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An experiment while I try to keep my eyes open and focused on what’s physically before me dans l’hopitale—I am a moody writer, not very disciplined. It’s rooted in fear.
The experiment is to try to return from a mood done gone to a drumbeat that loosed a full-body sob wet with tears. At the time of the single drumbeat last week I was raw and receptive thoroughly to whatever might have hit.
Driving home from work a Tanya Donelly CD which I rarely listen to was playing in my car. The song was sparse and into it a drumbeat dropped right core, perfectly placed. I hadn’t noticed it before. An exquisite trigger.
I tried to remember whether Dave Narcizo, the Throwing Muses drummer who is a favorite drummer of mine, played on this album. Then my mind wandered through my drumscape. My grandpa used to play drums in jazz clubs. Until he was dealt a brain aneurysm.
When the aneurysm happened I was about five years old. I was sitting in the living room at my grandparents’ house, probably watching cartoons from a precarious city of cards I’d built for me and some imaginary Smurfs. I thought I heard my grandpa call my name.
I went to the sound and found him lying on his bed, his hand on his head. He’d been calling for Sally, not Sara. He told me he had a headache and to get my grandma. She was outside. I remember wondering why he couldn't take care of it himself if it was just a headache.
After my grandma came in things shifted course. The hospital in our little town was too lo-tech for what had afflicted my grandpa. We went back and forth to the hospital in Springfield for months while doctors doctored.
The aneurysm paralyzed the right side of my grandpa. His two drum sets in the basement occasionally got pounded on by my younger cousins. Years ago I wrote a poem about this and gave it to my grandpa in a frame for Christmas. It may be the only poem I’ve ever written with such direct, disciplined intent.
Hearing the kids pound innocently but recklessly on those drums directly below him while he could no longer play struck me deeply. It was a cruelly physical manifestation of emotional frustration I imagined he might be experiencing. What terrible tantalization.
Driving home last week, I began thinking about the moment, if there was a single moment, when my grandpa realized what had happened to him and what that meant. If it were me, I might have clawed like an animal at the air around me—to rip and roar my way out of that wrong place I’d come to. What an alone and frighteningly stripped moment, when the passion that drives and dresses your identity is suddenly sliced.
Positioned in my own version of that moment—desperately wanting him to know right then that I was trying to connect and understand, feverishly wanting him to not feel alone or sad, neither then or now—tears streamed many and rapidly from my eyes and shook my shoulders. Uncontrollably.
This outpouring baffled me. I didn’t know it was in there, and it put me in a floorless nexus between the now and then. There is a stark moment, that stills and dizzies in the heat of the script forming, which is infinite and tuneless.
The changing of the season into cold compounds things: it's when I worry I haven't done a good enough job letting the people I love know how much I love them, or that I'll never be able to do so satisfactorily for either me or them.
There is tragedy in the aloneness involved both in my grandpa’s position, inexpressible at core, and in my unlightable quest to reach him as profoundly with an all-better-now as I’d like to. Tragedy, though, like everything else has at least one flipside—insight by catharsis for present and future reference.
Surely I'm missing some key clarifying component--it was the storm of unexpected tears that initially took me. Tomorrow I embark on a 13-hour drive to where my family and I will make thankful noise at a table stacked with turkey and stuffing, a wash of orange, brown, and red, wine-tipped.
The experiment is to try to return from a mood done gone to a drumbeat that loosed a full-body sob wet with tears. At the time of the single drumbeat last week I was raw and receptive thoroughly to whatever might have hit.
Driving home from work a Tanya Donelly CD which I rarely listen to was playing in my car. The song was sparse and into it a drumbeat dropped right core, perfectly placed. I hadn’t noticed it before. An exquisite trigger.
I tried to remember whether Dave Narcizo, the Throwing Muses drummer who is a favorite drummer of mine, played on this album. Then my mind wandered through my drumscape. My grandpa used to play drums in jazz clubs. Until he was dealt a brain aneurysm.
When the aneurysm happened I was about five years old. I was sitting in the living room at my grandparents’ house, probably watching cartoons from a precarious city of cards I’d built for me and some imaginary Smurfs. I thought I heard my grandpa call my name.
I went to the sound and found him lying on his bed, his hand on his head. He’d been calling for Sally, not Sara. He told me he had a headache and to get my grandma. She was outside. I remember wondering why he couldn't take care of it himself if it was just a headache.
After my grandma came in things shifted course. The hospital in our little town was too lo-tech for what had afflicted my grandpa. We went back and forth to the hospital in Springfield for months while doctors doctored.
The aneurysm paralyzed the right side of my grandpa. His two drum sets in the basement occasionally got pounded on by my younger cousins. Years ago I wrote a poem about this and gave it to my grandpa in a frame for Christmas. It may be the only poem I’ve ever written with such direct, disciplined intent.
Hearing the kids pound innocently but recklessly on those drums directly below him while he could no longer play struck me deeply. It was a cruelly physical manifestation of emotional frustration I imagined he might be experiencing. What terrible tantalization.
Driving home last week, I began thinking about the moment, if there was a single moment, when my grandpa realized what had happened to him and what that meant. If it were me, I might have clawed like an animal at the air around me—to rip and roar my way out of that wrong place I’d come to. What an alone and frighteningly stripped moment, when the passion that drives and dresses your identity is suddenly sliced.
Positioned in my own version of that moment—desperately wanting him to know right then that I was trying to connect and understand, feverishly wanting him to not feel alone or sad, neither then or now—tears streamed many and rapidly from my eyes and shook my shoulders. Uncontrollably.
This outpouring baffled me. I didn’t know it was in there, and it put me in a floorless nexus between the now and then. There is a stark moment, that stills and dizzies in the heat of the script forming, which is infinite and tuneless.
The changing of the season into cold compounds things: it's when I worry I haven't done a good enough job letting the people I love know how much I love them, or that I'll never be able to do so satisfactorily for either me or them.
There is tragedy in the aloneness involved both in my grandpa’s position, inexpressible at core, and in my unlightable quest to reach him as profoundly with an all-better-now as I’d like to. Tragedy, though, like everything else has at least one flipside—insight by catharsis for present and future reference.
Surely I'm missing some key clarifying component--it was the storm of unexpected tears that initially took me. Tomorrow I embark on a 13-hour drive to where my family and I will make thankful noise at a table stacked with turkey and stuffing, a wash of orange, brown, and red, wine-tipped.
5 Comments:
Hi there, I just came across your blog through a circuitous path in blogspace. I love your writing, which feels stream of consciousness but perfectly structured simultaneously. I'd love my writing to read as free and interestingly. I look forward to reading more.
P.S I highly approve of your taste in books and movies.
Hi Jonathan--thank you very much! Your description of my writing fits what I might say is my aim, were I to try and pin down an aim. Take care.
I dunno if this makes me sad or just echoes certain things I feel as well. Or both.
what beauty. can't really put my finger on it, but it's moving enough for my very own giving-thanks-for-the-writers-i-know.
"The changing of the season into cold compounds things: it's when I worry I haven't done a good enough job letting the people I love know how much I love them, or that I'll never be able to do so satisfactorily for either me or them."
I called you last night on my late drive home from a late meeting. When I didn't reach you I got into it and had similar thoughts about my niece and my father (I don't see her enough, I should be a role model, I should be there for her more. I don't call him. We should have breakfast) and today I read this post that has been waiting here. Thank you. When I told my Dad I was moving, he cried immediately and I didn't expect it. I didn't realize how much I meant to him/how much he loved me. Sometimes it is good to revaluate these relationships, only when they don't lead to beating up the self.
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