Further Meditations on a Theme

(A note before I begin: look, I really am essentially okay, in case anyone's worried. I know I keep talking about this; it probably won't be forever. Minds interest me, and mine's the one closest at hand for study. That's most of what's going on here.)

1. Here's another thing mental illness has helped to do to me or for me: it's made me an essential skeptic. I've had to clear my inner closets of things like religion, political ardor, mysticism, and even to some extent self-confidence so that madness can't find them there and turn them toward ill use.

2. I know that setting all the clocks in my house a few minutes ahead would help me get places on time and thus improve my life in measurable ways. But this seems less valuable to me than actually knowing what time it is.

3. I'd forgotten about this other mode of depressive psychosis: decoupled from anxiety, there's a flattening of affect toward the excessive meanings that the world continues to produce regardless. Then this thing turns self-mocking and mean, but it has an okay sense of black humor. As the butt of an insult comic's jokes in the audience might still laugh.

4. Part of how it works is: there's a quasi-physical sense that my "I" is too small for my purposes. I feel it clamping down over me like a clamshell or the underside of a set of knuckles. (It's come to me in milder form on the edge of sleep for some weeks, too, as was often the case in childhood. It is of course ontologically intolerable that our selves should disappear for so long every night. The mystery is that we can think of anything but death.) With this constriction arrives the certainty that a thing so small could easily be guided by some other force that I almost have access to. (In some corner of this hall of mirrors flashes the fact that in one obvious sense this hidden force is the illness itself, not that there's much to be done with that notion. Look it in the eye and move on.) A feeling of insufficient personal reality descends, although it's not clear whether I'm more or less real than the things around me. The cogito gets you just a couple steps from nowhere; after that, you're on your own.

Sensory input doesn't arrive with its usual force. It's coming in from a long way off. I find myself gripping iron railings, running the back of my hand along brick walls, trying to tie tighter knots between me and the world.

5. Historically, voices haven't been the main hallucinations I've experienced, but I can so easily see how they're produced. In such a state, thoughts become words -- even become couplets of medium-poor poetry -- instantaneously, and don't seem to stem from my own powers. The world's speaking to me in sentences rather than in sense data. I don't have to go to the trouble of translating and assembling them myself. It's like the subconscious has just disappeared. Context, subtext: they're all just text scrolling across the wall at once.

6. Hate, like heat, collects in things. Every object wears its most ghoulish mask. There's a dead possum on the sidewalk. But actually a plastic bag. But, upon closer inspection, perhaps a bloated pigeon? (A plastic bag, of course.) Church architecture an assemblage of mausoleums. Everyone on the street is lurching in the throes of some contagious illness. But it affects me almost abstractly. My body goes through the motions of disgust: the shudder, the crossing of streets. Something else is in charge of that, though; I can hear it happening somewhere in the neighborhood, but not where I live. So the mind laughs flatly at itself, for allowing the body to be moved along such senseless routes.

Psychiatry calls this patient insight and it's indisputably better than the alternative. But it makes it hard to maintain much, ah, self-esteem.

7. In depression is the counterargument to one of the values I'd most like to transform into belief. Ipsa scientia non potestas est. Instead of acting on the cold knowledge, the iterative disillusionment, that it's constantly synthesizing, depressed consciousness loops and loops through a bureaucracy of inner courts. They are endlessly in session and endlessly handing down convictions.

I've sometimes harbored a little abstract envy toward other, more florid species of psychotics -- the ones with delusions of grandeur, the ones being called upon to save the world. You could maybe get a few things done in such a state.

8. It's good and terrible that mental illness is incommunicable. Cannot be communicated. Lately it seems more interesting to write anyway than not to.

More on creativity and mental illness: Parallel Motions

"The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you." - (the admirably and authoritatively sane) Mark Vonnegut

Now that I've climbed up on this horse, why not ride a little farther, since I haven't yet talked myself out of this as a potentially fruitful area of inquiry? After having talked about the ways in which mental illness interferes with creative efforts, and made clear that I don't support the classic romantic connection between madness and creativity, I want to draw out some of the other, more tentative and fragile connections I find there. 

For as long as anyone can remember, I was a pretty weird but also smart- and creative-seeming kid, and this might have mitigated some of the surprise when it turned out I was also crazy. My mother began saying things like, "I guess that's the thing, when you're really creative . . . ," as if my illness were only further proof of my exceptionality. I squirmed under this proud pity, but when I was being lax with myself I could let it seem like a slightly less dark corner of that darkness.

Though all this was, of course, a major burden on my family, it might have also been something of a relief. Until 7th grade I'd been a star student, but once I got to middle school a combination of rebellious awakening (what, precisely, was the point of all this bureaucratic ritual around me?) and incipient depression sunk my grades to the point that I was at risk of being kicked out of my competitive-admission magnet school. (I am incredulous at and a little proud of my 12-year-old self to recall that during a parent-teacher conference it was revealed that I'd submitted zero of the five geography assignments given so far that quarter; the teacher, who seemed to hate me for other reasons than my lack of initiative, was later fired under circumstances surrounding his penchant for the blonder and bubblier of my cohort.) Mental illness might have provided something of an explanation, an excuse for the past few years of decline -- and a promise that, if treated, I'd return to my unproblematically exceptional previous performance.

It was probably a few years before I had enough distance to consider at length what my family was going through at this time. Lately I've wondered about another possible factor in their conceptualization of my illness. I have a girlfriend now, which my family did not know was within the realm of possibility for me until a couple of years ago. They've welcomed her with an effusiveness that suggests a little more may be at work than delight in Heather's highly family-pleasing character. The other week on the phone with my grandmother, after some polite chat about what Heather was up to, she broke out with: "I'm just so glad you're happy now."

Now? Now that I had come out and into my true self, I suppose she meant. I had never actually framed the matter as a "coming out," never indicated that this had been a matter of much inner struggle for me (it was and wasn't, but not due to any kind of self-repression). But this is one of the narratives at work around us, and it might well present itself as a comforting explanation for why one's granddaughter was so miserable for all those years.

Sadly for narrative convenience, my mental illness surely did not stem from my being creative or being queer (though the latter factor might well have added to the general feeling of pressure under which my first break occurred). But it has informed my art, not so much as cause or content but as process. The two things can move in similar ways.

Metaphor is itself a kind of paranoia; poetry, like psychosis, depends on seeing things as they are not. A piece of praise that sticks with me is a comment that I seemed to "see more than anyone else." (The capacity for paying attention makes up about 90% of my talent in any area, I suppose; it's not much, but it can do a little more than one might think.) In a paranoid state the mind runs its fingers more and more rapidly along threads of connection between all things (perhaps half-realizing that it is weaving these very threads with the other hand, and perhaps not at all), enwrapping the world in an ever wider and more elaborate net. Similarly, when things are going well as I write or compose in my head or plot out an essay it is among life's highest pleasures to feel the successive sparks of connection between ideas; I feel maximally powerful drawing so many things within my grasp, alive with the sense that I am doing the thing that I was designed to do – as a cheetah must feel when it runs, a hawk as it enters its swift controlled fall toward its prey.

Accordingly, the first stages of agitation can feel almost virtuous themselves in their similarity to this blessedly productive state. The hyperawareness of anxiety sometimes brings along a sense that the world is burgeoning with barely-contained meaning, and every so often it does produce some useful flash: an apt image, a slightly bitter bit of aphorism. Usually, however, this branching of thought turns in on itself before reaching the desired destination. Consciousness begins instead devouring data on the body and its accelerating heart rate, the twitch developing in one eyelid, the nausea puddling in the gut, and the fraught border where the self meets a judgmental world. Past this point, the best that can be hoped for is to eventually collapse into an exhausted calm; the promised breakthrough is lost for good.

Depression does something else, which it can do in tandem with these other forces or alone. It saps the will to such an extent that it can, in some middle state between normalcy and incapacitation, actually provide a sense of focus on those few things that seem marginally non-useless. When things are going easily in a superficial way, the sense of urgency needed to undertake creative projects fades. If one is happy cooking delicious meals, watching movies, having drinks with friends, why not bask in complacency for a while? In a steady mood I can go days or weeks without the question of what I am here to do posing more than a minor itch at the back of my skull.

In a depressed state, however, art becomes one of the few things of worth in the world and one of the only ladders up toward the light. When making art is a way to feel better (and not because it helps "work through" my feelings, but rather because it dissolves the self and feelings in its own process), one is compelled more strongly toward it.

If my work ethic were stronger to begin with, these prompts of illness would lose their authority, I think. As it is, I try to wring what I can from them without losing sight of the inevitable point where they stop being of assistance, without forgetting that they are not the only spurs that can induce me to work seriously, but only the most painful. Which is not the same thing at all, as it turns out. 

Pedway ghost

The elevators at work sometimes make me feel like a ghost. They fail to recognize me fully or at all. I stick my arm into the closing maw of one, which shoves my elbow aside before reconsidering my claims to reality at the last instant. The pair of sales reps inside don't pause their conversation.

Other times I press the button for my floor and its little orange halo will not light, which I may not notice at first. Instead I whoosh through two dozen stories of atmosphere in my dim capsule until someone else summons the car, entirely at the mercy of anywhere anyone else wants to go.

There are of course some forces at work here, mechanical quirks and human errors (how many times have I blindly walked onto an up elevator intending to go down?), and sometimes I solve the mystery to some extent, realizing for instance that some Charon of the system requires that I scan my key card as his fare. Often, however, I don't sort it out in time to avoid an embarrassing trip in the wrong direction, wincing goodbye to the departing members of the car as I remain and wait to go back up.

In general as I move through the office and the pedway below I feel ghostly, flickering into and out of visibility at the most inopportune times and through no desire of my own. Here I am, hungry and attracting no attention at the sandwich counter. And here I manifest myself as someone I vaguely know walks by and either waves or does not wave, but certainly notices the panicked half-smile on my face when I try to figure out which it was and what I should do when I catch her eye accidentally and too late. And then, my god, there are the system of pedway doors that demarcate the boundaries of the skyscrapers perched above. At what distance must one hold open the door for someone approaching from behind? Should one hang back or speed up if someone else threatens to undertake such an act of chivalry? (In the elevators, some men silently insist that women get off first, though I -- in a shapeless, puddle-splashed jacket, clutching a bike helmet and dabbing at my cheeks to sop up or at least spread around the tears the wind has produced -- am clearly not the specimen of womanhood these rules were built for.) My own girlfriend has walked by me in the pedway before and I have not seen her, too intent on making it through this minefield to get my lunch.

Down here, among the busily chatting and expensively shod, I feel as I often have when wandering at dusk through well-off, gold-windowed neighborhoods: inherently suspect and with the feeling that I should want to steal something. But are the ghosts in stories ever thieves? They take maybe a token from the living, something of sentimental value, nothing more. What use would they have for anything else?

On Not Writing about Madness

I have been thinking for a long time -- years and years, really, as I had considered myself a writer before I had any experience with mental illness -- about whether and how to write about mental illness. It presents a problem for fiction, I have long been told by writing mentors who know what they are talking about, since it seems to erase the comprehensible motives for action on which most fiction plots run. "She was crazy" is a dead end as explanations go.

So although mental illness is an actual and in fact a fairly sensational-sounding aspect of our world, our forms of narrative art have rather a dearth of ways to work with it. There are memoirs and biographies, of course, but typically the mental illness is presented as the thrillingly seamy flipside to a life (as an artist, a writer, a mathematician) whose on-record interest lies elsewhere. When it is used in literary fiction it is often afflicting a secondary character as a complication in the life of the non-mentally-ill protagonist (the first examples that, for some reason, come to mind, resting a little way apart on the spectrum of good taste: Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True, Eugenides's The Marriage Plot).

One genre that poses a major exception is the young adult or coming of age novel, in which I encountered mentally ill adolescents by the dozens as an adolescent myself. Most preteens are morbid and melodramatic by nature, easily cast under the spell of any subject with an element of gothic romance -- consider Lurlene McDaniel's absurdly prolific career of novels about terminally ill teenagers (some of her more than 70 titles: If I Should Die Before I Wake, Too Young to Die, Sixteen And Dying, A Time to Die, Please Don’t Die), consider the scores of '60s girl group songs about misunderstood boys committing suicide by motorbike, consider young Werther. And so it is with mental illness -- now, perhaps even more than when I was a kid rubbernecking at the misfortunes of my fictional peers, we have the anorexia novels, the self-injury novels, the addiction novels.

So this is another reason why I've hesitated to make any prolonged effort to write about mental illness: the taint of the adolescent, the overconfessional. And beyond even the feeling that it is unsuitable subject matter for adults is my discomfort with the element of romance at the heart of these books. I do not think their authors consciously intend to enhance the sexiness of this subject matter; they simply think they are representing the challenges faced by today's teens. But the romance is there; it is likely the main draw.

As the reader sinks into an ever deeper identification with the beautifully damaged or self-damaging protagonist, the affliction being chronicled appears as a painful but also fundamentally interesting way to live. Given a certain amount of inward affliction, the struggle of simply being oneself imposes a clear plot structure upon one's life. (This elemental plot also drives the coming-out novel, another rich young-adult subgenre I devoured even before suspecting that I myself was queer.) And although the reader, like the author, would not consciously frame it this way, such a readymade plot -- what Susan Sontag calls "the metaphor of the psychic voyage . . . an extension of the romantic idea of travel" -- can hold existential appeal to a reader aswim in the mundane formlessness of adolescence.

For most readers, of course, the romance ends there, and they return to their more or less healthy lives. The passionate pathology of the narrative casts its seeds onto the firm, dry soil of the soundly pragmatic mind, where they shrivel and blow away a little while after the last pages are read.

So I am certainly not saying that fiction made me mentally ill as a teenager; some combination of neurochemistry and life circumstances did that. But it was, I think, a force for rather than against my pathology once it began. It laid the groundwork for madness to flourish with the idea "that illness exacerbates consciousness" (Sontag), and for me to see it as a subject for study rather than an invasive species to uproot. My illness seized me unbidden, but after not much struggle I walked with it a while, prepared by fiction for it to take me somewhere interesting. It seemed to me at first that it might not only impose a new narrative on my life, but also benefit my writing. At the time I considered myself before anything a poet. In hallucinations and delusions were fresh images for my craft, inaccessible to anyone else around me.

The trouble was that they stayed inaccessible when I put them down in words. They were true nonsense. I wrote only a few poems using the content of my delusions (not mid-attack, but afterward; my psychosis was, on the spectrum of psychosis, mild, being episodic rather than all-pervasive, and I think I never wrote a word while within the grip of such an episode) before realizing that for any reader they would be nothing but little sealed rooms with a formless arrangement of inscrutable objects inside. No one saw them. I made a different attempt at at it a year or two later, deploying an elaborate chain of metaphors to depict the state of being mad (It's more like a jungle in the dark, intricate and awful . . .). I brought it to my writing mentors; they did not see much reality in it and asked questions trying to understand.

"Well, it's a metaphor," I said uselessly. A metaphor for a state with which no one could really identify. A sequence of images whose logic no one could follow, mapping to a state of mind signposted only by its own idiosyncratic pathology. It did not interest them; it was of no literary interest.

My salvation came partly when I became able to see madness as boring, when it became apparent that it was not only ruining my life but failing to add richness to my writing or the great narrative of my existence. (By salvation I only mean the power and will to work against my illness; there was no moment of conversion or cure, only the passing of time and the cultivation of a preventive vigilance within me.) I was already well into the demythologizing of my illness by the time I came across Illness as Metaphor, but I instantly grabbed onto Sontag's tough anti-romanticism. "The most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking," she writes.

Such has been one of the key tenets of the rabidly pro-sanity system of values I've built for myself. That system has saved me, but it's also meant that I don't know quite what to do with madness. I'd like to see nearly everything within the scope of my experience as a potential entry to creativity or exploration, but when I arrive at mental illness I usually turn back pretty quickly. Because it is disreputable, because it is in a certain literary sense uninteresting, because I find it irresponsible to participate in the tradition of romanticization but don't entirely trust myself not to do so. And, to a non-negligible extent, because it makes people uncomfortable. It remains a loose thread for me. I keep taking it out and winding it between my fingers because even now I feel that there must be something I can do with it. I just haven't figured out what yet.

(A brief note on terminology here: I've used "mental illness" and "madness" more or less synonymously, aware that this may be an outdated and problematic choice. But because I'm dealing here with the tension between clinical and romantic modes of viewing pathology and because I have laid claim to both characterizations at various points in the time period discussed, I've retained the somewhat sloppy intermingling of terms.)

A Personal History of Beyonce

All the snow came down at once, ending the feeling of easy, undeserved freedom we'd enjoyed from fall through mid-January. And just a couple of days before this, we -- I mean now Heather and I, not the city at large -- got a dog, somewhat analogously. I walk her, though not as much as Heather, who wanted her most. The snow presents a new subject for her study, rewriting the city's book of smells in a fascinating foreign dialect. She dips her nose into it, pushes at it with a professorial paw. Snow catches in the loops of chain link fences, erecting a skin of delicate scales around some yards. It's beautiful, and puts me so on edge. Cementing me into a difficult season I'd been able to slip in and out of until now.

A few weeks ago I wrote about music that comforts by immersing the listener in a kind of iterative difficulty; today I'm looking at the value of escape instead. Today I'm looking at one of my personal saints of pop jubilance. What makes Beyonce work for me?

Some thoughts and experiences, in no particular order:

1. We were at Heather's mom's monthly family dinner and she was casting about for a performer to epitomize some form of . . . pop degeneracy in the kids these days, I suppose. I don't remember the exact context. What she came up with was "Bounce-ay" (emphasis on first syllable, at least). Bouncy -- a perfect spokeswoman for the aging suburbanite's vision of popular culture: bubbly, brainless, and patently absurd. Probably also a little dirty, if you thought about it. 

But how can you not know who Beyonce is well enough to know how to pronounce her name? She's everywhere.

2. I was in the car in the High Sierras where my friend Kari lives and something about Beyonce came up; possibly my surprised enjoyment of "Crazy in Love," or maybe something one of her younger cousins said.

"Man, fuckin' Beyonce," I said, shaking my head in admiration.

Kari laughed. "The old Daphne would never have said that."

I really was more committed to seriousness as a virtue at some point in my life, I guess. Probably that'll happen if you go to a Great Books school in the desert mountains (and if you're the kind of teenager who applies to only one college and that's the one). I think it was Andrew who told me once about a classmate or lecturer there who railed against hip-hop because its beat evoked "the rhythm of sexual intercourse." Even then of course I laughed, but -- what weird and austere worlds I've lived in from time to time.

3. Some Google search results:

"I love Beyonce": About 1,740,000 results

"I hate Beyonce": About 56,800 results

(Honestly I didn't intend to expand on this point, but paging through some of the results for the latter phrase is actually pretty fun:

"Sure I liked the song and music video, but then when I saw Beyonce, I just knew that I wouldn't like her. She had look all stucked up and stuff."

"Do You Hate Beyonce? Join friendly people sharing true stories in the I Hate Beyonce group. Find forums, advice and chat with groups who share this life.")

4. I think I can come off as a pretty solemn person, if not somber, and when I conceived this post I sort of thought, well, ha! If that's what you think, let me write a few hundred words about Beyonce, of all things.

Then I remembered that part of the reason I'm writing this is because I am a crier. Or used to be, or am in the sense that an alcoholic continues to claim the title after years of sobriety. Not especially when I'm sad (at least not sad about situations in my life, though put for instance a sick kid on my TV screen and I'm instantly immobilized by reservoirs of tears awaiting the slightest breath to spill forward), but certainly and infuriatingly when I'm angry I have to fight it back, and certainly when I am . . . I don't know, beauty-struck? But by a very particular kind of beauty, the kind that slices suddenly into the joy of being a living expressive being and instantly stings the eyes with the vapors it sends up.

Plenty of perfectly respectable art does this for me, sure -- Chagall's America Windows, sentences of Proust's or Nabokov's, scenes in Tati's Playtime. But a certain set of performers within pop culture also produces this effect: typically female, youthful, beautiful, smiling, and sending out outrageous quantities of charm. This can come across excellently on record -- most of the '60s girl group songs I love operate on this frequency, Leslie Gore's "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows" and The Toys' "A Lovers' Concerto" being prime examples -- but especially on video. Dolly Parton does this; so does Janelle Monae. I watch them sing and smile, my jaw drops, my eyes well. There's some kind of pure life force on display there that demands my gratitude and rapture.

"Countdown" -- the song and its video both -- seems to throw nearly everybody into paroxysms of delight, so it's no surprise that it turns on my personal waterworks. Throughout the video Beyonce gives an incredible impression of somebody trying to be glamorous, tough, and cool, but always failing at the last moment to suppress a gleeful, spine-melting grin that betrays exactly how giddy she is. Coming out of the intro and breaking into one of the fairly unconvincing interludes of clubspeak that dot the song, her lip curls into a snarl that's immediately pulled under by a more characteristic twinkle. One knows intellectually that this is surely as choreographed as everything else about Beyonce -- even her long eyelashes flutter to the beat in closeups -- but the smile zaps down any such distancing.

Most of her videos -- sure, most of her songs -- don't approach the artfulness and pleasure of "Countdown," but even in tacky crap like the video for "Run the World," she communicates a sense of play in the close-ups, like all the clouds of dust and wild animals and "edgy" stylization are just an elaborate game of dress-up. As, of course, they are -- making her also seem not only more playful but also more intelligent and grounded than any of her fellow pop queens.

One of the main things about Beyonce is her aura of total self-possession. "Countdown," like "Crazy in Love" (the track that initiated my gushy admiration), is a headlong rush into unquestioning adoration. But what comes across is how good it feels to be in love; she's exulting partly in her own state of soul. We don't see the dream boy in the video. When she sings "grind up on him," it's herself she's wrapping her arms around. Romping through candy-colored sets among marching band members, she effectively brings to life the way love has of sending an entire universe into bloom, whether the loved one is present or not.

Of course she has just had a baby and the internet is, has been, abuzz with the news. I and the world seem to think that Jay-Z is a pretty good match. I like his music, and he exudes the same steely professionalism that one knows must underlie as highly willed a career as Beyonce's. But when he comes in on "Crazy in Love," he simply sounds like some dope interrupting. I mean, who wouldn't?

5. Once I was home from college and went to the mall with my friend Claire so she could use some gift certificates, but also so she could show me the girl who worked at the smoothie shop counter who, Claire said, "looked just like Beyonce." Claire wasn't out yet, but who wouldn't be crushed out on someone who looked just like Beyonce in real life behind the juice counter? (She wasn't there that day, but I undoubtedly would have been instantly in love.) Beyonce is universal.

6. Despite my considerable streak of snobbishness, I'm pointlessly delighted when my tastes converge with the zeitgeist. I was thrilled when "Hey Ya" and "Bad Romance" and "Million Dollar Bill" were big, not only because it was occasionally possible to hear something that I enjoyed in the grocery store or the gay bar, but because I felt relieved, momentarily, from the imaginary pressure of defending my tastes to the masses. (Despite surely bringing down the pressure of defending my tastes to that mostly imaginary coterie from whom I'd just defected). Loving Beyonce is a kind of optimism about the world, a little bridge to the considerable part of it that can appreciate ebullience as much as I do. There, I can say. There's one thing that we are all about.

Migration season

I have finally finished reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, after an entire autumn spent savoring it in small sips and draughts, on buses and curled up on the couch, my breath taken from me with nearly every page and spirited to a place of wild refuge. But my stunned admiration for the book is not, just now, what I am thinking of. It is instead a passage where she talks about the flight of a maple seed – a maple “key,” she calls it, in a marvelous usage totally unfamiliar to me before now – and yes, of course, this little instrument unlocks the entire structure, its scaffolding and all its wings. Reading it, it occurred to me that perhaps I have not seen a single maple seed (or whirlybird, as I have also heard them called charmingly but less strikingly – helicopter, also) this season. How can it be?

Heather and I biked a few miles along unfriendly suburban roads the day after Thanksgiving to visit a little nature preserve I'd heard about, the Anna Oaks Nature Center in Skokie. So, of course, there were oaks, the ground strewn with leaves of several different kinds, as in an illustration for children. On the shores of the pond where the bottom tapered off into featureless murk, the leaves and anything else that had fallen in had become immediately and uniformly covered with green-gray silt, algae, or some other form of matter too delicate for me to name. They appeared spray-painted or cut from construction paper, or the background artist had grown lazy and treated the entire area with a monochrome wash of muddy watercolor after the initial sketch.

The whole preserve had something of an illustrative quality about it. We walked along a path into the 13-acre patch of woods and heard some bird peep above us. Standing still, we eventually followed the sound to its source: a largish bird as song birds go, with a smoothly tapering body, dark up top and white-bellied. It tumbled from branch to branch, at one point landing upside down before hoisting its light body around upright. I wondered aloud what it was, drawing forth and then rejecting the few creature-names with which my mental cabinets were once so full. And then the world answered me: the bird began hammering its beak into the branch in the distinctive woodpecker way, with a sound called up straight from a cartoon.

We covered about all the ground there was to cover in the park, hopeful of living things. Along the shores of the pond I stopped to peer in and stir the muck with a stick. Nothing came. In the middle of a little amphitheater two men were chainsawing pieces of deadwood; there'd been a controlled burn earlier in the day, signs told us, and indeed the ground was strewn with unreadable patches of ash, clinging to the bases of trees like shrunken shadows.

Geese sat arrayed all across the pond, just one occasionally making a low, cowish sound. All the while the two-car Skokie Swift train rattled comically through on tracks just behind the preserve. We were leaning over to look at a handful of sluggish, deep orange goldfish sunken into the pond when something unknown made the better portion of the geese alight and ascend directly over us. The new thing here – perhaps I'd just never been flown over so closely by so many geese at once? – was the noise of their wings: there was a crisp, almost insect buzz produced, I suppose, by the motions of their stiff feathers against each other.

So the city is full of wonders, to be sure; I saw a fox the other day as I was leaving the house, and my mind cycled through “dog” and “cat” before I could finally allow myself to believe that this silver-auburn creature dashing between houses was, indeed, a fox. (I added it to a small, private menagerie that includes the coyote I saw loping through Wunders Cemetery one winter, and a deer that suddenly began to gallop alongside our bicycles as Heather and I rode to suburban LaGrange.) Even so, how can I not have lately found myself in a place where maple seeds flutter down on me unsought through leaf-filtered light? 

Especially in the fall, an ache rises in me to be in deep woods alone for as long as I care to tramp through them, my footsteps rousing the sweet odor of vegetal decay. It's a slightly ridiculous position my temperament has put me in, city-loving hermit, like some sort of amphibian whose two habitats are miles from each other – and now the fall, best season of migration, is more or less over for the year, and I've only made it a little way across the shore between them. Next year I should make a better attempt at a longer escape.

Some Women in Concert

This summer and fall I've gotten to see at least four breathtaking concerts, all loosely linked by the fact that the primary musicians have all been women and some linked by the fact that they are musicians I thought I would never see, or never see again. In order: Cibo Matto, Wild Flag, the Raincoats (with openers Grass Widow, a new favorite), and St. Vincent. The ones I mainly keep turning over in my mind, though, are just some of these, or a handful of musicians in these, who do something that coalesces into a singular style for me, a certain mode of attack that I only rarely see but that softly nudges me in the gut and releases something I've held there. It strikes me as being one way of making feminine or feminist music, though I'm still working out what I'm sensing when I sense that.

It's hard to know which of these to start with, but as a study in contrasts, perhaps, let me take Wild Flag. I greeted their formation with fangirl glee – Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein, returning to me at last! And the things I knew I would love were as exhilarating as ever: Janet's fierce precision, and Carrie in fine, athletic, high-kicking form, she who was my biggest heroine/crush for years on end, again in the flesh a couple of feet away from the front of the stage where I stood in as much awe as ever. But something there had hardened a little, I thought, into a posture; it was the idea of a rock star that was strutting magnificently across the stage before me. It seems to me that her voice these days is shellacked with layers of mannerism, and the sneer is partly the sneer of the successful. She knows she's great. She is. Determined to be all rock 'n' roll fun, and pulling it off marvelously.

And I want to talk a little about the women rockers who risk not being all rock 'n' roll fun. Mary Timony is Wild Flag's other frontwoman, and her presence was an interesting contrast to Carrie's. She's every bit as adept on guitar and as fully willing a participant in some spectacular stage acrobatics, but there's a different mood there. I'd say a more private mood, but in fact there's no lack of privacy in Carrie's performance, either – the bravado is a kind of wall. It invites your body into the music, but it doesn't invite you into communion with the musician. Mary seems to be doing something else, daring to put her privacy and inwardness on display. Wild Flag's a pretty upbeat group, but in her performance there's a clear connection with the musician who fronted heavy, heavy Helium and carried on the odd, downbeat solo career. One of my favorite songs of hers is “I Fire Myself” from “Mountains:” a catchy, echoing piano riff punctuated by handclaps, which, it soon becomes clear, will repeat obsessively throughout the length of the song, working something out. The lyrics, sung matter-of-factly, are florid in their evocation of the trudging work that is middle of depression, or self-doubt, or some equally internal misery:

I fire myself ten times a day

I fire myself in a watery grave

With fourteen horses on top of my head

I hear the voice again and again

The last line is “the end of fear, the beginning of hope,” but it's sung to the same melody and with the same inflection as the rest of the song; she makes hope sound like a form of exhaustion, a temporary place of rest before the climb up the next mountain begins. The strings and guitars on the rest of the record saw away at the endless pilgrimage of everyday life.

It seems to me that there's a great deal of risk in this sort of thing. No one wants to hear about someone's depression, one assumes, and especially not if it's a woman, and especially if the cause of the depression at hand is obscure, opaque, wholly private. But Mary Timony's not willing to sell it or make it seem more important than it is – and that in itself poses a kind of challenge, to assume that this stuff is worthy of attention all on its own. There isn't any melodrama in the music, and there's no arc. Just an emotional reality to swim into – which can be a source of tremendous comfort and companionship if you're sawing away at a similar emotional state.

(St. Vincent, more upbeat and clever, is more of an obvious storyteller than Timony, and so there's less sense of the personal being laid bare – but she has the same love of obsessive guitar figures, often fuzzing almost into ugliness, and stabbing lyrical refrains that make me want to include her in this general feeling. Paint the black hole blacker, she sings in my favorite song of hers, and she's never afraid to let desperation creep into her angel's voice even while she shreds on guitar. Hysterical strength, she sings on the new album, a fitting summation.)

Then, from out of the past, there are the Raincoats, who I also saw, bizarrely, on their six-city reunion tour. This was a reunion I'd never even dared to dream about, but here they were – Ana da Silva and Gina Birch, fully and unapologetically middle-aged, not apparently having spent the intervening years becoming any more readily saleable or developing any “chops,” with Anne Wood on violin as on “Looking in the Shadows” and a very young male drummer who sensibly faded into the background.

I got into the Raincoats because a guy who was interviewing my high school band (an all-girl punk band called the Cautions who achieved some level of local renown only, it's now clear, due to our novelty and strangeness) compared us to them and later gave me a cassette tape of their self-titled album. I carried that packet of desperate harmony and noise in my tape player for months. It's still my favorite, and their reunion show drew mostly from that album. There's their exuberant, complicating cover of “Lola,” which everyone knows if there's any song by the Raincoats everyone knows, but then there's the rest of the album too, violin and guitar and drums and voices all communicating with maximal intensity about the situation of being a highly internal woman moving through the world -- being looked at and not being looked at and loving unloved and wondering whether she will make it through the rest of the day. The lyrics are often hard to make out; one hears scraps of piercing demands, obstinate and unjustified claims to our attention: Don't ask me anything – I'm not sympathetic; Don't take it personal; Her feeling of being watched / isn't easy to define / so I won't trouble you; I can't do a thing today.

And none of this seems to have changed as Birch and da Silva have gotten older; these are not the passing worries of angst-ridden youth. Their reunion album, “Looking in the Shadows,” released at the peak of the grunge era, was, if anything, even grimmer in content and sound, with slower, more minimalistic guitarwork. They played some songs from this one, too; Gina's more prominent on it, and she's a more outgoing stage presence than Ana, who stood mostly still at the show, small, blunt, and dressed monastically in oddly-shaped black garments. On this album there's an extended musing about methods of suicide, a song about a woman whose “body said no” to children and who attempts to make a dog fill the void – and all of this is delivered rather lightly, with the wit to see how ridiculous pain can make us look and sound.

This is music that figures out how to live within depression, which is treated as personal, existential, and even political at various points. It doesn't solve problems or assert triumphs or romanticize; it refuses to pretend that there is an easy or permanent solution (when love is involved, there is no imploring the loved one to notice/come back/take any action). The bold move it makes is believing that it is worthy of being heard and that an audience will pay attention.

And why do I feel that this is somehow a feminist kind of music? Maybe because the way these women formulate their rock and roll assertion stands so distinctly against the laid-back, cool-guy mode of rock tradition, and against rock-star bravado, while still refusing to be particularly delicate or pretty. I was almost afraid for the Raincoats when I saw them, stout and aging and being so loudly vulnerable. Of course, the audience, being an audience that had come to see the Raincoats, was as reverent as I. But when I hear a woman singing or talking about her small but heavy feelings I tense in anticipation of some attack. There are famous men who have operated sometimes in this mode -- Lou Reed (I'm thinking especially of "Heroin"), Elliott Smith. I can't think of a woman who could have been taken seriously enough in order to reach that level of fame and critical respect while doing the same thing. Famous sad women in music have mostly operated in the modes of the lovelorn or the kick-ass angry babe; there's generally a clear explanation for their feelings, typically relationship-centered, and a clear way to resolve them, with less space to meditate and let them unfold. So even though "The Raincoats" came out in 1979, this keeps on feeling new to me.

I don't think that this is the only way to do music or that everyone must enjoy this way of doing music; it's not even the only way for music to be a form of comfort. It can be as good to lose yourself in light and warmth, and certainly it's sometimes preferable to escape from darkness rather than diving into someone else's rendition of it.

But: the other week I was riding out one of the senseless waves of depression that carries me under every so often, and I wrote a song about it, feeling that I could do this in part because I'd seen and heard it done. It made me feel so teenaged, putting it down so baldly, but underneath all this was a sense of relief at having made anything at all out of this gray heaviness upon me. I debated whether to record it, then whether to send it to the band, worrying it would seem silly, immature, morbid, melodramatic. Not rock 'n' roll fun, not something the boys in the band could get down to. I did record and share it, though; we're going to play it, and it will undoubtedly feel strange to make such private and disreputable sounds onstage. But no one, I figure, is alone in this.

You Guys Must Be Rich

“Occupy [Your City Here]” keeps going on, somewhat miraculously; I haven't been involved, have only been involved in activism by any stretch of the term tangentially and sporadically since I was in high school, really, and I wonder how I would have felt about it then, when it still seemed to me that my life would be spent in passionate protest. I am a little excited about it now, from a distance, feel that it is good that it is happening; generally I am pleased to see extensive and spontaneous use being made of our public spaces and freedoms, testing them to make sure they still work.

And it is interesting that class is starting to become a part of the public conversation that's harder and harder to ignore, if only in a simplified way. I thought about class as an anarchist youth, certainly, listened to proudly working-class hardcore bands and made conflicted steps towards claiming that identity for myself (all the while cringing against the philistinism of my surroundings and hungering desperately for a sense of security they couldn't provide). Still, the extent of what it meant to be working-class didn't fully develop for me until I went away to college and lived among honest-to-goodness rich kids for the first time and began taking the kind of jobs my family had had all their lives to support me in my leap away from my native culture. Until that point the “upper class” was a political concept that showed up mainly in newspapers and statistics. We stayed out of each other's way.

Sady Doyle has a wonderful essay on Tiger Beatdown that's been making the internet rounds, about her conflicted feelings toward OWS and the understanding of class that lumps an entire 99% together. I recognize intimately the milieu of the childhood she writes about, especially this:

“My first stepfather worked the night shift at a grocery store; it wasn’t understood that we were doing poorly. My best friend’s mother worked the deli counter at a different grocery store. You could live on that money . . . So, not all of us had office jobs, or the education or background required to get them. But we had our own houses, we were suburban, the idea that we weren’t firmly middle-class would have been an insult to us. Of course we were. Everyone was.”

Growing up, we lived roughly at the middle of a fairly smooth gradation along the river from the older, shabby blocks of wooden houses toward downtown (and south of those, the only housing project I knew about in my city) all the way to curving streets of well-kept two-story brick homes whose backyards sprouted play structures that looked more solid than our entire aluminum-sided ranch house. My first elementary school there was in the direction of the nicer neighborhood, from which most of my friends were drawn, but differences between us still seemed easily hopscotched over. They'd have the name-brand backpacks and fancier lunches, maybe, but we still played in the same parks. I think we all figured that aside, perhaps, from a handful of celebrities or people living in mythical ghettos or rural shacks, everyone was basically like us.

In fifth grade I transferred to a performing arts school in the inner city. Here I noticed for the first time a few kids who were clearly poorer than me. The trick at this school was somehow to remain authentic, of the street-savvy neighborhood, while still having Starter jackets and nice sneakers; those who couldn't manage both of these things were mercilessly teased. One of the few friends I managed to find was Breanne, a scrawny, clingy, loudmouthed blond kid who lived on the hill up close to the housing project. I went to her house maybe only once; I remember it being dark and cluttered inside, disorienting, and the outside covered in the kind of stick-on siding that resembles roof shingles. We were there just to pick up her homework or something; she never wanted to invite me over.

And in fact, I may have had her over only once as well. During that visit she let slip to my mom that I had a crush on Jake Bullock (10-year-old guitar prodigy, dreamy eyes beneath floppy brown hair) and I wanted to wring her neck for it I was so embarrassed. My mom had recently cleaned house, I think, when she came over; we looked good. Nonetheless I was unnerved the next day at school when Breanne said to me, “You guys must be rich, huh?”

No one has ever said that about my family before or since. In college the common, polite, getting-to-know-you question “What do your parents do?” was a nonstarter for me. “My mom's a receptionist, and my dad drives a truck” was, at an expensive liberal arts college, far distant from the sort of teacher/architect or lawyer/lawyer parings that had brought forth many of my classmates. In my year alone were at least two rumored heirs to big-name business fortunes. My family's history was a thick, blank wall for these interlocutors. What more is there to talk about, in a line of waitresses, cashiers, factory workers? What link can be drawn from those people to the girl waist-deep in Aeschylus and Plato? What is she doing here?

Unless you'd caught me in some chance shibboleth (my freshman-year surprise and envy that a friend had a house with fireplaces in it, for instance, or contemplating out loud pawning some of my stuff for enough money to join the Search and Rescue team), you would not have guessed my origins. More than once I've gotten some variant of “Oh, I thought your parents were professors or something!” In my last job, a woman I was training at one point said, when things had irreversibly deteriorated between us due to her near-pathological incompetence, “You must not have had to work through college.”

“I've always worked,” I barked back.

Throughout college I always had a pleasant on-campus job and frequently another less-sheltered service job. The first of these was in a movie theater where I sold tickets and concessions and cleaned. The selling was nominally my job but the cleaning composed the bulk of my time – clearing rafts of popcorn, food, and trash from the theaters after the lights went up, polishing lobby fixtures, wiping down bathrooms, which sometimes included soaking up vomit with a special powder that turned it into a solid substance that could be maneuvered into a dustpan. Even when we were behind the counter and no customers were around, we were not allowed to lean against the cabinets or sit on the one battered stool in the staff area. This connoted laziness. Instead we were to always be cleaning – scouring away grease and syrup from every crevice of every machine and counter. Nearly everyone was younger than me and passed the time saying terrible things about each other.

A boy in my circle of college friends asked, apparently in all innocence, “Why did you start working there? Do you just really like movies?”

And so that was a kind of class realization, there.

When I graduated and moved to Chicago I did so knowing that I'd fit well enough into whatever service job I could find. I could handle the shooting foot and ankle pains induced by long hours of standing, the forthright disrespect from customers and managers, and the fierce, bizarre rivalries that sprout up when people are forced to compete for the only things – the big tips, the days off – that make their jobs bearable. I stayed in my last bad office job for three years largely because I felt that the service industry was the only obvious alternative.

For me, being working-class has meant a certain instability at the foundation of my life. Will I be able to go to summer camp? Will we lose our house? Will I be able to afford to go to college even if I get in? Will I be able to afford my second year of college if I make it through the first one? My student loans? What if my parents are laid off? It has meant that I do not ever fully trust that things will be okay or that I will not suddenly be jettisoned from the ranks of the well-off and the cultured. And it has meant that a slender serpent of resentment slithers quickly through my ribcage when I sense the presence of those who have not been kept continually off-balance by these questions.

Just briefly. In a way I am frequently at home among these people, after all – they are so well-bred, congenial, have had the time to read books and think of art and never felt they were stealing anything from their families by doing so. But there is a little venom in me still, and all the foreign privilege I have lucked into may never be sufficient antidote.

How do words work?

Composed a small poem on the way back from the grocery store (hauling our weekly bounty of surprise produce from New Leaf), thinking of the way in which I'm pulled toward and always slightly repelled by symbols, allegories, lessons. 


(Title credit: my initial mishearing of the refrain of "Wordy Rappinghood," from the Tom Tom Club record I picked up in Nebraska this past weekend.)

Reforesting

Sunny now, but in the wind the trees

shed pieces of their hoarded silver on me

the excessive richness of this world forever spilling

over into the stiff hands of metaphor, whether

we give it there or no. And that portion

of its assets frozen --

                                   Too hard myself,

to ever chafe at the conditions of

the small security the world ekes out for us

and for itself, parent of limited means and vast

awkward benevolence. Together so we go reforesting

the landscape, wet tree upon

wet, dense, translucent tree.

Summer is ready when you are

Summer is about saying yes. My schedule is at the whim of every invitation casually tossed my way, my taste buds ready for every bite of fruit and sip of nectar offered. Delightful to set out with friends for an impromptu popsicle at a gourmet popsicle pop-up shop this morning, for instance. (Well, not this morning – soon after I got up, rather, having played a show into the wee hours last night.)

A hazy, humid morning has matured into a shady 82-degree afternoon, bathed by nearly imperceptible breezes. I walked to the grocery store for veggie sausages for Monday's cookout and ingredients for a cucumber gimlet granita. It turned out to be one of those patches of time where the very texture of experience seems to become more dense, where pleasure in existence pools – the one peach in the bushel that has unaccountably ripened more fully than the others – sticking you to while also removing you from your surroundings: everything is supersaturated, and therefore not entirely real. You half suspect that you may have been snatched up by the hand of God and set down in an ideal heaven. And this is almost a source of worry, but not quite. It's something like a photorealistic painting that doesn't quite come off, the painter having zealously lavished as much attention on the feathers of the bird in the sky as on the picnickers in the foreground.

(This is how I was sure it would be, heaven, when I was a a religious child convinced of my own virtue and likely future sainthood, when I'd wander around the soccer field at recess basking in the promise that God had bestowed upon me. It would be this very state of grace and abundance, only forever, untainted by the thought of death – that little vial of poison with the crumbling cork, always perched in some precarious place and waiting to spill over.)

It's easiest to achieve this state in the woods, alone, with endless hours to roam, filling your heart with the afternoon light like a basket with blackberries – which, as it happens, drop from the bushes, too copious for even the birds to eat, while dragonflies hang in the air. I've walked through fields and down paths unable to stop, sometimes, from laughing aloud, even as my eyes filled with tears of diffuse gratitude.

But it's possible in the city, too. This neighborhood encourages such idylls; it blossoms with so much care. Gardens spill over the borders of nearly every yard; husbands trot assiduously with push mowers, back and forth. A man climbs a ladder with a shutter, perhaps thrown down in the recent storm, tucked beneath his arm; another man steadies the ladder, which seems a little unstable; and for a moment I watch this silent scene with bated breath until he reaches the top. I walk past St. Gertrude's Church; all the stained-glass windows are pushed open in the heat, and from inside, music: either a choir practicing, or just an extraordinarily tuneful congregation. It's good to live here. It's good to live.

(Title credit: The Breeders, "Saints")