maker, it is as if one more nail in the coffin, one more boulder to the tomb, set loose. The things we make that bury us, in the byproducts of creative thinking-- it's the knowledge that death can creep in at any moment for the Content Creator, the instant he or she losses that momentum of expulsion. Loses out to depression or physical ailment, because in a twist of logic, that unburdening of "dead weight" is a Life affirming process, and when no longer making that "refuse," the Artist is already dying inside.
Going in, I knew he was no longer creating. Parkinson's, my husband told me. I understood the particulars of what that illness entailed, the debilitating involuntary tremors. My grandmother had suffered it. Her handwritten letters to her elder son almost illegible in final years, yet still she wrote, by necessity, unfailingly remarking on her scrawl (przypraszam za bazgroly) until she absolutely could not intelligibly hold thought nor pencil.
...the Dualling of life and death, is ever present, as a question unspoken: How are you ... Doing? I shook his hand. Not an ordinary shake, firm. Held. Our eyes locked, depth, and a cemented understanding: One of us.
Maybe numbers people (accountants, lawyers, bankers, etcetera) have the same sensation of Recognition. I'm sure poets and musicians do. The connection was strong. Painter to painter. He couldn't know, but it's as if we did. Whatever was wired in that handshake went through a lifeline, telepathically. Deuce the details.
I turned aside and fought tears and pride.
He reminded me of my father. He was a father figure to my husband. He hadn't compromised-- in a life full of compromises. He had insisted on Living. The biology of the Artist being to Create content. And when he stopped creating, back in 2019 or prior, he was already dying. I had the foolish notion of understanding something of the phantom pain he was feeling, as the amputation of the archaic vestigial organ of creativity, while he showed us around; where he used to work; what he used to do...
The understanding being that the Death of a Content Creator can come at any moment. The content, meaning, what resides inside the person: the Next.
with or without receipt
when the Universe
declines
in kid gloves
stretching the skin
sacrificial
I think of Dana
and losing touch
the herd
thinned
the babies
dispersed
the land
so close
to being sold
a dance beat
Native
in space
else
where
it could be
man or woman
...who will judge
the stepping out
of Time
beside
a small town
ShopRite
jaws of register
a spoke poet
sound
hands molding
clay like candy
wordlessly
handling
the Flood
To Pin a Moth
It's going on 13 years since Gil passed away. He was our last connection to a past that wore itself for us like an invisible locket of childhood. Gil on one side, my big brother Jem on the other, lying right upon my heart. Atticus always said it's the unexpected that mortars men as kin, more than any blood. Guess that's the way we felt about Arthur Radley, too, our hidden friend "Boo," down the road. He was the kindred that came out from the shadow and saved Jem after the beating we took, costumed in the dark, stumbling home from that fateful Halloween school pageant.
Bob Ewell was an alcoholic, a physical and emotional abuser, but he wasn't an amnesiac. He'd no compunction taking his ails out on his daughter, or on our father Atticus, nor on us children-- bidding his time, as he had to, to divert suspicions. If it hadn't been for Boo overcoming a deep-set agoraphobia, Ewell would have broken bones in all three of us; me, Jem and Gil, and left us to bleed out. Revenge for the bad reputation that he'd brought upon himself, but which he'd blamed Atticus for, thinking he'd leverage social opinion and inferred racial superiority, to nurse what Atticus referred to academically as his "inferiority complex," meaning colloquially and more specifically, as perception of being "poor white trash." Like Gil said, an image Ewell had reinforced in himself, with loathing, and then berated his family with, as well.
I'd felt akin with Gil long before we'd taken those earliest vows, unofficially, with stolen kisses under the massive oak in his family's yard. Then some years after, we'd graduated and officially married, and had Alternia Radlee Finch Harris. So named, we agreed, to honor the memory of that summer that brought us all close together, him and me, and Jem; and our late housekeeper Calpurnia, and Atticus, may their souls rest in everlasting peace.
That summer turned to fall and drew us spiraling out of a dark- light ignorance and innocence, like the partitions of misunderstandings and misperceptions. I know that we were blind. We weren't blind in failing to see. We were blind in the glare of our own fears, projecting in flashes onto other people, and again by the fears reflected back onto us, from the eyes of equally fearful strangers. Trinkets of "knowledge" like that sparkle falsely and deceive us. We think we are learned, like when using big words, not quite fully cognizant of their meanings. Information becomes a collection, looked at, and not understood, not experienced. Something dead, even when living it, because we have labeled it, rather than identified with it.
Never did I suppose, since that time, that I would find myself caught up in that blaze again, and so isolated. Jem and his wife Angelica and their three children all moved to Canada years ago. We telephone a couple times a year, what with money being tight, and travel all the more prohibitive. We cherish the idea we'll one day have a small future family reunion. We'd thought maybe when Alternia has her children, though now that seems an eternity away. Maybe never.
Gil'd had a big heart, always. Too big, Alternia would say, in simplification, hugging the empty space in place of her father, when the doctor'd tried to explain the enlargement of the ventricles to her. He'd had a murmur from infancy, and it tore unexpectedly as he got older, a sudden gaping hole when he'd finished med school. Demonic twist of fates, he laughed, with a brave face. He said, "loving us was worth the pain," if loving us too much had caused the rupture in his aortic valves.
He'd held my hand so lightly from the hospital bed, weak and tender. "Don't go," whispered low when he wanted a word with Alternia. She was six, but old enough and wise enough to take things seriously, especially when he used that paternal voice. It reminded us immediately of me and Atticus, each of us precocious. How he knew then, I'll never discern, but something must have prompted Gil. He wanted me to hear. He said, "Altie, it is hard to be different; and impossible to be the same. Think of me in your trials. Have heart; and take care of your mother."
Maybe it's just the overlap of words, and definitions, that haunts me like in a crossword puzzle, and it was not at all prophetic. Just seems that way, in the blanks, now that Alternia is in juvey. She's seventeen. Eight more months and the rules would be different. They tell me the detention's for her own safety, for what she claims to have seen, not so much for the actual charges of possession and robbery, disputed. Nor for the assault she suffered, undisputedly. It pains me, for not having been more vigilant. It's as if a failing of my motherhood.
Maybe it was my fault for not leaving Maycomb. Maybe it would have been the right thing to do, by the family, to sell Atticus' house and leave behind the Ewell's and especially Mayella. Jem said the Ewell's had tainted the county for him and he was glad to get away--- to college out of state, and then out of the country altogether. Jem had talked a lot about Human Rights, and why he was following in Atticus's footsteps as counsel. He worked pro bono whenever he could, and we were all rightly proud. He'd never had much respect for Mayella, though. It was like he sensed she'd carried a sickness, latent, that which had progressed so detrimentally in her father. I confess I held it against Jem, a little, as though he had hardened his heart, unjustly, and I tried to keep mine open.
Psychologists claim that victims perpetrate, or perpetuate, their wrongs. Still, I thought it unfair to look down on her, her history being what it was. Bob Ewell, had long been a neglectful self-indulgent. It's hard to add the word "father." Mayella had been deprived of many things, foremost childhood, and parental love. I reckon I'd cheered for her silently when I'd heard she'd married Robert Farrow and that they'd had twins, a boy and a girl, and I'd lost track of them, in our own family plights. The little I knew from our catty neighbor was that after less than three years Rob'd left her, and that Mayella had picked up on some her father's habits, what with drinking and other rumored substance misuse, prescription as well as illegal. Maybe it'd always been like that, just better kept, behind curtains.
I had no idea of the depths of abuses. We hold "Mother" in such esteem. Reviled behaviors are incompatible with its definition. Men are as if always one step removed from the tie of paternity. Culpability is more easily placed, maybe on account of this doubt, for emotional or physical abuses, even sexual abuse. But how could a mother? ...a Mother.
Altie had been, with my repressed reservations, as well as charitable encouragements, friendly with the Farrow twins. She'd always been closer with Warren, than Cassidy, Cassidy being reticent in words and gestures, and quick to bow out of group activities. Our Altie'd no such reservations and wouldn't hesitate to drop in to visit Cass whenever she withdrew. It should have been a red flag, but it seemed an adolescent phase that Cass withdrew more, and more, and Alternia with her, pulling away from home.
It tugged at my heart that my girl was grown, and soon I'd be empty nesting, as they say. It did not occur to me that things were complicating, in ways that would subsequently implicate my baby.
She'd come back one night, not so long ago, and said something that stopped me in my retirement to bed with my books and chamomile tea.
"Wherever did you hear words like that, sweetie?" I asked her, biding some time to respond judiciously. My landed work as a real estate agent had prepared me for emotional data gathering, pitching and making a sale. I scanned her body language. I inferred she'd had a disagreement with her friends.
"um.. tonight... Warren said you were a 'butch-mom' when I left after our study group, Scout." Hanging his quote with clawed fingers. The teen's words meant most obviously to wound, instill doubts in the most vulnerable areas of stability, and pierce self-image.
She accepted my definitions and resource suggestions. I departed thinking of growing pains and could only wonder what was going through her mind. Again, I thought of Atticus always treating us as "reasonably thinking individuals."
When she came home a few nights after with a split lip, it was too late. Something had gotten out of hand, and it was spreading in the neighborhood by mouth. The stares, the whispers, the silence, the cold treatment, and the heated slurs. I suspected down deep, it was creeping up from the Ewell-Farrows. Our experience from the Bob Ewell/ Tom Robinson trial in our youth had prepared me to see it as an illness of humanity, nothing personal.
It was Cassidy who was in peril.
***
Author's Note: sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird" ... in which the main character Scout, now widowed mother of one teenaged daughter, finds herself in the trial of a lifetime to stop the incestuous abuses of a neighboring mentally unstable Mother (Mayella Ewell-Farrow) against her children (Warren and Cassidy Farrow), and the wrath that incurs from inherent social needs, sibling jealousies, parental emotional ties; and community outrage.
Thieving Angels
We tried for different.
We shot for stars,
and compared the
scarring of our arms
trying to help
in the business
of God.
We shined the platter
for head of duck
in our serving up,
and in the sheen,
I said Look!
It's us...!
We tried for different
Outcomes.
We shot for stars
And compared
The scarring on our arms
Trying to help
In the business
Of God.
We shined the platter
In our scheme to
Plate a steamy serving
Of roast duck,
But in the sheen of
The metallic plate
I thought I caught
An accidental glimpse
Of the divine,
Then quickly changed my
Wary mind and said
“Look!,
It's just one of us…
…That reflection looks
So much in line
With how you genuflect,
And bow your head
In reveration
When they tell you
What and when
We tried for different
Outcomes,
in belief.
We shot for starlights
And compared in vain
The scarring on our arms
Trying to help, by the way,
In the business
Of God, and us.
We shined the platter
In our scheme to
Divy a steamy serving
Of roasted apple
and duck,
But in the sheen of
The metallic plating
We thought we'd caught
An accidental glimpse
Of the divine, no...
Then quickly changed
Wary minds and said
“Look!,
It's not one of us…
…But the reflection looks
So very much in line
With the genuflect,
And bowing of the head
In veneration
When telling ourselves
What and when
to mistrust...
We aimed for different.
We shot for stars
in our eyes.
We stopped comparing
the divide
the masthead,
bowed over the platter
of God.
***
Mavia & Bunny Villaire
Inspiration piece: Dead Can Dance
https://youtu.be/OiNSfRqCF10?si=2lq2pCxNowZukqor