Inner Workings, in Meadows
When I was a child, I often dreamed in meadows. I have never had the occasion to fall asleep and dream in a meadow; rather, my daydreams often were set in meadows. Music happened there; animals gathered, fought, pounced about, lived out their daily dramas to the music that orchestrated in meadows. And, so, I often steered my portable transistor radio in the direction of classical music so that I might imagine animals, fluffy and non-fluffy alike, and relate what it was to live and love and then suffer and die to the melodies and ascents and plummets of violins and concertos. The little piccolo showcased little baby feet sticking in mud, the little buds of growing weeds sending out feelers. The bassoons and cellos came then with a darkness that caused suffering and stole everything away.
I had no knowledge, however, when it came to classical music. I had at that very early age—I don’t think I was quite four when I closeted myself with my radio—a desire to play piano. Gingerly, I would pass the electric organ in our living room; the electric organ was there, and I never knew where it had come from, but it was there, and then it wasn’t there on account of it having been sold, and so there was no learning the piano, and there wasn’t ever any fingering of electric organ keys on account of my mother never letting me. I could not even play on it, never mind learn to play it properly.
I have always yearned to learn the inner workings of things; I have always wanted to learn the rules of things. Growing up, however, I was never afforded opportunities to do so: I never had a music lesson, a swimming lesson, a ballet lesson, a painting class. I could never do what I wanted to do.
I take some of this back: in middle school, I asked my father to purchase a flute that a girl up the street was selling for fifty dollars so that I could take band so that maybe the older boy in high school who was in band might notice me. Although I did learn a little bit about music, that boy never did notice me, and I never did play well, and the pads on the used flute were so badly worn that I could never play well anyway, and the music director asked that I not attend the concert, where families showed up to hear the students play at the end of the year, because I did not look like the other kids and would embarrass him and the other students, so I did not tell my father, who bought the flute, about the concert, nor did I attend.
I did not look like the other kids because I was trying to learn the inner workings of things; I was trying to learn the inner workings of things without any formal training. My training consisted of listening to music, and the music explained that there were inner workings and that emoting properly could release those inner workings so that others would notice, and at this time I wanted to be noticed, and so that is why I wrote poetry during homeroom and why I wore my hair the way I did and listened to the Sugarcubes and imagined that someday someone would see and understand me. My inner workings would be laid bare in the meadow.
I would be the animal that, having left the safe confines of the brushy woods, was suddenly vulnerable to attack, and so then, on account of that, I would be the animal that constantly hid in fear. Writing outside oftentimes works like that.
I am the animal that retracts: writing against sometimes works like that. I take another thing back: in high school, I asked my father if I could attend a class at the city university so that I might take a real class, a real literature class. There, I learned that blackness was a ubiquitous octopus that spit over everything, not just me, and that there were others who, despite the potential for attack, felt the need to lay bare for others their inner workings. I wanted to be an apprentice of the inner workings so that I too could one day make a great piece that would reveal my inner workings, that is, make me vulnerable to attacks.
It wasn’t until I went away to college that I saw a meadow that mirrored the one in my imagination. In that meadow was a barn all enveloped in kudzu; the twilight was a shimmer of corn silk air. There were, however, no animals—at least that I could see—struggling there. So I placed hanging bats in the barn, all dark and slick and shriveled like prunes; they, I imagined, were sick; their babies kept falling from the rafters; their bodies were musical notes orchestrating the air: I gave them a hidden, imagined life there.
Einstein on the Beach/Postmodernism/Electronic Beeps
On the last day of class this semester, I wanted to give my students the gifts of wonder and inspiration. I wanted them to marvel at things that could be done. For many years now, I have taught and reread Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and not once during these years (a decade now?) had I stopped to ask my students why Philip Glass and Robert Wilson were photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. (For Barthes, the young Bobby Wilson is all punctum.) On the last day of class, I projected Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Glass and Wilson onto the screen.
The photograph has always captured my attention due to its incongruous elements: Wilson’s hair is clean-cut,
