A day out

I say, let's play a game. I'll be your daddy and you will be the prodigal son, the one I sent away when he came out, singing and dancing and tying his shirts at the midriff.  But now you have come back, and now that I see you all grown up, I'm beginning to have feelings I've never had before, even tinglings. Oh gosh, shall we really say that? Ting-a-lings? And why not, fuck it, when I see what a man you've become, just like our Lord compleat in all parts a man, born of a woman, but now one big manly man.

A tenor friend once told me a story: heading into a gay establishment on the outskirts of the big Texas city, who should he see but his own father sitting at the bar, who turned to see him there and who then simply said we will never speak of this.

My wife, the Empress of all things beautiful, so much a woman, and my woman when she allows herself to be, tells me every day how much action I would get if I simply came out, and I suppose she means first to myself, finding that truth like the love that dare not say whatever, and I too could find how natural it can be "when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him," and the two meet in that closeness that can be no closer, one to another and again and again.

So come now and sit on my lap and cuddle up. Maybe after we'll go fishing or play ball or the other things that fathers and sons do. But first the loving. First the consensual torture. First the slippery slope, unabridged.

In porn, there are simple rules. If someone is seen on camera, they are going to fuck or be fucked by something, and if two people are seen together in a room, or out by the pool, or in a school or examining room or boxing ring or shoe store or malt shop, or when the pizza is delivered by someone who is cut like diamond, they are going to fuck each other, and here I use the word fuck in the sense that my wife uses it, the broadest sense, that is something that you do that you may not want to tell your wife or boyfriend about if they the singular they are not excessively broadminded, and may include such as nipple pinching and a rubbing of a clothéd crotch and slapping so hard across the face that their hair flies and they laugh out loud, slapping you back and you both fall over into each other's arms and the kissing begins.

Back here now. Slip off your shirt, and I will put my hand on your toned chest, and then undo your pants and I will sit you astride me, looking into my eyes while I look into yours, and I notice the moistness of your lips and the touch of your beard on my face, and let me live with you here for always in a sphere of copper and gold that holds against all the world.

Concerns and Annotations

Aspects of the libretto for the upcoming opera have raised some concerns among some of those who have read it or who have some knowledge of it. Those concerns come from the real event that it references, namely the death of the three children by their mother's hand. Does it represent the people, especially those people still alive, fairly or accurately?  Might it hurt those people left behind, devastated by the tragedy?

I don't know. It's too great an event to capture in words or music. The reality is that I know nothing of the mother or her life, nothing of her inner world, nothing of her motivations or her communications with God, nothing of her relationship with her family or the events in their lives or the children or their father or anything. The libretto at most is just a fantasy, a concoction of my brain and its random associations of the few reported facts and some certainly misreported information with half-memories of my life and my prejudices and desires.

The writing was quick, a paroxysm of scribbling, multicolored, in a state, my breathing ragged and heavy, without editing. I can't really justify its point of view or claim it as my own, at least in a thoughtful sense. The writing of the libretto was the closest I have come in my artistic life to direct communication with the godhead, that divine stream that flows through us all. That direct link was a new experience for me, and I found it curious I could achieve this in writing words, when in writing music - my chosen art - it doesn't happen. For me, music has too much bookkeeping and too much intellect and too many details and decisions for it to flow freely out of my pen and spread itself across the page.

But, unthreading it all now, one can see where many of the words come from and, before one forgets, one should make note of these beginnings and directions and passes through one's neurological landscape. To follow along, one needs a copy of the libretto, which one can find here.

The opening line, as the footnote notes, is from Huxley, in particular the book pictured above. When I was a boy, I was believed to be gifted and I was placed in school programs designed for gifted and talented children. I basked in this appellation and believed in it or at least wanted it for myself. When I went to college, however, I discovered that there were people so far beyond me in intellect that I understood the reality of the quote. My geek friends said their clocks ran faster than ours, and I understood this to mean that there was no way to catch up to them, that their basic hardware was different than the rest of ours.

The second line is from Genesis 22. The Abraham and Isaac story looms large in the opera, a story that is bizarre and horrifying, as horrifying as the mother's tale, if one can get past one's Sunday School coloring book familiarity with it. There is no way to make sense of it, and even my 1950s copy of the 12 volume Interpreter's Bible begins its commentary pointing out that any man who thought of it, if his thoughts were detected, would be institutionalized, and any man who acted on it would be convicted and executed.

In reading the libretto, I see how much most of the story is me rather than the mother's: the tale of my sister's illness and the descriptions of my family, my take on Pascal and my high school friend's experiments, my reaction to hearing the story of the children, my reaction to reading the court documents, my thinking through it all while sitting at pier 7 as the day fades into evening. The libretto does not help the reader or the opera audience.  It does not clearly label the edges of my story and the mother's, and they do mix frantically and fluidly. The character LaShaun, unlike the actual mother, is oftentimes saying or thinking things that I might say or think. Also, regardless of our command of the language, our thoughts are often profound, and because of this the LaShaun/Erling character sometimes slips into a highfalutin voice when representing his or her thoughts to us.

Some of the words do come directly from witness testimony, e.g., the child pleading 'no mommy' as he was thrown into the bay. But most of the words, like most of the text of the letter, and her prayer while killing the children, are my invention, except for a few bits cribbed from the Pascal Memorial. The death of the cat is the story of my cat, and the feeling of falseness in the world when the reality of death invades is something that I have felt and that many greater writers than me have related. Some bits after the murder are from the court documents, but even those are mixed up with my words and thoughts as well.

I notice, rereading the text, that are many threes, and I remember the use of threes in the score, in groupings and repeats and word painting, relating the deaths of Jesus and the two criminals on Calvary to the deaths of the three boys. Other biblical analogies appear: Jesus carried his wooden cross and Isaac carried the wood for his burning, so it is important that the boy carry something as well, but that's just a literary importance with no basis in fact.

I didn't know anything of the life that the mother had with the father, so the sex scene in the libretto has no relation to them, but is mine alone. I have felt what is described, the desire to merge with my partner but being stymied by the gap between us, and how we are all fundamentally alone, in life and especially in death. And, just to make sure it is clear, when she speaks of being left alone, and asking how He could leave her alone, this is an existential loneliness, and the pronoun He refers to God, the heavenly father of herself and her children, not the earthly father.

Society in general seems to have decided that the mother is crazy, and I've always wondered if one were crazy whether one would know. Would one have an inkling that something was wrong in one's thoughts? Would one reflect in one's own thoughts society's prejudices about craziness? I've heard something of the pain of insanity and this leads me to answer these questions in the affirmative. Thus the mother/Erling character in the libretto finds herself navigating the prejudices of craziness in herself. When her boy is sick he enters a delirium that describes a delirium I experienced when feverish with the measles as a child, and her desire to cool him in the water is my story, something I wanted.

The man with the Lorentz transformation tattoo is a friend of mine, a burning man campmate. The description of migraines is a combination of my experience, as I encountered the aura and still do; and the experience of my first wife Lynn, who had severe nauseating migraines throughout our entire marriage, each lasting several days, except during the period when she was pregnant. When vomiting forth this section, I remembered my mother telling me that Mormons believe that Mormon women will be eternally pregnant after death - a fancy interpretation of a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants - and thus the reference to pregnancy as a heavenly state.

The end of the story is me alone. When my current wife Lynne heard about the murder of the children, her immediate comment was that she hoped no one would ever cure the mother of her insanity, that the mother's bright, clear and sane knowledge of her actions would be too horrible a punishment. Those thoughts stayed with me throughout the piece, and especially the end.

The Sounding Plunge

As composers, we are supposed to construct worlds in sound, finding our own way through this evanescent art form, following no rules except the not-often-enough-written truth that [ahem] a sound may occur in any combination with any other sound preceded by and followed by any other sound or combination of sounds. As composers, we see ourselves primarily as architects, as sculptors, making objects not of clay and metal and wood, rather out of the ephemera of sound itself. But sometimes we see ourselves as writers and, like writers to the printed page, to the glue of the binding, to the musty smell of the reading room, we are attracted to the object of the score itself, a beautiful thing, expressed through a beautiful symbology. The making of a score is a private pleasure for me, one of the things that most attracted me to being a classical music composer, that music could exist as a quasi book, a book written especially for instruments played by performers who can actually read the instructions contained therein. 


But composers are not writers. Our medium is not the word. We are artists who have chosen sound as our medium, and who revel in sound short-lived nature and, as such an artist, I had little patience for in my youth for words.  I was angered by requests for words to explain what I did in words. I care not for words.  I spit.  The music is my art, the art is sound, the art is music, why should I have to translate my beautiful sets of sounds into the coarseness and baseness of language, convincing others of its goodness so? Language is about communication, and maybe music isn't even about communication. Someone who is interested in the possibility of giving money to composers should just listen to a piece or two, they should come to a performance and sit there and listen. Maybe a recording is acceptable as at least an ersatz facsimile of that experience, but words have no relation to it.

You have been to an art gallery, yes?, and you have noticed how the eager-to-learn supplicants attending the art spend more time reading the title cards that are placed next to the painting than looking at the painting itself? I find myself doing it, I find myself ensnared by those words. I understand that it makes me feel that I am learning something about the work, but that's not really true. I am merely learning something about the curator. I've seen many cards with descriptions that are outrageous, consisting of turgid, pompous nonsense. Unfortunately, the prostrated communion of the art goer to those descriptions, and the weight given to narrative expressed by them, is something that seduces artists themselves. Artists begin to create pieces of art that lend themselves to descriptions that will impress. Such seduction is rife in the new music world as well. Before I became a jaded old man, I would read the program notes and think: my, this is so interesting, I'm so looking forward to hearing this, and then I would once again be disappointed, left at the altar, wondering where that piece had disappeared to that was promised to me. Had it slipped past without my noticing? Had I missed the glorious audible representation of the lovely ideas which were so lovingly presented in the program notes? 

So - can we simply take all the labels off the paintings?  Giacinto Scelsi, that wonderful swindler and possible composer would send, when asked for program notes, a drawing of circle.  I can't say that I really know what he meant by that circle, or whether it had a meaning at all, but I hope that it read as something to the effect of shut up and listen, shut up and write music, and stop describing.

* * * * *

That all being said, can I now say that I love words, that I love to read them and write them and feel the way they feel passing by my lips? A few days ago, I had a visceral reaction, literally deep in my guts, upon hearing Michael Krasny say the word confabulate, and this is a common experience for me. I love my friend Jim Bisso's blog on words and grammar and language, the wonderfully punctilious EPEA PTEROENTA. And I've wanted to be a writer since I was a precocious child, the one who carried around the complete works of James Joyce in his briefcase, letting himself be seen kissing them in public.

Given this, maybe it's not so strange that words have stolen away my heart from my chosen art form of the construction of sound.  I am surrounded by English, and I myself am a carrier of it. It is one's duty as a speaker of a language to be part of the mix, to eject those bits that no longer express what you wish to express and to create new language that expresses what you do wish to express.  Like a composer, this should come from the sound up.  We should each be inventing new phones and phonemes, new words, new phrases and new architectures of speaking and writing and expressing.  I am happy with misunderestimate.  It's a great word that expresses something that can't be expressed without it.  Although at first my fellow liberalists used it only to make fun of George and his malapropisms, I've noticed that, now that some time has past and it's not so funny anymore, it is still being used, a jestful usage that has become real usage as people realize the word really might have what it takes to join its fellows, journeying up the ladder from the Urban Dictionary to the OED.  We artists know that mistakes are a great generative tool across all creative endeavors. [Ed: this particular verb may be a bad example, as according to wiktionary it can trace its lineage back:

1897 ...is almost sure to misunderstand and misunderestimate the significance of the question at hand. — The Outlook, American Diplomacy on the Bosphorous April 17, 1897]

Another malapropic and fellow target of my fellow liberals' ire, the late governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, tells us we should all invent words, and on this one point I agree.  We overeducated folk are too nervous about our speech, we should allow for mistake. I know this is hard. It is hard for me personally. When I commit a verbal gaucherie, the embarrassment lingers.  I wish I had the Oxford-or-equivalent background that is given to the Brits when they are born, allowing their even the most casual sentences to be constructed perfectly. My first wife once told me a story of how, in England, she saw two very young British Children standing outside a country house gazing across the grounds. As she watched, one said to the other: "Oh, what a marvelous garden, let us go get lost in it."  If I could speak like that, I would die happy. But I fear that, when one hasn't learned a language when one is three years old, and I mean really learned it, one can never catch up, and real mastery shall always elude. But I soldier on anyway, doing my bit, correct and uncorrecting here and thre as I see fit.