What note goes here?
Grief, Music, and Laughter
We had a very good wake for my Mother-in-law. We had all the right people and a lot of good food, and the neighbors came and the house was filled with flowers and children and interconnected friends. I cleaned dishes all day, heated and reheated food. We filled an entire recycling bin with empty cans and bottles. We sang “The Sun Will Come out Tomorrow” and “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” at the piano with her sisters. We said all the right words and it’s true, we are happy that she’s at peace. But peace is tricky too. And ever since, my mind has been spinning through metaphors, trying to explain this what-now feeling.
What-Now Metaphor 1: a poem
The winter wave has collected souls
So quickly this time -
I mean, I knew that they were made of sand.
We built them up,
watched them erode.
We saw the tide rise.
But nothing prepares you for the wave
that wipes your beach clean.
The flatness.
There is room to walk
In either direction
if you want to know,
But your feet have been
sucked into the gloop of the shallows
And you’ll have to pull them out,
You’ll have to not lose your balance,
Be resolute
Maintain the other castles
that are waiting on the beach,
The sunset glistening behind them
(As always)
Where the here and the horizon meet
What-Now Metaphor 2: If this were a movie, the movie should’ve ended, but the camera is still on. So what now?
Elaine May was once honoring the film The Graduate and explained how it defied expectations by staying with the protagonist. He’s fought his way into the church and run out with the bride and on to the bus and that should be the end but the camera stays on, “and of course, he has nothing to say",” says May. “If the camera had stayed on Prince Charming after he put the slipper on Cinderella he’d say something stupid like ‘nice shoes!’”
We long for endings. For good resolutions.
What- Now Metaphor 3: Musical resolutions
There is the most wonderful, ridiculous jug band in Cincinnati called the Dancing Pigs. If you’re lucky enough to catch them at Arnold’s bar and grill they might play you some of the silliest songs you’ve ever heard. “Alice, Alice, who the f&%# is Alice”, or the parody of Do,Re, Mi, that starts “Dos a Beer, a Mexican Beer, Ray, A guys who buys me beer…”.
But the one that always made me chuckle the most was “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” sung one beat or word ahead of the usual words. So instead of TAKE me OUT, it goes: take ME out TO the ball GAME take ME out to the crowd BUY…. Me some peanuts and crackER jack I… Don’t care if I evER GET back for its root root ROOT for THE home team IF THEY. don’t win it’s a shame FOR. It’s one TWO three strikes you’re out at the old BALL GAME _____. It’s a silly musical exercise that results in the last note of the song being suspended without a word.
The link below looks like people I could be related to but no. And I would argue that they are a full TWO words ahead.
Explaining why it’s funny ruins the fact that it just is. It’s like the roadrunner, over-running the bend and finding himself suspended over the cliff. But he doesn’t fall. It’s unfinished. It’s Buster Keaton falling down a house, through a window, into a firehouse, down the pole and then relaxing on to a truck, only to have it drive away. It subverts expectation. Simple.
A song needs a resolution. We’re just stuck without it. No, we don’t always listen to music thinking consciously about what note will be next, but when we come to the end of a song, most of us could place the resolving note. We’d know how it was supposed to end.
Endings in Life and Death are not quite as final. Sometimes they keep that note hanging for awhile. Yes, there’s a death, but then there’s a funeral and after that, the untangling of their possessions and the settling in to a new life without them. And even before that, there was an end before the end and lot of little endings before the final note of that saga was revealed.
When I feel adrift, I like to think of a musical chord that just hasn’t been resolved, a chord or scale that just hasn’t been finished yet.
The particular trauma of dealing with a long illness, of dementia that crescendoed quite quickly into a discordant piece of modern music with its bangs and bleats and silences, makes you wish for silence, even jealous of the peaceful stillness that followed. The last note was not your last note. Your chord progresses. And sometimes (especially in classical music) the ending goes on and on. It’s how music and humor and death are connected. Suspense-Tension-Release in all three.
Diminished or Augmented: a chord finds harmony.
Satirical or Farcical, a joke is built through tension.
Sudden or Gradual, the tension of life is released.
Metaphor 3 part 2 - One Song in Particular
I’ve always loved this piece from Debussy’s Children’s Suite.
The video below interprets the piece more slowly than usual so you can hear how the lovely lines, the scales move so naturally, chromatically up and down, in little themes and parallel ideas, and dynamics. You can hear when life moves faster and louder and feel when life is moving slower and quieter. And it has a sort of unexpected ending, a double ending as I’ve been thinking of. I think originally it was meant to be a funny sort of scales exercise, but it sounds like waves to me and like a mind wandering. The lovely bass note holds the waves together. So many little resolutions.
What do you hear or see?
Are these ideas coming together?
I’m thinking about notes that go together, that complete one another, like ushering another person out of this world while you remain in it. I’m wondering how life (and death) can have so many notes and tempos. I’m thinking about how listening to good music helps you think. How if only life’s key could just be switched from minor to major, we could be happy. I’m thinking about silence after a party. I’m thinking about good parties and the people who know how to make them good, like the completion of a musical phrase.
A lot of what I think about comes back to music. The joy of dissonance, of withholding the note. Of singing the wrong one at the right time.
If you like music and laughter combined, you’ll like this one. Hold for the punchline please.
What do you hear in the Debussy? Do you have a better metaphor for me? How can a person sing in F sharp when the music is in F Major? Has the horrible footprints in the sand poem ruined all beach related poetry? Maybe. Would love to hear your take on any of it.
I am so sorry about your MIL. Please share my condolences. But I absolutely know you threw a kickass wake - I have no trouble imagining that!
The metaphors here! The notes - the silence. We are conditioned to finish the song, the sentence, what we start or what was started for us (our lives?). But death is a finish of it's own and sometimes we're not ready to finish that way - other times we are - but it sure doesn't generate the satisfaction of finishing a loved ones sentence or hearing and feeling the end of a song. Thank you for sharing these ideas - and for the ball game songs! You did it! My brain I fear would not allow me to make that swap!
I am drawn to the silence that sometimes follows the last note, as though silence itself is the resolution. You can recognize this in the opening scene of THE GREAT BEAUTY when the tourist drops dead at the conclusion of "I Lie." Something similar happens in the film OUT OF AFRICA, when Deny's flies away from Karen's farm for what we know will be the last time. The drone of his plane enters the sunrise, and then silence follows. In both scenes, it is the silence that stays with us--silence and perhaps the echo in our minds of notes just heard, just hushed.