(recorded
for self-evident reasons)
.
I have
glorious friends. One of them, David Schechter, who’s on my poetry list (people
to whom I send my more-or-less daily verse-and-visuals) just noticed – it’s
easy to miss – that I’ve taken to appending a link to a YouTube recording of
that day’s enterprise in the email. David is an inspired actor, director,
playwright, singer whose shamanistic embrace of existence gives everything he
does and says a glow of cosmic hilarity and deep deep feeling: a kind of sweet
loopy grace which is his alone. I cherish him. Therefore I cherish what he said
about my recordings, so sensitive is he to speech and sound, which he says he
likes a lot.
I wrote
back an effusive thanks, and told him, yes, reciting these things into my
iPhone’s video lens has by now become a central part of whatever it is I do
creatively: to speak these things is for me a species of singing, really. I
write by ear. In fact right now I’m intoning these words aloud as I type them.
They rise and fall like notes - musical notes, that is (verbal notes as of
course they also are) – in fact they’re really more sound than sense: the
‘sense’ takes care of itself; I barely give it a thought. Which sometimes makes
‘sense’ a casualty (what the fuck is he talking about?). Actually I
suppose it’s a wonder I ever make any! It’s all about inflection, pitch, rhythm
rhythm rhythm. Doesn’t always have a point.
I
stuttered badly (actually I suppose I stuttered quite well - nailed that fucker
down, got really good at it!) for years through postOedipal childhood (starting
about 6, 7 years old) through my teens and twenties and here and there ever
since although falling off almost completely by now (except when I’m especially
tired & tense, when it will come back like a whimpering old wounded dog):
fluency was a rare luxury and oh how I valued it! The craving for it probably
is why my violin playing & writing & drawing bloomed as fast &
ardently and almost desperately expressively (as if forced in a hot house) as
they did. (My father stuttered as a child & adolescent; he too resorted to
singing – god what a voice he had! – and drawing & writing probably also
compensatorily.) Anyway I’m making up for lost time I guess.
Mentioning
my father in that parenthesis made me realize again how much his son I was, am,
will always be. I’m glad I could, as I think I did, reflect some of the better parts
of our shared inner experience back to him. It was easy because it consisted of
the three talents we shared in art, music and what I think of as “using” words,
sometimes by writing them (not least as captions for drawings), sometimes by
singing them, always as having them as creative agents in the mind. Whatever
the media, we both played with it irrepressibly. He never wasn’t singing. He
drew with a childlike expansiveness, as attracted to creating strange creatures
(which however in his case usually posed as actual people or animals) as I
apparently am. When I was about 9 or 10 he’d set up an easel on the second floor landing and
a big pad of drawing paper and pastels and sketch in a face. When I passed it
during the day I’d alter it. Then he’d alter it. And so on – so that at the end
of a week you’d have seen it morph from balloon ghost to cantankerous old man
to crazed clown to suspicious neighbor. The chiaroscuro got pretty dense, lord
knows.
Unlike my
mother, and many other good artists I know, who work “from life” – used models,
looked at actual skies or bowls of apples or sunlit bays or other aspects of
the “real” world as guides to what they put on paper or canvas – my father and
I much preferred working from what was in our heads. Finally, I think, that’s
what all artists do – but it was obvious in us because, well, we weren’t
looking at anything when we drew except what we were drawing! It somehow both
felt like trespassing – when you make things up, you get to make them pretty
‘out there’ and disturbing – and ameliorative: the healing was partly private –
when you draw, you draw alone – and partly shared, as we each came back to see
what they other had done and then added our outrageous addenda. Who knows that
it wasn’t for me (in addition to being everything else under the sun) a kind of
way to rage out against my inability to speak.
Stuttering
is dreadful, especially when you’re a kid. It’s a kind of constipation of the
mouth. You can’t get words out except in painful bursts and pushes and stops
and starts: it’s like spitting nails. Because you’re convinced that certain
words that begin with an “s” or a “t” or an “o” are impossible to pronounce,
you become hugely adept at seeking out synonyms that ride more easily out of
the mouth. This can foster some pretty strange syntax. Which means, of course,
it fosters creativity, if of a forced and fraught kind. But you never could
evade the horror. Excruciating eternities beset me when I’d have to stand up
and recite something or read a paper I’d written. My father, hauled as a 7 year
old child from West New York New Jersey where his German parents emigrated from
Bremen in about 1910 (he was born in 1913) back to Germany after the First
World War for a couple years to see their families, suddenly found himself
often literally unutterably in a land where not only the language but customs
of every kind (what you wore, how you behaved) were forbiddingly alien. That it
encouraged stuttering in him seems plausible. However, human behavior and
proclivities are a strange business: sources of them are, to me, either
ultimately obscure or often not pertinent to the real point, which is how to move ahead from it: in my father's and my case,
how to find fluency. I used to be interested in the ‘psychology’ of stuttering (all
sorts of things seemed logically implicated in mine, that I was gay for
example) – but it’s now a word I almost can’t write without scare quotes, as I
would phrenology if that were still all the rage. I think it often breeds in
its abstract phrases more of a block to the possibility of understanding what’s
going on than an aid to helping you move forward: a terrible generalization,
but I make it anyway.
So while
there were very likely external (family- and socially-derived) conditions that
had some effect on my dad’s and my ability to get words out, but I’m now more
interested in the adaptations that we quickly developed, first because we felt
we had to, so that we could experience fluency in some other way. Enter again:
Singing. Drawing. Writing. Arguably we became efficient at wielding them
because of a felt necessity: they were our only alternatives. But mostly, if we
did get “good” at any of it, it was because we dived into a private realm of
pleasure – we learned we loved doing this stuff, expressing what was in us in
these other ways. We shifted the scenario from pathology to out-and-out
playfulness – with a lovely reward: we had something to “show” for it – a
drawing, a song, a movement from a Mozart violin concerto.
What I
suppose I’m also groping to suggest is that by having to respond to the need to
communicate via other means than talking, we were learning that feelings and
thoughts could at least be intimated, and sometimes more freshly and even more
exactly communicated through visual and musical shticks than through what we
could say aloud. A version of this describes the experience, and arguably the
great good fortune, of people who can’t see or hear. They know in ways that we
cannot what life is through the conditions they’re able to sense it. (How else could
they?) They are prone, sometimes prey, to acute sensations we do not need to
develop: touch and smell and every nuance of sound to a blind person; a
meticulous and nuanced examination of what can be seen, to the deaf. I permit
myself to imagine that my father and I similarly learned, perhaps not too much
less dramatically, that what we were feeling was larger and stranger than it
would have been had we been able to resort to speech as the first ‘go-to’
tactic. So much speaks, it turns out, without speaking.
With what
amount to these triumphs over what first seemed impossibility – communication
that matters – in mind about my dad and me, I found myself looking at old
photographs of us in a different way. Two photos, one of me probably about 14,
one of my dad who may have been 12, but both essentially in our early teens.
That age marked what I remember as the peak of my stuttering, and I know it was
for my dad at that age too. However, we both were at the brink of lives which
would not too long after allow to us to locate our ability to speak with some,
and then greater, fluency. I truly don’t know how or why. My mother had me see
a speech therapist, who made me feel so self-conscious about stuttering it
simply tripled the problem. I know my father was scolded as a younger child by
his German uncles and father for it – once my mother all but spat out at me,
“try not to stutter later, will you?” before “company” came. These frustrated
pleas or expressions of anger may seem cruel, and in effect they were, but they
weren’t “the problem” either. How did my father and I stop, to the nearly
complete degree we did. We stopped because we stopped. I never heard my father
say anything about it to me (and he did talk to me about it because I was him,
essentially, when I was going through the worst tortures of it) other than that
it just went away.
There is
a lovely illumination in this for me, and I suspect for my dad. Again, that the
nature not only of what we do but of why we do it is finally a mystery. It
seems to me you can do two things in face of mystery: have it scare the hell
out of you, or find it absorbingly – funny! I wonder if my father would have
nodded yes to all or any of that. I don’t know. But it would probably make him
laugh. One thing life (hobbled by whatever impediments we experienced in and to
it) gave both of us was an enormous readiness to laugh. Which oh we did and oh
I do. And he did even through the Alzheimers’ disease that whittled away almost
everything in him. He lost all words, but he still could sing. He still could
draw. He still could laugh. Not least, I’d like to think, because of the
tenacity of joy and aghastness at realizing nobody knew what was happening
(really) in my dad, it resonates beautifully with me now that so many of the things
we find dire – up to and including dying and death – harbor in their secret
heart a huge cosmic hilarity. My father had it in him to the end. And probably
still does somewhere out or in or beyond whatever the hell “here” is.
This is surely made manifest in that picture of my dad and me
attempting the Can Can, taken in front of the Forbidden City in Beijing in
December 1985 (a wonderful trip I took with my dad and mom and my then-partner
Richard). In a way it’s a visual trope for the response he brought to most
things. (Do the Can-Can!) And, to bring in the other treasured pic here, wit
don’t nevah stop with my friend David Schechter – whose warm response
to my orated poesy started all this musing – and
whom you see here with me next to a bronze Daumier figurine he gave me that had
belonged to his mother who’d recently gone to the next dimension, aka “died.”
(David has connections in that realm.) She knew what funny was, too.
Funny is God.
