I would open this, my latest Schlock-offering, with profuse and self-deprecating apologies for my long time in absentia, but I have kicked off roughly 70% of the posts on this site in such a manner and I would so hate to become formulaic! I aim, always, to shock and disturb my readership, a readership that now consists of family members, extended family members, classmates, friends, friends-of-classmates, roommates, ex-roommates, ex-boyfriends, ex-professors, Kevin Costner, and apparently (according to my site ticker) a network of Russian spybots...?
But how to satisfy such a variegated audience, how to consistently manufacture universally appealing (appalling?) Schlock of the schlockiest caliber? I choked under the pressure. You see, guys, the True Creative Process does not jive with the American mindset, not so much: we like to say "chug-chug-chug along, hum away you little machine, maintain an unflagging rate of production for your consumer base"... but I'm more, like, organic, man. When I go, I GO, but there is a lot of dead space in between the going. I'm like the river in that one Schubert song, frozen on the surface for a seeming eternity but REALLY all roiling and tumultuous underneath, just gathering up all of this kinetic energy to burst on the scene when Time commands it!
... except that the past few months are not really deserving of the metaphor of a noble wintry river-- "Cesspool of Suck" might be more accurate. And before I could commit said suckage to blogular posterity, I felt compelled to take some samples of the Cess and the Suck, to place droplets of it between slides and conduct a thorough microscopic analysis; thus, in coming to understand the deepest elemental nature of the Suck, I could hope to transcend it. Of what was the Suck comprised, you ask? It had a complicated molecular structure that I can now break down for you. Part Eins: my encroaching apathy about my program and field; Element-of-Suck No. 2: my chronic worn-down-ness from the teaching job and the numerous other little gigs that I had taken on to make ends meet; Part the Third: still not making ends meet and being super fucking broke all the time; Factor the Fourth: the onset of some funky health problems including migraines, TMJ, muscle aches, nausea, anxiety, depression, etc. etc., which led me to believe that I might have an undiagnosed food intolerance and which has recently compelled me to eliminate wheat and dairy from my diet, which -- given my already-vegetarianism-- means that I can now eat about two things (quinoa and kale [FML]), and I do kind of feel better physically but GOD DAMMIT I would commit an act of terrorism if it would allow me to partake of some croissant and cappuccino (or, at the very least, some beer and nachos); and The Fifth Component of the Suck: my involvement in a rather spectacularly dysfunctional relationship that briefly blasted a hole through whatever self-esteem I purported to have.
Wow, Internet, you sure snapped to attention on that last point. You were just nodding along on automatic, pretending to listen to me while you thumbed your iPhone and fantasized about bacon ice cream, and then I hint that I'm about to ill-advisedly drop some juicy personal information and suddenly you're all ears. Piss off. I keep it classy, people-- I don't aim to paint anyone in a negative light (although I probably do this to myself unintentionally) and anyway, this is a space for Schlock, not tabloid journalism! And believe me, I would not even choose write about personal unpleasantness WERE IT NOT essential expository material for the ultimate thesis of this entry (and there is a thesis! kind of! I promise!) because even as I begin to contemplate No. 5 I begin to regress, to experience just the slightest clenching of my jaw, the remotest desire to punch a wall in my apartment, and I REALLY would prefer to get my security deposit back at some point so if I were smart I would just abort this entry right now and go nibble on some gluten-free crackers (double-FML!!) and do some mindfulness meditation on a cushion in my bedroom and whisk myself off to some virtuous, beatific plane. BUT for the sake of this narrative, I will press on. See what I do for my Art?
So, once there was me, and there was this composer. And yes, there have been several composer-cameos in the History of Me-- we seem to find each other, probably because in my line of "work" I spend a lot of time with the dead ones in an attempt to get inside their dead-heads, and so I also seek out living, breathing examples to do some cross-comparison (and, often, to wring my hands and wonder what happened to Beauty, but more on that later). I myself have never written music in a serious capacity, oppressed as I am by the stupefying weight of tradition, of "genii" past who have walked the earth... but I admire individuals today who can shelve their paralysis and attempt something original (even if it sucks, which it usually does) and so I tend to seek out these people-- to learn, to spar and debate with grand passion, to catch, like a contagion, some burst of wild creative energy that might carry me through the mundane business of living...
Back to Composer X and me-- we were volatile, mismatched, no-good-very-bad together. It's okay, it happens, the details don't matter: let's just say that one of us was fundamentally driven by the desire to be the Best, and the other was driven by the need to be Right all the time (try and guess who is who!) and do you see how that would escalate quickly? But there were some rich moments between the blowouts and the tears and the incendiary emails and what have you. We sat at the piano a lot, inventing games like "make up a fugue subject in every key!" or "improvise something in the style of Bartok, and then something in the style of Stravinsky, but don't tell me which one is which: I have to guess!" And I got absorbed in these tasks, a strange intensity overtaking me, and I was suddenly deeply, happily fulfilled (... until, inevitably, my activity partner and I would have some small difference of opinion that would devolve into the Clash of the Titans). This one time I was screwing around at the keyboard, harmonizing the National Anthem with generically dissonant, cluster-y new-musicky chords, and X threw up his hands and exclaimed, in this frothing impossible mixture of frustration, admiration, insecurity, support, envy: "Jesus, why don't you just go be a composer already?!"And I was like, "Blah blah, I have nothing to say / intimidated by the Masters / spotty knowledge of craft / 'there can be no poetry after Auschwitz' / [the usual platitudes]." And he said, "Just sit down one of these days and try to write something. Something small, a piano piece. Just do it, see what happens." ... "Well, maybe, if there's time. If the muse strikes. If my PhD program doesn't eat me. Heh. Fat chance."
Anyway, soon enough we two were splitskies and much hurtfulness ensued and I was fully immersed in the Cesspool and I was NOT interested in finding any fucking silver lining but was perversely content to wallow in the Suck, replaying the most dysfunctional scenes in my mind on loop and wailing, "WHY? Why did I do that to myself?" Of course, all of this emotional enfrazzlement, this whole "I'm going through something right now, guys" phase, took up a significant chunk of my time and energy-- it was like full-time job on top of my multifarious part-time jobs-- and with such a commitment there was no way that I was going to branch out and try my hand at becoming some kind of creative musical genius. I mean, come on.
***
In December, Johnny Lupus and I dined in a greasy-spoon Chinese establishment that would burn down not two weeks later. True story! We could have easily had our Last Supper there-- pan-fried dumplings, country-style tofu, green tea, fortune cookies, fiery inferno, sayonara. But the odds were in our favor and we were spared that night. Oblivious to danger, we talked and our conversation skittered over many surfaces, but we kept returning to the subject of Johnny's poetry. My friend is quite talented in the art of, shall we say, scatological verse-- he makes my attempts at lowbrow humor look like Amateur Hour-- and one of his more recent "bardic offerings," based on personal experience, took up the topic of toilet cloggage (the Cesspool metaphor extends to this [seemingly] unrelated storyline! look at that!) And, since Johnny was going to stay at my apartment that night, I stared him down with my best intimidating scary face and told him that under NO circumstances was he to do damage to my building's plumbing system. "Well, I can't make any guarantees," he said in mock-sheepishness.
"No, I'm not kidding!" I replied. "If you mess with my toilet, the repercussions will be severe. You must repay me with... hmmm. Oh, I know! I've got it! This is so mean of me.You have to compose a dirty villanelle."
"... wait, what's a villanelle again?" he said. I tried to remember: "Oh, it's this really strict poetic form, it involves a lot of word-for-word line-repetition and this tight rhyme scheme... it goes A-B-A-A... I think... no, wait... hang on... you know, let me just look for an actual poem to show to you..." At this point I extracted my iPhone from my bag, ran a Google search, found an example by Elizabeth Bishop and passed the phone across the table to Johnny. He studied the grimy little screen for awhile. "Ah, I see. That's a tall order."
"You know it!" I said, retrieving the phone. "But guess what? I'm stepping up the consequences even more. Should you back up my toilet, not only do you have to write a villanelle, but it must be on the subject of The Menstrual Cycle." Poor Johnny Lupus. His eyes widened in horror, as though he were first becoming cognizant of my truly diabolical nature. "Wow, Alana, wow. You drive a hard bargain."
The scare tactic must have worked, because no serious harm came to my restroom that weekend. However, a few weeks later, Johnny asked me to remind him of the name of that one type of poem I had threatened him with-- he wanted to take a crack at the form anyway, albeit on a topic of his own choosing (buffalo wings). I clapped my hands together, thrilled to have made myself useful in some small way, to have imparted my arcane knowledge of the Ars Poetica to somebody who could make good (?) use of it. "Villanelle!" I said. "Villanelle. Hang on. I'm gonna email you another example."
Another example, but what? I was about to consult Google for a quick fix, about to dive into the internet's teeming excess to come up with an easy specimen, when a memory intercepted my Googling: a path opened up in my mind and it was leading me back, way back to high-school when I was still a wide-open, thirsty creature who trembled at the power of language and took to heart everything that struck me. The memory was a single line, measured and dirge-like: "Time will say nothing but, 'I told you so.'" Oh yes, Auden, my favorite, senior year, A.P. English. I opened an email-window and typed Johnny's address, and wrote the first line of Auden's villanelle and then immediately out spilled the rest, from memory (sans Google!), the rhythms and cadences still encoded from years back. I hesitated before pressing "send"-- some things are too precious to give away to just anyone, they must be shared with discretion, imparted only to those most deserving-- but then I thought, what the hell, and dispersed the verse out into the ether.
They stayed with me for days, those lines, repetitive, simple, cryptic, and true. I whispered them when I was alone, and then at some point my recitations morphed into humming-- first just rough melodic contours, but soon they coalesced into clearer shapes with suggestions of underlying harmonies, and I sat down at the piano and monkeyed around and began to sense tantalizing possibilities of what could be done with this text if it were brought into song, which clearly it MUST be! I had never been so sure of anything, and I could think of nothing else-- I walked around in a daze, hyper-engaged, testing rhythms in my head, playing with different ways of approaching the repetition that is a hallmark of the poetic form, and I felt that maybe, finally, it was time to do this, after years of studying the creative process from the outside, after so much time spent raiding the toolboxes and tricks of the "genii", after such extensive training to become a critic, an aesthetician... it was time for some role-reversal. Would it be any good, this little creative endeavor of mine? Who knew? Who cared? I would try, I would operate according to a logic and a beauty of my own making. And I thought, offhandedly, that there must have been a fertilizing element in that Cesspool of Suck, because after all, don't you need mass quantities of manure to come up with a bountiful field of broccoli? Not to compare my lofty artistic labors to a green vegetable-- must be my restrictive diet speaking there-- no, it's more like this: every phrase that occurs to me, every tweaking of melody to be just that more text-expressive, every little miniscule two-note idea, it all feels like the humble beginning of some momentous shift, a river just starting to twitch to life, a fissure in the ice, waking, waking, waking...
