When my voice is inhibited, it’s one of the only times I listen to my own recorded music. In some ways, it’s the only time I have enough distance from myself to be objective and only a listener. It’s at those times I listen with nostalgia and a wistful vanity, like an old woman might admire a photo of herself in youth as she never appreciated such a thing at the time. It is always more beautiful to me then … I always marvel at it more when it is just out of reach. When it threatens flight.
So I am not pushing things out. Instead, I am taking things in, which sometimes requires quiet, and a humbling of the self.
I imagine the Kahlo painting I posted, but with my own face, the animals replaced by instruments and the thorns at the neck encircling a sacred heart, inflamed as my throat. The duality of the power and the pain of it … but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve recently “discovered” Frida Kahlo, and have found myself seeking out her story as if it was my confessor and my cautionary tale. Her pain informed her art, and her pain was so much greater than mine could ever be. And she felt broken, strange and alone as I do, but just look how my friends and fans have rallied around me. I read her quotes and they remind me of what I have and how lucky I am, and at the same time they reach out and into my isolation as no person can. Andre Breton called her artwork “a ribbon around a bomb.” Many years ago, when I titled my first solo enterprises Upholstered Fortress, I was thinking something like that. Violence. Softness. Vulnerability. Isolation. Strength. Something explosive contained by something ironically beautiful and laughably inadequate. A ribbon around a bomb: When I heal from this thing, maybe that will be my next tattoo.
I have also recently “discovered” while reading The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, the word: chance-medley. I enjoy the way it almost sounds like it could mean a serendipitous commingling of songs. In fact, it is an ancient legal term, defined as:
[n] Accident or casualty not purely accidental, but of a mixed character. Unpremeditated manslaughter. “Chance,” in this case, is actually derived from the adjective “hot blood.”
A word that sounds musical and beautiful, but in fact hides a violent, mixed up, uncertain series of dangerous events ending in tragedy. Though no one has died, it seems to sum up my predicament. Who knows how I’ve gotten damaged, exactly? How these musical, hot-blooded months have been tragic, or serendipitous?
