So.. it's one in the morning, and I have just finished an "assignment" that is technically an assignment for my students, but as I think I've mentioned on here before, with creative writing that we ask them to read aloud to the class, my co-teacher and I have promised that we will always write on the topic as well, and come prepared to share what we've written, so it is not just them under a spot-light that's ravaging their confidence, but also us in all our nerdy, adult vulnerability..
It is once again during our unit on the novel The House on Mango Street; just a wonderful little book to teach lyrical/poetic prose with, and to give freshmen a heaving dose of literary devices... So we ask them to write a few vignettes in the style of the author (Sandra Cisneros) and this week's needed to be a treatise on or vivid memory of music in their life.
And here is the bleary teacher's-edition of the mimic-assignment:
There is a silken web that winds itself in and around and under me—shot up my veins like an internal tree running roots down my arms through my throat—the glue between a million little polaroids. It is notes, songs, snatches of harmonies that wind gnarly vines around soul and set it free from body. If travel has been the demolisher of my walls, music was what kept me in one piece during the glorious fall-out. It is the haze that my breath blew on the windows of a boxcar as the train whirred onward to somewhere new; dissonant chords rolling off Thom Yorke's tongue, sent to light the fire in my belly—baby’s got the bends—and so did I… pressurized, and about to burst.
It is the hours spent on a piece of carpet, with a long-adored brother, eyes closed, listening while eternity drips slow to the layers in an album—Innocence Mission—and my heart on fire—O happy, O happy, the end, the end, the end—she says. Because music is like water, whirling around in ringlets of change, lilting through and welding together chapters of life to form a whole. Because it is only music, and light, and water and God that transcend the gaps and gutters that the rest of life digs deep.
It is the wild-hearted drum-circle, spontaneously combusting after the Easter service at my church, and docks that shook with the voices of youth camp kids, cluttered together to join and surpass the worshiping toads. It is the funereal dance around the blazing fire, one white-hot whisper, so much life found in that Ghanaian celebration at another man’s death.
And maybe then we are like notes. Each bobbing along, suspended at times, meeting others to form chords—some combinations disastrous, clashing gongs, but unrelentingly powerful—and others the sweet tilt of harmony, trills in form of relationship. Our own music that breaks wide the marching lines of time and leaves something wispy on a page to mark the crescendo.
Posted on 6 March 2009 at 1:06 AM Comments (1)
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