Painted on

I bought my first lipstick when I was eight. It was from a drugstore, thick as paste and a particularly vehement shade of dark purple. According to the leaflet by the make-up display, I was a "spring" and was flattered, ergo, by the color of rotting plums.

The lipstick, along with the other make-up I (or rather my mother) bought to go with it, was for the stage. I was to be in a ballet recital, and all the girls had been instructed, by the whippet-thin, chain-smoking woman who ran the kiddie ballet school, to supplement our leotards and tights with industrial-strength hairspray, full make-up, and a hairnet. Down in the dressing rooms we wore the hairnets over our faces, pirouetted through sticky clouds of spray, and gleefully applied enough blush, lipstick, and eyeliner that, once released into the streets, we attracted the half-appalled, half-titillated glances usually reserved for child porn stars.

I've had a strange relationship with make-up ever since. I've used it, abused it, and spurned it in fits and starts. I abandoned it semi-permanently toward the end of high school -not as a part of any principled stand, but rather out of a burgeoning laziness, a lukewarm languor that began, in the last months of K-12, to render my education into oblivion. Nowadays I wear make-up when I perform and that's pretty much it. I own one cheap, utilitarian item per make-up genre. I keep the whole caboodle stuffed in a case with a broken mirror at the back of my drawer.

Yet, it hasn't really bothered me, heretofore, that other people wear make-up. Yes, I think it's strange. Yes, I am convinced most women are more beautiful without it. But if someone wants to spend half an hour every morning blow-drying and styling her hair before painstakingly painting her face in what strikes me as a colossal waste of precious morning minutes, that is her own personal choice. Besides, lots of women think make-up is fun. It can be fun.

Only lately it's started to piss me off.

It started when I entered the job market. Suddenly I had to wear close-toed shoes. I had to make sure I wasn't showing midriff. I had to look professional. The thing is, part of looking professional, for women, is wearing make-up. And styling your hair. Looking, in short, as close to the glam rag ideal as you can get. If you choose to stagger into work looking "unprofessional," you will, in a very real way, reduce your chances of getting hired. You will reduce your chances of getting promoted. You may even get yourself reprimanded by your boss.

OK, OK, I understand that no one at work wants to see my belly button. But why, exactly, is make-up "professional?" Does liquid eyeliner sharpen my evaluation skills? Do children speak better when I wear the appropriate lip liner?

The expectation, be it silent or shouted, that women will wear make-up in the workplace isn't fair. It isn't right. And yet that expectation is being propped up, day after day, by the millions of women who, every morning, drag the mascara wand through their eyelashes because that's just what you do. Folks, we're doing this to ourselves.

I'm declaring war. It will be long and quiet and bloodless, and I'll fight it every day with my naked face.

Doen Daphne d'over schoone Maegt

Music is sublime. Musick is the food of love. Music is boooooring.

At least I think that sometimes, despite devoting several decades to its study. Maybe it's because I'm only a sort of good, as opposed to a really good, musician, but sometimes music seems to hobble along in two dimensions where other art blooms in three or even four. Words rocket off through sound and lexicon and narrative arc, whereas music just gimps through pitch and time.

Sometimes, though, music turns me over its knee and larns me good. I've been playing a lot of themes and variation from the 1600s. These pieces are pretty self-explanatory: you start with a theme and get fancier and faster until you're jogging along in a forest of small black notes. It's the kind of thing that, given its improvisatory origins, should be performed memorized, so I've been playing it and playing it again. I was on my fourth or fifth go-round when I got to the end, stopped, and wondered: why don't we play it backwards?

I mean, whose idea was it to go forwards all the time, to progress, to grow, to develop? What's wrong with diminishment? Or with cycles: simplicity to complexity and back again?

So sneaky: narrative in music.

For government consists mainly in so keeping your subjects that they shall be neither able nor disposed to injure you.

There are a lot of things in life besides onions that are layered, and not all of them make you cry. Language is one: you've got meaning and then, overlaying that, words, which in turn transmute into phonemes and then motor programs for those phonemes, until what you've got is a whole precarious tiramisu of an utterance when all you wanted to do was to tell the driver on your tail to go to hell.

Correction: language can make you cry.

But what I'm really getting at is that, if you look carefully, most things have an underlayer. A hoop for a skirt or magma for a tectonic plate: something to rest upon, something to -more or less tumultuously- rub up against.

Sometimes the jockeying between layers is more evident; sometimes it is less so. For example, words and meaning pull apart most obviously during small talk: you may be babbling on and on about the weather or your week or someone's recent trip to Majorca, but what you're really saying, the pannier upon which your blathering is draped, is: I won't bite you and hopefully you won't bite me.

Then there are jobs. Although there are a few jobs -gravedigger comes to mind- that are about what they purport to be about, most jobs are more like Trojan Horses in miniature. Trojan Mules, say, or Trojan Asses: ramshackle structures you allow past the gates of your life because they appear to be something they're not.

Take the job of musician. You think being a musician is about music. And it sort of is, but on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment level, it's really about schmoozing. And airports. Also bad food and the inability to poop in foreign climes.

There's library clerking (more about bar code scanners than books) and tech support (more about people than computers). And of course there's my job. My job purports to be about helping people communicate. That's vaguely accurate. But the meat of my job, its secret subtext, is getting other people to do what I want.

That's really what I do, day to day: compel obedience. What's scary is that, like anything you do seven or eight hours a day, I'm getting better at it. Sure, I've always prefered that folks do what I want as opposed to what I don't want, but never before have I expended so much effort furthering that goal. Never have I plotted and schemed; never have I made such comprehensive use of props and strategies and guile; never have I pressed so hard.

I'm scared about where this is taking me. I set out to help people, and now I spend most of my time bending them to my will. Sure, these people are mostly under the age of five, but so what? I do it with the older kids, too; I even adjust my strategies by grade level (authoritarian for kindergarten; enthusiastic for second grade; supportive for sixth...)

Watch for me in a couple of years. I'll be the one declaring martial law.

On Not Walking; On Water

I'm running and I see this kid, nine or maybe ten, black t-shirt and greasy hair, paddling like a dog through his yard. Here I am, red-faced and sweaty, guzzling will in order to propel myself forward into a future in which I am, if not healthy, wealthy, and wise, at least exercised; and here he is, swimming.

One of us is being rude, but I can't tell who.

Everything's flooded. It's rained for three days, and there's water in the basement, in the old library, flung in sheets of black ice across the street. People are having accidents and coming down hard on their elbows and losing, according to the radio, "irreplaceable" family mementos. The word snags me like a branch hidden in the flow of talk: sure, I want to ask, you lost the pictures, but what were they doing for you anyway?

I run until I've burned up all my will, until the stink of scorched will streams behind me in colorless drifts. I sputter and stop. For the rest of the day I will read nothing of consequence, locomote in no cardinal direction, choose no righteous path. I will manage dinner, drink tea, maybe stare at the wall. It will be time for bed and I will go willingly, not kicking and screaming like I would have at seven, like I should at twenty-seven because this day, this particular Thursday, is dead.

Meanwhile, the boy wades out into the water. There is more than a foot of it, draped like a cold, grey coverlet over the lawn. The sky is the kind of white to which trees are violently opposed. The boy chooses his route, aiming for the middle of the makeshift lake; once there, he proceeds to lower himself, inch by inch, into a squat. A car splashes by. The boy leans forward until first his hands, then his elbows, last his shoulders disappear from view. He pushes off with his feet and moves like that, like a water moccasin or some lost piece of our amphibious past, all the way across the lake to where I'm already gone.

On Pain

Except it's in, not on. Not atop or about or above or by, but within, encompassed, located, enclosed, sealed, in the mail, in the air, in pain.

Prepositions never lie.

Pain's been on my mind lately. It's a phase I've passed through, a country I've toured. I could put it on my "where I've been" map if I cared to record things like "where I've been."

You've been there, too. Sometimes you show me pictures, postcards, souvenirs. Sometimes I've bought you the plane ticket, or you've bought one for me, or there we are, 36,000 feet up, hurtling together through the blue.

Today I said, "it looks like this is painful for you" to a mother who bit, with her upper teeth, her lower lip, then nodded. Today I barked my shin against the bed frame. Today I, like you, like the wall-eyed, stringy haired drunk I walked five blocks out of my way to avoid, hurt.

I have that cartographic urge. I want to map, to chart highways and byways, to plant my flag and claim this country for England, O England. I want to fix, with certainty, where I am. Is your pain the same as my pain? Is today's pain the same as yesterday's? What's the difference between slicing open my finger and slicing it off?

The funny thing, the only thing I know, is that pain and reality, like maps of the same country from different centuries, are only sloppy facsimiles of one another. Sure, you can trace the transformation, over time, of life into pain, but the landscapes are startlingly different. You cry, inconsolably, when your mother dies. And when you lose a part in a play. And when you realize your child will never speak, and when the boy you like goes for someone else, and after your third-grade teacher yells at you for talking out of turn. Small hurts can be more painful than larger ones; subtle aches can be more agonizing than stabbing loss. Is this condemnable? Or commendable? Or contemptible?

Maybe it's just human. Pain, like Texas, is a country unto itself. An interior country, spread over your vital organs, your hopes and dreams, your rules and regulations. The pain you admit to and the pain you don't; the pain you can explain and the pain you can't; secret pain and shared pain; the pain you know is legitimate to feel and the pain you know is wrong, that you haven't earned and shouldn't feel and aren't entitled to, but that, nevertheless, you're in.

That preposition again, with its howl for metaphor. Not a gunny sack or prison or love. Maybe poker.

All in.

On Line 1

Below is a smallerized version of a marvelous document I ran across the other day in the course of my professional endeavors. (No, smallerized is not, in fact, a word, but it ought to be.) As you can see, this handy Bomb Threat Checklist will save you work and energy in the event of a bomb scare. Simply check the appropriate boxes for a useful, time-saving memory aid!


Here, for example (click to see larger version), I have checked that the caller was a male adult, making a local call, and warning of a bomb set to go off at noon. Unfortunately my caller was not kind enough to leave his name and address (see item 1) but he had a raspy, pleasant voice, talked with a lisp, had excellent language but poor grammar, and was calling from Bedlam.

I encourage you to print your own copy of the Checklist to keep next to your phone. Or under your pillow. Because you never know.

Get Thee behind Me, Martellato

There are things I do because I think they're right and things I do because I think they're funny, and unfortunately the latter tend to outnumber the former. It's a pathology, really. I read church newsletters. I menace squirrels. I buy people wind-up sushi for their birthdays.

I attend handbell concerts.

I mean, what isn't funny about handbells? They're shiny, oddly-shaped, and of limited utility. They have loony, antic overtones, require earnest concentration to play, and are blessed with a repertoire of overwhelming depth and dreadfulness. Go, handbells go!

So it goes without saying that the moment I discovered that a Presbyterian handbell choir was giving a concert (free pizza reception to follow) at a church a half-mile from my house was the moment I cleared my calendar. Handbells!!! I scratched: three exclamation points. And when the glorious day arrived, I bundled up, put on my silliest winter hat, and set off into the tinkly blue yonder.

Only to receive cruel karmic punishment in the form of Serious Thoughts:

1) Handbells are a unique musical endeavor. Normally in musical groupings (choirs, orchestras, chamber ensembles), the sound is layered like a hero sandwich, each instrument pursuing its own line through time/space. Apart from hocketers, handbell players are the only musicians I can think of who actually dice music, splitting it not only horizontally into different chord tones, but making quick vertical cuts to the melody and harmony lines as well. Sure, keyboard players divide lines between different fingers, but what other musicians divide lines between different people?

(Does it make you listen more carefully than you would if you had your own bone of a line to drag off to your den? Does it humble you? Is it any fun?)

2) Art is messy. And art is messy not because artists can't find their rear ends in broad daylight, though this is true, but because, with art, you get fooled into thinking you're absorbing information in one modality when really you're absorbing it in two. Case in point, music and movement. The handbells drew my attention to the overlap because they're so physical, coaxing smooth, choreographed movements from their players. It looks like dancing. It is dancing.

This made me think about when I was young, and the first thing non-musicians would tell me when I played was that I was fun to watch. I've leached the movement out of myself over time, but it's dawned on me that the reason concerts are more vivid than recordings is that you do get to watch, in real time, music moving through a person's body. It can be electrifying: a rawer, less conscious descant to the sound. Music is, for all its abstractness, fundamentally of the body.

It's funny it took handbells to make me see it. Just not funny-ha-ha. Sigh.