Feeling Blue
Maggie Nelson, Parallel Subway Cars, and My Stranded Weekend
I am surprised by how quickly this reflection bubbled to the surface and how much I gravitate towards writing to pin down my various thoughts. I am also grateful to have the forum to do so. Thank you, as always, for receiving what I put out into the world. Tonight I wrote about that give and take, and I hope you will give and take something as well.
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This weekend, I have been reflecting on loneliness. A series of canceled flights during a mild snowstorm has left me stranded in West Virginia after arriving on Thursday night for a solo appearance with the local symphony. My Sunday crack-of-dawn trip home morphed into Monday morning, then Monday evening, and now fingers crossed for Tuesday departure. As sleet fell, I found myself in a groundhog’s day featuring the hotel’s identical daily breakfast bar and copy-paste carpeting – an endless movie montage, appearing prostrate on the couch, then munching at the table, diagonal across the bed, and finally lain on a repurposed towel on the ground.
This scene isn’t new. I have performed a vast number of concerts in my life, very often traveling by myself, rehearsing, performing, staying overnight, and returning home. Still though, my thirty some minutes on stage fill me with awe at the human body, my own vessel. The adrenaline still pumps in my veins when I retire to an empty hotel room. Before this trip, I read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a gift from a friend. Curled up on my (blue) armchair, I devoured it in one day, captivated by her meandering meditations on blue, not just as a color, but a guide throughout her life. At one point, she posits that “loneliness is solitude with a problem,” and asks, “Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms.” Nelson knows that part of the dignity we have in solitude is repercussive care, the possibility of someone’s love out there reverberating back to us long enough to sustain our moments by ourselves. Lying back on the hotel couch after Saturday’s concert, I find myself wondering, does the concert hall hold me enough to quell the loneliness?
This relationship between self and others, especially as a motivation or reciprocation, interests me greatly. There is a specific rhetoric within musical institutions lately positioning music as an act of service. I agree with the sentiment in some ways but either roll my eyes when it’s said at fundraisers or find it not quite sitting right with me. In fact, I have been hung up for a long time in thinking that my musical practice was a fundamentally self-serving, selfish act. Playing the flute, apart from its later evolutions into teaching, was something I originally wanted to do for me. It took me away from quotidian anxieties (of course later producing more in their place). It was my private, personal practice to experiment with sound, polish it up, and revel in it.
Part of the way I chose to burn time within these awkwardly wallpapered walls was to watch Chef’s Table, which never fails to stir something within me. The episode centered on a Thai chef seeking to unearth a diminishing Thai food culture, focusing on sustainable sourcing and local, incredible ingredients within Thailand. She reflects on how she started in the industry because she wanted to cook and to eat. But the more she learned about what good food really is the more it was imperative that she shift her priorities. Ethical, small batch, organic produce that flourished within Thailand unearthed a history, culture, and community hand in hand with the best flavor. To Chef Bo, this isn’t just cooking, it became her way of life. I found myself tearing up at the transformation of palm into dark hardened crystals, mouth agape at a simple spoonful of three pure ingredients, or the care that went into the house made coconut milk, painstakingly found from organic farmers, cut, shaved, pressed, and bottled. Despite some brutal kitchen experiences, Bo holds her food because her food – through its entire journey from farm to table – holds her.
Inspiration comes to me in these tangents. There is Chef’s Table compelling me to write, or a concerto in a new town recounting Nelson’s idea of loneliness. I rarely know where each thread of thought is going, but it feels like I am uncovering something even as I am building it. A music-food-friend of mine recently told me he was inspired by the way I live out my food philosophy – a full practice. I am grateful he made me think about my journey. My drive was never hip trends or cool places. The farmers markets, composting, pickling, sourcing ingredients, reading about traditions, meeting makers, finding career paths, cooking, and hosting: these were my steps towards building/uncovering a philosophy of holistic connection to products, people, and process. It’s grandiose perhaps, but my understanding of sustainability evolved from purely cerebral to nonnegotiable.
How did this come to be? What clicks the thinking brain to the feeling one? For Nelson, blue tints her world so that she notices aquamarine, periwinkle, and cobalt with sharper focus. It shines a light, provides something to blame or grip as love falls apart and disaster strikes. She admits that blue does not actually speak or wrap its arms around her in moments of true blues. But it is this very “blue-ness” that gives her thoughts enough shape to resonate.
I imagine my life on two parallel subway tracks, and both are thrust forward by the relentless movement towards our inevitable end. One train is everyday life carried forth; no matter what path I choose to take, it simply chugs ahead. The other train that runs parallel is this “something,” it’s this “blue” that admittedly I may be imagining or purposely prescribing meaning to. But it’s a force that I work at and push forth myself. And once in a while, the windows of these two trains align, and I see myself in the flashes of the other car. I imagine that moment as the electricity in my spine, the tickle in my tear duct. The heart pulse in my throat when something scares the shit out of me because it feels real. As life barrels forward, it’s these moments of alignment that keep me from throwing myself off the rails. If this blue line is my mission, my focus on finding community and connection, it’s art that keeps me looking. Art has the power to shock my system, make me look at myself, force me to care because I feel.
For now, this is my answer to the question of why we make art. It’s not service exactly, it’s not self-aggrandizement. It is to create the possibility for meaning, connection with myself – this moment of life, of blue, whatever you want to call it. Art gives me hope, a way out of the senseless, away from the problem that sullies solitude. It forces me to look, listen, care, feel, taste. It is why when I am stuck in a showroom, there is still the possibility of peering into the adjacent subway car in flashes. That doesn’t seem too selfish.
I was reading about indigenous ways of thinking, specifically regarding the gift economy. In Western culture, when we give a gift, we like to say that it’s selfless because we don’t expect anything in return. But if we are being honest, we do. Let’s say we give a birthday gift for years and years, never to get one in return. We might start to question that relationship or harbor some ill will. The point here is that in indigenous social contracts, you do expect something in return. You give when it is time to give, and you share when you see someone in need because you know, and expect, someone will do the same for you. It is a community of care, of holding each other, and there’s no opportunity for taking advantage or reaping the benefits. It’s permission to throw out the dichotomy of selfish and selfless because to care for your community is to care for yourself.
This seems like a helpful way to extract myself from my own brain barriers. I can give myself permission to dive into art because it the only way I can maintain sanity in this world. Concerts may not remove my loneliness, but they offer the potential of windows into myself, dotting lines to others. One of the most striking moments in the Chef’s Table episode was when Chef Bo expressed her surprise at realizing that Thai restaurants were extremely rare in Thailand because cheaper ingredients were used at home or at street vendors, and dining out was reserved for the treat of foreign cuisine. The underlying idea here is that what is foreign, or what is outside of ourselves, might be worth more, and how sinister and prevalent that thought can be. Part of Bo’s mission was to re-instill pride in Thai people about their Thai roots.
My parallel battle may be to allow myself to live in this way, without the clear-cut split between selfish and selfless. Not focused on a singular track of food or music or being alone or in a hall of a thousand, but on giving myself enough opportunity to see into those windows. I must trust the blue line, that mission and philosophy, that runs within me. Nelson ends her mini reflection on loneliness and blue by saying, “sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink – Here you are again, it says, and so am I.”
I have just returned to the hotel now after yet another canceled flight, and when I walked into the suite, I laughed out loud. It was the exact same room in mirror image.
Here you are again – a little different after some reading, writing, music making, and a journey back to the start – and so am I. This time a little less lonely.
fascinating & wonderfully written! thank you for sharing 💖