Swish

by Joel Derfner

  Finally, one evening in my second semester, after sitting in a practice room writing for an hour and a half and coming up with the same song yet again, this time for a character whose husband was about to be shipped off to war, I found one of my professors. “I can’t stand this song anymore,” I said, dragging him to the piano. “Can you help me write something different?”

  “Thank God,” he said. “Okay. Play a few chords.”

  I did, and three of my six standards came out. “See? It’s just gross.”

  “Hold your horses. Now take your hands off the keyboard and wiggle your fingers around.” I did. “Now, without looking at the keyboard, and without shaping a chord ahead of time with your fingers, put your hands down again.” I did, and the piano emitted a bizarre, hideous sound. I made a face. “Do you like that?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Try it again.” I put my hands down, produced a different bizarre, hideous sound, and made another face. “One more time.” And this time the sound that rang from the hammered strings was bizarre…but not hideous.

  In fact, it was kind of interesting. It was full of instability, ambivalence, doubt.

  I looked down at my hands to see what notes they had struck to create the sound still echoing faintly in the air. The chord made complete theoretical sense; it just wasn’t anything I would ever have written on purpose. I scribbled the notes down and tried again. When I had found three or four chords I liked, I started playing with accompaniment patterns: Should the fingers of the right hand stay still while those of the left hand moved? Should both move at the same time but in opposite directions? Then I looked at the words my collaborator for the week had given me and considered possibilities for the vocal melody over the accompaniment. Once more, you must go, the lyric began, and I pull you tight. The musical line that came out was slow and tentative, almost in denial. My professor and I kept going, and by the end of the evening I had written a song that sounded like nothing I’d ever composed before. This was bara, what Director Gina had defined as bringing something into being out of nothingness. Certainly my previous songs had been the products of bara as well, but this felt fundamentally different—this felt vast, immeasurable. It wasn’t a completely comfortable experience, but I felt nonetheless a bubbling excitement utterly different from the joy of asah that had filled me when I sang. When I brought the new song in to workshop the next day my classmates applauded wildly, not because it was such a great song but because for once I hadn’t subjected them to the six chords they had come to know and loathe.

  More important than the actual sound the pianist and the singer produced, however, was my growing understanding that I had been wrong about musical theater. A form in which characters feel emotions so powerfully the spoken word is insufficient to express them is not stupid; it’s revelatory. Yip Harburg, the lyricist for The Wizard of Oz, said, “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” I don’t think there’s anything else on earth that can do that.

  And along with my changing perspective on the form itself, I also began to learn that, in a piece of theater, a song doesn’t have the luxury of just sounding pretty, of just expressing love or rage or despair; it also has a job to do, in helping a character make or fail to make an emotional journey. Whether or not you want to hear it on the radio isn’t quite as important. In the year after my musical prison break, I set lyrics like this one by my friend Diana to music as unresolved as I could manage:*6

  Last night we spent an hour on the phone.

  We talked about our friends, and moaned about our jobs,

  And laughed about the villain on that stupid TV show.

  I hoped your voice would fill the empty spaces in my heart,

  But all I heard was what you weren’t saying,

  And I don’t know if those words will ever start.

  For a song in which Lizzie Borden went mad, I wrote music in two different keys at the same time (imagine the dreadful sound of the first lines of “Happy Birthday” as sung by any large group before everybody starts singing the same notes, but lasting throughout the song and in fact getting more and more dreadful as the character’s sanity slips further and further away).

  The project that takes much of my focus these days is a musical drama I’m writing with a brilliant lyricist named Len Schiff and a brilliant scriptwriter named Peter Ullian about Terezin, the concentration camp the Nazis filled with artists and musicians and intellectuals and then used as a propaganda tool to show the rest of the world how well Hitler was treating the Jews.

  Whenever I tell people I’m writing a musical about a concentration camp, their brows wrinkle in disbelief. “What, with singing Nazis?” they say. “Why on earth would you want to write a musical about the Holocaust?”

  To which my answer is that we’re not writing a musical about the Holocaust. Terezin is about what happens when art is co-opted by tyranny, about how people can assert their freedom when they are not free, about what truths might be worth dying for. We’re telling a story of the triumph of creation over despair. And where else should we tell this story but in a concentration camp, because where else but in the face of absolute cruelty do courage, generosity, and kindness put the forces of destruction more thoroughly to rout?

  We do have singing Nazis in our musical, though they don’t sing much. But the song the younger one sings is among my favorites in the show, because often the most terrifying villain is the one who doesn’t know he’s a villain:*7

  And to the ones who cry compassion,

  Preaching, “Hate is not the answer,”

  I say humans must hate Jews

  The way the surgeon hates the cancer:

  He reserves his share of pity

  For preserving human life—

  Attentive to his cause,

  Unswerving with his knife.

  When I saw this lyric, full of hate and anger, I understood that the worst musical response would be to set it to hateful, angry chords. Because it’s not illuminating at all to write music that communicates what I feel about the character; I have to communicate what the character feels about himself. So the music is some of the sweetest, most lyrical that I’ve ever written—and the song is really creepy, because the audience sees not a cardboard cutout but a man whose noblest impulses have so decayed that he can’t even recognize what he’s become.

  And ultimately that nobility and that decay are the reasons I write musicals. What’s playing on Broadway now? Mamma Mia, a totally fun, campy show written around the songs of ABBA. Hairspray, a totally fun, campy adaptation of the John Waters movie, short on subversion but long on delight. And I really enjoyed these shows when I saw them, and God knows we need all the fun we can get. But if musical theater stops there, if its writers remain silent about the corruption and wickedness and greed around us, then we are complicit in our own destruction and in the destruction of everything we hold dear. “If I write about a hill that is rotting,” declared Wyndham Lewis in the introduction to his collection of stories The Rotting Hill, “it is because I despise rot.” If composers and lyricists and playwrights allow rot to pass unremarked, we are wasting our opportunities and squandering our talent. Hitler is dead and the Nazis are no more, but as far as I can see, our leaders still manipulate us and poison us and sacrifice us on the altar of their power, and if people who see Terezin aren’t led to consider the parallels, then Len and Peter and I have done our job badly.

  Near the end of the show, the heroine, Lorelei, comes to believe that the Nazis have destroyed all the sketches she made of her friends and family. But in the last scene, after the war is over, she finds the drawings secreted away throughout the camp, hidden by other inmates between bricks, behind shingles, under floorboards. During a recent rehearsal for a production outside of Seattle, as I watched Lorelei learn that through her creation something of her loved ones still lived, what I was thinking about was Moon Landscape. In 2002, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon asked the Jerus
alem Holocaust memorial for an artifact to take into space; they gave him a drawing by Petr Ginz, who at fourteen had been an inmate of Terezin. Ramon had Moon Landscape with him on the space shuttle Columbia when it blew up over Texas on February 1, 2003, what would have been Ginz’s seventy-fifth birthday.

  A few days after the Columbia disaster I read that the only living things to survive the rain of aluminum and flesh and mystery into which the shuttle had exploded were some worms. They were C. elegans, apparently the first multicellular organism whose genome scientists mapped completely, which was why they had been taken into space in a container that later fell to earth intact—researchers wanted to find out how reproduction over multiple generations in space affected the species.

  It turns out, I learned, that C. elegans is hermaphroditic; it reproduces itself. Maybe, I thought, this means it’s whole in a way no Homo sapiens, gay or straight, can ever be, because it can just keep going and going past the end of time with no help from anybody or anything, while if we can’t love one another and annoy one another and have sweaty awkward sex with one another we die for good.

  Petr Ginz was murdered in Auschwitz two years after he drew Moon Landscape, so he never got any closer to the moon he drew than the Columbia astronauts did. Still, I hope that on that February day in 2003 his picture was ripped into seven billion pieces, one for every person on this planet, and flung just like in Steppenwolf so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering that the light of his bara, spreading its radiance, might touch us all with its enchantment. I believe that the planet visible in this drawing has never known mounds of gold fillings from Jewish teeth, or the castration of singing children, or Matthew Shepard tied to a fence, or the Janjaweed rape of black women in the Sudan, or husbands and lovers and children leaping from the windows of the World Trade Center. And so if Petr Ginz, who saw around him in Terezin an endlessly renewed mass of people sent daily to the slaughter, still imagined a planet without cruelty—and I hope fervently that he did—then he committed the boldest act of bara since God breathed life into Adam in Genesis 2:7.

  We will end up food for C. elegans no matter what. But our souls are immortal, and I think reaching for that immortality when it can never be achieved is the greatest gesture of creation in the world. When Petr Ginz and all the other artists in Terezin, who had nothing—no food, no supplies, no dignity—used that nothing to create hope, they made themselves immortal, while the world exploded, by reaching for one another and for us.

  A few months ago I was in Chicago, visiting old friends (theirs was the first lesbian wedding I ever attended), and one day one of them said, “Hey, listen. A singer friend of mine had a really bad case of gastric reflux, and she went to a specialist who did some new kind of treatment that completely cured her. Do you want me to get you his contact information?”

  I said, “No, thanks. I’m happier doing what I’m doing now. I don’t want to go back there.”

  I was lying.

  The loss of asah haunts me. If there is nothing like the joy of writing a piece of music and hearing it come out of an actor’s throat for the first time, there is also no getting around the fact that it’s somebody else’s throat the music is coming out of, somebody else who is Poe’s earthly harp. I compose with my mind, and feel pride and satisfaction; I sang with my body, and felt ecstasy. Music doesn’t exist without a performer—notes on a page are not music, any more than a recipe is dinner—and so when you are composing you are powerless to give your creation a soul. The act of creating is separated from the act of bringing to life. But when you’re singing, you’re not only molding something from what already exists; you are what is being molded. You are creator and created at the same time, thrumming with the breath of life, reaching out to everybody on earth and feeling everybody on earth reach back. For bara you need faith that one day someone will read or look at or hear what you have made and be changed. But when you engage in asah, that day is today. You don’t need faith, because your audience changes in front of your eyes, and, in changing, changes you too.

  The choir in Terezin petitioned the commander of the camp to delay a transport to Auschwitz so that the singers destined for the gas chambers could perform the Verdi Requiem before they died. They knew what awaited them, and they knew the world didn’t care, so they couldn’t have been motivated by pragmatism. Of course they can’t tell us what drove them but I choose to believe that, after their request was approved, as they stood and sang “Lord, grant them eternal rest,” understanding that the words were as far from rhetorical as they would ever be, they were transmuted by the spray of their moment’s happiness into gold so pure no crematorium could ever destroy it.

  When my lesbians went to the movies a few hours after our conversation about their singer friend, I didn’t join them, even though I had heard Hugh Jackman spent a lot of time onscreen with his shirt off. Instead, I sat at their piano and worked on a trio I was writing for Terezin. I’d already written the basic shape of the song, so I started playing with the different voices, bringing this one in here, taking that one a sixth higher there, joining all three in unison for a line before splitting them into dissonance with a resolution so unexpected it made me laugh with glee when I discovered it. Eventually I reached a natural stopping point in my work, but I didn’t get up from the piano.

  It was certainly possible, I thought, that I could go to my friend’s friend’s specialist and he might wave his magic tongue depressor and give me back what I had lost. But it was also possible that he might wave the tongue depressor and nothing would happen, at which point I would be unable to bear breathing any longer.

  Because the glee I feel when I surprise myself composing is real, but I feel it only because I have lulled to sleep the memory of what infinity feels like; and I am afraid of what might happen if I woke that memory up. I love my life because a part of me has learned how to give up hope, and that, I suspect, is a dangerous lesson to unlearn.

  As I sat at my friends’ piano my fingers eventually assumed a position they had not held for years, and then I opened my mouth: “Gentle airs, melodious strains,” I sang, picturing the dust motes shimmering in a Boston chapel. But when I got to the next part, when I was supposed to sing “call for raptures out of woe,” neither my hands nor my throat could remember what to do.

  ON GO-GO DANCING

  “How’s the book going?” my friend Jim asked over Indian food.

  “Bleah,” I said in between forkfuls of beef samosa. “Mostly it’s fine, but I’m worried. I feel like there’s some aspect of gay life I haven’t tapped into. And if the book isn’t perfect then everyone who reads it will hate me. Maybe I’m not gay enough.”

  Jim couldn’t respond right away, as he had gotten something caught in his throat that seemed to require a great deal of coughing to dislodge, but when he had regained his composure he told me he had faith I’d come up with something. Then he started talking about the sketchy party he had been to on New Year’s Eve. “It was in a restaurant,” he said, “and there were a bunch of naked go-go boys dancing with hard-ons, and people were sucking each other off in dark corners. Then there was a competition to find America’s Next Top Bottom.” During the fit of uncontrollable laughter into which this sent me, Jim joked that I should become a go-go boy and write about that, but I didn’t pay attention, because all I could think about was racing home and Googling “America’s Next Top Bottom.” When I finally did so I found, among other things, a blog kept by a go-go boy who had attended the party, though he had not competed to be America’s Next Top Bottom. His account of the event was delicious, and in general his experiences as a go-go boy sounded, if not entirely wholesome, at least exciting. (“Though Jack was talking with someone and getting blown by someone else, he absentmindedly stroked my cock until it was rock-hard. I ran the back of my hand over his backside, which was incredibly smooth.”)

  And then Jim’s words came back to me and I started thinking: What if he was right? What if I should become a go-go
boy? What if an exploration of gay nightlife was truly what my book needed to be whole? What if it was what I needed to be whole?

  But I was being ridiculous. Go-go dancers were muscled, sexy, carefree, and young. I was no longer overweight but I couldn’t imagine that the musculature required for dancing in underwear was anywhere close to within my reach. Furthermore, I felt as sexy as Kermit the Frog, I was as carefree as Job, and at thirty-three I was already cheating death in gay years.

  And yet.

  The more of Go-Go Boy’s blog I read, the more compelling I found the idea, especially after I realized that he was just a working stiff who’d started dancing for fun a few months before the party Jim had attended. What if I could actually do this? I wondered.

  It was difficult to picture myself writhing on a bar. For my first thirty years I had held the life of the body beneath contempt. In kindergarten I had been so absorbed in the puzzle map of Africa I was taking back to the map drawer that I didn’t realize Samara Zinn had tripped me until I was flat on my face, former French and English protectorates mingling indiscriminately about me on the floor. My first-grade T-ball team put me deep in the outfield because I was too busy picking flowers to pay any attention to the ball. A photo of me at twenty-eight shows a sphere standing in a theater lobby, my porcine fingers barely able to close around the playbill. I had stayed away from the world of gay clubs because my only strengths were my intellectual ones, which were imperceptible in the dark no matter how many cosmopolitans men around me had consumed. Though I was now aware for the first time that I possessed physical mass, it was not an aspect of myself with which I felt at all comfortable. And I was considering a career as a sex object?