After a night constructed of tosses and turns, I am slowly opening my eyes to the day with the help of a tall Americano. Even though I am inside (Concourse A at the Detroit airport, where the streamlined, glossy cherry-red tram that reminds me of nailpolish passes overhead to my right in 10-minute cycles), I have just shared a tiny bit of scone with the bird that was staring at me as it perched over on the row of seats a few feet away. There are a surprising number of birds in here. I noticed it yesterday as I was walking to the airport shuttle. This morning, I wonder once again if some of them spend their entire lives inside this airport, never experiencing the world outside. I am thinking about the alter-ego of this place: a universe of birds, avian perches, homes, territories, mating rituals. As humans rush back and forth completely unaware, instead simply arriving, departing, scurrying for their planes and doing all their human things.
My plane to Maine, which I anticipate actually being on today, leaves from Concourse C, but I am hanging out here for awhile because it's a vast, open space with more light than the concourses below. There are international flights up here: people headed to Korea, Japan, Belize, China. Just hearing the announcements in Japanese are making me homesick for Japan, even though I never LIVED there, but immediately felt at home on my first trip. Since yesterday, I have had fantasies of being a travel writer (ok: I'm lying. I've had this thought many times over the years, so yesterday wasn't the first time). Talk about a fantasy career! I love travel. I love the being caught off guard, having to go with the flow of it: the random conversations you have with people you will never see again, the opportunity to make a few memories in a place that will join the pile of all those anonymous, often look-alike restaurants, bars, and hotels you've ever been. Even while certain details of each one will never let you go.
There are four birds circling overhead now. At least 100 feet above, flying in and out of the open spaces between the corrugated, arced panels that stretch over the terminal in contemporary buttressed fashion. The birds are going about their day, and I am finally shedding the exhaustion of strange sleep. And disruptive dreams of being paged at the airport and being accosted by giant centipedes. The centipede dreams were the echo of the real centipede that decided to say hello when I was in the dirty hotel bathroom at 2:00 a.m. The hotel seemed like it had the potential for bugs. And, indeed, it lived up to this promise quite well.
Now. Time to gather my things again and head to Concourse C. And a rainy day in Maine!
A Painter's Perspective: Twenty-First Century Philosophical Musings on Art and Life
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Freewriting Detroit
I am in Detroit, supposed to be in Maine right now, already having landed, already having made the ride in my rental car from Portland to Freeport, already settling into my room. But I am not: the flight from Detroit to Portland was oversold. I was bumped right off, last on the list, never stood a chance. Never even held the promise of an assigned seat. Instead of a rainy drive and stormy coast, I am sitting in the place oh-so-uniquely christened Wings Bar and Grill in a Day's Inn off the highway, a half-eaten feebly limp salad to the left, a much better Cubre Libre to the right (at least there's not much you can do to damage good old Captain Morgan). I am eavesdropping. I can't help it. The dyed-blonde bartender with the dark, almost orange tan and triple Ds pushed right on up to the ceiling with a low-cut hot pink camisole, says wisely to the man at the bar: well if she was able to just leave like that, then she was never a good mother anyway. He is seeking consolation--an ear, a nestle, a little bit of snuggle if he's lucky--that gray-haired man with white socks pulled up mid-calf, running shoes, and t-shirt with a spray-painty beach scene reading Margarita on the back. I can't tell if they have just met or if they have known each other for years. It's the flavor of bar conversation: it wouldn't matter either way. In here is out of time, the conversations are fast and loose, all happening within seconds in this dingy, low-ceilinged room lined with TV screens out on the highway, where you look out the window and see concrete buildings, the view of an industrial park and you remember that you aren't near the beach, but just that close to the airport after all. A few stragglers walk in and out of the bar, stepping cautiously over the brown-swirled carpet, like the middle-aged woman who walks through the doors, blinking a little like she's not quite sure why she's here, but where else will she go, what else is there to eat tonight, because she looks like she was bumped off too and finds herself in that strange, fly-by-the-seat-of-your pants, because you have no choice, night of suspension. So instead of Maine, I'll toast Detroit. Straight to Detroit from the Captain as the Margarita man walks out. After the bartender turns away.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
A World in which Improv is Key, Part 2
When my surgeon, the stranger who would soon know parts of me no one else had ever touched, told me I had to have a bypass immediately, one of the questions that went through my mind was “Does this mean my chest will be cut open?” I didn’t ask this out loud. Of course, I knew the answer.
Getting to a patient's heart requires that the chest is
cauterized and cut open at the same time with a tool designed to do
both at once. Once the skin is open and peeled back, a rotary saw is used to
cut through the sternum. Imagine how the ribs must feel, once the tension is
released and they open up for the first time! Imagine how strange the patient
must look once the ribs are cranked open, the arms flung down off the table, and--if she is a woman--her breasts flopped unnaturally, drooping abandoned toward opposite sides of
the room.
I admire those who know in advance all the details
they are in for and still show up at the hospital. Though my
curiosity got the better of me, and I started watching videos
of bypass surgeries as soon as I got home from the hospital (what would I have done without YouTube I have to wonder), had I known the details of my surgery before, I can only
imagine the nightmares.
If open-heart surgery happens “on pump,” which is still usually the
case, especially with grave emergencies, the patient's heart is stopped, and two cannulas connect the body to the heart-lung machine. The cannulas become the vein and the artery through which blood circulates
out of the body, into the pump, back into the body, over and over again as it
bypasses the heart and lungs. Her heart and lungs have been stopped and machines are doing all the work; Essentially, for that time, the patient on the operating table is dead.
***
One Sunday, after I had been working with Ran for
more than a year, and had been at his apartment through the afternoon drafting
the letters I would go home, type up, then later that week send out to people who would likely be
just as surprised at getting a real physical letter as they were to get
compliments and heartfelt advice from someone they didn’t know, or at the most only
knew of, Ran told me he needed to go take
a bath. He was headed out later and needed to get ready, wash off the day, put
on some good clothes, but I was welcome to stick around and play the piano.
In my memory I reconstruct this scene and hear him
telling me that he’s going to see a Hitchcock double feature. I want to give
him the gift of that: to write for him a night of film noir on the town. I’ll
make it a Sunday night of Tippi Hedren in The
Birds, Janet Leigh in Psycho, and
Ran Blake, Boston piano man extraordinaire in his navy blue trench coat, leaning
forward, hands on his knees, chin in his hands, sitting in the dark theater in
Brookline, surrounded by friends, right at the edge of his seat. Melanie
Daniels is making her way across the bay when a gull pecks her on the forehead,
destroying her carefully coiffed hair, warning us of what’s to come, even if
for a moment we are fooled into thinking that handsome Mitch, who rushes to
her aid when she gets to the dock, just might be able to save her. And Marion Crane—heart pounding, hands
gripping tighter around the steering wheel than they've probably ever gripped anything
in her life (even her lover), drives in the rain with all that money, trying
so hard to find a way out of her mundane life, and all-the-while repeatedly meeting her guilty conscience in the rear-view mirror. And Ran's absolutely loving every minute of it, even though he knows the dialogue and soundtrack by heart
and has known for years how the stories will end. How Melanie will get attacked
by birds, but get to keep her man, while poor Marion’s blood will keep swirling right on down
the drain, no matter how much you wish it wouldn't, and all that money gets nice and soggy in the swamp while Norman stands there watching the last bit of the car disappear into the muddy water.
No matter how many times he’s seen them, Ran will
watch enthralled. Will completely devour the discordant notes of their celluloid bodies and lives. Because other than his worship of the ear and the piano, for him
there was film noir—its shadows, its twists, its heaviness, its sounds. It was the achy foundation of so many of his compositions, the moody thread
connecting his days, the shape of his black composition bag that became his
graphic trademark, the theme of the infamous musical and art soirées he
organized in various spots around Cambridge and Boston. And, of course, it was
the perfect companion to Jack Daniels (Ran introduced me to whiskey served neat,
which I still love, though sometimes I wonder if I stop to drink it as often as I should).
And once the
birds seem to have mellowed out and Norman Bates is sent away, Ran and his fellow movie
goers will get up from their seats, walk out of the theater, and head on to Khao Sarn at Coolidge Corner for a late dinner and rounds of toasts and conversation. Melanie, Mitch, Marion, and Norman will come and go between the miang kum, the pad thai, the ginger fish, the coconut drinks with umbrellas, the sticky rice with mango. Like all the other places in Boston that open their doors wide for him, Ran is well-known at Khao Sarn. The owner of
Khao Sarn has even hosted pre-noir-event parties there.
***
Before heading off to get ready, Ran suddenly suggests we have our first piano lesson. We had been talking about
it for a while, but the two of us had been so busy, we hadn’t gotten around to
it. While I played, he would listen. He would leave the bathroom door open slightly so
he could hear me and respond. It was time for me to begin my worship of the
ear, my own praise to that small puckered, curly-qued, dried apricot thing that
quickly becomes bizarre if you ever really stop to look at it protruding from
the side of someone’s head. He was convinced he could teach me to train my
ears. Convinced my apricots, which I was certain were tone deaf, had that power too.
I had played piano as a girl for years—he knew that—but no more than in that
slavish, route way that begins when a child is forced by one or both parents to
sit in front of sheet music and plunk out the notes one by one, while getting
smacked, chastised, occasionally praised but often goaded (depending on the
disposition of the particular teacher and the vicissitudes of the day). “What a
wonderful sight-reader you are!” my first teacher with his fantastically fat, broomy,
gray mustache told me, before commenting on my deplorable rhythm as I sat there
trying so hard with back straight, wrists up, fingers precisely, classically curled. A good
sight reader: I was proud. I'm sure I shared this with my mother when I got
home. And later I was even a decent player. By the time I was in high school, friends heard me and were impressed. But that
was about it. Nothing more. There was emptiness about it. I wouldn’t have said
that at the time. Wouldn’t have known HOW to say that, wouldn’t have even
realized there was a problem, but later, when I encountered the music of Ran
Blake, Keith Jarrett, and George Russell; as I fell deep into the heavy down-noted
chords of Thelonius Monk; as I stepped through the fissures they created and
basked in the music on the other side, I knew the difference. I had never really
played at all. Chopin’s preludes and waltzes by route, stiff memorization
didn’t count. I was a great imitator. Nothing more.
And now Ran was telling me to play for him the first notes of
George Russell’s “Strastusphunk.” His words were something along the lines of: Just start. Work it out. And do it completely by
ear.
To be continued ...
To be continued ...
Monday, May 28, 2012
A World in Which Improv is Key, Part 1
About 10 years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I
worked for a piano player named Ran. Every Sunday around 12:30 I hopped on the T
(the Greenline from Lechmere bound inward to BU) with a new book in hand. The thirty-five-minute-or-so
trip was the perfect amount of time to be seduced into swimming amorously
around inside the waters of an excellent plot to the rhythm of the click-clack,
back-and-forth, hum-sway of the train and the in and out, get up, get down motions of its riders. Paragraphs
and pages later, when I got to my stop in Brookline, I would emerge from my
swim, put my book in my bag, then walk the rest of the way to Ran’s
underground, filled-to-the-brim apartment with the horizontal windows like
narrowed eyes hovering street level at the top of the walls.
I was one of a tiny army of people who worked for
Ran. I’d taken over the job from my friend Dawn and was there, like she had
been, to do small administrative tasks: jot down errands and reminders; transcribe
the letters (real ones, not emails) he continually sent out; and make note of
the labels he wanted me to type up for the new videos he'd added to his library
during the week (he recorded everything—60
Minutes, Dateline, the CMA Awards,
old movies, and for a while a Spanish language teaching show on PBS that for a
few episodes featured a little brown dog who had lost his way in Barcelona, thus
enabling viewers to learn to say in Spanish such dynamic conversation starters as: “Excuse me.” and “Have you seen my dog?” and “No, he isn’t big; he is
little and brown.”). Every week there were more letters: praises and
ruminations to authors of books he had just finished; advise to students from cities as far away as Bombay and Tokyo, who had emailed him for input about
their goals and abilities; and short notes simply saying thank you to people
who had come by, called, or sent him a package in the mail.
Ran taught at the New England Conservatory of Music
(still does). He had friends all over the world. He was a great cook. He was
co-founder of the Third Stream department with Gunther Schuller at the
conservatory in 1973 (It’s now called the Contemporary Improv Department). And,
most importantly of all, he had infinite faith in the primacy of the ear. If
someone were to say to me: “Tell me something about Ran,” these are just a few of
the things I would say. But not necessarily in that order.
Before Ran, I had never heard of Third Stream; nor
did I know too much about Contemporary Improv. These days I don’t want to
imagine the world without it.
***
When I was 38, I almost died. And stunned everyone around me (myself included) with two heart attacks followed by emergency
bypass surgery. It was a rare event in which the arteries on the top of my
heart started to split. If they had ruptured, that would have been it. I was
lucky: My surgeon knew what he was looking at when he saw my angiogram—knew he
wasn’t looking at plaque about to rupture or your average hardened, narrowed artery, but something much more severe—and he
knew he needed to act fast. I was lucky my body decided to enact its riotous convulsions when I was in Nashville, a city where all the hospitals in town want
bragging rights when it comes to excellent cardiac care, instead of somewhere
else, like Binghamton, New York, or Ellensburg, Washington—two much smaller cities where I’ve also lived, where I likely wouldn't have fared nearly as well.
Last night, while lying in bed thinking about my
heart and about the way many of my attempts to write poetry about my summer of
almost dying have been no more than that, I thought about Ran. About all those
Sundays we spent together: the conversations, the video clips we’d sit and watch
over lunch (he liked to include bits of dialogue in his video library log and
we would often rewind and review the episodes about which I was taking notes);
all the words I transcribed (words that I can’t help imagine would make the
most incredibly dynamic word cloud in the world); the lunches and the way he
would combine foods in unexpected ways; and eventually, the walks we would take
to the farmer’s market in the spring. I don’t know why he or those days came to
mind when I was thinking about my attempts to write my heart, but I decided to
pay attention. With a willingness that would make Freud proud were I
to jump into a time machine and become one of his patients spewing out my history while he listened in silence, I embraced
the mind in all its strangeness: opted to let it flow on its own accord—as serpentine,
circuitous, labyrinthine as it pleased. Trust enough to let yourself fall,
and you’ll end up in a place you never would have imagined. Sometimes, this can
be a good thing. At the very least, it will be revealing.
As I conducted this mental inventory of the writing
that hadn’t worked—because it came in combinations of words that felt too
dramatic, facile, mythic, and somehow false—compared with the writing (including
some lines from the shoddy pile) that had,
I started to notice that the writing I like followed a similar pattern: it came
up from behind, embraced my heart from the side, surprised it through imagined scenarios
and narratives, and most of all it was writing that trusted its medium enough
to simply let it be, in whatever form it took—even when the words that came out
were vernacular, banal, and didn’t “sound” poetic in the slightest.
This entire inner query ultimately prompted me—in
my eye-masked, ear-plugged, and nighttime cocooned-up-tight state—to challenge
myself to a narrative exercise. I asked myself: what story would you tell about
your heart if you started talking about it in plain language, with no
preconceptions of the story’s form or its literary parameters, with no ideas of
how it should be, or how you as an overly constructed “survivor” should tell it?
I let my mind wander (easier to do when one is in that space just before the
body abandons itself to its nightly mini-death) and within a few seconds, “About
10 years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I worked for a piano player name Ran,”
passed through my mind. I didn’t expect it, but followed it for a few
paragraphs before falling asleep. This morning I remembered and stopped to
write that sentence down.
One of the lessons I take from improv: follow
without asking why.
Another: if something strikes you grab on.
***
To listen to Ran play was to watch (and feel)
someone transform, to move from dusty-basemented afternoons of wrinkled shirts,
cluttered rooms, untied shoes, and the occasional echo of lunch lingering in a soft,
white beard into that extraordinary sort of moment when a sudden, welcome (even
if you didn’t know you wanted it) fissure appears in the universe. When the
world as you know it—the ordinariness of a room, some scuffed chairs, worn out
patches of carpet, a broken blind dangling over a window, dirty snow melting
off boots—is gone, when the mundane rings with a voice so physically alive that
what is expected out of a moment is split wide open, turned inside-out, as its inhabitants
are invited into a secret space behind a veil they didn’t know existed, a space
they aren’t even sure they will know how to take in, a sublime moment when you
realize you are in the midst of something unique, a putting together of body
and notes that never existed until then. A combination that won’t ever happen
again. A body and notes that feel much larger than everyone in the room
combined.
This could be referred to, more simply or directly
perhaps, as the ecstasy of the aesthetic experience—for the listeners and the
performer, both of who get lost when art is that incredible. But to say that
wouldn’t do (all the wonderfully delicious associations evoked by the mere
utterance of the word ecstasy aside). Because if I were to write: listening to the
piano player, one felt the ecstasy of the aesthetic experience, I would skip
right over the flesh—his, ours, the flesh of the experience itself—and the
color and heat of our transformation. When I write of him playing, the way he felt,
I want to hone in on the bodies in the rooms. If I were to show it to you, I
would direct you to his fingers, to his head bent over so low it seems as if
any moment he will kiss the keyboard, his curved back, the sound of his foot pressing
down on the pedal. I would point out the darkness, the small cone of light glowing
golden around his body, and the people in the audience who bow their heads and
close their eyes—not to a god, but to music. I would tell you to stop and
listen to the long, full silence that rises up between the performance and the
applause and lasts longer than you might expect. Though he has finished no one
is ready for it to be over, or break the spell with the slap, slap, slapping of
their enthusiastic—now sweaty, together let’s make a thunderstorm—hands.
***
Last night I caught a glimpse of myself standing
in Ran’s bathroom. It was late summer. Some of his students were over and I could
hear them laughing with him in his studio down the hall. I was washing my hands, and when I glanced
up at my reflection in the mirror, I paused: there was someone familiar looking back,
someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. The woman in my reflection looked happy, more alive than she’d been in months.
My years in Cambridge were a strange time for me—most
of them spent living with a man I should have never lived with in a city I
should never have been in, because I never should have followed him there. I
was dreadfully unhappy—for some months (I realize in hindsight) I was deeply
depressed. So depressed I didn’t leave the house for days on end, couldn’t talk
myself into going out no matter what I tried.
Sometimes, I think of it now and I am incredulous.
I was living in CAMBRIDGE after all: a city that, even if I shouldn’t have been there, was at the
same time exactly the kind of place I had for so much of my life absolutely
craved. I lived just minutes away from the line where the Charles River
separates the city from Boston, in the midst of art
museums, galleries, writers, conservatories, music at every turn, cinema,
architecture, all that creative and intellectual energy to feast on, but for my first few years I
didn’t see it. I had forgotten to open my eyes. I looked at, lived in, and
feasted from the refrigerator and its salty-sweet promises instead. I gained so
much weight that when I finally started noticing and stepped on a scale I
wasn’t sure I was the same person. I was shocked when I finally noticed how I was living, and realized
I had been hiding in some dark space I thought was comfort. By the time I
started working for Ran, I was slowly making my way out into the world again. I
was still blinking a lot and gun shy (As we know from Plato, it takes time to
adjust when you’ve been living in a cave, when you finally stop to notice the
sun.). But slowly my eyes were adjusting to the world outside of my own dark once again. The blinks were fewer and further between. I became more open. When
I talked to people, I was actually meeting their gaze.
Last night, I saw myself standing there and remembered
exactly how I felt that day—smiling in the mirror, realizing I was going to be
alright. I was wearing a V-neck tee. In the mirror, I had no scar.
For part 2 click here
Monday, April 16, 2012
Coded Red*
If her name is scratched in red,
it means she is on fire, means she NEEDS—
to be put out, stifled, calmed down, shut in,
means potential homicide, almost suicide, a failed attempt, a close call.
If her name is there—as evidence, as proof, as a map into
her state of mind—inscribed darkly, boldly, with so much authority in red,
it could mean so many scenes:
a knife in the kitchen or a gun in the drawer or
pills in the bathroom or a slumped over body in
a closed garage or too many tentacles to count unfurling
in a white-hot rush of 1,000 lashes.
And.
If she is there, in that book of authority written
so confidentially there, so permanently there
in red incised into the page so sharply red,
it means she is:
a warning light, a stop sign, a tender box, a short fuse, and most of all
a RISK to herself or someone else, even someone unsuspecting.
And when she is branded she-needs-help-right-now red, she must be handled
(as you invite her in, as you say to her sit down)
carefully,
tenderly,
gingerly
(Watch out, watch out, don't open that door too fast... ),
but not so soft that there is no connection, until
the ink that is her, the ink that is her name, is changed (will be changed)
(but never, of course, by her)
back to the time (to the color) when she would have never seen
this, couldn't have imagined this, wouldn't have sculpted
this: this dilemma, this problem, this relationship, this life, this (fill in the blank)
coming.
* Inspired by a conversation with my husband (a mental health therapist) who told me that in his office when a patient is homicidal, suicidal, or generally "at risk," her or his name is written (posted on the computer) in red as a code to the therapists. I started thinking about the idea of what it would mean to be "coded" red.
it means she is on fire, means she NEEDS—
to be put out, stifled, calmed down, shut in,
means potential homicide, almost suicide, a failed attempt, a close call.
If her name is there—as evidence, as proof, as a map into
her state of mind—inscribed darkly, boldly, with so much authority in red,
it could mean so many scenes:
a knife in the kitchen or a gun in the drawer or
pills in the bathroom or a slumped over body in
a closed garage or too many tentacles to count unfurling
in a white-hot rush of 1,000 lashes.
And.
If she is there, in that book of authority written
so confidentially there, so permanently there
in red incised into the page so sharply red,
it means she is:
a warning light, a stop sign, a tender box, a short fuse, and most of all
a RISK to herself or someone else, even someone unsuspecting.
And when she is branded she-needs-help-right-now red, she must be handled
(as you invite her in, as you say to her sit down)
carefully,
tenderly,
gingerly
(Watch out, watch out, don't open that door too fast... ),
but not so soft that there is no connection, until
the ink that is her, the ink that is her name, is changed (will be changed)
(but never, of course, by her)
back to the time (to the color) when she would have never seen
this, couldn't have imagined this, wouldn't have sculpted
this: this dilemma, this problem, this relationship, this life, this (fill in the blank)
coming.
* Inspired by a conversation with my husband (a mental health therapist) who told me that in his office when a patient is homicidal, suicidal, or generally "at risk," her or his name is written (posted on the computer) in red as a code to the therapists. I started thinking about the idea of what it would mean to be "coded" red.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Promise
In the salmon of dawn,
when my heart burrowed tight,
small as a bird quivering
into the curve of its wing,
and the corridor was the expanse
of too many countries to name,
the two of you stood silent
as promise at the end.
And there, in that swamp, I walked on my own
through the weight of my body as nurses smiled pink,
clapping health to cheer me on.
And I knew myself as infant,
starting over,
again.
when my heart burrowed tight,
small as a bird quivering
into the curve of its wing,
and the corridor was the expanse
of too many countries to name,
the two of you stood silent
as promise at the end.
And there, in that swamp, I walked on my own
through the weight of my body as nurses smiled pink,
clapping health to cheer me on.
And I knew myself as infant,
starting over,
again.
Monday, March 12, 2012
a fragment from a move
and that is why, she says, to absolutely no one at all
i am selling the bed and throwing out the dishes
and the traces of our dinners and mouths and spices and laughter all shoved
down with bad jokes and forever secrets into a box
into a box i now leave
on the sidewalk marked
FREE
in giant black letters, because yes,
the moving marker is in my hand
and the past is splayed wide open
for anyone who walks by
for anyone who walks by
and happens to want a piece
and this is why i watch
as the every-day-at-this-same-time-again woman
takes 2 plates, a green-rimmed bowl, a few tattered books
before the dawn
why thank you i say around the pushed-back curtain
thank you and good bye
to worn out boots in the snow
to the silence before the coming train
to those meals and the first winter and the dark, bald branches like hunger
clamoring through the sky
clamoring through the sky
and to the rush of the charles
blue-black-slapping
frozen wild
to the tempoof thank you, she's marked FREE,
on the sidewalk
the story's there.
--- 2003/2012
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