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.  

Crimea and Punishment

A friend of mine bought me a Murakami novel a couple of weeks ago. He came by to deliver it but I so rarely hear the bell downstairs or even answer the phone in my post-pandemic insulation.  It will take me a while to adjust to spontaneous door-knocking and full-frontal facial nudity.  While he didn't leave the book, in his honor I took another one from the good old NYPL.  I liked it-- until the end, that is.  Many writers have this issue with endings... like they fall in love with their characters and can't bear to leave... or they have multiple finishings... like a sort of round table discussion in their head, with the characters in triplicate, discussing.  And it hurts the book; a good story already has an ending. 

In this case, the characters sort of split off-- like they could see another version of their own reality... death and life coexisted-- the ending and the plot.    One of the women even had white hair and black hair, not that this is so unusual in our cosmetically facile culture.  After all of the credible reality and details Murakami set up, it just seemed like a cop-out.  A space ship comes down and airlifts someone... or you simply disappear, like one of those strange mysteries.  In our society, missing people haunt us; for the most part, like milk-carton children or even that Gabby Petito-- there is evil in the explanation. 

It was especially disappointing because I identified with the character. Hard to imagine Japanese girls being messy and badly groomed... on my visit there they were spectacularly put together... but it was part of her charm.  Murakami protagonists-- and narrators-- are often disarmingly direct and candid.  It seemed obvious to me that her disappearance was out of character and engineered by the author.  I prefer when the characters tell us writers what to do, lol.  Literary fate.

I am resisting the temptation to go off on one of my academically ingrained analysis-tangents.  Murakami can inspire this sort of thing... and every so often, despite the omnipresence of detail, there are these blurred adventures which step out into a sort of unlikely dream, or alternate reality.  For the realists and sleuths among us, this can be challenging and annoying.  But lately I have had these overpopulated dreams-- with plots and armies and characters and weather and animals;  they last for what seems like hours and bring me into a morning-after mental hangover.  Not unlike these novels. Waking I find some of the tragedies and losses of my imagination quite real.   

Even more than that, it forced me to think about perceived and actual realities, as manifested in the narrative of this horrid Ukranian war.  I don't pretend to understand the complexities of the disagreements and the difficult history of Crimea and its affiliation. As often in these territorial wars, the people inside the borders are not as cleanly delineated as the political boundaries.  But the main issue is the humanitarian crisis that has emerged.  And the manipulated distributed journalism in Russia is disturbing, unless we are misunderstanding entirely.  Lack of transparency, personal threats, imprisonment for opinions-- these are all qualities of a bullying and paranoid government.  While a solution seems near-impossible, it is unacceptable that innocent civilians pay the price of despotism and aggression.

Mysteries abound; people are missing, lost.  Families are divided and things have been left behind.  I have read Russian stories claiming they are rescuing Ukraine from Nazi forces.... they are liberating and protecting the people.  The POW soldiers insist a similar fiction has been their motivation.  Another story today accused the Ukrainians of inventing casualty statistics-- of  'staging' these photographs of the dead and wounded for effect.  How can these realities co-exist?  

Fake news... we are all-too well-acquainted with the term and the meaning.  The UK poet laureate used the term in his new official poem decrying the war.  'False news is news with the pity edited out,' he says, with maybe  a little intentional clumsiness... but I choose to continue to see it as news with the truth removed, and reality skewed or divided or manipulated.  Rather than 'Resistance' the poem seems to convey a sort of impotent spectator-ly dismay.  

Maybe acceptable in fiction, this lassitude of conviction and failure to convict... but with the reality of a war, the threat of annihilating a country... well, not nearly enough.  I'm not sure what is demanded of us here... perhaps if the theatre of conflict was closer to us, we'd be more active, more alarmed.  It seems discussion and talk have been dismissed;  how did we end up here, watching a hideous version of political failure become bloody and tragic history?  Why is war the chronic destroyer of peace?  Are there not enough problems without these absurd man-vs.-man killings in the name of some propagandistic principle?  

I think it's time we name a few additional sins.  The seven seem not nearly sufficient for what ails not just Eastern Europe but the global geo-political pandemic of greed.  I wonder how long it's been since Putin read Dostoevsky... a writer who understood endings.  And sin. At this moment in time repentance may seem a lot more appealing than conciliation.

Noir Morality Tale

Okay. Here is a Writerless-style New Year's morality tale. I’m not even sure what that means…but I think I mean the kind you don’t quite 'get' from those medieval mystery dramas:

So after years of longing-- of hourly, daily, drawn out minutes of obsessive vague craving for not just someone but the absolute possession of your self by this moment of completion, of everything you are-- where it becomes a kind of religion, an utter devotion to the pursuit of this moment...

There you are, in the perfect bed of the perfect moment--- you have touched his perfect body with your mind, as Leonard Cohen says—and the reward of it, the ecstasy of knowing everything you are has entered this person as he enters you--- every word you have ever spoken is on the tongue of this night, and as his breath begins to even and deepen, and you are drifting into this after-sleep of the perfect night, you miraculously (the mystery-play thing) watch yourself sit up… and pause on the edge of his bed--- the sheets draped around you… and you feel your bare feet touch the floor, you calmly and deliberately put on the clothes he took from you--- like a palindrome—and you walk down his dark hallway to the door… knowing you can go back--- you are still in the moment--- you can go back to his blessed warmth, to that bed and the night and the body you have created, the two of you—this body which is you and he, which understands and is everything you have waited for… and you open the door to the cold hallway with the glaring sconcelight which is so harsh and hellish… and you pause again, knowing full well what you do-- knowing his pain will be nothing compared to your own, and you are driven/compelled-- -there is no choice… it unfurls in front of you--- the sound of the door latching, and the walk down the hallway to the elevator, and your hideous baptism into the dawnlight of the rest of your life… and there you are, on the train, your clothes slightly misbuttoned, your hair uncombed, the scent of him on you like a drug, and you ride away from this night.
In an oarless small rowboat you float on from the shipwreck of the moment into the endless sea of the rest of your life, into the reverse of the longing.

And he will awaken, and cry out for you, and then he will wonder and begin his journey. He will take your necklace and your barrettes he finds in the sheets, and hold them to his face; you will pray that he makes a small shrine, that he lights candles and worships the possibility of your return. But of course he begins to hate you. After five unanswered voicemails he flushes these things into the Manhattan sewers along with pieces of your heart, and he steels himself for his life so that even if he passes you on the street and your pulse is hammering in your mouth and your head is shaking on spineless memory-twigs, he will not look.

You toss and turn in your bed of shipwreck; every night is a worse storm, like some mystery hell-planet of bad dream-weather, and every day is a walking disaster where you are an emotional amputee and he is the aching broken limb that you cannot repair, and to hate yourself is nothing—to speak is a revulsion, to think is to step with all your weight on that broken limb…

You are the open-wound version of yourself you have created. You are the director of your own deliberate fate-- the camera, the actor, the writer, the sole audience, the film itself. The blackness. The simultaneous birth and death of love, the perverted Promethean punishment of your life you have devised, only it is your heart not your liver and it is the god-author of yourself who lets it be eaten and there is no anesthesia of time because every day the pain is equal, the blood is fresh.

You go through the motions—you are living, you drink coffee, learn to speak with someone else’s voice… you can hear, you can see a bit, you pass as human on the street and occasionally lock eyes with another wrecked being—another heinous criminal who will go unpunished because you are your own victims and what is the moral here? Are you better, are you worse, those who crucify themselves, who cut themselves and pierce themselves, who pay others to carve pictures on our skin, who employ specialists to abuse us, to hurt us… those who hurt others to hurt ourselves… are we better? Do we stare horrified and mute as our doctors ask us where it hurts and to describe the pain on a scale of 1 to 10 and around us are the injured and ill and medically torn, the victims of earthquakes and deformity and falling buildings, of firestorms and deluges, who have had children and limbs ripped from them and live with this indelible noise?

Shall I compare thee with a summer’s horror? A winter mass-killing?

I am this morning sleeplessly wondering whether there is anything behind one of the billion darkened windows or in the stacks of some e-library or a warped profile on match.com or okcupid which admits to stalking an endless corridor of its own palindromic fate, editing the un-editable neverending of a morality tale, tasting the addictive immortality of that moment out of which I am doomed to watch myself walk.

Fade to black.