something stupid this way comes

i think why i keep coming back to poetry is because...well, it might have something to do with narcissistic self-obsession, but i think it also has to do with the fact that poems NEVER express what you think you want them to. or what i want them to, at least. and what singing has taught me is that this isn't a bad thing. you don't control what you make.

someday i'll go back to the metropolitan museum of art, and i'll go and find that late monet painting of the stroked-in water lilies against the purple ground, and i'll cry, not just because it's beautiful, but because i'll remember seeing it the first time, and my tears from then.

right now, i'm shaking with a sadness born of longing. it's a beautiful feeling...a summer feeling.

religious poem

i looked down

and thought, what the hell did i bring?

what was i thinking, to wish to place

gold and myrrh into tiny hands, as if

he could even close his pellucid fingers

around such heavy things?

his eyes were closed

and his mother looked

wary, as if we would

attempt to take him

or say one

of a thousand things

she'd already heard,

and i thought, what the hell

am i doing here?

and then he woke,

and i looked to his face

and realized that

son of god or no,

son of god or no,

no journey of mine

had ever been

less of a waste.

his hand was

barely big enough

to wrap

around my finger.

later when we'd left

i thought back to nights

crossing the desert

to come to him--

the scent of frankincense

had been thick

when i held it to my face,

the sick longing dreams

of a king i had had

had been tinged

with that smell.

and then i thought of

the smell of him

and knew

that even such sickness

was a benediction:

nothing

had passed,

but all

was changed.

hell probably not!

this is my own personal bete noir (aside from virginia woolf):

as a semi-professional opera singer who hopes to eventually become less semi-professional and more professional (okay, so my professional goals are basically limitless, but i really haven't even begun to attempt to make them happen), it bugs me when people talk about image, because to me, it doesn't seem right. not that i have any objection to dressing nicely for auditions or portraying enough confidence to have auditionees not be worried about whether or not i can shoulder the responsibility of a role (although, though i don't have an objection to this second thing, i'm also not very good at it). but i just feel like all the good advice in the world--on what to wear, how to think, what to portray, etc. etc. etc.--isn't going to make up for, for lack of a better word, bravery.

why are we singing? seriously. there are some brilliant voices out there that i don't connect to at all, because the person producing the sound is sheltered so far back behind the packaging provided by image consultants and agents. why is nobody bothering us about what we put into our sound? they are perfectly willing to talk about the ferocity of the competition and that being why we all have to lose twenty pounds, but, no, nothing about spirit, struggle, or what can't be sold... i've been reading little women; i sound a little louisa may alcott-ish right now.

i'm not talking about acting. marilyn horne couldn't act, from what i've seen. it's anecdotal that joan sutherland couldn't act. marilyn horne just OWNED the stage, because she was willing to share what she could do. as voice students, we get so used to people telling us how to hone our sound that we forget why we even wanted to make the sound in the first place--now i'm going to channel e.l. koningsburg (sp?) in up from jericho tell when i say that i think we sing because we want to share. but the whole thing about learning to sing is that that gift--the song, as we produce it--gets sent back to us continually in our lessons, because we're not doing it "right." the focus gets lost; we think we're not giving the right gift. but what the lessons are rejecting isn't the gift itself--it isn't what we want to share that is being shaped and changed (i mean, hopefully this is the case. it has been with all the teachers i've loved). it's, more simply, how we share it. we ourselves aren't being rejected. our sound, the gift we want to give, isn't being rejected. it's just the parts of the sound that are themselves covering up the gift--distorting it, perverting it, controlling it--that are being rejected. and said parts can feel like the most personal parts of all that we're offering, because they're the ones we understand the best, the ones we've put the most of what we want to be into...the parts of us that are the best in control.

when i was doing the paper on azucena, i read some stuff about how people (scholars--it's a cool little subgenre that scholars of opera but not music fall into, they get to really get into the "bodily" aspects of feeling and emotion at relatively NO consequence to themselves; opera becomes this segregated act that they don't have to interrogate, and they jump into writing these vaguely insulting and pretty ridiculously irresponsible books of "criticism" that made me turn to bakhtin as a breath of fresh air despite the fact that i didn't really understand the idea of the chronotope except in mild flashes--at least he was a generous thinker, someone who valued accuracy, demonstrating, to me, that which is operatic with much more acumen than many other people who actually write on the topic of opera) think of opera as a bestial scream, a bodily function, devoid of rational meaning. i don't agree with this; i think opera acknowledges the operatic in life much more than it shuts out the real world with its music. but i do agree that what appeals in an operatic (or any other genre of) voice is its uniqueness. a sung note isn't just unique in the voice; it's unique in the moment. it points out its own existence in a way that shatters divisions between reason and body (i'd argue this out more thoroughly, but a., you don't exist, reader, and b., you probably wouldn't care if you did...thanks for getting this far!)--and our training points us toward making these notes unique as possible, by clearing out the obfuscations our self-image puts on our self-expression. singing demands the self itself, not some self we want to have.

which brings us back to the subject of image. is it any wonder that we struggling singers can't express that which is really and truly in us, that so many of our voices sound beautiful but dead, when we're being constantly bombarded with these external mandates on such topics as how we should look and what we should sing and where we should sing and how we should act? it's the "how we should look" one, honestly, that steams me most. i got into opera in part because i'm too tall to act shakespeare. it's just the truth: i am too tall to play viola, so i turned to opera. opera is home to a lot of people who aren't magazine-perfect--or, in the case of such singers as marianne anderson, who aren't magazine-acceptable in their time, no matter how utterly gorgeous they may be. i feel like there's a tradition of acceptance in opera that this whole movement to make everyone conform to some standard of beauty that will "sell" to audiences is stealing away. i could be wrong; my knowledge base is ridiculously slim. but, damnit, in this world where t.v. is supposed to be showing us something like reality-plus all the time, it's amazing that there's still some corner in which these external, "realistic" values aren't enslaving us...or there could be said corner, if it'd just be allowed to survive. 40-year-old women singing 16-year-old girls is amazing. it's amazing because it gets at a truth that's deeper than the external: gounoud's juliette isn't 16; she isn't 40; she isn't white, black, hispanic, asian, half-hispanic half-icelandic, quarter-cherokee, or even a woman necessarily--she's a sound, just as nobody in this world is anything more or less than a sound, a soul, a light, a deep dark...a body-mind, a thing. externals matter, of course, but opera teaches us how goddamn little they have to.

that said, i'm not about to go to a different extreme, and dress crappy for auditions and act unprofessional (though, again, i've got to work on that)--and, honestly, if some management wanted to sign me, i'd lose up to 20 pounds, if they asked nicely...or if they demanded. but this is in part because i have to learn to submit, to divide myself from what i don't need. if i have to lose 20 pounds to sing, i'll do so, because it will be an exercise (pun only slightly intended) in finding a solution, which, for me, is another facet of what singing is about--losing 20 pounds without losing anything i value in myself--just as acting more professional would be the same sort of challenge--acting professional within parameters i can handle, which don't stifle me or make me feel untrue to myself.

and it's in part because i don't want to stand in my own way. i might be a purist, but i do believe in purity in adversity. it's sort of a twist on what elizabeth bennet says about poetry in regards to love: i'm strong in myself, so testing myself makes me stronger, feeds my strength (but if i'm weak, then i should get out the kitchen). that is, i don't think i'm strong. "strong" is probably a bad word to use--i sincerely doubt it'd be even in the top fifteen words that sprang to anyone else's mind in regards to my character. i mean something like "self-convinced." i might actually mean "driven" (though again, it's not exactly a striking attribute)...i may be stupid and weak and small, but i refuse to give up being who i am. i'm not about to defy the gods with a massive display of self-faith; it's not anything so positive as self-faith. it's desperate, in fact--i have a need to be who i am; it's always been that way. but within that parameter, because i can't change, i want to accept the things that come as me--i want to work them out as myself--and that makes my sound what it is. i am my sound. i won't be leeched out of myself to make me palatable to a larger market share. i will change and change and change, but i won't go.

hopefully.

from hades. why do i identify with that stone bastard so full heartily?

to persephone

strong

the depth

to this circadian rhythm--

its dance

haunts

the vein.

a pulse

against itself,

the figure

of lying infinity,

lying

alone:

we are joined;

your heart

beats as

mine; i

touch it

here within.

feel the

pulse press

into the skin of

my panting love.

i have called up

the dying gods

of winter

to lay me before

the bruise-shadow

of your feet,

the shadow

that crests

your footprint.

thus

memory intersects

thirst,

thus draws out

the falsely

infinite: the touch of your lips

against themselves. you close your

mouth, and summer comes.

erroneously self-reminded of proust

i hope to god this is a rough draft.

summer teaches how to forgo

summer teaches

how to forgo

what one loves

best:

turn the salt-touched

skin,

the crusted

lip

to benediction--

one sends up

the high gloss

of summer evening

as a paean to rain.

it is

sweet

to beg

in memory

for the scent

of wet asphalt

to linger,

for the water-soft

bark-of-trees scent

to stay

on the still wind

of impermeable

summer night,

the manifested scent of rain

a memory

of what rolling time

took--

until not the scent

but the plea

becomes rain's

representative.

my darling,

press your memory

hot

like living wire

to mine.

i have lived

once

in you

and

my life

is now complete,

recomplete,

resown,

rereaped,

the hovering shapes

of the earth

and sky

remade

as

your face

and earth

and sky

nowhere

to be

seen.

ahem.

the heart is a spiral

the heart is a spiral, against which its just

beat presses, face first, beat's breath a clothing

fog upon the heart made window glass, less

flesh than constant display, heart's red show cleaved

to shaking rounds, spiralling suck, a rose

whose petals run into a pit, the grade

at which they plunge steep as the plunging grave.

to become the heart's beat--to will the cleave

of face to rose, the surge of breath that rises

against the tilting petal, the sigh's jut

through lungs and mouth a press no less, no less

than that of glass against the heart enclosed.

to breathe against the rose, to clothe

heartbeat in the half-death of breath, unbraid

the strand of rose and glass and heart, unclean

the blood veining up the words, leave unblessed

the point of this unseaming, adjust

the glass around the rose;

exhort the breath that out of the mouth rose

to touch nothing, not even glass, to watch the heart just

spiral, and if within there beats a dream unclothed,

to hold back even death before the unsplit heart, the great

spiralling red, to hold back even breath. cleave

away, cleave away those delirious things, worth less

than the spiral value of the glass,

by which the panting breath upon the rose

imagined itself. this distance just,

clothed

in the gradation

of cloven

sanctity, split, cleaved,

the beat from the heart, the beatless

heart, the heartless grade

of the slip of the rose

toward the clothing

grave, the infinite jut.

the just

grave, the retrograde

spiral, the cloth

of breath on the rose

fleeting, the raw glassless

heart stopped, cleaved

from its spiraling.

methinks i do protest a reasonable amount considering

my heart is too crammed with ash to write about meistersinger. it all sounds like disney film music after the prince has just left the princess for the first time and she's staring after him wistfully (or the other way around, if it's aladdin). the whole time i was listening to the quintet, i was envisioning ariel gazing dreamily at the point at which prince eric had just disappeared. figuratively speaking. actually i was more thinking, "this music is making me ill. what the hell is the point, even, of non-sturm-'n'-drang-y wagner?" things that are badass: the liebestod. things that are not: the prize song.

maybe i could just use that as the title of my paper.

it was kind of like when i went to see die fliegender hollander (sp?--it's just so much more fun of a title than the flying dutchman, but i guess i'll go with that), and was underwhelmed. not by the singing, much of which was very good (though the baritone, a., wasn't, and b., had developed his own version of the park and bark, which was the stalk and talk [he didn't need no stinking sustained line, OR to use his knees when he walked! he did what he wanted!]), but by the piece itself. the whole time i was like, "this is supposed to be wagner? this is to real wagner what strauss's operas are to strauss's songs. seriously. this is the musical theater version of wagner." not that i don't like musical theater. but for the most part i don't like strauss operas (rosenkavelier? come on. it's so self-conscious it's ridiculous, and you can't even call it ridiculous because it knows it's ridiculous so you just have to call it freaking ridiculously self-conscious. and salome, which i do kind of like, still seems to have been written in an apologetic attempt to live up to beardsley's illustrations), and i really don't like dutchman.

and while i can see that meistersinger is better, or at least less rough, than dutchman, it's still got that dutchman-y, musical theater-y, song and dance-y feel to it. it's the emma to dutchman's northanger abbey, except that i like both northanger abbey and emma. oh, don't pretend you don't know what i'm talking about. it's got a certain degree of self-forgiveness that i just can't get into. even if i wanted to, which i don't. in meistersinger, wagner knows what he's doing. in tristan, he either doesn't know or doesn't care what he's doing. and that uncertainty, the uncertainty expressed in tristan, for me, right now, makes art art--uncertainty, or lack of control, makes for art that i respond to. because i'm someone who's living in uncertainty, i'm therefore living as uncertainty, for uncertainty, and nothing so completely self-credulous as meistersinger can touch me.

i'm even tempted to do the full marxist, and take an adorno-ish stance by condemning meistersinger as a really IRRITATING example of bourgeois what-have-you-ness. blah blah national art blah blah c major blah blah fairy godfather and shoe cobbler hans sachs, go ahead and reject the blonde kid! GOD KNOWS you wouldn't want to be anything like king marke! king marke had something to die for; you don't appear even to have that.

of course, if i could do this assignment thoroughly, i might feel better about it...or i might just get really really frustrated with how much i don't like meistersinger, as opposed to the merely very large amount of frustration toward it that i currently carry.

ah, how sweet it is to whine about something vaguely amusing. i like this adorno, though not as much as his thing on mahler. adorno is determined to tear wagner up from the floor up, at least in the first half of this in search of wagner thing. what i like best about adorno is that he's not frightened of getting personal; though i think that his attack falters somewhat by being placed on shifting ground in this particular book (in the mahler one, it was different, as far as i remember), i feel like he also makes it clear that he's talking about his particular viewpoint--it's a need-based argument; he needs to be very stringent with wagner, especially because this work was published first in '52. and within that parameter, that of his need to condemn, he functions brilliantly. the brilliance of personal need is never an issue with me. i like things more when their authors' preoccupations show up in them. at the sfmoma, they have a few matisses, and though i like the green lady in the hat, my real favorites are the color sketches he did of indeterminate, bright-rendered landscape. i like them because they share the personal; they aren't guarded. this preference probably shows up in my own stuff; you could never accuse anything i write of being, you know, polished. if i were to have a sense of something like an aesthetic, it would certainly include unfinished-ness in its parameters.

maybe at some point this will change--maybe at some point i'll understand how a person can stand to listen to meistersinger with any degree of complacency, for example. any degree of complacency that he or she can still occupy, considering the fullness of wagner's own complacency in the work. maybe if i hadn't been reading the adorno, i wouldn't be seeing so much to object to in the opera. but i don't know. i watched the ring on t.v. when i was five or three or something. it's pretty much my earliest memory. my mom was falling asleep on the outside of the tv, and siegfried was dressed vaguely as mary martin in peter pan on the inside of the tv, and erda came out the trap door, and it was all verrry exciting. meistersinger is not like the ring. it is nauseatingly self-assured, and does not push itself in any direction that touches me. i really can't handle sachs musing on sacral german art. and i can't handle this nonsense about spontaneous crowning of master-poets and jokey riots. BAH.

i mean, if wagner wanted, like the harvest moon shines, to muse on, in utter fatuity, about aesthetics, he should have come to the future, followed my example, and gotten himself a blog.

in which i remind myself, erroneously, of laura riding

i have turned my back for the time being

i have turned my back

for the time being

on longing.

i wish to take a stab

at wanting, because

wanting is so much

feasibler

for one

alone.

take the depicted

st. sebastian

in several much-vaunted paintings:

to be tied up and stabbed

all over with arrows,

some would see this

as longing, but

longing has no

true metaphoric

bearing

on his

situation--

it is wanting

that st. sebastian achieves

against his sharp-barked tree.

he has succeeded

in truly experiencing

the stab of desire.

for a figure of longing

with tree and arrow,

the inviolate son of william tell

will do well.

dude.

if i had an attic

if i had an attic

i would find things i'd stored there

years later--

mementos of trips taken,

dresses i'd grown too full for,

ornaments for holidays

and spotted diaries

full of a life

i remembered living

but never lived, pages

crammed

with the testimony

of someone

i remembered being

but wasn't me,

the recalled feel

of cloth that never touched

my skin. the garments' emptiness

within their trunks

would be nothing new

to me, who never

had filled them,

but i would recall

myself, clearly enfolded

in their swirling patterns--and

the trips, cross-country, face

pressed close

to the hot window

of a car i never was in.

and suddenly to realize

that the dust-crammed objects

surrounding me were

never

a part of my life...

and that

the attic

did not exist.

and to cup

my palms

and color them

the color

of fine wine.

unfolding, unravelling

specific creation song

there was a god without a name

who created

several things, such as

cinnamon,

amber

with its light-trapping flaws,

death,

the wheel,

delicate antennae

that stood out against the air

and touched the wind

as if it were a solid thing,

the metaphor.

in the cupping of his hands,

from the touch

of the edges of his palms

against each other,

he took sensation

and created a flower

whose many petals

lay smooth and long

against each other.

while he waited

for her to open,

a god that lived in fire

touched her

with blazing fingers, and

each of her long petals

became a ridge of fire.

consume yourself,

the fire god breathed,

as i have consumed myself,

and the hot wind

of his words

fanned the flame

he had set on her.

her creator set her down

on a lake like glass

and she floated, burning,

even when the fire went out

and left her petals ragged stubs--

she burned in memory

and floated far away

from the touch of anything.

she turned away

from the touch of her reflection.

she turned away

from the touch of her own name.

the flesh healed itself

while she turned away--

years and years she turned,

and unnoticed her edges sealed over.

she came to the edge of the lake

where other things grew...

they liked her--

her color, her shape,

the smell of ash that

cored the sweetness of her scent--

they asked her name.

she did not answer

until she looked into the water

like glass

and stared back at herself,

and then said

her name was peony.

and they gave her ground

and she found

herself laying

roots.

this story

does not end.

really really

today someone told me that there was a point, in their depression, when they sat on the edge of a fountain in the snow for two hours looking at a hot dog they'd bought but hadn't eaten. which is the saddest--and the funniest--thing i've ever heard, and it makes me feel so much better. i don't know why it's good to hear that someone else has gone through this--it's not just the sitting in one place, unable to move; it's the hot dog. because i've totally done that. not in the snow and not with a hot dog, but i've stared at food for lengthy periods of time before.

there are people around me for whom hearing my problems would not be a burden. i have no judgment, so i don't know who they are...but there are people around me who i don't have to worry about hurting by being myself.

this is what i mean: it's extremely painful, but i'm so grateful. i'm being rescued by some part of me that realized it was time to stop being so shut out from myself, so locked in. i can't leave the pain part unacknowledged, because the pain is important. when it hurts, it hurts like a bitch. nobody is more tired than myself of having panic attacks in theory class, though probably its teacher runs a close second. but when i'm not afraid or anxious, i'm happier than i've ever been. literally. i'm finally capable of feeling at peace--not deadening myself to the point of numbness with food or books or alcohol or movies. and though that means that i'm also capable of feeling really really scared...i mean, at least i can finally feel scared.

the point is, thank you, person who told me about staring at the hot dog. i really really appreciate it.