“I am not going to describe her face because I want you to think of her as a bride.” —Terrance Hayes
Music plays constantly on the memory care floor. Right now it’s Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” It wafts across the common room where the old people sit, waiting for lunch. Sausage and peppers. The man who lives downstairs has come up to eat with his wife who lives upstairs. To see her, he has to key in a code—a code he remembers but his wife doesn’t. That’s the point. They’re at a table for two tucked away in a corner, like they’re on a date, only they don’t speak to one another. The unattached, on the other hand, are arranged communal-style, and they don’t speak to one another either. Not really. There’s muttering, sure, but it doesn’t seem meant for anyone in particular. One woman has laid her head down on the table and fallen asleep. Another is asleep with her eyes open, head pressed hard against the back of her wheelchair. My mother is sipping from one of those tiny Coke cans. Her appetite these days comes and goes, and today it’s altogether gone. She wrinkles her nose. Sausage and peppers? No thanks. She looks up absently and her gaze drifts across the room. There’s always an air of palpable non-excitement here, except when Candy screams at the aides, Get off of me! Don’t touch me, when they tell her it’s time to eat, or when Patricia asks for the hundredth time today, 246, 246, which way 246, or when the woman (I don’t know her name) wonders where her mother is, she can’t seem to find her mother, and the man (Steve) who’s angry, bangs the table, says he wants his food now! These people, these exclamations, cannot coalesce into any effective tableau, cannot arrange themselves into any “formal feeling” (as Emily Dickinson says), until the Armstrong tune comes on, oh and then I feel “as if the top of my head were taken off.”
“What a Wonderful World” was something of a protest from the very start. Its composers, Bob Thiel and George David Weiss, imagined that when it would play over the radio, when Louis Armstrong (uniter of races, friendly face of jazz) would perform it live, it would behave like a movie’s diegetic overlay. That is, none of the movie’s characters would hear it but the audience would, and the audience would therefore understand the fundamental mismatch between the song’s sensibility and the world outside of the song: Vietnam, political assassinations, all manner of cruelty. It’s a cinematic move on the songwriters’ part, if you ask me. Cinema: that ultimate revelator, eater of all other media. At least that’s what one of my teachers once said. And he was right, too, I guess. I can’t visit the memory floor without believing myself to be in some really depressing movie.
I’ve had a lot of teachers. Bitter teachers. Teachers who’ve felt the world was passing them by. Teachers who’ve clung to some outdated notion about art—what’s in and what’s out. There was that college teacher of mine who kept only Diet Coke and sausage in his refrigerator, who faked his own death to get out of going to Vietnam, who thought that arms folded across the chest in death makes a corpse look like it’s flying back into itself. Maybe he was right in saying music authoritatively leads us places, but I’d argue that poetry does too. Poetry is just sneakier about it.
I had a teacher in college who said if poetry is a democracy, then music is fascist, that it’s basically mind control. People don’t goose-step to Dickinson, do they? And what other art form (think about it) are we inundated with on the regular, organizing our days into various montages overlaid by various playlists (for example, girl shopping, girl exercising, girl being depressed). It’s kind of fucked up, if you think about it, how much pull Beyoncé has over me. I see that now. I see now that I’ve never not had a soundtrack, and if music is indeed fascist, then I’m just another (un)happy audiophile getting told how to feel and liking it, licking music’s boot, lying prostrate before it.
My high school art teacher, Ms. Thompson, was mysterious. Her face was a poem. If Ms. Thompson hadn’t vanished, she was sitting with her feet up on her desk, pointer finger on her temple, thumb on her chin, watching us make paper, sew scraps, sketch a bowl of fruit beside the model skeleton. Once when we were carving linoleum blocks for printmaking, the best artist in class decided to talk to me. That was Terence. I wanted Terence to like me. I wasn’t interested in his love, but his liking me seemed important, and in order to be liked, what a person liked or didn’t like was plumbed and assessed, addressed and analyzed, especially when it came to music. “What kind of music do you like?” he asked me. But he didn’t give me time to answer. “Freedom rock,” he decided. “Van Morrison. Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan.”
Teenage hormones always seem to throw music way out of proportion. Once, after Ms. Thompson had gone off to God-knows-where, Terence pulled out a little boombox from his backpack, popped in Nirvana’s Nevermind (on cassette), and jumped up on one of the drafting tables. When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit, he threw himself around in front of us like a Peanuts character or a locust-chewing prophet, and like all good believers, we joined in. We were, all of us, cartoon hands smashed by cartoon hammers. We were huge and throbbing. Bam! Blood on the Tracks. Bam! Astral Weeks. How could we be so obvious to other people and so mysterious to ourselves? But, no, I never listened to Bruce Springsteen. That’s where Terence was wrong, and Terence was rarely wrong. Terence was Ms. Thompson’s favorite. And why shouldn’t he be? He was charming. Smart. But also kind of mean, ugly/beautiful, like how Nirvana sounds, and a little scary too, the way he could command a room with his snobbery and concert T-shirts under flannel button-downs.
To like Nirvana was to inadvertently subscribe to what composer Vivek Maddala calls “non-functional harmony,” wherein a song’s chords are chosen “based on their color, weight, or texture—but not based on their function.” In other words, Nirvana primed us for an art-for-art’s-sake philosophy, whether or not we could or even wanted to articulate it, and that afternoon in the art studio we celebrated one of its foundational premises: We may be doomed to obscurity, but we’ll never sell out. Someday on top of our long-buried, functionless beauty, cleverer, richer people will build their bankable designs and salable novels, their francisable movies and summer-hit singles, but that’s ok because we’ve got art. We’ve got “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And I learned this lesson from Ms. Thompson who’d praise Terence’s paintings, then say I drew “like Walt Disney” which I took to mean bad. But it wasn’t all bad. From Ms. Thompson, I also learned about absence. Turning her unexplained disappearances into stories, I figured out in the process that I was probably a writer.
What I mean is, I try to articulate the connections and discrepancies—most especially those—between two disparate sets of information, say, the song “La Vie En Rose” and the low mechanical hum of my mother’s memory care unit, between orchestral swells and the muted clattering of plates, between lyrics like “Des ennuis, des chagrins s’effacent” and the muddled sound of old people’s breath. Nobody seems to recognize the music or pay it any attention, but I do, and it’s excruciating. While Louis Armstrong sings about seeing the world through pink-colored glasses, I notice how slow my mother’s movements have gotten, how deliberate. I see that her gestural circuit has become so small, it’s as if there’s no wonderful world outside of this one–her hand around the Coke can, the Coke can at her mouth, I Love Lucy on the TV, and Sachmo on the stereo. I begin to imagine she’s gone backwards in time, back to a time before I was born, and that she is therefore a ghost to me and I to her, that we don’t really know each other anymore.
I used to imagine Ms. Thompson had a secret art studio tucked away in some unused basement room where she kept her kiln and wheel, rows of half-finished sculptures all in various states of undress, black-and-white photos of old peoples’ faces she’d pinned on crisscrossing lengths of string hung from the studio’s ceiling. I imagined that she used these faces like geological maps. They were whole continents, these faces. With them, she planned where she was going which was, I imagined, deeper into self-knowledge. Self-knowledge doesn’t make you any money, but who cares? She had integrity. She had autonomy. She saw ghosts. I imagined Ms. Thompson saw ghosts. She said so herself once or twice but I could never tell if she was kidding. Her face, you remember, was a poem. “I saw Abigail Cutter again,” she said, and left it at that. But I imagined a feeling of cold had come over her when in the hallway Abigail Cutter’s ghost met her gaze with its hazy, veiled expression, glitching in and out like a bad internet connection.
It wasn’t until much later I decided to research Abigail Cutter and discovered that in 1831, she and her husband William Woodward founded “the first public school West of the Alleghenies,” believing all children deserved to learn. When Abigail died in 1855, she was buried beside the school she’d helped to build. In time, our school took over the original building. Because we’d eat lunch and play ball on top of her, we liked to think she was curious about us, the living. We probably seemed like fever dreams to her or like the hallucinatory odors that sometimes emanate from underground tunnels–the same feeling I get now, on the memory care floor. Strange figures glide past. Bad smells (“246? Which way 246?”) (“I can’t find my mother. Have you seen my mother?”). There can be no real communication, not anymore, but sometimes an old person’s eyes meet my eyes and we lock in, manifesting ourselves to each other. It takes a lot of energy on both our parts, so after a moment or two, we fade. We diminish, each of us, into our respective points of view.
Of course I could tell you music saves us or, if we aren’t saved, then at least we see each other, my mother and I, inside the perimeters of “What a Wonderful World,” and by hearing that song we are momentarily airlifted off the memory care floor and plopped down together in our old ’90s Starcraft van, Natalie Cole’s versions of the tunes her father Nat King Cole made famous playing on the stereo. “I always preferred what my parents listened to,” my mom used to say, accounting, I guess, for her obsessive collection of American Songbook standards sung by everybody from Willie Nelson to Barbara Streisand. Music after all, is a sort of tunnel running underground. It links sound to memory. I could tell you that music helps us, from the tunnel’s opposite ends, to reach one another, but I can’t. I’m sorry.
Did you know there’s a tunnel in Moonville, Ohio? Long ago, many men died while walking through it on their way home from the mines. There was no other road to take back then, and nowhere to escape to when the train came up fast behind them. Today, the tunnel is covered in graffiti: slogans and inside jokes, paintings of the Moth Man, the names of whatever bands are cool, whatever slang is in fashion, transient evidence of stupid moments intersecting and layering one on top of another until the tunnel could be called beautiful. Beautiful and useless. As useless as the art I make, as this essay right here, since I’ve “select[ed] [a] color palette on the basis of each color’s intrinsic beauty, rather than on each color’s utility in painting a particular image,” because what even is the image I’m striving for? I don’t know. I just know “What a Wonderful World” is playing right now while my mother picks at her sausage and peppers in silence, her face hard to read, like a poem. Songs are easier. You at least have two sets of information to work from. Do you want to play a game? Color? Sing along? She shakes her head no.
I walked through the Moonville tunnel once, or I should say twice, once coming and once going. Each time, I was struck by how the light contracted the closer I got to the tunnel’s center, then how it expanded the closer I got to the tunnel’s entrance/exit. The sound of my voice changed too. Its echo took on a kind of “metallic flutter,” as audio engineer Trevor Cox calls it, for “to hear a distinct note, the delay between the reflections must be short, less than about twenty-five milliseconds,” but my reflections were languorous, as if I had all the time in world. And I don’t. The train is coming up behind me. The train is coming up behind me in the dark. There’s no getting out of the way of it. I just have to let it hit me, so I do:
My mother is dying. It’s a fact as solid and dependable as the trains that racket past my house every other hour, filling the air with wheel-squeals and horn blasts in case anyone is lingering too long, earbuds in, on the tracks. Death is normal. It’s everywhere. It’s on everyone’s playlist. It can be heard from time to time over recessed speakers at the nail salon, grocery store, doctor’s office, but the trick is getting other people—not least myself–to really listen, to listen again the way we listened as kids, frisson raising goosebumps on our skin, the way Lana Del Rey “still get[s] trashed, darling, when [s]he hears your tunes,” as she says in her song “Terrence Loves You,” that is, with utter abandon.
But I find it’s as hard for me to reach the teenager I was as it is to be present here with my dying mother who looks at me once in a while, dazed, with a little smile on her face, then away again, so out of embarrassment or boredom I look down at my phone, decide on a whim to Google my high school music-crush Terence. Where’s he been? He’s a known artist now—well, known in smaller circles, I suppose, but known well enough to have his work in galleries across the country. Jamie Lee Curtis has bought some of his work. He’s mainly a printmaker these days, he says in a video made for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and has begun to make what he’s calling “dance floors” that have tiled patterns printed with images of Black leaders and artists and rabble-rousers, famous members of countercultural movements, so that when in an art gallery a dancer dances on top them, it’s as if she’s dancing on history, dancing all the way back to some original, transformative irony. And of course over the stereo system, music will be playing, ’90s postpunk and neo-soul and all sorts of tunes from scrappy, independent corners of the music world. Terence is still himself, I think. Totally. He’s always known that when the body is marred somewhat by the soul, or the soul marred somewhat by the body, when form and setting and tone conspire to twist meaning into configurations nobody’s seen before, it’s ok to not have an answer and no plot. Sometimes it’s okay to go nowhere and build toward nothing beyond an intensification of feeling. All that energy will eventually cracks the self right in two, then the breach is sealed over again by a streak of gold, which is forgiveness, or grace—whatever you want to call it. It’s an art, they say, that takes a long time to learn how to do.
There’s a woman in the memory care unit named Sue. When the two of them were downstairs in assisted living, they were the very best of friends; Mom even brought Sue over to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. Poor Sue, we whispered to each other, she’s way worse off than Mom. She even bragged about having known George Clooney when he was a kid. “He’d come over to our house to play basketball,” she said, and everybody at the table rolled their eyes. Dementia can sometimes cause delusions of grandeur. Still, my mother looked at Sue with those big, adoring eyes. I mean, she really saw her, and loved what she saw, flaws and all, as if the cracks in Sue’s mind let in the light and made her beautiful. She looked at Sue the way she used to look at me and still, from time to time, does, which always kills me. “Look!” I point Sue out to her, sitting upright and stiff in a high-backed wheelchair faraway at a different table. “Is that Sue?” My mother follows my finger then looks back at me, smiles, and shrugs. Meanwhile, the big Bluetooth speaker by the crafting materials has rolled right along from “What a Wonderful World” to “La Vie en Rose” and next to Rosemary Clooney’s “Hey There,” and my mother starts to mumble the lyrics a little, absently, like her muscles remember even if her brain does not:
“will you take this advice I hand you like a mother
or am i not seein things too clear
are you just too far gone to hear
is it all goin in one ear and out the other?”
***
Artwork sourced from Get Illustrations
