A Mind of Her Own

I'm finding it hard to sleep.  World catastrophes distort my thought processes; an impending hurricane, the threat of war... they impinge, loom like living shadows.  What is the worst outcome, I ask myself? Death? I have been surrounded by its aftermath; I learned its scent in my parents' bedroom, witnessing their denouement, marveling at the absence of comfort even a lifetime partner provided at the end.  He did not wait for her, nor did anyone honor her simple final requests.  

Suicide has become a devastating unintentional weapon.  When I was a teenager it seemed so innocent and near-poetic.  There was Sylvia Plath and Nick Drake... their deaths seemed to wind the threads of creativity into an organized narrative, with a kind of apotheosis at the end.  

The immigrants haunt my dreams somehow... trying helplessly to find a home in a hostile universe.  The tiny kindnesses of my week are so often offered by those who speak little English but understand the language of human need.  The mathematics of population are broken; there are so many here, and then so many more... where will they sleep, who will feed them? The Turkish fruit vendor who stuffs my bag with things... Happy, he says to me. Happy, as my eyes water. Crossing through Carver Houses on the way home last night, a pair of rats stumbled into the curb-- recently poisoned, they were panicky and deranged. A huddle of teenagers recorded their awkward dance moves on their phones, hysterical; a few of them threw rocks at them.  It was prime entertainment... and they were suffering.. God, what is wrong with me that I can't even bear the discomfort of sewer rats? That I take these things home with me like images burned on my head-screen? A kind of omen?

I woke up with lyrics on my tongue:  'She had a mind of her own and she used it well...' It took a senior minute for me to identify the Stones song which honestly I hadn't heard in years, but the message... kept on playing over and over.  According to my mother I never used it well, nor did I wear it well, in her fashion-critical opinion.  I believed in things... I believed in fate.  I waited for one of the myriad endings of one of my stories to unravel in realtime, with pen dipped in ink, poised-- waiting for the ordained, the handwriting, the lunar device... I rode the train and skipped his stop deliberately... 

Who of us is really using it well?  There are some... but the majority of slide-shows that scroll away-- they are re-runs, or remakes, or tributes... could we possibly have run out of ideas?  Film makers used to cut and cut to fit their dream onto a few reels of image; now there is infinite space and the content not quite as worthy.  I'm tired of biopics and contemporary versions of history and celebrity.  People used to look a certain way; they were iconic and unique.  There is make-up and dress-up and there are roles to play.. but there is also surgery and body shaping and face-contouring and it blurs the edges. The other night I realized I can scarcely tell the difference between Julia Roberts and Kira Sedgwick.  Doctor, my eyes? 

I'm not sure if it's a combination of chronic tinnitus and the subtle motors of technology, but I hear a sort of perpetual soundtrack-- a swelling and then a decrescendo... of music-- chords, harmony... some celestial sort of instrument.  I pick up a guitar and it doesn't synch.  It is either the sound of New York, or my own personal madness.  The inside of my head-- riddled with the kind of messages that undermined the confidence of that star gymnast in the Olympics... the emotional cancel-culture that afflicts the more sensitive among us.  

When we were young we overestimated our power.  I'm not sure if it was the era-- after all, we changed history with our demonstrations and music-- but we walked tightropes with confidence.  I used to obsessively watch my son's basketball games-- as though my presence could change their outcome.  We all do this-- we witness sports; we yell and root.  Recently I spent 5 hours watching a damn tennis game. Afterward I thought of this block of precious time, and I wondered at the end, lying on one's final bed, if one doesn't demand a refund.  

We do the best we can with the diminishing value of the contemporary, the desperate audiences searching while all around our structures are crumbling, our political world sways and we are threatened with daily horror.  I remember when love to me meant the patient impatience between lying-downs.  Then you have a baby and passion is whispered and things are spoken in beds... discovery and adventure are shelved and you find intimacy between sheets of a Memory Motel of your own invention.  Personally I miss not just the bedmates but the sounds-- the subtle music of foreign cities.  To write this into a song obsesses me, and I am failing.

For those of us with a mind of our own,  we cope with some unavoidable bitternesses; we fold our clothes and prepare our version of a coffin.  We assess the sad world-- count the suicides, the murders, the disappointments and failures-- pile them beside the things we have created... our children, our books and music... and we finally choose to believe, in a world where nothing is good enough, that we were just that. 

 

Going Home

The first time I went to London, I felt something.  Even venturing into the English countryside, there was a sense of recognition. For a time in the 1980's I moved there.  I married a journalist, connected with my long-absent legendary grandfather in Shropshire, got a National Health card, filled out paperwork for my UK passport and waited-- like a hatching hen, even pregnant with a London-conceived baby, to metamorphose.  But on trips back to New York--for gigs, for re-fueling-- I'd look down as the plane descended and feel my heart open.  Boarding for the JFK-Heathrow return, I'd feel like an emotional amputee and eventually had to admit I'd mistaken the familiarity of English novels for my soul.  I came back to New York with the excuse of giving my baby dual citizenship options, but 33 years later I'm still here.

For the last few weeks, every night at sunset, there's a gathering of African men at the north end of the park, on the grass along 110th street.  There are drums and colorful dashikis and robes and kufi caps and turbans.  Against the dull buildings there, it is a kind of visual joy.  The rhythms and chanting are audible long before I descend the Great Hill.  On weekends, women join... they dance and clap and shake. It's enough to stop me in my tracks; I want to join them sometimes... an old white lady who occasionally has 'passed' among African percussionists because they know I am a musician.   

But last night, because it was raining, there were no drums, but a small group of brightly dressed black men. They were standing in a tight circle and singing... a sort of high-pitched melody, in some language I could not possibly identify, but I stopped in the rain, to try to find a refrain-- a pattern.  The sound was hypnotic, but the song-- I could not follow.  Wet beneath the trees, my glasses beaded with raindrops, I listened to these men-- strangers in Harlem-- immigrants, celebrating their language and their homes-- different homes-- with their scars and their rituals and mutilations and the violence of families torn and challenged... singing their hearts out for maybe hours, there in Harlem where they are maybe homesick and conflicted and sad. 

The New Yorker sends me daily emails; I'm too broke to subscribe, even at their cheapest, and I used to manage to tediously read their offerings by scrolling in the tiny screen space beneath the prohibitive square that tells me I have reached the end of my free monthly article allowance.  They are hip to losers like me and now just 'tease' with an introductory paragraph.  But last week there was a reprint of Toni Morrison's piece about 'You are not the work you do'.  It's a good one.  

I've been reading Langston Hughes' autobiography-- The Big Sea.  He traveled quite a lot in his boyhood... the midwest, New York, Chicago, Mexico, had all kinds of challenging jobs. He managed after a disappointing time at Columbia University to get work on a ship bound for Africa where he discovered that he was not a black man after all-- he was brown, and mixed-- an American Negro.  

My college boyfriend did the popular junior-year-abroad program in Italy; I joined him there for some months.  It changed him profoundly. Things were never quite the same.  I think when you live for a time in another country, it seeps into you, and you can never quite go home again, as they say.  It broke us, in a way, because I felt somehow I could never be 'home' for him the way we'd been.  

At the gallery where I work, a French designer has installed pieces he made in Portugal, where he now lives.  They are beautifully made from the repurposed cork of trees that burned in a fire.  There are also black clay pots, fired in the earth with pine branches and extreme heat.  They are displayed in a circle of dirt and charred wood... so far from their home, their forms evoking the dark silhouette of mountains.  But there is one sample of the raw cork bark, as it was stripped from a tree--- nearly whole, with the char and the sense of forest. Looking at that lone symbol of the Portuguese woods and its material history, I feel a kind of recognition-- a core-sorrow-- with the sense of displacement and homesickness of the African men.  

At 4 AM last night I turned on my television and they were showing one of Pedro Costa's most sombre films of the slums of Lisbon-- In Vanda's Room.  Some of the scenes are shot in near-darkness, with the hopelessness of heroin addiction, the squalor and naked honesty of poverty, and the constant noise of the bulldozers razing the precarious structures and homes of the neighborhood while these people huddle and hunker down against displacement.  From the gallery I had the scent of Portuguese burning wood in my head, and it was like accompaniment.  

Sometimes I think about all the people that come to galleries-- the collectors and philanthropists who support artists... they seem to have multiple homes, as though they cannot quite settle.  So many of us travel to see the house or the street where we grew up; we look at old photos and films of New York-- at least I do.. and I feel something.  We are all a bit displaced in this culture-- we grow and leave our nests, and we never quite find our place.  Then we die, and our home-- our burial-- is just that.  

I have a song I wrote fairly recently... the chorus goes 'All roads take us back, and none of them go home... This one feels so close to somewhere I belong... There's nowhere I belong.' I can barely sing this without breaking my voice.  I guess I am sort of a failed writer-- in my heart I write as I walk, as I breathe and work... in dreams... the product is not enough, not yet.  I am also a bassist.  I am the work I do. It is as true for me as my 'home' which I have made here in the city, as best I can.  

Langston wrote his first really great poem as he traveled... The Negro Speaks of Rivers.  Just the title is enough.  He was not the work he did, or the work his father wanted him to do... he was this writer, and a teacher, in his way.  He was that work; he worked at it, too. Like many, he dreamed of Harlem, and the place was not necessarily the dream... but he was part of its rebirth, its rediscovery.  And like so many great men-- in literature and in history,  one often must leave one's home-- wander and search--only to return and find it.