Tous les sens

Instead of all the virtuous things I could do on a Sunday morning--getting ready for church, say, or heading outdoors for a hike before the sun really kicks in--I'm listening to a dirty French song. Specifically, I'm listening to Montréal's Ariane Moffatt whisper to her lover, "Je veux faire un puzzle avec ta peau" [I want to make/put together/construct a puzzle with your skin], before proceeding to this chorus: "Je veux t'aimer dans tous les sens." I want to love you in every sense. I'm blown away--or, better yet, disassembled--by the thought of the surface of a body locked, unlocked, and interlocked like so many scraps of scalloped cardboard. Moreover, I love the idea of loving someone, of wanting them and wanting to love them, not just in every direction but in and within each of the body's senses. What would it mean to trace the fissures and seams of a beloved body-puzzle with, for example, your nose? Or with your tongue, but not just your tongue; not even just your taste-buds, as though somehow a sense could be located once and for all in a given place; but in the diffuse--yet overpoweringly concentrated--radiance of sense, of senses, beyond them?

Somewhere a dog is barking.

I'm just back from two and a half weeks in Montréal, whose homely streets overflowed with beautiful people, and where I immediately felt, a little uncannily, and despite my lack of skinny jeans, chez moi. I found that city to be a puzzle in itself, its pieces not quite seamlessly proximate, even as I got a kick out of tracing and retracing its sidewalks. (What would it mean to tell a city that you want to love it in every sense?) There was something unexpectedly bracing, for me, about the familiarity of Francophone North America, where the buildings are straight out of the Rust Belt, even as the street signs and so many of the ambient voices at any given moment are in a language that seems neither exactly alien nor, obviously, in any immediate sense my own.

(Can I say, though, how grateful I am for the patience and, even, the kindness I was shown by so many folks in Montréal who listened to and coped with and even, miracle of miracles, occasionally said encouraging things as I fumbled around with French? If part of the Twilight Zone effect of those weeks was waking up each morning in a city that looked--and smelled--a lot like home, another part of it was continually encountering French-speakers who were generous, accommodating even, with the compromises and distortions that accompany all appropriations of a new, or even an old, language.)

I spent much of this spring with Linda Gregg's poems. In one of them, "Maybe Leave-Taking," the speaker describes her fellow passengers on, I believe, a Greek ferry: "All the people / strangers, people I do not know. A truer sense / of being than lovers and friends." One of the things that kept me afloat in Montréal--that island city--was the sense that, in a bilingual place, divided and sutured by competing empires and their aftermath, there is no mother tongue, no authentic, autochthonous language: just idioms cobbled together as places and means of passage, ways of affirming solidarity among strangers. (I would, however, not exclude lovers and friends from this community of "people I do not know.")

While in Montréal, I read Michel Tremblay's _Le coeur découvert_ [The Heart Laid Bare], a novel about, among other things, the families that gays and lesbians make for themselves. The shocking thing was that, in 1986, at least ten years before the big debates surrounding "homoparentalité" in France, Tremblay was already engaging with what it meant to be a gay parent. He also bravely and, I think, delicately--it's a surprisingly light, almost breezy novel--articulates the complicated tissue of relationships that inform even, I would argue, the most traditional lives. None of us, in other words, has a merely biological family. Long before my life was saved, repeatedly, by a series of lesbian godmothers--and in this I'm not unlike Tremblay's protagonist, Jean-Marc--I had, as a kid, at least one "aunt" who was no biological relation to me and whose presence in my life was sustaining. She was and is, it's true, straight and married and an evangelical Christian, but that only goes to show that our notions of queer community need to expand to allow for these things, too. We need to let more people on the boat.

The last thing it occurs to me to say, on a late morning in late summer, is this: To love someone or something in all directions, in all of the senses, is to become exposed to what might derail us. The ferry may not bring us to Montréal (or Mountain View, or wherever we'd like to be); it might dump us off in Ithaca. Not every homecoming will be a glorious one. But to be more alive to the puzzles of those skins that surround us--and I mean leaves and streets too, and the bark of dogs and trees--is to drag some of the strangeness of the boat ride up onto the shore.

Pop optimism

It has been over four months since I last wrote anything for this blog, and my apologies to anyone who follows it--does anyone follow it?--for having disappeared, or gently slipped into other modes of visibility, for a while. I returned to Ithaca last night from Italy, where I'd spent ten days reacquainting myself with a country I first encountered (and whose language I first fell in love with) fifteen years and nearly half my life ago. While I was there, I had time to witness firsthand the therapeutic value of a certain strain of pop optimism in the music that would play in heavy rotation on Italian television, specifically on All Music, a channel that suddenly, around 9 in the morning each day, at least in my hotel room, would become All Shopping, purveyor of a miracle (and, who knows, perhaps also musical) product called the Vibratone.

All Music plays, as far as I can tell, about fifteen or twenty different videos, about a third of them by Italian artists. The rest is the usual (although slightly Eurotrashier) stuff you'd expect from Vh1 in the early morning: too many pitch-corrected little girl voices singing about revenge and resistance over big 1980s arrangements. (Thank you, Sweden!) What was fascinating, to my inexperienced ear, was how much less cynical, how downright optimistic, the Italian popular music idiom is, in comparison to ours: where Lady GaGa (who is--does this matter?--Italian-American) sings about her poker face (and I love this song, even as I keep wondering whether it will ever be possible to make a dance anthem about a face incapable of hiding anything), Laura Pausini's new video makes an argument for obviousness as the ground of futurity: "what's there," she sings in possibly the most Heideggerian moment in recent popular songwriting, "is the most evident proof [comunque quel che c'è / è la prova più evidente]."

Don't get me wrong. This is an enormous ballad, and by every standard a colossal piece of crap, but I love it. Just as I love--to be honest, not quite as much as I love--Gianna Nannini's "Attimo," where the only out lesbian in Italian music promises, again in a future tense that we seem less eager to use, "In just a moment / I'll hold you [In un attimo / io ti stringerò]," just before asserting, with equal conviction, "Within just a moment / I'll lose you [Dentro a un attimo / io ti perderò]." (The chorus swells into a giant affirmation of this hope and this ambivalence: "Don't go away / before it hurts / Don't go away / without my life [Non te ne andare / prima che faccia male / Non te ne andare / Senza la mia vita].") At the risk of sounding every bit as sentimental as what I'm describing, I love the way these songs promise, and how Nannini's in particular acknowledges the risk of promising--and abiding with--something. (It also helps that the chorus of "Attimo" sounds a lot like Melissa Etheridge's "Come to My Window.")

What does this all amount to? Just the sense--fostered in part, I imagine, by jet-lag--that there's a place for promising in popular music, a place for acknowledging that hide and seek isn't the only game in town. Sometimes what's out there is the most compelling proof, the easiest thing to build a future on. To sing about a future isn't to claim to know what that future will hold; it is, nonetheless, to be committed to the idea of a future, to the idea of something or someone to hold on to. God knows that in the intervening "attimo" everything could change, but songs like these encourage us to place our bets on something, to come down on the side of holding or losing. I, for one, am determined to hold.

Homeful

Today I have been grumpy, and I have also been thinking about my grumpiness. (Why, for example, do I want to take every loud child in every Silicon Valley coffeehouse and throw them all, one by one, methodically out the window? I don't want them to hit the ground, obviously; I want an angel ex machina to catch them first; but I would very much enjoy the sense of hurling them, possibly by the ankle, into the air.) My boyfriend observed, an hour or so ago, that I'm quick to say that I hate particular places or people; and that these statements occur as frequently on one coast as on the other. (I attempted to defend myself, poorly, by adding that I am also quick to express my love of particular places or people: this German bakery, for example, whose apple cake is currently stretching the boundaries of my stomach into, I'd say, my ribcage.) But what is it that prompts the quick dismissal, the sudden flare of anger at one's surroundings?

Here is my tentative answer. I, like so many of us, have multiple homes: not in the sense of owning property, thank God, but in the sense of having many emotional and geographic centers in my life. And many homes frequently threaten to feel like no home at all: no place that feels, once and for all, like the definitive place, the place of places. This is generally not a problem, or one, at best, that lingers under the surface of larger problems. But, after five weeks of living away from the place I'd usually call home, in another place I have also occasionally called home, this homelessness (or, wait, shouldn't it be homefulness?) cuts a couple of ways: the California suburbs have attracted my passionate attachment and disaffection again, even as my sense of never ultimately being at home anywhere has increased with the weeks spent wandering these long, wide, sun-saturated streets.

There are a couple of things worth remembering, I try to tell myself, in the midst of the low-level anxiety that accompanies the extended experience of living somewhere you feel at once drawn to and repulsed by. First: it is a quintessentially Christian predicament to be at once continually displaced and essentially at home everywhere. (Whether this is consoling depends, I guess, on how you feel about Christianity.) Second: as exhausting as it can be to have your rhythms challenged by someone or someplace else's, it is also refreshing to be reminded that those rhythms can change. It's like discovering that you've been carrying around muscle groups whose flexibility has remained untapped; and then, all of a sudden, you stretch for some reason, or maybe you duck to escape something--a bird, a baseball--and they're right there, holding you up or out or down, sustaining you and taking you by surprise.

This is what homefulness would name: the abundance of places that call out to us, challenging our sense of ourselves not with the threat (or the promise) of the exotic but, instead, with the familiar, asking us to come to terms with the people we once were, or the people we continue to be for our loved ones as well as our frequently unloved neighbors. Homefulness would articulate some of the excitement (but also the weariness) that attends most of our experiences of the holidays: not, however, as an occasional event but as a daily fact of life. It's a blessing to have so many homes; to imagine San Antonio Road, flanked with olive trees, descending into the wintry landscape of upstate New York, or winding through the Hoosier National Forest; but this continuity also means never quite escaping the multiple, not always congruent demands that these places make on us, the demands of families and friends, saying, here, stay a while, make yourself at home. It is impossible to be entirely at home, under these circumstances, but there is no denying that there are far worse invitations; and making oneself at home is always also to adjust oneself to someone else's surroundings, to acknowledge, implicitly at least, that my home is also yours, or at least unthinkable without you.

Pretty music

I'm between trips, as usual: having gotten back to snowy Ithaca from rainy California, I've traded one kind of cold for another, at least for a day or two. As I type, the plastic Christmas tree on the dining room table, inches from the computer, is quivering, its small round ornaments and surprisingly sharp little lights suddenly alive. Patti Labelle sings, "Don't rush to give me a present / Your presence is enough for me / Stay at home, I'll be happy." She's reminding her lover that the trappings of the holidays are insignificant in comparison to love, and she's singing these lines over the sinuous strings and crisp percussion of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (and their collaborators), and there is, right now, no Christmas album I could possibly love more, as these chords modulate and then, with the strings soaring, explode: "It's going to be a Merry Christmas," Patti sings, and how could it not be?

I was listening, about an hour ago, to Mary J. Blige's 2005 album, The Breakthrough, which I don't listen to much, mostly because it's too long and the gems are buried toward the end of the disc. But I encountered the same crackling, shimmering sound on "Can't Get Enough Love," another Jam and Lewis (and Wright and Avila) production, and thought, damn, this is... Pretty. Like, really freaking pretty. The stacked, super-produced harmonies; the vaguely asiatic waterfall-trickle on the keyboard that emerges halfway through the chorus, if you can even call it a chorus: "This is true / I can't get enough of you." It's a seductively gentle arrangement for a statement of such conviction. So much of what's on pop radio right now (and I include R&B radio in this verdict) is extravagantly ugly, showing off the robotic dissonance that a vocoder can produce in lieu of the human voice, and although I'm at pains to say how, for example, Janet Jackson's voice is different when she sings 2007's "Enjoy" (Jam & Lewis again), since Jackson is not exactly getting by without technology, nonetheless there's a warmth, a delight in euphony, that cascades across those plinkety-plinkety piano lines and compressed background vocals: "Just keep on doing it / Until your heart's content." There's even a chorus of giggling children, and I don't care; it's that lovely.

Jam & Lewis are famous. I know only their basic coordinates (time with The Time in the late 1980s, Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation, Blige's knockout "No More Drama," a recent move from Minneapolis to L.A.) but what strikes me as most important, right now, is their audible commitment to everything that glides and glimmers in a love song. It might still be possible--they've been saying for two decades now--to hope for beauty right at the heart of the most stalwart clichés. Right in the thick of them.

Rejoice

The leaves are mostly gone. Not gone, actually, just somewhere else: they're on the ground now, not on the trees, and, sure, that's obvious, but it's also something I repeatedly forget. What we can't see isn't necessarily absent; it just may be elsewhere, or otherwise, than it was. Rosie Thomas, this Sunday morning, is whispering her version of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," with a new, minimalist melody, and--is this even possible?--more melancholy than the original. But, no, melancholy is wrong; melancholy means refusal, resistance, and this is a song about rejoicing, even if that hushed, slightly trembling voice at the beginning of the song--before a whole chorus of Rosies joins in toward the end, with the traditional melody as a counterpoint to the first few verses--seems to doubt, seems a little reluctant to rejoice, or to tell anyone else to do so.

There's something presumptuous, after all, about telling others to have a good time, to be happy. (A community of bloggers I occasionally follow has recently been the site of hot debate around this very question: is affirmation alienating?) But this command--rejoice!--is, nonetheless, at the heart of the advent hymn, and what might save it from falling into the trap of, say, the service professional who tells you to enjoy your meal or your movie--and whose own lack of enjoyment is probably embedded in the command--is its audience: after all, the hymn is set up as an entreaty to the one who's coming, as a kind of summoning spell, and "Rejoice!" marks the turn from Emmanuel to Israel, marks the turn from what (or who) is being waited for to the community doing the waiting. In other words, this is an equivocal rejoicing; it's something that initially seems to be demanded of the very cause for rejoicing (what would it mean to tell Christ to rejoice?) and only subsequently, almost belatedly, opens onto the folks whose waiting will be suspended by joy. It seems less presumptuous to tell someone to rejoice if the cause of joy is also subject to that imperative--if, to be frank, he's got to be at least as happy to see you as you are to see him--and if joy itself is unthinkable without waiting. There is no immediate rejoicing, no rejoicing alone or right now, but neither is it infinitely deferred. Israel mourns; it isn't melancholy. The leaves aren't gone; they're at the base of the trees, as some snow starts to fall--just a stray flurry, or, wait, are those more leaves?--and more will be coming. Always more.

Jesus in New Orleans (and San Francisco, and Saint Louis, and Ithaca)

"The road's been my redeemer," Karin Bergquist sings on Over the Rhine's 2004 album Ohio, and I wish I could sing that line a little more confidently, back in suddenly wintry Ithaca after two weeks of travel. (It was 39 degrees when I parked my car half an hour ago.) I love airplanes until I have to sit in one and nervously ascend, praying as hard as I ever pray, surrounded by fellow travelers I can't help hating a little when we're on the ground--everyone in SFO Sunday night looked shady, from the greasy-haired guy in the leather Mickey Mouse jacket who farted in front of me in the security line to the disheveled gentleman who abandoned his luggage for so long they had to make an announcement--but whose vulnerability becomes inseparable from my own once we're suspended in that narrow tube in the sky. If Jesus can be a woman drinking Bloody Marys in a New Orleans bar--as Over the Rhine would have it--he can also be a flatulent passenger on a late night flight; or, two weeks earlier, the impossibly young woman who came over to my table, ten minutes before closing, at the Culver's Custard in Corydon, Indiana, to offer me a sundae that someone had made and had no use for; or the surprisingly calm, tattooed bartender at the City Diner in Saint Louis who thought I'd just moved to town and gently suggested that I return on a weekend, late, to see the scene. Even the pale Portland kids in their peg-leg jeans. Even, tonight, the atheist father of one of my closest friends, as he reached across my legs to adjust the seat in his Porsche after I asked if he'd take me for a ride, touching my knee with a respectful, businesslike tenderness to make sure I wasn't hitting the dashboard; his dark brown eyes, liquid, inquisitive, so much like his daughter's. These are some of the folks I think of when I consider that redemptive road.

California songs

Rain is making the leaves shudder this morning: they're still mostly green, although a few close to the house have gone yellow at the tips and, beyond the end of the driveway, an entire treetop is orange. It's an early fall, even by these standards, and I'm listening to Peter Bradley Adams sing about leaving Los Angeles, his slightly mannered, breathy voice joined, in the second verse, by Sarah Siskind's lilting harmony line: "And we made our peace with lonely nights / And you healed our broken hearts." Wistful songs about California get me every time. Does any other place inspire so much dreaming and melancholy? I know from my six years of living there that it can be a profoundly disconnected place, profoundly solitary, as folks pursue their happiness in relative isolation from and disregard for others; but it's also a place where blue takes on a thousand new meanings, where no one apologizes for their pleasure, and where a kind of blithely superficial friendliness does (it does, my east coast friends, it really does) go a long way. And coming back east after that feels inevitably, I think, like failure; even if you know it's the right thing, at least for now, to do.

Denison Witmer returns to this sense of opportunity lost or relinquished in at least two songs about California: the first, "Los Angeles," from the 2006 re-issue of his first album, Safe Away, has him singing, in short, slow phrases: "I'm your / Lost happiness / Up in your / Los Angeles / Sky." And, as with Adams' reminiscence of a city he's taking flight from, here too it's all about the sky: compromised and toxic and vast and, in the warm, oblique early-evening light that, even now, can make my throat tighten a little, so full of promise. But that promise--and this is why it's inevitably with wistfulness that folks sing of the place, at least since Joni Mitchell swore, "California / I'm coming home"--that promise comes at the end of the day, not at the beginning. California's is a crepuscular beauty. It's a promise that's already fading. That's why I find it so damn poignant and true.

That may also be why I'm thinking of it now, in our crepuscular mid-atlantic season, a fall that seems to be arriving at least a week or two early, and with an uncharacteristic burst of bright color, maples blushing all along these hills.