Idiophone

by Amy Fusselman

  Just wait quietly for some rope to pull you up.

  Just wait to unfold to the ceiling in your glory.

  Just wait there, O.K.?

  Just think about something else for a while.

  Just think about some other words.

  Just think about who is speaking when you speak.

  Who are you—your mother, your ancestors?

  Can’t all words change?

  Can’t annihilation become abracadabra?

  Can’t we all telephone?

  Can’t we all just call each other up?

  Can’t we all just message Tchaikovsky?

  Can’t we all be broken and fixed?

  It is so incredibly easy for one word to turn into another.

  I didn’t know the nutcracker had identical brothers.

  But then I saw them together.

  I saw them quadruple.

  I saw them quintuple.

  I saw them sextuple.

  I sat alone on my throne with my seven heads and watched them.

  The nutcracker brothers octupled.

  They were like the Rockettes in the annual Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular.

  They were doing the toy-soldier number where they all line up and then all fall down in slow motion.

  They have been doing that number for almost a hundred years.

  Keep it up, toy soldiers.

  Don’t drop it.

  8.

  Me:

  I am interested in your characterization of our current bodiless, danceless theater as fear-based. Can you elaborate on that, and on the ways in which dance, in your view, is positioned in regard to this?

  Annie-B Parson:

  Dance addresses matters of space from the perspective of the body. When we move our body it is immediately warm, sweaty, personal—even the cool, detached Merce Cunningham’s dance is personal. Or, as Cunningham said: “We give ourselves away at every moment.” Who are we? Look at how we move in space: what body parts we chose to isolate, combine and engage, and with what temporal and muscular quality do we engage them. No acting necessary! We give ourselves away at every moment when we dance. In dance there is no pretend—unless we choose to layer pretend on top of the truth of the body. Perhaps this fecundity of exposure is alarming. And dance is sympathetic, meaning the audience’s body experiences a leap when they watch one, experiences a jump when they watch one, experiences a hip thrust when they watch one. Do we want this? No cover! No protection from the rain! And the abstraction—ambiguity is scary as well because it knocks on the door to the dark box that we try to shut inside of us. And our response to abstraction is complicated, and audiences typically like their theater served up with a moral ending like Arthur Miller or a flashy leap like Alvin Ailey. This is the American aversion to complicated thinking. We consumers like when politicians simplify the world for us—this same mind-set exists in dance audiences.

  9.

  My thirteen-year-old son and I are taking a boxing class together.

  They play music there, which we like.

  It’s really loud.

  The instructor has to shout his directions, and even then, we can’t always hear him.

  We have to watch other people in class to figure out what’s going on.

  Still, the instructor never turns down the music.

  That’s how important the music is.

  The lyrics are not, shall we say, feminist.

  There are a handful of women in class.

  We’ve heard it all before;

  we’re focused on doing the work.

  Much has been made about the connection between boxing and dance.

  I think of that when the instructor talks about footwork.

  We dance around with our gloves on.

  I am the oldest in class; my son is the youngest.

  We are partners when it’s required.

  We tap gloves after doing push-ups.

  We jab and hook from opposite sides of the bag.

  A huge mural of Joe Louis looms over us.

  Joe Louis supposedly said, “There is no such thing as a natural boxer.

  A natural dancer has to practice hard. A natural painter has to paint all the time.

  Even a natural fool has to work at it.”

  We work in that class, all right.

  Louis also said, “You need a lot of different types of people to make the world better.”

  I think he was on to something there.

  10.

  The baby bunnies are carrying my mother and the mice into the ambulance.

  My mother has been stabilized and given pain medication.

  Her right shoulder is broken.

  My mother needs to be assisted with living.

  My mother needs coffee and candy brought to her on a tray.

  My mother and the mice ride in the ambulance to the hospital.

  Their Bug is abandoned; the tow truck will get it later.

  My mother and the mice do not talk.

  The bunnies attend to them carefully.

  The bunnies are male.

  EMTS are more likely to be male than female.

  Maybe that will change someday.

  The hospital is nearby, under the area rugs.

  The area rugs are all rolled up.

  The area rugs are lying there like a pyramid of downed trees.

  The bunnies know their way around this place.

  In Balanchine’s Nutcracker, Drosselmeier bandages the toy nutcracker with a handkerchief.

  He is dressed completely in black, but the handkerchief is white.

  It is like a flag of surrender he pulls from his pocket.

  Maybe Drosselmeier gives up at that point,

  or maybe it’s the Nutcracker who gives up.

  He is a nutcracker with the soul of a prince.

  But we can’t see his soul.

  It is supposedly the soul that drives people.

  It is the soul that drives the body like a driver drives a car.

  We can’t see the soul-driver; we can only see the body-car moving.

  The whole thing is very confusing.

  We should just close our eyes.

  The bandaged Nutcracker is on his way to princedom.

  It’s all there, but we can’t see it yet.

  Why we can’t see what we need to see in this world, I do not know.

  Why is it so hard to see what we need to see?

  Why do we need to struggle to do the simplest things?

  Why is there always a grand pas de deux to be done to survive?

  What a miracle it is that a waiter will bring you a big stack of pancakes.

  What a miracle it is that a waiter will set them in front of you, warm, and you can pour as much maple syrup on top as you want.

  You can do this, that is, if you have the money to pay that waiter.

  You can do this if you have the money to pay for those pancakes.

  There it is, the money problem.

  You have to make the money appear.

  You have to be that kind of magician in this life.

  The baby bunny who is driving the ambulance almost hits a food truck as he pulls into the hospital driveway.

  The food truck is driven by a rat.

  The rat squeals as he avoids a collision, then he keeps going.

  This baby bunny is unfazed by terrible drivers.

  He is an EMT; he doesn’t screw around.

  As he pulls the ambulance up near the hospital entrance, he says, “You know, the barbecue from that food truck is really good.”

  “Have you had the pork? It’s fantastic,” the other baby bunny agrees from the back.

  “That rat can’t drive, though,” says the baby-bunny driver.

  “No one looks where they’re going anymore,” the other baby bunny says, getting ready to lift up my mother.

  The two baby bunnies are joined by more baby bunnies to get my mother and the mice out of the ambulance.

  There are s
ix bunnies in all, two for each gurney.

  All the white bunnies have black radios on their hips.

  All the radios begin crackling.

  All the radios are staticky.

  It’s a chorus of static.

  It’s like all the white bunnies and my mother and the mice are running around in a snow globe of static.

  The white bunnies are taking my mother and the mice someplace in the static-snow.

  My mother and the mice are all on gurneys now.

  Suddenly the bunnies change.

  Suddenly the bunnies unzip their bunny costumes.

  Who knew they were all in costume?

  Their white fur coats were just very realistic costumes!

  They all step out of their costumes, and their white fur puddles on the floor like melting snow.

  Maybe ballerinas will slip on them.

  I hope not.

  The bunnies are no longer white bunnies.

  Now they are all men in black suits with black top hats.

  They are all men in black capes with white gloves.

  They are all magicians!

  They have black magic wands instead of black radios!

  The static has stopped.

  The stage is empty. 8 bars of mysterious and tender music.

  The magicians wheel my mother and the mice through the automatic doors.

  Wow, this isn’t a hospital after all.

  This room at the end of the hall where they wheel my mother and the mice isn’t the operating theater.

  It’s a theater-theater.

  That’s not to say there are two theaters, but one theater that is itself.

  I underscore its selfhood by saying its name twice.

  Maybe we can apply that logic to the idea that this world is made more world-y by the presence of other worlds.

  Maybe we are in a world-world and not just a world.

  Maybe our world is larger and more multidimensional than we are generally led to believe.

  Maybe it would be helpful for us to remember this when the essential things are hard to see.

  Maybe it would be helpful for us to remember this when we are frustrated by our world.

  Maybe we should actually just seek to see double all the time.

  Maybe we should actually seek to see triple and quadruple.

  Maybe we should go out and seek to be in a world-world-world-world-world-world-world-world-world-world.

  People, meaning mice, are often perfectly happy to keep the door of their one world closed.

  Keep that door shut, dormouse.

  Sit in there, in the dark, with a drink.

  Now the magicians wheel my mother and the mice to the theater-theater.

  Oops, the magician pushing Mouse One is not a very good gurney driver.

  He is a bit chubbier than all the other magicians.

  He is pushing Mouse One’s gurney as he tries to eat a ham sandwich.

  He almost rear-ended Mouse Two’s gurney.

  Watch out, ham-sandwich magician!

  Didn’t they teach you how to drive in magic school?

  My mother and the mice are wheeled onstage.

  They are going to be in a magic show!

  Oh my goodness, the ham-sandwich magician is getting a saw out!

  Is he going to saw my mother and the mice in half?!

  11.

  In his essay “Winnicott and Music,” Nicholas Spice writes that children who learn to play music are frequently taught to respect certain master composers. He uses Mozart as an example.

  I am going to quote the passage here, but I am going to change Mozart to Tchaikovsky. I am going to put Tchaikovsky in a box so he is safe and protected in a world he never asked to be born into.

  Spice writes:

  To learn respect for [Tchaikovsky] is to be free to pull [Tchaikovsky] to pieces so as to see how [Tchaikovsky] is made and where [Tchaikovsky] is well made and where less well made. It is to pull and push and stretch and bite [Tchaikovsky], to rail against him and say you are bored by him, to love him and hate him, to test him (if necessary to the limits of destruction), to burlesque him and alter him, to steal from him and make him your own. To learn to respect [Tchaikovsky] is to discover that nothing you do to [Tchaikovsky] will change him. That he survives. It is to treat [Tchaikovsky] as a body of human knowledge and not as a collection of religious texts. To use [Tchaikovsky] as a springboard for something new. To encounter him as one composer to another.

  I called up Tchaikovsky and asked him how he wrote the majestic, tree-growing music in The Nutcracker off the words The Christmas tree becomes huge. 48 bars of fantastic music with a grandiose crescendo, and he told me that he didn’t look to the director’s notes to get the job done. He didn’t look to anything outside himself. He stayed in his box, he said. He went into the box of himself and stayed there in the pitch-dark with the door locked. He was free in there, he said, completely and utterly free.

  He told me that. And then he hung up on me.

  12.

  Light acts as an antiseptic, has medicinal properties, and is a food for plants and trees.

  We go to the theater to be enlightened.

  We sit in the dark to watch the stage.

  We sit in the dark so we can see better.

  We sit in the dark so we can focus on the important things.

  It always seems like there are really intriguing things going on along the sides and in the corners of the tether, though.

  I just misspelled theater as tether.

  The theater is a tether.

  It ties us together and pulls us in.

  Let’s hope it pulls us up and doesn’t drag us down.

  Let’s hope it pulls us up but doesn’t hang us.

  I learned something about Tchaikovsky, I mean, the Talking Heads: when they first formed, they wrote a manifesto about their work. One of its stipulations was that they would not perform in rock-star lighting; that is, with the audience in the dark and themselves under purple spotlights, with dry-ice fog, etc. They would perform in full light. They would perform under crappy fluorescent overheads. They would try to undercut that rock-star mysteriousness. They would be seen as they were, as humans playing instruments and singing. They would work against the idea that they should be viewed as gods. They were not gods.

  Of course, they were gods, though.

  13.

  My daughter and I recently bought a necklace in the jewelry department of a department store.

  That is, we bought two necklaces.

  There are two necklaces, but the charms on the two necklaces fit together into one charm.

  The charms are two halves of a broken heart.

  One half is pink and one half is red.

  My daughter decided she wanted the pink one.

  It says:

  MOT

  DAUG

  Mine is the red one and says:

  HER

  HTER

  When my thirteen-year-old son saw the necklace on me, he said wryly, “Oh, so you’re a hurter.”

  I smiled. My heart was breaking.

  I am trying to raise my three children as if we are stable.

  I am trying to raise my three children as if we are in a place that is like the place where horses live, in wooden boxes next to wooden boxes.

  I love that horses run and make a sound like thunder simultaneously.

  I admire the sound of horses running out of their boxes.

  I admire the beating of horses’ hooves.

  Horses’ hooves beat the ground as if the ground were a directly struck idiophone.

  Maybe they are an ongoing demonstration of this fact.

  Maybe the world is actually an idiophone.

  More cowbell.

  We live in boxes next to boxes in this city, and sometimes the boxes come tumbling down.

  The world is terrifying, I am telling you.

  It’s fighting.

  Let’s not forget the fighting.

  A box
ing ring is a box in which a controlled fight takes place.

  During fights that are not controlled, a box can seem like a comforting place to go.

  Let’s hear it for comfort.

  Let’s hear it for resting in a box with your eyes closed, smiling, as the saw in the hand of the magician hovers over your belly and then finally begins its grand pas de deux with the wood, and the little bits of sawdust go flying through the air like snow.

  14.

  The Talking Heads’ David Byrne used to live across the street from us here in New York City. He was one floor below us. If I stood on our porch I could see a little bit into his apartment. I could occasionally see him from his ankles down, walking around.

  He had a Christmas tree up all year round. I guess it was always The Nutcracker over there.

  15.

  My mother is onstage, in the spotlight.

  She is on the gurney, in a box.

  Her head and feet are sticking out of the ends of the box.

  She has her eyes closed.

  She is smiling.

  I didn’t know that this world existed, but now that I see it, it makes perfect sense.

  The ham-sandwich magician is the magician king—go figure.

  He has a big top hat and a female assistant.

  He addresses the crowd with his booming voice.

  I can see glimmers of spit when he talks.

  The ham-sandwich magician takes up a lot of space.

  He is holding his shiny saw high in the air.

  It looks like he is going to saw my mother.

  Mouse One and Mouse Two are offstage.

  I hope they are being treated.

  The ham-sandwich magician seems very sure of himself.

  Magicians always seem sure of themselves.

  That’s kind of where they have to go with their performing.

  It would be interesting to see a magician who acted like he had no idea what he was doing.

  I think that’s probably the territory where magicians and clowns overlap.

  Magicians and clowns are yet another example of two tribes that don’t always see eye to eye.

  I am just going to sit here and watch what happens.

  I am just going to be a patient audience member.

  When you sit down to watch a performance it’s always a bit of a risk.

  You have be prepared for the possibility of a bad show.

  When The Nutcracker finally premiered in Russia, the critics were not crazy about it.