We Can Never Go BACK

In about a week and a half, I'm competing in a singing competition for the National Association of Teachers of Singing in the musical theater category. I gotta say, I'm stoked for my repertoire for this competition. One of the songs that I'm performing has become really important to me. The song is "Back to Before" from Ragtime, the 1996 musical.

Before you listen to the song, here's what I have to say about it.

Back to Before makes me so emotional in a profound, speechless, kind of way. I mean, just fundamentally, the orchestration of this piece is EXQUISITE and the lyrics are so nuanced. It's a tender tune with great movement, great passion, and great variety of emotion.

I love that this piece simultaneously represents an "undoing" and a force of self-empowerment. The singer is a woman who has been in a horribly neglectful relationship with a man that she is entirely in love with. The song is her lament for the love of their previous years, tied with some guilt of her own wrong doing in the relationship, and the verbalizing of all the signs she missed tied to some serious self-hatred.

But the song is also about her independence. It features her coming to terms with her limitations and her recognition of the inevitability and permanence of her past. I love this song because of her decision to be "unafraid to be strong."

The first verse:
"There was a time/ our happiness seemed never ending. / I was so sure / That where we were heading was right. / Life was a road, / So perfect and straight and unbending / Our little road, with never a cross road in sight. / Back in the days, / When we spoke in civilized voices / Women in white, and sturdy young men at the oar. / Back in the days when I let you make all my choices... We can never go back to before."


The second verse:
"There was a time / My feet were so solidly planted / You'd sail away / While I turned by back to the sea. / I was content / A princess asleep and enchanted. / If I had dreams, then I let you dream them for me! / Back in the days when everything seemed so much clearer, / Women in white, who knew what their lives held in store. / Where are they now? / Those women, who stared from the mirror... We can never go back to before."

The notion of being vacant for someone.
Being blank so that they can be bright.
Being a puppet for someone's whims.
Existing to the truth of another's heartbeat.
And the second half of this stanza features another one of my strong suits: comparing. I know EXACTLY what she means when she disassociates herself as a woman who stared from the mirror, and that is, painfully unique. The singer subconsciously wishes for the simple life of simple women with a strong husband, but is liberated from that prison.

The final verse and the climax of the song bears these lyrics:
"There was a time / When you were the person in motion / I was your wife. / It never occurred to want more. / You were my sky. / My moon and my stars and my ocean."

And then finally: "We can never go back to before. We can never go BACK... to before."
I think these final words hurt her so much. These words are representative of her literally cutting the ties with these memories. This is the moment when she surrenders the hope of her past being any different.

This song just resonantes with me in such a deep way. I am quick to fall in love with the past, to idolize my memory, to lust for the familiar, and to frustrate myself thin with what I could have done or should have said or what not. And this song is a great reminder to me that that way of thinking is a complete waste of time. It's normal to have regrets and frustrations about your circumstances, and the way that these things have panned out, but it is not okay to consciously, willingly, RETREAT to the past. That is the message of this song for me.

A Face To Call Home

I can't focus. 

I'm feeling this force of defeat that's just... imminently charging towards me. I'm such a stupid sponge to my environment and I just can't seem to make where I am "work." And that frustrates me endlessly. My OCD brain desires an order that simply cannot exist simultaneously with the reality of my life at present. 

One of the songs cycling in my brain is John Mayer's "A Face to Call Home:"

"I am an architect
Of days that haven't happened yet
I can't believe a month is all it's been
You know my paper heart
The one I filled with pencil marks
I think I might have gone and inked you in."

I have a paper heart, and I have this horrible tendency to ink some people in. I love quickly, deeply, and genuinely. I have an imagination. My life is some sort of chaotic example of a dreamer with anxiety and vacancies that seem to be unfillable. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEeRZ_OE3mk

Memory Dust (Now)

The worst part was her handwriting.

(If you could even call it that...)

All right, perhaps the “rotting fruits of her fingertips...”

It was more of a bewildered disarray of markings, primitive at best. It was almost anthropological in essence, but without the graduate-student lust and allure of the feat of its inevitable profound translation. Her writing bore no capacity for interpretation. It was an agent uniformed in discomfort to its viewers, and served to convolute and confuse.

The monster was this:

Her o’s didn’t close all the way. The middle line in her capital E’s was always longer than the top and bottom lines. Lower case f’s didn’t curve like they should, hers resembling a baby tree laden with a dump of snowfall. C’s and L’s stuck together to be mistaken for lowercase d’s. S’s lost the autonomy of their curves, and instead mimicked commas. Her N’s possessed some nonhuman harshness, biting the subsequent letters with titanium teeth.

The spaces between her words were inconsistently too small and sometimes non-existent.

She couldn’t submit to the edict of lined paper. Her words still fluctuated in and out of the thin blue boundaries like a baby snake darting about in snow.

She wrote with too much pressure.

Her lead broke and the ink smeared and she misspelled too many things. Her black erase marks thinned the paper. She couldn’t draw straight lines.

She hated the messiness of her most profound thoughts. The depths of her mind dwelled in the mud of stagnant ponds and gutters. Her dreams and visions lived in the midnight boondock of a swamp. She was immune to order. Despite any dotted lines, special plastic grips, or proper “training,” the intellectual red tape kept her ugliness trapped within the lifelines of her palms.  She was plagued with an inability to translate herself. She was destined to sit on the throne as the Queen of Misunderstood. Her monster became tangible with every homework assignment, every receipt, every grocery list, every tax return, every birthday card, and every calendar.

It made her worse.

It made her dizzy.

All of her art existed within a meta-plane of ugliness, covalent enough to avoid beauty and the pretenses of ionic charge. She couldn’t make her art feel beautiful; it instead was dusty and powdered upon a magnetic square, stretched around the corners of a refrigerator. It always retained a layer of dirt, the remnants of bones, or some smudge that corrupted the purity of her words.

And no one would dare to look past the spots.

So her heart would race. And she’d get clumsy. She couldn’t justify it fast enough. So instead she’d swallow her tongue. And feel her abandoned unspoken words escape through clammy palms and a pale face.

At the promise of solitude, she’d retreat to the self-sounding safety of her caves, and she’d pick up the drained words to nurse them back to language, to meaning. And her own hands betrayed her and left more stains, somehow paradoxically illuminating the face of her fear: a grimy artist. Her reflection on the tanned carcass was a conjured image of defeat, imminently and relentlessly charging towards her. The architecture of her neurons was dirtied threads that transmitted a toxic self-poison.

It was a self-perpetuating cycle of her deafening, oblivious muse.

Nothing could keep her clean.

Nothing could make it pure.

It (she) was dry and cracked and now

-CB