The Music of Domesticity and 'A Song About Breathing'
Gathering some thoughts: An old reflection, a new recording, and some things I liked this week.
In response to the question I was asked by one reader of this newsletter: Do they all have to be so long? (I guess the editor needs an editor.) I will, every now and then, be sharing quick notes and ephemera that may or not include poems drafts, language experiments, homemade music, etc. This is one.
Many years ago — 18 to be exact — when the internet felt more like a playground than a minefield, I did a bit of writing and music making at a blog I called The Low-Fi Sound Bank. I was nearing the end of a stretch of performing in bands and was looking for some sort of quieter personal ground on which to make art, and I found myself, quite happily, listening, reading and experimenting with my own work in isolation — that is, at home in our apartment in Brooklyn, with my wife and then 2-year-old daughter. But I was also wondering what role music was going to play in my life if I stopped performing. A few weeks ago I found this entry for that project saved on my computer:
I got up early to write but was interrupted as the steam heat in my building runs through pipes that are as old as the rest of the place (est. 1940) and makes noise as it pushes through them, a different kind of noise in each room. In the living room the pipes rattle. In my daughter’s room there comes a manic chorus of tiny Bulgarian 12-tone serialist opera singers, apparently struggling for breath mid-libretto, and when they begin to gasp and wail, my little girl, being in a place of dark and shadows, wakes, expressing her concern. When this happens, I go in and attend to her, my mind occupied with the sentence I was about to write and a song I had just begun to listen to. I sit beside her bed and hold her hand, but as the chorus intensifies in volume and pitch that is no longer sufficient so I pick her up and she clings to me, half-asleep, marsupial-like. She is 2 ½ years old.
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Soon I am holding her, her head on my shoulder, legs dangling and the rest of her folded into the crook of my arm, and my impatience to get back to my desk melts away. After 15 minutes or so she falls back to sleep still clinging to me so I untangle us and put her on the couch to sleep until sunrise, then back at my writing and listening perch, I play this haunting song, "Allelujah," guitar and voice by Christian Kjellvander and as the still dark room starts to fill with the sound I cannot help but look over to my little girl sleeping and, O.K. I’ll admit it, a few votive candles are burning, glass cylinders of wax and wick purchased in a bodega on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, flickering, beautifully and cheaply adorned, one with San Miguel Archangel bearing a raised sword y the other San Antonio cradling the Child, and the song is very peaceful but strange and there are strings plucking and a voice that sounds wounded and eerie Spaghetti Western harmonies floating out of the chorus and then a shade more daylight enters the room and I wish at that moment that time could both stop and keep flowing —
So how was it I ever wondered what music is for?
At that time I was experiencing the new rhythms and textures of being a father, of our home becoming the gravitational center of all our days and nights and of the three of us, in our confused, exhausted intimacy, becoming a family. I had forgotten about this vignette, but it cheered me to find it now, especially since the little girl at the center of it, now 20, moved away two years ago. And it warmed me to listen to this song again and have it return me to that moment. It reminded me that music acquires power not only in its performance of it but also in the listening, and in our conscious experience of a song in a particular place and time, and in what we make of it.
I often think of the fondness I developed during those years for tinkering at home, for writing text and making music for no one in particular, for the pleasure of making them, expressions of the mundane or of stillness, in the quiet spaces that can sometimes be found in domesticity. I was also becoming comfortable with the idea music is always happening around us and that we become part of it in the hearing. I was not going to cease being a musician because I stopped playing in bands or performing in clubs. That idea changed the way I experienced the world, for the better.
I still like playing with found words or sound and fiddling away with them at home. I do this as — I don’t know — a vocation or a practice or a form of worship to what I do not know. The sample below is a recording I made recently in the privacy of my home in a few distracted hours when the words were not flowing. I called this "A Song About Breathing,” not because it’s a song in the usual sense — there are no words or even any structure — but because that seemed to be the name of it. It was made in the midst of a few hours when “nothing” was happening. Wine glasses were involved.
A Few Things I Liked This Week
~ I have come out publicly as having a thing for prose written by poets. This post from Michael Klein about, of all things, paragraphs and the book/text Autoportrait by Edouard Levé articulated very fluidly and insightfully many of the impulses and challenges I come upon when writing. It made me want to read the book, too, though I must say it sounds very raw and I feel a little anxious about it.
~ I loved reading this essay at Aeon: Flat Places by Noreen Masud, a lecturer in 20th-century literature at the University of Bristol in the UK. I marveled at how beautifully it found a philosophically rich and poetic ground in flat land and open space, which we often see as a lack of something. “Flat places are the ground that my mind is built upon,” she writes. “Wetlands, fenlands, stretches of shingle: I never get tired of their clear, straight horizons. Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless.” All this movingly tied to her childhood in Pakistan, “full of painful nothing.”