Coda:
"You Are Not I" (1999)
"I often feel that something is about to happen, and when I do, I stay
perfectly still and let it go ahead." Ñfrom Paul Bowles' "You Are Not
I."
for
Paul Bowles, on November 19, 1999, on the occasion of his death the night
before.
Paul
Bowles died on November 18, 1999; National Public Radio told the news of his
passing the next day. After the
obituary, an archived radio interview with Terri Gross was re-broadcast. She
had asked Bowles if he believed in an afterlife. "Why?" he replied,
plainly, and would not elaborate when pressed. I wrote Coda: "You Are
Not I" in response to Bowles' persona in the interview: throughout the converstion, he seemed
to discover, with some anxiety, how little he knew about his own beliefs and
emotions. At the same time, his refusal to offer insight on matters unclear to
him was almost religious in its consistency.
Paul
BowlesÕ story "You Are Not I" (1950) is a short meditation on identity, told
from the perspective of an institutionalized woman who, in a crisis, slowly and
cautiously develops a plan to trade lives and bodies with her sister, who lives
in a nearby city. She succeeds,
during a surprise visit home, by forcing a stone into her sisterÕs mouth,
perhaps symbolically unloading the voiceless-ness of mental illness from one
body to another, reconfiguring her own memory of whose body is whose. She
doubts the transformation, though, because little details in her
environmentÑinterior decoration in her sister's home and landmarks on a return
trip to the mental hospitalÑfail to compare sensibly with her precise
expectations. This woman, a
strange mixture of inflexible goals and a perpetually uncertain sense of the
world around her, is the character that came to mind when I heard BowlesÕ and
GrossÕ recorded voices trembling on my car radio. ("Éwhy afterlife (?),
why 'why?' (?), why that question
(?), why now
(?)É")
***
Coda:
"You Are Not I" was also a response to my other experiences of
November 19. I paid attention to
unrelated events, and remembered them:
(1)
It was the day that the Venezuelan baseball team, on a goodwill mission led by
their prime minister/pitcher Hugo Chavez, played against Castro's beloved
national team in Cuba.
(2)
Later that afternoon, a French breach of sanctions against Iraq was noticed
with displeasure by the US and Britain.
(3) 11-19-1999 was also the last date,
until the first day of the year 3111, that could be spelled completely without
even digits.
Finally,
a striking photograph was taken in November of 1999, and printed in the New
York Times Sunday Magazine
("What They Were Thinking" September 10, 2000), long after my work on
this composition. At some distance
from the subject, we see round glasses, thinning grey wispy hair, and
nondescript clothing; the woman shown has a largish body and an androgynous
face. Some of her features are in
shadow, and most of her torso and legs are overexposed in the strong blurry
sunlight of a nearby window.
It is an image we are supposed to pity. The caption reads, in part:
Karen
Edna Wallstein, Camphill Village U.S.A. [ a managed care facility ], Copake,
N.Y., November 1999
"I
came to Camphill Village when I was 20.
Now I'm 58 É Usually I smile, but in that photograph I was just waking
up from my rest hour. I read, and
I listen to my radio, and I sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep É Some people can go and
live in the city on their own and nothing happens to them. I'm pretty weak to live on my own and get around on my
own because I don't know what will happen. I just don't know why some people can do better than other
people. Why is that?"
(Emphasis
mine, interview by Catherine Saint Louis.)
Karen
Wallstein and Bowles' fictional character (whose parallel sentiments are in the
epigraph at top) feel bewildered and intimidated by the freedom and the
competancy of outsiders, especially with regard to the elusive skill of knowing
a kind of flowchart for one's daily environment. Bowles himself provides
another link between them with his defiant one-word manifesto
("why?") against speculation about the future. (The question was
about the afterlife, but his answer seemed to protest an enemy of greater
breadth.) In expressions that seemed to converge in a singularly potent
November moment, these three personas display an admirable humility. All three
lack the false confidence that enables "common sense" questions, and
the "everday" practices that separate sanity from illness. But this
tentative agreement brings new problems. Giving up our well-established private
pretenses--our sane "knowing what will happen"--means letting go of
myths about the self and the soul -- dismissing all the comforts that we build
on those foundations.
In
Coda: "You Are Not I" (11-19-1999), structures of rhythm and
voice consciously resist the formation of expectations about the immediate
future. Instead of such expectatations, an abundance of "present
moments" should emerge, which suggest multiple and contradictory
reinterpretations of the immediate past. I hope the melodic voice that emerges
from within this texture will reflect a common failure to know oneÕs own
memory, and past, as a reliable basis for identity. But the struggle is a quiet
one, and it is also meant to provide opportunities for release and freedom,
putting curiosity and openness in place of too-comfortable knowledge about
"what comes next."
performance (John Mark Harris, 2001)