I Did Something Bad

Story of my life: since I was very small, my creativity was suppressed. Not sure exactly why, but I assume some of it was just plain fear that something terrible would happen to me. I can’t vouch for the truth of these stories, though I was there, but my mother told me bits about me from before I can remember. Example: I pulled out the drawers to make a ladder, climbed up on the counter, emptied the cabinet shelf above – or pushed the stuff aside – and climbed into that. She told me I was trying to get into the upper shelf when she found me. Example: after a Rome, NY snow storm, she told me that I almost crawled out the second story window, that it looked like I was figuring out how to drop into the snow. And I know they not only had child gates but I had to be disciplined repeatedly not to go over them. I remember an instance of suddenly appearing in the living room and being forcefully sent back to my bedroom hallway gate, where I sulked as I played with the gate. The part that’s hard to understand is how the worry about my physical safety – which I can see justified in their eyes when I destroyed my hand – became a worry about my mental stability. If I did anything out of the ordinary, my parents would try to pull me toward what was, in retrospect, the safest course, but which to me was utter boredom. School became like that too. I remember the exact moment: I had been working through math workbooks like they were pieces of candy and I kept bugging them for something new, but they gave me ones like I had already done. Instant frustration, followed by ‘why the heck am I being forced to finish something I’ve already done just to get another math book that may not even be better than this one?’ I remember being given a new math book, opening it up, and turning the pages realizing there was nothing in there of interest.

Understand I’m not complaining. My parents loved me and worried (a lot) about me. I’m describing. We all have a struggle. Those who blame others don’t understand: it’s how you react that counts, how you make yourself as the world makes you. I had red hair and pale skin and now I see that’s attractive, but then I stood out in any room and if I took my shirt off in summer I glowed white and people told me to put on a t-shirt. Driving through Dorchester yesterday on the way to the JFK Library – another story – I noticed how all the faces on the street and in cars were darker skinned. I could see in that moment how they could, as individuals, feel isolated in a world where the faces are lighter, just as a poor kid feels isolated around money, and how that can make you want to stay where people look like you and where you know the rules and how to act and you feel like you fit because you already fit there. I went to a prep school set up for Episcopal choir boys. There were a number of Jews, so it felt like WASP-lite except nearly all my friends were from that culture. I grew up in the suburbs, in a tri-level, one of a handful of Jewish families in a neighborhood that was not only Christian but skewed Catholic. I did not grow up in a Jewish world, in a Jewish cultural environment where Yiddish was spoken by adults, where traditional Eastern-European foods were eaten. As we were driving yesterday, I brought up how I could walk around Northland Mall (in Southfield, MI), and be the only white face in a huge crowd, and that most light-skinned Americans never experience that outside of a car driving through some neighborhood or on some specific visit. Darker skinned people experience that a lot. But it doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t feel that way: look at the person who walks into a gym not knowing what to do or how to strike up a conversation.

I’m wandering. My idea was to talk about this song because it’s about the creative self and how it is the most fun you can have and how you need to be that way. I love the way Tali alters her voice as she sings, ‘and I’d do it over and over and over again if I could’ so the meaning moves from sensuous defiance to near the edge of crazy. That’s exactly right. She encapsulates that thread of emotions related to creative self-actualization in one densely rendered phrase. Blows me away.

But the affinity level for me is – I don’t know why I’m resisting saying this … the repeated ‘ya-da-dit-da-da-da-dit-da-da-da-da-da-da’. I want to say this correctly: that’s what I sing to myself. Example: guy we knew, father of a friend of Rachel Taylor, had a Jewish music radio show on which he played old, mostly Ashkenazi, cantorial stuff. I turned it on one night and listened to an old recording of a cantor singing ‘ya-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, ya-da-da-da-da, gut Shabbas’. I’ve sung versions of that for over 20 years. In a Shabbat service, there are ‘niguns’, meaning songs with sounds instead of words. I’ve always done versions of them, including some with Star Wars references (though I’m not a Star Wars fan – sorry). The first time I heard the song, I didn’t understand the chanting, found it jarring, wondered what it meant. A few hours later I found myself singing it, slightly slower with a less mechanical edge, and realized I associate that, both the noise and the act of making that noise, with the creative self and with the devotional act of creation.

You might ask: how in the name of bleep did you jump from the noise you make and the noise you hear to creative self and devotional acts? Because that noise I make comes from my creative urge and is a creative act, and in this case my parodies are actual creative devotional acts, versions of liturgy in the ritual conception of ‘tefillah’. That word is reflexive, meaning you do to do to yourself, you judge to judge yourself, you seek assistance to seek assistance within yourself. Every time I sing, I judge how I sing versus what I intend to sing: is it the right voice, did it convey the right emotion while sounding right for that emotion and right across the phrases as they run together? I do this on the piano too. There are forms of intentionality. I try to be conscious of as many as I can, of as many parts of each form as I can. Some of that process is uncovering what I do unintentionally, how I react to stimuli automatically, and how to gain control of those reactions.

My initial attraction to Tali’s music, as I’ve noted before, came out of a single melody thread at the beginning of one song that was highly layered with intentionality. The seamlessness of the emotional and musical transitions, of the intonation, of the literal meanings, all made into one short piece that fits into a larger verse and then into an entire constructed song that is so perfectly managed. Intentionality. Hearing that inspired me. As I’ve also noted, I had doubts because 1989 was a transitional album for a person in transition. As I worked on my stuff, I wondered if she was for real or if she was becoming a glittering shell, if maybe she had reached the level of perfection she could achieve. I even thought of this as a Madonna moment: being from the same area, I felt a closeness to Madonna’s artistic growth through Papa Don’t Preach and then a sadness when she followed that with pop crap about sex. She’s done some great songs (e.g., Like A Prayer) and some great performances (e.g., Vogue stands out for its true theatrical presentation), but I always felt she stopped at that point in a deep way.

This did not happen with Tali. She did the reverse: she rejects things she felt or believed or did that don’t match to the deepest parts of her. It is the opposite of Madonna’s portrayal of her disheveled self half-stumbling down a hotel hallway after a video and song about tawdry sex: in her version, the self is that which experiences stuff. But Tali is about the deepest self. She is true to her deepest self. This is difficult for anyone and extraordinary for a person in her situation.

On an entirely different note, my eye exercises seem to have been working. I spent part of my workout today trying to use only the very edge of my peripheral vision to hit the heavy bag. It’s amazing how much you can be aware of spatially in a tiny corner of your vision. And then striking the bag when it’s at extension, not where it’s right there and easy to hit hard. I’ve been working at focusing my left eye better, at moving the areas of focus I can achieve through the visual space, back and in on a line, in motion across the image. It’s mind-bending. Causes some dizziness but I’ve learned the best treatment for dizziness is to work through it. The goal with the left eye is to be able to read better with it, to be able to focus on words with less jumpiness, and to bring it closer in harmony with the right. I’ve also been working on pushing my vision around the eye, in the thought that no one ever does this so how do we know what we’re giving up or missing by not working to see around better. I’ve been making progress at working without reading glasses and at eliminating some of the wave interference stripes that show as blanks.