Scene Not Heard

I'm about to release a cd of original music. At these small benchmarks in our creative life, one becomes reflective.  For me, performing seldom these days, I ask myself why I am still working-- day after day-- without audience, without goals or a plan.  It occurred to me last night that when I was 3 years old I made a vinyl record.  It was one of those amusement-park booths where you actually sing into a microphone and they press up one copy on some kind of bona-fide machinery.  I sang Around the World I've Searched for You... a song I knew well from my mother who played a small repertoire of sheet music on the piano. I sang in perfect pitch-- didn't miss a lyric.  After the little performance, my father announced me-- my age, my name... and then clearly, amid the audible background sounds of carnival, I ask my sister.. Wanna do it? She denied. Silence.  Head shaking, I imagine.

At nursery school they acknowledged my musical abilities; they urged my parents to send me to a special school.  Apparently I'd not only had the lead role in their little performances, but I wrote the songs. My teachers told me this, when I got older; my mother was terrified I'd have a miserable life on some cheap stage and tried her best to discourage me.  I played all the instruments in my house-- not a genius, but it was comforting and felt like 'home'. I made up little melodies. In middle school and high school I was somewhat encouraged, and sang and danced in school performances. My older sister did as well... she was a natural drama queen, lol.

As a girl I was careful; it was the two of us, against conservative parents, and nothing was worth incurring the wrath of my older sister.  She was, unlike the dark Barbie to which I compared her physically, barbed.  She surveyed everything I acquired, suffered any accolade, and conspired to steal candy and gifts, which I freely gave her.  She was older; she had a certifiable mean-girl power. Despite certain talents which I was given, inherently-- I hid under a sort of cloak of mediocrity.  I had no ambition to be 'seen' or perform outside of the normal school parameters. I played our guitar quietly and secretly, shut myself up with books, early classic rock and Beethoven, and wrote my little stories and poems in notebooks which I've learned she discarded.

I've been reading Mann's Joseph and His Brothers.  It's an old translation, slow-going-- deliberately Biblical.  One must look up names and places and I've forgotten so much. But I've always been obsessed with the Jacob story-- the sibling rivalry, the stealing of the birthright.  Deception is common in these legends-- one wonders if the switching of Leah for Rachel was payback of a sort.  But clearly Jacob was the chosen brother... somehow the trickery was part of his destiny. And his acquired name, Israel, which I understand has something to do with struggle-- well, it all seems vaguely pertinent to the current situation in the Middle East.

Mann, at the beginning, touches on the Osiris legend.  I've always loved that name, and even as a girl, I wandered the Egyptian corridors of the Metropolitan Museum looking at images. But Osiris married his sister... and was killed by his jealous brother, dug up and put back together by his sister for enough time to make a baby, Horus.  It's endlessly complex and debatable and there are versions and tangents... but all of these histories seem to revolve around issues of parental favoritism, sibling jealousies... epic infighting. 

Joseph, the son of Jacob's beloved Rachel, was the favorite.  His fate-- both the good and the bad, seemed predetermined by the jealousy of his brothers.  Also his persona.  One molds oneself according to family peculiarities and dynamics.  But even as an adolescent, standing at the well, being scolded by his father, Joseph-- like a Biblical Elvis-- seemed destined for stardom.  While I am at the very beginning of this daunting novel and nearing the ending of a strange life, I can't help personalizing these issues. 

I've always shunned self-promotion.  Somehow it seems wrong for any kind of artist although it seems to have become not just prerequisite but part of the product. Of course they say success is generally the best revenge... but I'm not sure I ever wanted revenge. I just wanted not to be victimized.  What a terrible attitude this seems, in these times when even disabilities and flaws are displayed with pride. 

This new cd is the iceberg-tip of my productive output.  Were it not for the producer and arranger here, I probably would not have released anything.  I am grateful to him, for looking under the rock of my relative anonymity and wanting to chip away and bring a few of these to light.  Way beyond the threat of sibling hatred as I am, there is maybe a small sense of relief. Like Thomas Mann and the limited fame of this epic novel-- his personal magnum opus--  one is so often praised for the things that come easily, and overlooked for that which is difficult.  Unlike Mann, I will not be read by generations, or acknowledged by more than a small circle.  I am thinking more, in terms of this world, how rivalries-- jealousies, familial and tribal resentments-- national and political competition-- have destroyed so much of what might have been good and so worth saving.  

Death Be Not Proud

I used to love Thanksgiving.  This year-- with the threat of war everywhere-- my own friends unable to agree, people divided by religion and politics arguing-- the migrants everywhere in the city confused about their fate... the prospect of a holiday wears on me. The older I get, the less resistant I am to infection by societal ills. My son and I went to see Oppenheimer Sunday.  I was very affected and wanted to talk about things... but like most of the theatre, we just went to have a coffee and life moved on for him.  Not so for me; I am haunted. 

And I'm no longer sure about things.  When I was younger my beliefs seemed airtight-- had conviction.  I had faith-- some kind of support system. Maybe it was watching my mother disintegrate, slowly... her generational beauty slipping from her like old skin.  She saw devils and flocks of birds.  Some days she sang it out in a midnight howl; other days she barely croaked a weak 'no'. She saw things-- she felt things.  I backed her up, swearing I, too, could smell the black snakes coiled among the mattress springs; she slept in a chair.  My architecture began to creak as her crooked future unraveled.

Every time I read in some news article that so-and-so died a peaceful death, surrounded by family, I think of my Lucia, standing in the stairwell like a skeleton, a thin sweater clinging to her ribcage like a clothes hanger.  Until the last weeks she'd been too proud to ask for help, hid her illness from daylight, slipped out of her apartment in late evening to pick up some yoghurt or tea which would barely sustain her.  

But the last weeks, for which I was conscripted, were beyond nightmarish.  To comfort myself I wrote poems-- a living, rolling eulogy so her suffering might not be in vain, and so the unwilling witness I was could have some higher purpose.  I had known birth-- the protracted minutes of agony, the endless crescendo of contractions until you were outside of your own body.  But death, in these rooms, was a hideous slow drama of one... a whole-body soliloquy with no particular point.  

I prayed; I left the room for some hours to visit various churches.  I begged for her suffering to end. But it was the longest week, the last one, and death came not on cat feet but hovered like a hideous vulture stealing breaths and yet keeping her awake.  Lyrics circled like songbirds, but anything above silence seemed more painful.  I listened to the last groans of life, heard and smelled things for which I was totally unprepared... all because I could not bear to say no to this formerly beautiful woman who had completely run out of options.

In the end, it was like a coming of age, or the worst dream I'd ever had... not to mention the EMT workers who appeared to collect the body and screamed at me for executing the last wish of a dying woman I barely knew.  I wasn't even sure if her assumed name was real. I only know we shared an intimacy few people will ever experience.  And my life was never the same.  

So I've grown to mistrust death-- to mistrust pain and diagnoses and illness... to respect the final authority of Time, with his companion Death, who will outlive us all-- each and every. And as these anniversaries present themselves, growing in number until (as my Mom warned me) the death dates far exceed the births in one's calendar, I am no less bothered by these statistics.  In fact, today, it occurred to me that the toll exacted by these absences is what really ages one... we wear loss like an old face.  

We do our best to comfort friends and family who have cruel diagnoses and accidents-- who lie in sickbeds and depend on us like children.  Those of us who have watched death, who have sat bedside in  final hours-- with or without medicines and drugs, we know.  But most of us have not seen war.  And yet, around the globe, there are wars-- there is artillery and explosives that are virtual death machines.  Not even in beds, children and soldiers are lying now-- suffering, untended... victims, the prematurely violated, tortured... for principles of life and territory which can only be determined by negotiation, in the end.   

Even Oppenheimer has died-- whatever his legacy-- both brilliant and terrible... he surely suffered the agony of death by cancer, and his words, via Hollywood, now resonate once again.  We, the audience-- the successors of his generation, have access to great knowledge and opportunity.  Yes, the science of life is such that Death will always author our final page, but we do not have to become his handmaidens.