They didn’t teach me how to climb stacks of chairs like in the Moscow circus.
So there I am, hoping I am not going to break my neck on my poorly made tower of chairs.
And then I finally reach the light bulb and try to unscrew it, and that is always a surgery
I have the wrong instruments for,
like I am trying to hollow out the center of a fourteen-foot-high breadfruit tree with a melon baller,
and my fingers can never grasp the light bulb securely,
and a couple of times I have done that thing where I try to unscrew the light bulb
and instead I pull out the glass part but leave the threaded metal base still in the socket,
like somehow I separate the glass from the base, the two parts that are supposed to be forever joined.
How I do that, I don’t even know.
It’s like a miracle I don’t want, which is sometimes what my life is.
And then I am standing there with bits of broken glass
falling on me like iridescent paper-circle snow,
and I hope I am not going to slip and fall like a ballerina in The Nutcracker,
and there are wires sticking out where I am supposed to put in the new light bulb,
and I can’t touch the wires because I am scared I will electrocute myself,
and I know I have to climb back down the chair-tower carefully,
but for a few seconds I just have to stand there and swear.
I just have to stand there swearing and trying to see the entire situation like the giant Christmas tree in The Nutcracker.
I just have to stand there like my own gigantic-mother slit gong.
And it is going to be dark forever in this corner of the apartment, I think.
And I will always and forever be standing in the dark.
And I am huge and horrible and filled with light.
There is a party around me and a star on my head.
And I don’t care.
I am alive right then in my furious glory.
I am converting subatomic particles into radiant energy.
I am shining.
You can see me for miles.
You can set your course by me.
IV.
1.
“And now it is finished, Casse-Noisette is all ugliness,”
Tchaikovsky wrote when he finished The Nutcracker.
Over time, however, he began to love the music he had made.
“Strange that when I was composing the ballet I kept thinking that it wasn’t very good but that I would show [the Imperial Theatres] what I can do when I begin the opera.
And now it seems that the ballet is good and the opera not so good,” he wrote.
Nothing is stable, I tell you.
The horses run wild, and so do the children.
More cowbell!
Our friend E. T. A. Hoffmann was still having a rough go of it;
at the end of his life he became ill with a disease
that gradually paralyzed him,
moving from his feet to his brain.
When he could no longer use his hands to write,
he hired an assistant and dictated
until almost the hour of his death.
Imagine that.
Imagine being reduced to a mouth.
It reminds me of something my friend Melissa told me; she heard it from a friend whose son performed as a soldier in The Nutcracker.
She said that the ballerinas who dance in the snowstorm have to keep their mouths shut.
They actually have to clench their teeth or the snow from the blizzard will fill their mouths.
Imagine your mouth is not your own anymore.
Imagine your mouth is just a slit,
and it won’t open and close easily,
and words that aren’t your words are put into it.
Artists, you have to battle that;
you have to win that bout.
You can do it; I know you can.
The boxing instructor says things like that to us.
He believes in us; we’re like Santa.
At the end of class, he tells us we can rest.
By rest he means, “Do a plank.”
He calls this active rest,
which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
2.
The yellow cab carrying my daughter and me is taking an unexpected turn.
Now it is flying in the air.
This doesn’t bother me; I am excited.
I am excited to find Santa and clock him over this crazy holiday he has made,
this holiday I have to figure out how to make my own every year.
Things could so easily be different.
I could be in a different world.
I could be living in Vanuatu.
In Vanuatu, authorship is understood differently.
The person who commissioned the slit gong—in this case, the tribal chief—is considered its creator.
The carver is just an assistant.
Many artists here work in a similar way.
Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst come to mind—
employing studios to fabricate their pieces.
A million other artists before them have done that, too.
Maybe things are not so different.
Maybe all worlds are the same.
Maybe we’re all just in one world.
There’s an old saw for you.
I always hated that saw; it’s treacly.
And yet in some ways I think that’s where we need to get going.
That’s the place we need to head toward—the sharing of resources and peaceful coexistence.
In that world I would live and share peacefully with
people who think I should not write books,
who think women should be subservient and hidden,
who view my female body itself as a threat.
Yep, that’s where we need to go, all right.
We need a map for that.
Maybe you can work on composing a guide for that, Tchaikovsky.
See what you can do with just those few words,
with sharing of resources and peaceful coexistence.
I can tell you that flying in the yellow cab in the air over New York City,
beside my sleeping daughter,
I thought of my mother.
I thought in particular of my mother’s Construction
and how it was really remarkable
in how it was created.
She’d developed this technique
where she took photographs of her fabric.
And then she put the photos on her worktable
and used a mirror contraption she’d made—
two mirrors, connected with hinges.
She had these mirrors custom cut at the glass-and-mirror store,
and then she connected them with pieces of clear packing tape.
She played with photos and mirrors until she found a design she liked
that was partly on her table and partly in her mirror.
It was like something Copernicus would have done, had he been a quilter.
Then she cut up the photographs to create a two-dimensional rendering of the image she had found.
And she made a color copy of that
and transferred the color copy to cotton fabric with chemicals.
The intricate pattern on the fabric was created via this process,
and for her to submit this to a national quilt show was an uppercut to the idea
of quilting as a laborious handicraft done solely with needle and thread
in order to produce something flat
to be hung on a wall
or laid on a bed.
She rolled her quilt-tank into the square of that.
I don’t know how conscious my mother was of the subversion in her Construction.
I don’t know how many mice of hers were in that light bulb.
I don’t know if she
was aware that what she was doing was sculpture
and possibly conceptual art
in a context that wasn’t prepared to accept, much less embrace, either.
I saw the whole thing as I was flying in the cab over New York City.
I was an exalted watcher.
My mother was stopping traffic like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
She had big, shiny balls on her.
3.
My daughter and my husband recently went to the flea market.
My husband lets my daughter choose one thing she wants there each time they go.
She chose a box covered in red Chinese fabric, worn and a little dirty.
My daughter is obsessed with boxes
and putting things into other things.
They bought the box for five dollars.
Inside it was lined with more fabric
and nestled within the fabric were two metal balls and a piece of paper.
One side of the paper had text written in Chinese and the other side had text written in English.
I read the English side, which was titled “Synopsis of the Healthy Ball.”
My daughter picked the balls up to show me that they made sounds when you moved them.
They were something between a bell and a ball.
The paper said they were to be used for exercise:
“The balls are placed in one’s hand and rotated in either a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction.”
The point of this exercise was to “keep all of the points in one’s hands in constant motion,”
with “the muscles in one’s fingers and forearms contracting and relaxing harmoniously.”
I held the balls in my hands and tried to do the rotations.
I thought my nibble-of-fat hands could do with some of this.
My hands didn’t dance with the balls very well.
But the balls indeed made a pleasant sound,
a high metal tone, not quite like a bell at Christmas.
It didn’t have the same tone.
It was slightly different,
like when T. S. Eliot reframed the journey of the Magi
via a Beckettian landscape,
though Godot had not yet been written.
I am conscious of how I am referring to white-men writers here,
to white guys alone in their rooms.
But I am so glad for those men.
I love them,
by which I mean I love their work and I am grateful they made it.
In “Journey of the Magi,” Eliot writes as one of the three kings traveling to greet Christ.
He turns Christ’s birth into a death,
that is, his own death,
the death of his beliefs,
the death of magic and astrology,
and he acknowledges how difficult this death is,
and he mourns that life, which Christ’s birth marks
the ending of.
Abracadabra; annihilation.
The Chinese/English paper adds that “beginners should
select balls of a smaller size”
and then “increase ball size as one’s proficiency improves.”
I held the two balls in my hands gently.
The paper said ball-owners “should avoid violently knocking them against each other and against solid objects and surfaces.”
That’s what the box was for, to keep them safe.
I put them back in their bed, which is a box.
I gave the box back to my daughter.
She went off to play with them.
Those balls can’t be busted.
4.
Now it is time to have pancakes.
We had them already, yes.
But now we are having them again.
We were just thinking about pancakes,
and now we can have them again.
We can have pancakes a million times,
every day of our entire lives,
like red-hot pokers applied to the spine,
we can have pancakes with syrup on them.
Let us take the carafe of maple syrup!
Let us hold it aloft!
And now:
I am going to pour syrup on my pancakes,
and then I am going to pour it on my kids’,
and then I am going to pour it on the slit gong
and all the other artwork in the Met.
I am going to pour syrup on my family,
on my husband and three children,
on our apartment and our building,
on Lincoln Center and Radio City.
I am going to pour lovely maple syrup,
which is a syrup that comes from trees,
which is a sap that flows from a tree,
and which you can lick right off a tree.
You can do this by kneeling beside it
as if you are about to make love to it.
You can lick syrup from its hole,
and this is something you should do right now.
In the meantime I’ll pour syrup on quilts,
and I’ll pour syrup on boilermakers,
and I’ll pour syrup on ballerinas,
and I’ll pour syrup on mice and roaches.
I’ll pour syrup on computer keyboards,
on the Talking Heads and on Tchaikovsky,
on Beckett and T. S. Eliot,
and on the status of women in publishing.
I will pour maple syrup on it all,
warmed syrup from my glass carafe,
I will pour and pour maple syrup,
and then I will eat everything,
yes, then I will eat every last thing
maple syrup ever was poured on.
5.
The slit gongs of Vanuatu are unusual in that, unlike other slit gongs of the region, they are played standing up.
Vertical slit gongs are found only in central Vanuatu.
Formerly, they played an important role in communication.
“Consisting of a complex system of beats and pauses whose meaning is understood by both senders and recipients, these languages permit messages about specific topics, even specific individuals, to be transmitted through the densely forested mountainous terrain at the speed of sound,” wrote Kjellgren in the Journal of Museum Ethnography.
Slit gongs are a type of telephone.
The one on display at the Met is decorated with iconography that is particular to the tribe of the chief who commissioned it.
The tribal chief’s name was Tain Mal, and this slit gong was made in the mid to late 1960s.
The slit gong depicts an ancestor of the tribe.
The ancestor has curling tusks like the ones on the pigs that are sacred to this tribe.
Each of his eyes has a red pupil, outlined in black and then embellished with a design that extends out in red, white, and green paint.
According to James Tainmal, the brother of tribal chief Tain Mal, these eye designs represent “the morning star (metan galgal).”
The meanings of the morning star are manifold for Westerners.
Astronomically, the morning star is the planet Venus when it appears in the east before sunrise.
It is also the name of a club with a heavy, spiked head.
In biblical terms, the morning star is a phrase used to refer to Satan.
In biblical terms, it is also a phrase used to refer to Jesus.
I have just about had it with words and their meanings.
I am going to call up Tchaikovsky, I mean Kafka, and complain.
6.
In our house we are not very religious.
Some days I think this is a blessing.
We celebrate Christmas every year.
We trim the tree with old toys and other castoffs.
My son’s glow-in-the-dark cast from when he fractured his wrist is on there.
And there is a naughty anime doll I found in a public toilet in Japan.
She is half dressed
and wears bunny ears; I place her deep in the needles.
And there is a tiny stuffed tiger from my own childhood, which I bought at the Peabody Museum in Connecticut.
It has real fur on it, and I remember thinking it was like an object from another world.
It was as exotic to me as the stack of cards my friend’s mother kept from her husband’s flower bouquets.
That man is no longer alive.
He died not long after I graduated from college.
But I like to think of that stack of cards and what would have happened if he had lived longer,
if he had stayed a sober flower-bearer.
They would have had a stack of cards taller than their house, then.
They would have had to keep that stack outside like a telephone pole.
They could have made calls to the morning star with it.
Maybe I could have talked too.
We could have gotten a party line.
We could all have been singing together.
And all our singing could have been transmitted from that stack of cards deep into space,
as if there were a great magician/telephone operator up there
and he was like a stagehand, wearing a headset and holding wires,
and he was plugging the wires in and taking them out,
and he was backstage, in the dark,
and he saw everything and heard everything,
and he had mercy.
7.
In the Journal of Museum Ethnography, Kjellgren explains that the slit gong is used for special ceremonies in Vanuatu.
The ceremonies are part of a male achievement system called fangkon, or “sacred fire.”
As an initiate passes through each stage, he rises up one level,
gaining “religious knowledge, more social prestige, and more say in village affairs.”
Men of each fangkon grade cook and eat only with those of the same grade.
Social position is not passed down but is achieved by each individual for himself.
Each man tries to rise up through the grade system until he reaches the pinnacle grade of Mal.
Kjellgren notes that “men who have achieved the highest grades become de facto leaders of society” and that it is “normally only older men who can muster the enormous resources required to attain the highest grades.”
“In some instances,” Kjellgren adds, “certain fangkon grades are open to women,
but only to those whose husbands have already achieved a certain fangkon rank.”
8.
This is just to say
Idiophone Page 6
