On stage in Portsmouth, The Composer’s Ensemble does not look like most orchestras. There are only fourteen musicians, all with strange smiles on their faces, and the assortment of instruments is bizarre: six violinists, one flute player, three cellists, two percussionists, and The Composer at a grand piano. There is also an older, balding man at an electric keyboard, sitting in a darkened back corner, whose presence might be mystifying, unless you know that his role is to visually account for any sound that could not have been produced by the other thirteen musicians. Of course, all the sounds that the audience members actually hear in Portsmouth and later on TV were recorded years earlier, with different musicians. The stage is dimly lit and drenched in dense billowing clouds of stage fog. You can barely see past the dead microphone in front of you.
Before the concert begins, there is a dress rehearsal and sound check. Dozens of video and lighting and sound technicians run around the stage, preparing their equipment, whispering urgently to one another, barking orders into walkie-talkies. At some point one of the sound techs begins yelling frantically into his wireless headpiece. He becomes so agitated that the dress rehearsal comes to a halt.
“I don’t know!” he yells to the control room crew. “We’re not getting anything. ANYTHING! I can’t figure it out! We’ve got nothing!”
Every single musician on the stage knows why the sound tech isn’t “getting anything.” But the only person who speaks is Kim. Still holding her pennywhistle, she walks across the stage, over to The Composer.
“Just tell them,” she says softly. “Just tell them.”
God Bless America Tour 2004
Little Rock
Somewhere between “Misty Lake” and “Forests of Gold” I realize that, despite going to the bathroom three times before the concert started, I have to pee. Except I don’t actually have to pee. My mind is tricking me, attempting to convince me to flee the stage. I try to ignore it.
Harriet and I have a secret language on stage. We live for the small flourishes in the music, the one or two measures where The Composer’s shallow compositions reach their maximum depth. But tonight I cannot relish the flourishes. I have to pee. But I do not have to pee. But how does one ever really know? How did I know before, whether or not I had to pee? When did I learn? If I can remember how I learned, maybe I can relearn. It’s a thing you take for granted, knowing when to pee, a piece of knowledge that you never question until you do, and then everything in life becomes impossible (To pee or not to pee . . .). The notes march slowly across the staff paper. I fantasize about The Composer hitting the Fast-Forward button on the Sony CD player, speeding up our concert so it takes a fraction of the time. This makes me think back to my college astronomy class. According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, I could get from September to December in five minutes with the right kind of rocket ship. And what about all those quantum physics theories that suggest it’s possible for an object to be in two places at the same time? Ergo: According to Einstein, I am not on this stage. According to Einstein, it is already Christmas Eve and I am back home at my parents’ house in Virginia (my own bathroom!) eating the Feast of the Seven Fishes and anise cookies and wrapping presents. According to Einstein, I am not really in Little Rock, Arkansas, about to pee on stage.
Einstein doesn’t work, so I try a different tactic. Relish each note, some fake cheerful voice inside of me says. Hit each note with the sweet spot of fingertip fat. Warm the note with vibrato. Your fingers are tiny fires, warming up notes for dinner. Next note. Hit. Sway. Warm. Twenty more measures. Fifteen. Five. Six more songs to go. Fifty measures. Thirty. Twenty. Five more songs to go. I have to pee. You do not have to pee. But it sure feels like I do. You do not. Four more songs.
I try to relax, but then I become terrified that if I relax too much I will pee. Before I left for the tour I went to three doctors, thinking I had developed a urinary tract infection. Or perhaps my symptoms had something to do with the severe and chronic intestinal illness I developed a few months before going on tour. But the doctors all came to the same conclusion: everything was normal with my bladder. My urinary symptoms had nothing to do with my intestinal illness. It will go away, I thought. Nothing is wrong with me.
It has yet to occur to me that nothing has to be wrong with one’s body for one’s mind to go haywire. It has yet to occur to me that the mind could play such a mean trick, going after the one thing in life I want to discuss the very least: my bathroom habits. It has yet to occur to me that there is, in fact, a diagnosis for this: crazy.
Crazy is what happens when one person splits into two. The first part deceives (I have to pee). The second part knows it’s a deception (You don’t have to pee).
You don’t know it yet, but it’s here at a concert in Little Rock, Arkansas, that you have your first full-blown panic attack, the first of hundreds of attacks you will experience, the opening notes of a disorder that will mar the upcoming years so completely that your life will become unrecognizable from anything you ever expected it to be. The attacks will cause you to behave in bizarre ways that you know make no sense, ways that you know make you look insane, but you cannot stop. Up until now the attacks have only been hints, vague premonitions of dread, which you chalk up to the sound of the pennywhistle. But at this concert in Little Rock the rewiring of your brain—the scrambling of the fight-or-flight instinct—escalates at an alarming speed:
Not only am I going to pee myself in front of a hundred people, I’m going to throw up. My dress is going to fall off, my shoes will break underneath me, crippling me. My knees are just a thread—how are my legs held together? Am I sure they are held together? Have I ever checked to make sure? I am going to faint. I am going to throw up and faint at the same time and then choke on my own vomit. I am going to smash my violin on the ground and stomp it with my foot. I am going to throw my violin at an audience member and start screaming obscenities. Worse than obscenities, offensive things, the most vile things I can imagine: racial slurs, September 11th was a wonderful day, fuck the veterans and fuck the elderly and fuck cute babies. Fuck abused puppies and fuck PBS. I have no control over anything, not my body, not my mind, and certainly not the musical soundtrack that is shaking the air all around me. I’m on a predestined track that can’t be stopped. I am going to die up here, and no one will know because I’m smiling.
After the concert I sprint to the bathroom, slam the stall door shut, all but rip off my concert dress and underwear, and slam my butt on the toilet. It’s only then that I realize: You don’t have to pee. Not at all.
You Became Audible to Yourself
Years later you will read that a panic attack is a scrambling of the same flight instinct that tells the human being to run from a bear. But you’ll never find that description to be accurate. The panic you experience for the first time on stage in Little Rock is not like the panic you’d feel if you were being chased by a bear. No, it is, instead, like the panic you’d feel once the bear has already caught you and has begun to eat you, the panic of someone with no chance of survival, in the last moments of consciousness, when neither fight nor flight will help.
Your panic attacks escalate, as panic attacks do, though you don’t know anything about panic attacks when you first begin having them on the God Bless America Tour. In time the attacks will invade every area of your life until you cannot ride airplanes or subways or elevators or cars or be anywhere that doesn’t offer immediate access to an unoccupied bathroom. (And even immediate access to a bathroom doesn’t always count as a safe place. How many times are you allowed to get up during a movie? you ask yourself. How many times during a friend’s wedding? You parcel your life into thirty-minute segments, the maximum amount of time you can convince yourself that you won’t pee yourself, though you never actually need to pee.) Sometimes even your own parents (who will take care of you for months after you return from the tour and pay for your health insurance so that you can see a psychiatrist) are too large an audience for you to handle, and
you hide in their basement where no one in the world can see you, reading books and playing Mario 1 on your brother’s ancient Nintendo set, which hasn’t been hooked up since you were in seventh grade.
Part of the problem is the embarrassment. You do not want to talk about having to pee. It is gross, and no one wants to be gross, especially not a young woman still trying to reconcile life in the body. Later, you will find out that panic attacks disproportionately afflict young women in their twenties. Later, your dad will invite you to shadow him on a night shift in the emergency room for an article you are writing, and you will discover the ER at three o’clock in the morning is not full of blood and gore but women in their twenties having panic attacks. There is a particular, feminine shame in the act of crying “I’m dying” when nothing is actually wrong. Panic attacks serve as confirmation of the very things women spend their lives working to negate: suspicions of female silliness, stupidity, hysteria. Panic attacks involve the removal of the mind’s control over the body, and in this way are aftershocks of an earlier mind-body separation—the moment when adolescent girls realize that no amount of brains or charm will save them from life in the body.
You will also find out later that there is an entire subset of psychiatric disorders that revolve around the fear of losing control of one’s bodily fluids. You feel a powerful kinship with the Atlantic editor Scott Stossel, who writes about an emetophobia so powerful that he bolts out of an interview with Bill Clinton, convinced that he is moments away from vomiting on the president, only to realize, after he flees, that he feels perfectly fine.
At the core of any anxiety is fear, and yours is this: You have lost control over everything. The differences between the real and the fake are beginning to blur, not just in your mind, but in your actual body. You have spent years working hard under the belief that hard work matters, but you are suddenly struck by the idea that nothing you do matters—because everything is fake. You look up the price of health insurance premiums for a woman your age with a preexisting condition. The sums are significantly more than your rent, more than your ballooning student loan payments that you have already placed in deferment. You realize you are not going to be able to use the money you are making from the God Bless America Tour to return to the Middle East and become a war correspondent, as had been your original plan. You are not going to be able to make a living doing anything remotely interesting or important or artistic or special. You are going to sink to the bottom. It is a mathematical certainty.
In his New Yorker article titled “Petrified,” John Lahr writes that performers who experience stage fright feel exposed, at sudden risk for losing control of the body. Lahr points out that “break a leg” and “merde” are good-luck sayings that recognize the risk of making a bodily mess on stage. “Instead of being protected, as usual, by the character he is playing,” Lahr writes, the performer “suddenly stands helpless before the audience as himself; he loses the illusion of invisibility.”
But perhaps visual metaphors are the wrong way to describe what happens to you, a musician. If actors lose “the illusion of invisibility,” you lose the illusion of silence. You suddenly hear yourself. And you do not sound like the Vivaldi you played in your head at four years old. Despite ten years of lessons, you still can’t play all the notes in Vivaldi’s “Winter,” which has a fast tempo and a challenging key signature.
No, you do not sound like Vivaldi. You do not sound like a creeping mountain fog. You do not sound like the seriousness of life and death.
You sound like Titanic.
God Bless America Tour 2004
Little Rock to Baton Rouge
We speed south into pitch-black Arkansas on a rural route. Around two in the morning, we stop at an old house, a bed and breakfast. Harriet and I carry our suitcases up creaking stairs and collapse onto four-poster beds with scratchy quilts. A few hours later, milky sunlight streams through antique lace curtains and, half-awake, I reach for the phone book on the nightstand. But there is no nightstand, no phone book, and I fall back asleep not knowing where I am.
The next day we drive past dark pools of water with puffs of cotton floating on their surfaces and arthritic trees reaching out of their depths. I rummage past the I-should-be-reading-this books in my RV cubby and go straight to my emergency books, the ones that I have brought on this tour precisely because I have read them a million times already and they can be counted on to take me somewhere else, anywhere besides where I am. At first I consider rereading Pride and Prejudice. But something about the way the trees look outside the window makes me want to reread All the King’s Men.
The America Robert Penn Warren describes is so different, yet so similar to the one I see outside the RV window: There were pine forests here a long time ago but they are gone. The bastards got in here and set up the mills (The Walmarts, I think as we fly through Louisiana towns blighted by strip malls. The Ruby Tuesdays, the Hampton Inns) . . . and paid a dollar a day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar . . . The saws sang soprano (the pennywhistle, I think) and the clerk in the commissary passed out the blackstrap molasses and the sowbelly (Frosties and McRibs) . . . Till, all of a sudden, there weren’t any more pine trees . . . There wasn’t any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their backs (what this place will look like when Walmart, having sucked the marrow out of the bones of small-town businesses, finally shuts its doors as well, I think, looking out at a Louisiana town that’s all but dead, its only pulse a skinny blue-vested teenager pushing a bumpy line of empty shopping carts toward the immaculate glass doors, which yawn open and swallow him whole).
In the beginning of the book, the narrator Jack Burden offers his sardonic descriptions of Willie Stark, who we know is really the politician Huey Long, without taking any responsibility for his own life. (That comes later.) But in the beginning, Jack Burden describes Stark from a distance, while Willie’s on stage. And even though this happens in the first few pages, we the readers already know that Willie Stark is a master of deceiving his audience. He gives a speech about how he’s not giving a speech, and the crowd of bumpkins, not realizing that they’ve been had, loves it.
As I take turns reading and staring out the RV’s dinette window at a landscape dotted with cotton puffs and mobile homes, The Composer stumbles and bangs his way from his back room to the driver’s seat, where he asks Patrick some variation on are-we-there-yet. Now that he has finished his Christian musical he has more time on his hands. He’s reading a book, too—the seafaring adventure novel Master and Commander. He saw the movie with Russell Crowe and loved it so much he decided to read the book. When I ask him if the book is good, he says it is, that he likes books about boats. And then he tells me about life at sea, how hard it was for the sailors, and that the master and commander is just another name for the captain of the ship.
“And what’s cool about the Master and Commander,” he says with excitement, “is that he can kill anyone he wants. Like, if anyone on the boat gives him trouble, the Master and Commander can kill them.”
I watch The Composer as he stands in the patch of empty space between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat talking to Patrick. He stretches his wiry arms out wide so that his hands can grasp the back of the headrests and hold himself steady on the bumpy road. The gray light through the front windshield casts a shadow so that, from where I sit, The Composer is nothing but a black silhouette in the crucifixion pose, hurtling through the Louisiana sky.
One Night, Everyone in the RV Watches Master and Commander
When The Composer tells me about his love for Master and Commander, I assume that the soundtrack for the movie includes a lot of pennywhistle. But the movie is actually all strings, most captivatingly Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. It swells up repeatedly during the movie’s emotional climaxes.
When he wrote the piece in 1910, Vaughan Williams instructed the performance to include three differ
ent string orchestras seated apart from one another (large, small, smaller) like aural Russian nesting dolls. The piece is a wise selection for a movie about a ship at sea (ocean, boat, person—large, small, smaller). During one climactic swell, a little over two minutes into the piece, a small section of second violins breaks off from the larger orchestra, running arpeggios against the rest of the orchestra, which holds sustained notes of the main melody at full blast. The second violins are like a small boat fighting against a high sea. You can barely hear them—they are slurring two notes to a bow, up down up down—but they are there.
The second violinists are the least talented violinists in the orchestra, the ones who aren’t as good as the first violinists in auditions, the ones whose faces you can’t see even if you have a good seat. But Vaughan Williams gives them the rebellion, the countermelody that gives everything else its depth. It’s their smallness that makes the entire piece of music seem immense, the way the ocean becomes larger once you see how tiny an ocean liner looks in the middle of it. It’s the exact opposite effect of a composition by The Composer, which is crowded with a singular simple phrase, like a surfboard in a bathtub.
Master and Commander is as manly of a manly-men-at-war-at-sea-movie as you can get (a woman’s face appears on screen just once, for about two seconds), with Russell Crowe in his full bulbous macho glory, and I have a hard time becoming involved in the story until all of a sudden, Russell Crowe, the master and commander himself, is playing a violin.
I know what this means. The ability to play classical music is cinematic shorthand for brains, competence, and sophistication. (Chess playing is another commonly used shorthand. The protagonist plays chess, ergo the protagonist is smart.) And this is doubtless what the shorthand is in Master and Commander. Crowe’s character—Captain “Lucky Jack” Aubrey—is smart because in addition to his naval warfare skills, he plays beautiful classical music on the violin.
Sounds Like Titanic Page 14