The Many Writings of

It’s been an interesting time for me in the Chinese sense. When I finally got off the road last year, every cell in my body was screaming STOP!, as in stop everything.

I hadn’t taken a break from performing since I was about twelve years old, and I was long overdue for a hiatus. My strongest impulse was to dig a hole and pull the dirt in over me, and that is pretty much what I did. I needed to, and what’s more I had to. The bulk of my life was starving for attention, while the ego was glutted with a surfeit of strokes and fuzzies. My body was in dire need of repair, and my personality needed an overhaul. Years of frenetic scheduling had left so much undone and postponed that the sheer volume of backlog threatened to overwhelm me. After the backlog got tired of threatening, that is exactly what it did.

Lady Irony and her fuckbuddy Paradox had me over their collective knee, and they were gleefully paddling the hell out of me. I had intentionally knocked out from under me all the props that had kept the thin veneer of sanity in place, and there was nothing in my field of vision to replace them. At once blessed and wretched, I doddered through long days of silence in the little cocoon of my studio. I wanted to sing, but the sinus infection that had begun several years earlier, entrenching itself in my head with the aid of too many pressurized cabins full of foul air, was threatening to destroy my voice. I wanted to write but couldn’t put a single word to paper. My head felt as empty as an abandoned warehouse. I wanted to relax and rejoice in my newfound freedom, but I was too busy with my existential panic to breathe. Even my family looked at me strangely. Who was this person? This largely enigmatic man who, up until now had been a sort of visiting celebrity, was now as prosaic as a household fixture like a TV or a washing machine. I could feel myself quietly slipping deeper and deeper into the pool of sadness and anger in which I had occasionally immersed myself throughout my entire life; there were no distractions to prevent it. Chemical depression had run undiagnosed through both sides of my family for generations, and I was not to escape the fate of many of my relatives.

As summer decayed into fall and fall lapsed into winter my mood worsened and I ideated daily about offing myself and the relief it might bring me. The only things that stayed my hand were the thought of how such an act would affect those I loved, and a promise I made to my brother that I would not cause myself harm. At one point I cursed him for asking me to make that promise. It seemed like a good time to begin exploring the realm of antidepressants. My first encounter was a near-disaster, the drug deepening my funk and driving me further into retreat. Everyone reacts differently to these supposed equilibrators, and prescription is an inexact science, the method being ‘let’s wait and see what this one does’. After months of struggling to produce and instead falling asleep on my studio floor, I quit the stuff cold turkey and endured the unpleasant taser-like body shock withdrawal symptoms that go largely unmentioned in the literature about the drug. I thought, not wrongly, that withdrawal had to be better than the abyss into which the drug was rapidly propelling me.

Meanwhile my state, while not exactly vegetative, wasn’t feeding the life force in me. I was convinced that I had come home to die, in the gloomy tradition of my father. Whenever I looked in a mirror, I saw my father’s empty eyes staring back at me. I turned off my phone. I stopped talking. I tried not to breathe too deeply in the hope that, if starved of oxygen, the pain might begin to recede. In an effort to climb out of the hole I had dug for myself, I gave myself an assignment: find five funny things about depression. I didn’t manage to find even one, let alone five. Even in hindsight I can’t think of anything funny about depression, except perhaps how I looked to the world of spirit; a caricature of a man slogging through a nightmare landscape of his own device, flaying himself and searching for bandaids to cover the deep welts. I was functioning well enough to do what needed doing, but beyond that I was a wreck.

The thud of hitting bottom reverberated in my skull like a huge gong. There was no error in my perception of the level to which I had descended, and the feeling of finally reaching a point past which I could sink no lower was something of a comfort. It reminded me of all the submarine movies I’d ever seen, in which the crew is frozen in their places, not daring to breathe, the sonar man calmly calling out the rapidly increasing depth while the hull groans and rivets pop, and the sub finally settles on the ocean floor. The crew begins to breathe again, knowing that they can’t go any deeper and relieved that they won’t be crushed to a pulp by a hostile, alien environment.

It is surprising to me, as I write, at the ease with which this small act of revelation comes. At one point I thought that if I didn’t die of despair, I’d certainly die from the shame of revelation. It’s not working that way. What surprises me the most, even after all this time, are the gifts that flow from my blackest moments. On the other side of the transition, I wish I had done this more gracefully, but I am no stranger to that wish. More times than I care to remember I have done the emotional equivalent of a bad belly flop off a high dive. I don’t suppose it matters how we get through things, whether it’s with grace or clumsiness. It’s getting through that counts the most. The amount of collateral damage one racks up on the way through is just a measure of the klutz factor. Some of it can be remedied and some of it can’t, but I look at it like a pinball game – you get to the bottom of things only after having been bounced around a lot. You run into the bumpers and they hit you back. You go flying and get swatted around a bit once again, and so the process goes until you make it past the paddles to safety. And then you do it all over again. Each time it’s a little different, but not much.

Aside from the malicious chemical component, my guts were all knotted up over the gradual erosion of my voice. Somewhere down there in the pit, I realized that, in order to save what was left of both my voice and my sanity, I had to pick my ass up off the floor and get proactive or I was going to lose both of those shrinking commodities completely. I had tried every alternative healing method I could discover, hoping that one or another of them might prove to be the agent that would evict the nasty bacteria that had been squatting in the various hollow spaces in my head. I had reached the land of last resorts, which included the most mechanistic and least pleasant approach, which was to have a meat mechanic get in there with hellishly sharp, tiny blades and serve notice to the vicious wee beasties that their presence would no longer be tolerated.

After many hours of breaking and entering, rotorootering and the surgical equivalent of Drano, I looked and felt like something from the Rue Morgue. It took nearly two weeks for the initial bleeding to stop. I’d had my share of bloody noses before, but this one was epic. My nose had been broken internally, so beside the general malaise, I had splints in my nose, kept in place, I think, by the coagulated blood that acted like glue and cemented the splints to my nose hairs. The unceremonious yanking of the splints after the first week made my eyes water, but it was a relief to get the sticks out of my proboscis, even if I couldn’t wiggle it. There is something inescapable about having one’s face as a locus of torment. It becomes a large and undeniable impediment. There’s no escape when the problem is right there in the middle of your face. So, mouth-breathing like Julia Child, I sat for a couple of weeks, the misgivings mounting in my mind, fear and anticipation clamoring for equal time, all the while praying that I had done the right thing. In the course of my research I had heard many horror stories of singers being wrecked for life through similar procedures.

It wasn’t until at least a couple of months after the event that I could sing at all, and I was, I thought, emotionally prepared for a traumatic and unfamiliar experience. Again, I was readying myself for a worst-case sitch. I could have, I suppose, come at the nodal moment of pitched phonation with a more positive attitude, but I so badly did not want to be disappointed when the results fell short of the anticipatory fantasy I had formulated that I clung stubbornly to my fears. No amount of reassurance from the famous surgeon could dent my dread-to-be.

I still felt like someone had used my nose as a heavy bag. I looked pretty much the same, aside from a nearly imperceptible new cant to my shnozz. Aside from the feeling that a road crew had been busy inside my face, there was no indication that anything at all had been done. My fantasy was that, after anaesthetizing me, the surgeon had ordered an intern to punch me in the nose as hard as he could, and then they all went out for lunch, laughing at the inert form of the doped-up dupe on the gurney. After returning from lunch, they shoved a couple chopsticks up my nose and woke me, having first made sure that I would instantly puke upon opening my eyes.

Medical science has accelerated to the point where this extremely delicate procedure was performed in the afternoon and I walked, albeit unsteadily, out the door that same night. I’m glad my kids were asleep when I got home because my appearance would certainly have frightened them. I didn’t have the shiners associated with rhinoplasty, but I had to wear a little mini-Kotex under my nose, held in place with an awkward web of surgical tape, for a couple of weeks. I sat and read and bled, popping ibuprofen, breathing through my mouth and wondering just what I had done to myself. I had felt so crummy for so long that this felt like merely another insult, and my less than sunny disposition occupied me with disaster scenarios; the voice would be a wreck, I’d open my mouth and sound like Liza Minelli, it didn’t work and all the schmertz was for nothing, et cetera ad nauseam.

Why am I dwelling on the minutia of a surgery? Well, it turned out to be a birthing of sorts, and births take place in an effluvium of blood and pain. Fast forward now a few months, and the gifts are beginning to identify themselves. The newly excavated resonating chambers in my head are reconfiguring themselves, and my freshly minted voice, at once familiar and completely unexplored, is beginning to emerge. One day while I’m vocalizing it all snaps into place and I once again feel the divine gift, the heart-thrill, the intense tingling pleasure of saturating myself with living sound. My voice is almost deafening in my head. Everything in there is jiggling and vibrating in sympathy with the voice, producing an internal sound not unlike ripping metal. Each day thereafter it is a little better, a little different, a little more familiar. I gradually and delightedly discover that I can do things with the voice that I could never do before. It is responding to my thoughts like a well-trained gun dog. After my initial gun shyness over daring to dream again, I am beginning to allow myself the pleasure of anticipation as I reinvest myself in recording. As with most things that I allow to occur naturally, in a timely manner, the nuts and bolts of the recording process are falling into place by themselves.

Part of my quandary has been deciding what to record. Initially I was afraid that if I made too ‘serious’ a recording it would prove disappointing to a pop audience, and if I put out a primarily pop-focused disk it would display my weaknesses as both a writer and producer, and the project would take forever to complete. I spent a lot of time asking myself why I wanted to do this at all, and for whom was I doing it? The answers popped, fully formed, into my head during the recent lunar eclipse, as the full moon turned burnt orange. I’m doing this for me. There are pieces I’ve wanted to record since forever, and circumstances are lining up to make it happen. Yeah, the rep is mostly serious alright, but that is the stuff closest to my heart and I know I have to scratch that burning itch before I can do anything else.

I don’t care about selling records. I’ve never in my life made more than a pittance for all the records to which I’ve contributed, so doing this project for the imagined income would be utterly stupid. I want to share my idiosyncratic love with anyone willing to listen. I want to make my tribute to the people and the voices that have formed and fed me. I want the opportunity to settle into my musical roots and squirm around until I’m as happy and comfy as a mud-slathered piggy.

I took la voce nuova for a test drive last week. Aptly enough, I used my new voice for the first time doing the premiere of a new chamber piece for two voices and several instruments. I had a great ride. I think my personal kibosh on performing is drawing to a close now that I feel rested, relaxed, and repaired. I needed the downtime, but everything has its season, to badly paraphrase Scripture. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to take up a full performance schedule and be popping up in a town near you. It doesn’t mean that at all. I don’t think I want to work that sort of schedule ever. But I do have my newish nose in the wind and an ear to the ground, a most uncomfortable and awkward posture, as I wait for the new opportunities to find me. And they will.

A special thank you to all of you who continue to stay in touch. You have been a tremendous support.

yrz,
bear