Betwixt-and-Between

by Jenny Boully

  When I was in graduate school, there was a boy I thought I was in love with, and this boy told me that I had a dark side he was afraid of and that’s why he could not love me.

  There are days, like today, when I feel like a very bad writer. I am still terrible at cleansing my mind.

  The craft of writing as getting someone to love me despite how dark I might be.

  It’s difficult to accept that it was twenty years ago when I used to think I could, simply through visualization and the right herbs, get the world to change for me. And that is the worst thing, the thing that clutters my mind the most: there is a twenty years ago and the world, despite my deepest wantings, will not change for me. The only thing, really, I can bring to this craft, however dark it is, is to write sincerely because I am dying.

  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, Glass’s hair is shaggy; Glass wears white socks and black boots, Wilson wears light sneakers and dark socks. The incongruity is furthered by the visual split in the photograph as well as by the grayer background behind Glass opposite the lighter one behind Wilson. I have never known just where to direct my sight: the entwined limbs, the pointed feet, the commanding hands, the chair backs on the sides of the subjects, Wilson’s hard stare, Glass’s disheveled hair, Glass’s slight slant toward Wilson, Glass’s shoulder in Wilson’s space, Wilson’s shoe encroaching on Glass’s.

  I asked my students if they recognized the photograph. Yes, they had seen it in Barthes’s book, but not one of them could tell me why the two were photographed together. Then, I tell them that in 1976, the two of them, Glass and Wilson, collaborated on a piece of musical theater called Einstein on the Beach. I myself had not heard of Einstein on the Beach until I was a graduate student, when I listened to it in my husband’s—who was not yet my husband—dorm-style campus apartment, a setting that is, perhaps, in total opposition to the dreamy and enchanting musicscape that is Einstein on the Beach. Although I had been, previously that semester, introduced to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, it had not prepared me for the snowflakes, the ephemeral sea, the lulling waves crashing that are Einstein on the Beach.

  I could watch over and over again the PBS documentary Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, a film that I showed my students. The film documents the staging of Einstein on the Beach in 1984 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

  And to think, public television used to broadcast such beautiful things, I tell them, a statement that makes me realize that I have grown older. I am ever-so-much older than I was in 1976, when Einstein on the Beach debuted (and when I was born), and in 1984, when Glass and Wilson put the show on again for the Next Wave Festival, and in 2002, when I heard for the first time, on a CD player, the one-two-three-four-fives.

  Einstein on the Beach is an existential electronic pulsing, the pure and perfect postmodernist dream, and like Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Wilson and Glass, an arrangement of subtle yet stark incongruity. It riffs from classical dance and opera yet subverts those very traditions at the same time it celebrates them. There is repetition, change through repetition, collaging, splicing of the overheard, fragments of conversations/advertisements/in
structions/trifles, historical inquiry and plundering, the inclusion of the seemingly insignificant and the mundane, a meditative surmounting of the opera’s heroic subject.

  The background of Einstein on the Beach is composed of electronic hums, blips, and beeps; one senses that at its very core is a strange mechanism, an enormous supercomputer with no connection to the empirical world nevertheless striving to connect to that world. But I grew up in the ‘80s. The very soundtrack of my life was electronic. The world pulsed through the sound of electronic machinery. The term postmodernism and what it represented was occluded from me; I could not see the forest for the trees. I could fast-forward and rewind, fast-forward and rewind, and hear again and again a phrase or song. I could record my very voice and play it back and speed it up and slow it down again.

  I have been thinking about this impulse in my writing; that is, there exists an impulse to false start, to say exact words over again, to abruptly insert a pronouncement, to skip over pertinent parts, to return to a scene over and over again.

  I am officially old-fashioned now, now that I can see the forest for the trees.

  I do not know how to end this except to say that in video games, which were the playthings of the ‘80s, when new life was given, it was given with electronic beeping; and when the struggle or flight or fight commenced, there was electronic beeping; and when a death occurred, there was electronic beeping. And I have been hearing these sounds less and less.

  On the Voyager Golden Records

  When I was a child, seeing future dates always made death and old age seem impossible—the future was a thing that was so far away it could never arrive.

  With their plutonium stores diminishing, the Voyager probes, according to NASA, will be unable to send back information beyond 2025, at best 2030. Perhaps in 1977, when the probes were launched, the year 2025 seemed far off, an unachievable dream; however, now that 2025 is ever-so-near, I still cannot see the present for what it is: even this very year seems unreal, futuristic, beyond what is possible.

  That our tether to the Voyager probes will sever in 2025 means letting go, forgetting, acknowledging an inability to get in touch ever again. It is more than empirical absence; it is an existential termination.

  The Voyager’s mission was to chart and analyze our solar system’s territory, but its mission was also to go where no probes had gone before. The probes were programed to leave the heliosphere; they would journey on into interspace and forever remain there, orbiting within our galaxy for billions of years.

  In addition to instruments that would analyze and send back data, each probe carried a precious piece of cargo, an identical Golden Record, but other than a stylus, NASA did not send any other technology with which to listen to the audio or reveal the analog images embedded within them.

  NASA did, however, equip the records with illustrations of how to decode them, illustrations that would themselves need a fair amount of deciphering. If an alien being were to, in that far-off off-chance, discover the records, it would be faced, first, with the task of interpreting the instructions of how to properly place and time the stylus; from there, it would have to be tech savvy enough to create the analog video images by translating wavelengths in a certain timeframe to a certain number of vertical lines. It seems a nearly impossible task; however, given the effort that went into the planning and implementation of these records, it would seem that the records are more than mere time capsules of how humans will speak to future humans; that is, the records are testimony to how humans wanted to speak to the expanse beyond our solar system, even if that expanse was void of intelligent life.

  If a far-off civilization were able to decipher the records, it would hear greetings and well-wishes in dozens of Earth languages. In English, it would hear a “Hello from the children of planet Earth.” It would hear ocean waves, thunder, wind, a heartbeat, Glenn Gould playing Bach. They would see a nursing infant, snowflakes, a seashell, a musical score, children, a family, a sunset. Morse code would signal a Latin phrase announcing “through hardship to the stars.” It is a beautiful sampling, a startling compilation, eerie and ethereal, canonical in its own poetic right. Schoolchildren for all eternity should have to learn what it was that we found precious enough to preserve.

  What interests me about the Golden Records, more than their silence and the infinitesimal chance of them being discovered and fully decoded, is that they contain a snapshot of the world—albeit a highly curated one—when I myself was being formed and then born. When the Voyager probes were launched in 1977, I was a little over twelve months old.

  The records attempt to capture the world as it existed at a particular moment. They speak to who we were as a society and what we valued. We were, in the 1970s, a society that chose to launch what was less a scientific proof and more a sentimental token of our culture’s faith in the notions of timelessness and interminable beauty.

  Upon discovery of the Voyager probes, that hypothetical far-off civilization would also see, but most likely not be able to read, President Jimmy Carter’s greeting mounted on each of the spacecrafts that the records are “a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings,” that “we are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” To ensure that the records lived into that future, NASA sent the records in thick metal covers meant to protect them from time, interstellar dust, micrometeorite propulsions. The humans who launched the probes understood their own mortality and that the future was indeed a long time in coming.

  It will take forty thousand years for the probes to approach the nearest stars they are bound toward. If there exists any life outside of our planet, then it would presumably have to exist near a star such as ours.

  If humans have learned anything, they have learned that the preservation and transmittal of knowledge through the ages is a rather difficult and at times futile enterprise, yet it is an endeavor that we pursue nonetheless. Hence the great care when choosing the materials that the records would be composed of; hence the embedded uranium to serve as an atomic clock, measuring time beyond time, so that whatever finds us will know just how long ago it was that we tried. We are a culture that marvels at the survival of artifacts, fortunate that, after four thousand years, the Epic of Gilgamesh still lingers here, still speaks.

  Forty thousand years is a long time to wait for a chance encounter. Only love should be that foolish. It seems to me that the intended recipient of the Voyager Golden Records is a hypothetical addressee, an abstract entity to whom we fling our hope, our love letters, our prayers.

  Although I cannot comprehend the infinity of space-time, as the present quickly reaches for 2025, I am grasping, however terrifyingly, the finiteness of a human life. The engineers of the Voyager probes are themselves retiring, growing old, passing out of existence, and when they all die, so too will our ability to make sense of the now-crude computer programming language that wrote our way to the stars, the stacks of microfiche with our longing’s history, the subtleties of communicating with our vessels that navigate the realms of the in-between and unknown. The data, in other words, will exist, but it will be inaccessible. Deciphering this past will become some future generation’s work.

  Like the Voyager probes, I myself am in my fourth decade; my children are growing up; they will soon be grown and spiral outward until they exist in orbits so far from me; my parents are suffering the sufferings that come with growing older. I know I won’t be alive to witness many miraculous deeds of humanity.

  Is there any reason to do what we do? To strive to build monuments of remembrance and send them out beyond our lives? I want the Voyager Golden Records to be found. But I wonder why, when I know I won’t be alive for such a thing. Why, too, do I carry the hope that a reader will find this essay? Why should I long for my words to have longevity? Perhaps I believe that by building this monument of remembrance I can propel myself into the future and make it so that I truly exist.


  I want the records to be found because I, like the humans who launched the Voyager probes, am a creature of faith and hope. Perhaps I like to think that if the records are found and deciphered, then the world of 1977 will be resurrected, that I will find myself again encapsulated in a childhood dream, my future still all before me.

  The Page as Artifact

  If you’re spending too much time on the page and not enough time outside the page, then you’ll need to find more time to find poetry. The page isn’t poetry: rather, the page is poetry’s artifact, poetry’s afterthought. The page is what happens after the fact.

  Poetry happens outside the page. Poetry is an instant. It strikes us oh-so-quickly; it makes us mourn. It happens when life too painfully or too blissfully filters through us. By the time we’ve acknowledged it, poetry has passed.

  That’s why we turn then to the page. We want to filter that poetry through the page to give that poetry a place to live again, because it’s since stopped living.