Idiophone

by Amy Fusselman

it is nonfiction but it is not the kind of nonfiction we are used to,

  it doesn’t sound like poetry.

  Just put it in a box, would you?

  Just put it in a box so we can contain it?”

  I have heard that over and over,

  like a mouse fight we love to watch each holiday season.

  “As an artist, I am a powerful person. In real life, I feel like the mouse behind the radiator,” said my mouse-mother, the artist Louise Bourgeois.

  My real mother was also an artist.

  My real mother also busted my balls.

  My real and mouse mothers made art, and I write, and writing busts my balls.

  I am having my balls busted right now as I write this.

  I am using my hands to write this on the computer as my balls are being busted.

  We don’t usually think of writing as a handicraft.

  We don’t usually think of writing as something like crochet or knitting; that is, as women’s work.

  Writing is work a woman has to fight to do.

  I wish that fight were through.

  I wish women’s work were always legitimate.

  I wish we could lie down in a fluffy white bed with the feminized-work fight.

  I wish we could take a nap in a cab on that issue.

  But that’s not the way it is, my loves.

  You can’t fall asleep.

  You have to wake up.

  You have to drive your bed-car around the stage.

  You can’t pass out in battle.

  You have to fight to get those words out of your nutcracker heads, daughters.

  You have to get your hands on the keyboard and get those words out.

  And then you have to put that work in the world, which is so often closed to you.

  You have to open that world.

  You have to open that world up with your words-sword.

  You have to make a slit.

  You have to fight your words in there.

  You have to fight your words out there.

  Imagine your hands on the keyboard:

  two mice scurrying around the feet of your mother.

  “I worked with my hands,” my mother said to me on the telephone during our fight, almost like an apology.

  The unsaid thing in that moment was that I do not work with my hands.

  The unsaid thing in that moment was that I work with my head, and my hands are my handmaidens.

  My hands just flutter around the couch, bringing snacks.

  In that moment, her hands were not dominant over my head.

  My head was winning that fight.

  My head was having its hand raised by the referee at the end of our boxing match.

  My seven heads with seven crowns were in charge then.

  The pointy ends of my seven crowns were scratching my mother’s hands like a cat.

  My mother and I never stop battling.

  It’s hard to stop battling when you don’t know where you stop and your beloved begins.

  My mother and I were once in the same body.

  My mother once held me in her womb.

  She once fed me through a cord in her womb.

  We danced like that for nine months.

  I think of this, sometimes, when I look at my mother: I came out of her body.

  I think, There she is: my portal.

  There she is: the door.

  Look, here in my pocket.

  Ballerinas stepped on this.

  2.

  The Nutcracker was an E. T. A. Hoffmann story, and then a story by Alexandre Dumas, père, and then a ballet by Vsevolozhsky, Petipa, Ivanov, and Tchaikovsky. And then they told two friends, and then they told two friends, and then it was a ballet by many other people with all sorts of stuff in it like rattlesnakes and crawfish and gay skateboarders.

  The Nutcracker is a game of telephone. We used to play telephone in kindergarten. You sit in a circle, and one kid whispers a long sentence to the kid next to them, and then that kid whispers it to the kid next to them, and on around the circle, and then you compare the sentence from the first kid to the sentence from the last kid, and it is funny to hear the differences.

  The sentence is always changed from what it was in the beginning, and the way it is changed is something to marvel at.

  It’s a game about a sentence in which a sentence transforms.

  It’s a game about a sentence in which a sentence is free to change.

  It’s a game about a sentence in which the words have no single author.

  It’s the very first sentence and the very last sentence that you compare side by side.

  It would be interesting to see every single one of the sentences written down and laid out in a long line.

  You could see the little changes in each one; you could trace the steps from beginning to end.

  It would be like watching a dance piece in which the words were the dancers.

  Telephone is not a game about a single person having an important idea.

  Telephone is a game about the movement of ideas and the movement of language across and through people.

  Telephone isn’t about one all-important writer flapping their handmaiden-hands alone in a room.

  Telephone requires a bunch of people sitting in a circle.

  It requires people talking to each other and listening to each other and making mistakes and examining them.

  It requires a slender opening like the one in a fourteen-foot-high slit gong.

  It requires the absence of a single territorial author-mind.

  It invites the ancestors to come and talk.

  It invites them for a witnessing.

  The telephone game is a witnessing.

  The telephone game is a monumental tree in the middle of a party.

  The telephone game sees everything.

  The telephone game has a twinkly star like a lampshade on its head, and it knows, and it doesn’t care.

  It just shines.

  3.

  I interviewed the choreographer, dancer, and director Annie-B Parson.

  I asked her:

  Why do you think so much theater eschews dance?

  Is it related to the idea of what words are and do?

  She replied:

  The separation of dance and theater—this is a life long irritant for me! In my personal and very subjective time line, the distrust in Western theater of dance all began post-18th c. Since then, we audience(s) have been increasingly subjected to mind-numbing, largely un-ironic, unambiguous “reality” on stage. The plays of the Ancients, 2000 years ago, were all danced and sung; in Shakespeare’s time, the actors danced; in classical Japanese theater the acting students begin with years of dance training. Our contemporary body-less, dance-less theater—it feels fear based. Is it related to our Victorian fear of the body, fear of corporeality, of sex and death? Does the divorce stem from our bias of mind over body, rather than mind/body? But yes, the separation must have also to do with the modernists’ hierarchical crowning of the primacy of “the word”; the modernists held the word as valuable and honorable, while poor dance was considered tawdry, the work of whores and . . . women! The things that dance owns: ambiguity, layer, mystery, abstraction, the non-narrative—these are the work of the devil! They hide, they suggest, they imply, they don’t have an implicit morality or any answers. So, in my tiny corner, I have tried to resurrect dance in theater. Dance is the sacred object for me; it is to be held close and protected from harm, and restored to its rightful place in the pantheon of materiality.

  4.

  My mother was thrown from the Bug.

  She is lying facedown on the floor now.

  She has her arms at her sides.

  It seems that her shoulder has been broken.

  I hope it can be fixed.

  The floor is covered in industrial carpeting, a type of floor treatment “which offers stain resistance and durability for places with extremely high foot traffic.”

  Mouse
One is slumped over the steering wheel, unconscious.

  Mouse One was wearing their seat belt, but they were also the closest to the point of impact—that is, the dining table leg.

  Mouse One’s head is bleeding.

  Mouse Two’s left arm is broken.

  Mouse Two is trying to use their right arm to call 9-1-1.

  Mouse Two is moaning as they make the call.

  The drunken cockroach who was on the scooter and who caused Mouse One to swerve has driven off.

  It was a hit-and-run.

  There’s an awful lot of drinking and driving going on at the department store.

  You’d be surprised to know what is going on under your feet, my friends.

  You’d be surprised to know of all the traffic under your traffic.

  You’d be surprised to hear the conversation in the static.

  Things look pretty bad for my mother and the mice right now.

  Maybe this is one of those times when we despair over the world we happen to be in.

  Maybe this is one of those times when we think how we hate this stupid Nutcracker.

  Maybe this is one of those times when we think how we hate this stupid Nutcracker, which we love and which we buy tickets to every year.

  Is there no way out of this Nutcracker?

  Is this Nutcracker always going to be so demanding?

  Do we have to remake the goddamned Nutcracker in order to get out of it?

  Do we have to make our own personalized Nutcracker in order to feel like we are in the right world?

  The Nutcracker has bodies in it, and bodies always state the truth.

  Bodies are miracles that cannot lie.

  Bodies lying in and out of cars state the truth.

  Bodies lying in and out of beds state the truth.

  Bodies lying and waiting for ambulances are truth.

  All bodies everywhere are truth.

  Mouse Two has managed to call 9-1-1 and now the sirens are screaming.

  My mother is still unconscious.

  Mouse One is still bleeding, out cold.

  There is no bed for my mother on the industrial, stainproof carpeting.

  There is no music.

  Or there is music, but we can’t hear it.

  It is very moving and beautiful music.

  The stage is empty. 8 bars of mysterious and tender music.

  I mean, listen to that.

  Those are a few words for you to go on.

  5.

  Tchaikovsky was in Paris, traveling to America, when he learned that his favorite sister, Sasha, had died. He was supposed to be composing The Nutcracker but had been having trouble with it. After Sasha’s death, he was grief-stricken.

  “Today, even more than yesterday,” he wrote to his brother after hearing the news, “I feel the absolute impossibility of depicting in music the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

  The Nutcracker was one of two projects Tchaikovsky was working on at the time. The second project was an opera.

  Vsevolozhsky, the director of the Imperial Theatres, had commissioned this two-part assignment: The Nutcracker and Iolanta.

  The libretto for Iolanta was written by Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest. It was based on the 1845 Danish play Kong Renés datter (King René’s Daughter) by Henrik Hertz. The opera premiered on the same evening as The Nutcracker in December 1892, the first half of a double bill. It was a late night for the mice.

  Iolanta, a princess, has been blind since birth.

  She doesn’t know she is different from other people and doesn’t know she is a princess.

  She lives in a beautiful garden in ignorance.

  Her father, the king, insists that she must never learn that she is blind, nor should her betrothed,

  Duke Robert.

  A doctor visits Iolanta and tells the king that she can be cured, but only if she is prepared to accept her own blindness.

  The doctor sings a song about two worlds.

  The king refuses treatment for his daughter.

  Duke Robert arrives at court; he doesn’t tell the king, but he doesn’t want to marry Iolanta anymore.

  He has fallen in love with another woman.

  He and his friend Vaudémont sneak into the garden where Iolanta is sleeping.

  Their sneaking in there is forbidden.

  Seeing Iolanta, Vaudémont falls in love with her and refuses to leave her.

  Duke Robert fears she is a sorceress and goes to gather troops to force Vaudémont to leave.

  Iolanta wakes up.

  Vaudémont realizes she is blind; he describes color and light to her.

  Iolanta falls in love with Vaudémont.

  The couple are discovered by the king.

  The doctor says the treatment may work for Iolanta now that she is aware of her blindness.

  Iolanta is not sure she wants to be cured.

  The king fears her desire to see is not strong enough, so he threatens to execute Vaudémont if the treatment fails.

  The duke returns and admits to the king that he has fallen in love with someone else.

  The king dissolves the marriage contract and gives Iolanta to Vaudémont.

  The treatment works; Iolanta can see.

  The kingdom rejoices.

  The theme of overcoming obscured vision is present in both Iolanta and The Nutcracker.

  It’s too bad you don’t often see them together on the same bill anymore.

  Iolanta hardly gets any production time compared to The Nutcracker.

  It reminds me of twins, when one is dominant.

  With some twins, you look at them and you can see the one who got everything.

  But maybe the dominant twin is weaker in invisible ways.

  You can’t always see a person’s strength.

  You don’t always know how strong a mouse is.

  In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 not-quite-a-children’s book, The Little Prince, the prince has an often-quoted line: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

  The little prince could be a twin, or maybe a cousin, to the Nutcracker.

  You could imagine them in a bar together.

  You could imagine them drinking boilermakers and talking about their travails.

  6.

  The drunken cockroach scooter-driver is home.

  He is going to sleep in his cockroach-bed.

  It’s an old futon, but it’s functional.

  He sleeps under a blue cotton blanket given to him by his mother.

  He curls up under the blanket.

  He’s a cockroach, so he can’t curl very well.

  He’s lying there.

  He is really drunk, so he is not going to sleep soundly.

  He is not so drunk that he is vomiting, though.

  He is just drunk enough that the bed is spinning.

  Hold on to the bed, drunken cockroach friend.

  Don’t pass out and vomit: hold on.

  I am a very lucky person.

  I am a very very very very very very very very very very lucky person.

  I am sober today.

  I am healthy and have a healthy family.

  I am a woman, which can be complicated.

  I can screw in a light bulb.

  I try not to contribute to the antiwoman culture that I am surrounded by.

  It would be great if I would stop fighting with my mother.

  It would be really, really, really great if I stopped fighting with my mother.

  I need to try that sometime.

  I need to drink from that drink-me bottle.

  I am super-lucky.

  Everything in my life could be different.

  I could easily be folded up in a box.

  I could have paper detritus sprinkled around me.

  I could be pulled up to the rafters.

  I’m not.

  I don’t know how some days.

  I don’t know how I got here;

  I don’t know
how I stay.

  My mother and the mice are still lying there.

  Finally, the ambulance comes.

  It is driven by two white baby bunnies.

  White baby bunnies make the best medics.

  One bunny is calling another bunny on his radio.

  The air is filled with that crackling static that is the sound of bunnies with radios trying to communicate.

  The bunnies are hopping softly toward my passed-out mother.

  You have to plod along in one world until it comes to its logical end.

  7.

  Is it possible to die from fighting to put your narrative forward in a world that does not want your narrative to exist?

  Yes, it is possible.

  It is possible to die in prison while awaiting trial.

  It is possible to commit suicide in prison while waiting years for your trial.

  It is possible to be totally alone.

  It is possible to be totally alone with your words.

  It is possible to be completely and utterly alone with your

  words like a boat floating under a wasteland of stars

  or an old man wandering through the cold, dark night with a gift.

  Why can’t you just change your sentence?

  Why can’t you just stab your words with your sword until they “die”?

  Why are they so important to you anyway?

  Why do you have to tell your truth?

  You know you are not your body.

  You know you are not a body that is imprinted with everything you’ve ever done.

  You know you are not a portal to another world.

  You know you are not a holder of your soul.

  You are not a soul at all.

  You are formless.

  You are smoke.

  You are a writer.

  You leave your body when you go to the page, you know.

  We’re all equal here, on the page.

  We’re all disembodied.

  We’re all just words.

  You and me, we’re just words lined up obediently.

  You’re just a few words, and you can change them.

  You can just easily change your words.

  You can just quickly change your words.

  You should just quickly and easily change your words.

  You should just love your words and be quiet.

  You should just hate your words and be quiet.

  You should just be alone in your box.

  You should wait to be pulled up out of your words.

  Just wait to be pulled up out of your world.