(Do You) Remember...
The other day I happened upon a soundtrack for the Broadway play, Beautiful, a show which lasted six years and one which I missed (it's still making a few appearances back east). But then, I don't live in New York and even in my local town, rarely attend stage plays or musicals. Don't ask me why, don't make me cry, don't make me blue, roared the Beatles. And I say that because I've actually quite enjoyed them on the occasions I've seen them. A lot of work goes into the choreography and the music and the lighting and on and on. And of course, there are the lines and lines of talented and aspiring singers and dancers and actors, although I admit that I miss not being able to use the word actress* anymore (so said without any political correctness).* To diverge a little, the BBC noted that although women appeared on stage in 1656 (when the "king" first allowed it), it wasn't until 1700 that they could use the term "actress" to differentiate themselves. The term dropped out of favor in the 1970s when feminism began its rise but consider this: since there are on average 8 roles for every one female role, how does the industry (Golden Globes, Oscars, etc.) properly award a single recognition for "best" actor? The odds are slanted...but I digress.
So speaking of kings, the play Beautiful was about Carole King (born Carole Klein but by the age of 20, she had already broken through the recording industry with demo tapes which were nearly the finished product; I had heard the demo songs on a cassette, remember those?) And as the title noted, she sang the lyrics: You've got to wake up in the morning with a smile on your face and show the world, all the love in your heart. And people gonna treat you better, your gonna find --oh yes you will-- that you're beautiful, as you feel. Nice words and nice thoughts, and a nice way to begin the year. A new outlook and one which we need...but can we do it?
Ah yes, another year and another reflection of how quickly this human creation of time moves past us. But there is another scale of time, that of geologic time and one which I've been half-reading, half-watching on the geology of North America and its national parks. Those "half-watching" markers should probably be termed "half-learning" because I admit that I know next to nothing about geology. Even with this being a presentation of both National Geographic and The Great Courses (both the lecturer and the photos/graphics are top notch), to a beginner like me there are only so many subduction zones, rhyolites, and erosion vs. deposition tales that one can comprehend. But it IS fascinating to imagine. During glacial times, oceans may have been 400 feet shallower, so the islands of Maui, Lanai, Molokai and Kahoolawe would have appeared as a single island (named by geologists as Maui Nui); and lakes the size of Lake Erie would have been common throughout the states of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. Sands from the eastern flank of the "new" Rockies created a desert in Colorado equal to the Sahara in size. And in the Basin & Range area, volcanic rocks uplifted mountains by more than a mile and water carved out canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon. But here's what I found that challenged one of my earlier views: As Pacific seafloor descended beneath North America's west coast, it dragged water and sediments down with it. Together they warmed, causing the sediments and overlying rocks to partially melt and then rise as magma. The magma inflated balloon-like bubbles of liquid rock deep underground, magma chambers that fed volcanoes high above. The balloons crystallized into a string of ganitic plutons -- a batholith. Faulting and tilting caused the batholith to rise, forming the Sierra Nevada mountains. What the heck is a batholith? And yet those are what created the Sierras? See what I mean? But even going at half-comprehension, it's still easy to be dazzled by this step-back approach to our home planet's history. Which begs the question, why do we call it our "home" planet as if we have several others to go to? "Oh Earth, that's my second home."
There are a few other "worlds" for sure, ones equally difficult to reach, even if others have done so. And as the holidays once again pass, it is easy to simply shrug as if all is normal and another new year is again beginning. But of course, that means we have gotten older (my doctor is retiring, for heaven's sake!). But as I remind those around me, aren't we fortunate to be here at all? We can read of wars from our warm and cozy homes or apartments, or gaze at the homeless behind our bulky winter clothes, or cut into a turkey just pulled from a hot oven. I make no attempt to mock any of this, because these are simply reminders that most of us are truly fortunate, and caring, and giving; and for many of us our hearts and donations and time does indeed go out to help those less fortunate, be they in neighboring cities or in a distant land. The orphaned baby rhino can tug at our heart strings as easily as the food bank needing a hand or some extra holiday cash. But this time of year can also bring out a sinister side of our brain, that of the dark alleys of depression or dementia which seek to lure us in when another bill arrives or a body part fails, or a memory no longer comes to the surface. Those darker pieces may be contained for most of us, but they are probably there waiting to emerge, as if to taunt us before pinning us down catlike with a snarl.
As the year ends, many magazines and "papers" are revealing what was most read during 2023. One such piece on the NY Times list was an essay by David Brooks who wrote about his childhood and adult friend who became depressed enough to end his life (he was a successful eye surgeon). Wrote Brooks: ...the philosophers Cecily Whiteley and Jonathan Birch have written, it is not just sorrow; it is a state of consciousness that distorts perceptions of time, space and self. The journalist Sally Brampton called depression a landscape that “is cold and black and empty. It is more terrifying and more horrible than anywhere I have ever been, even in my nightmares.” But Brooks also discovered later: ...I read that when you give a depressed person advice on how to get better, there’s a good chance all you are doing is telling the person that you just don’t get it...a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect and love the person; it’s to show that you haven’t given up on him or her, that you haven’t walked away...you don’t have to try to coax somebody out of depression. It’s enough to show that you are trying to understand what this troubled soul is enduring. It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which the sufferer can share her experience. It’s enough to offer him or her the comfort of being seen. Founder of The Sun, Sy Safransky once wrote about some advice from his mentor and "coach" about what to do if you have depression: Have a thoughtful response ready for your loved ones, who, after all the unanswered calls and texts and emails, will want to know if you're doing OK, or if you're going to kill yourself. If you're not going to give the truth to the people who care, at least deliver a well-built fiction. You're a writer, for Christ's sake.
My wife and I have a friend who is sharp as a tack, but a mild stroke has held captive her short term memory. If she doesn't write down that you're coming for lunch or that she has a doctor's appointment that afternoon, it is gone...within minutes. She can no longer read a book or fully watch a movie, simply because any sort of plot line tends to dissolve as if written in steam. Then Sun editor Sy wrote this: On October 23, 2022, I went to a doctor and found out that my brain is unraveling. An MRI showed that I have severe cerebral atrophy leading to impaired language, executive function, and memory. And I probably have Alzheimer’s. I used to have a brain. Now I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m uncertain about so many things...When I sit down to write, it’s hard for me to understand what I’ve written. My brain is confused. And so is my heart. Sometimes a friend will read my pages out loud, and I’m amazed: Is that really what I wrote? After editing a magazine for most of my life, I’m a man who no longer knows how to spell a word correctly. All those words lost in the cloud, no way to get them back. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to remember the names of the people I’ve worked with for decades. Or the names of my daughters, or my grandchildren, or my wife, or myself. It’s difficult to follow instructions or to read a clock. I can’t do any math. I’m sometimes confused about what day, month, season, or year it is. I don’t know how much more writing I can do. Nonetheless I am writing, and I’m thinking, and I’m grateful to be alive... Sooner or later I won’t be able to find a single word, never mind the perfect word — just as a friend with Alzheimer’s (whose name I can’t remember) couldn’t find the right words, or any words at all. For now I want to stop worrying about dementia and sit at my desk and keep writing as best as I can. As sad as all of this is, Alice Walker once wrote: A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world; more mysterious, beloved, insane, and precious for the sparkling and jagged edges of the smaller enclosure we have escaped. Those lyrics from The Carpenters now sound almost haunting: All my best memories, come back clearly to me, some can even make me cry, just like before. It's yesterday once more.
Perhaps all of this is not because we don't want to understand but that we are simply unable to. In his book Fluent Forever (I listened to the audio book in order to hear the pronunciations), opera singer and author Gabriel Wyner noted that when brain studies were done, a monotonous rock, rock, rock, rock, rock, lock phrase was repeated over and over. For most Westerners, the sudden change to lock spiked in the scan, but not for Japanese listeners. For them, the change in words barely registered. He noted that the Japanese language doesn't account for that type of change, just as Westerners are unable to detect the "thd" sound so common in Japanese (our Western minds want to place the word into a slot of "th" or "d" but not combine them). When I proudly told my grandmother, fluent in Japanese and long since passed, that I had learned a phrase in Japanese from reading Shōgun (the phrase was Tsuyaku ga imasu ka? which, in the book at least, meant "do you have an interpreter?"), I proudly said the phrase and waited for approval of my "excellent" accent. Instead I got only a puzzled look. I repeated it, and got back another puzzled look. "What are you trying to say," she asked, and when I told her, she put together imasu ka (a mask) and tsuyaku but told me, "but it's spelled tsu, and you need to pronounce the ts." What? She said it for me several times, emphasizing the "t" as if hissing. "TS" she told me; you need to pronounce the T. Hmm, end of my self-taught Japanese learning.
Editor Syransky also wrote this: Days pass; hours become months; the chronology of life breaks down; the clock stops altogether...death briefly breaks open the social hierarchies. As traumatic and painful and awful as it is, we all grieve, and we all face death. In facing this great leveler together, perhaps it's also a chance to envision a more equitable kind of world. When I re-read that (he was writing on grief), I thought that maybe he was describing not a physical death but a loss of self, either a loved one trapped in depression or yourself facing dementia. Either way, those were worlds "we" seemed unable to reach. But not so, said a follow-up article. Writer Lynn Casteel Harper was interviewed and said: As a chaplain on a dementia unit, I met a man I’ll call Tom. To get to know him, I asked him a lot of questions about his life. The next day, when I walked onto the unit, Tom put his head in his hands and said, “Oh, no, not you. Are you here to ask me a million questions again?” In the moment it felt bad, like a little dagger to my ego. [Laughs.] But he was right! I had peppered him with questions and probably exhausted his limited capacities. That was a truth that I needed to see, and he showed it to me. Those of us who don’t have dementia too often fail to recognize how we can learn from people who do. We’re not just bringing them our enlightened selves: Isn’t it wonderful that we’re so caring toward these folks? No! What are we learning?
Pulitzer Prize winner for her book criticisms, Gail Caldwell wrote: In the mathematics of memory and experience, we know that our perception of time's passage is correlative to biological age. Time blurs into slept uniformity when we are children, then accelerates alarmingly as we age -- as the length of the present diminishes in relation to the past...The trick is to let a time like ours shape you utterly without...[making] a career out of estrangement. But in her book, A Strong West Wind, she has us enter yet another common world, that period when adolescence fades away and emerges --sometimes in a rebellious fashion-- into adulthood. Here is how the now 72-year old describes that period of time in her life, a time when she had to leave the "trappings" of her small town and her family, even if she didn't know why: I can see us now against that long horizon, an angry father and his angry daughter, having lost our way. Where once we had adored each other's every move, most of mine in imitation of his, now we were in another kind of dance, wary and fierce. He forgot to tell me that I mattered, to him and in the world...our inevitable steps away from each other had become an anguished combat, and there was a world of such fiery possibility that both of us had already been handed our weapons...We fought about everything but the truth, which was that I would be leaving soon, that I had turned from a girlstamp of him into someone just as full of fire as he, but whom he hardly knew. That could be any of us looking back at ourselves. Who we were back then is so far from who we are now. And perhaps that is how someone with dementia or depression feels as well, their old "self" having somehow drifted away as if watching a raft cut loose in a swift current. All is still there, but not as it once was.
So full circle, the music. It is said that music penetrates even the deepest parts of our mind, that even a person "lost" to us in dementia is vividly alive when music from their past is played. Noted AARP in their recent issue: For more than 50 years, the medical specialty known as music therapy has harnessed this extraordinary aspect of music to treat diseases ranging from depression to chronic pain to movement disorders to autism to Alzheimer’s disease. But only in recent years has the scientific community begun to penetrate the mystery of how something as ephemeral as an acoustic signal --mere air vibrations-- can have such profound effects on damaged bodies and brains. I had read about this in the past but didn't really think more about it until I read a review of Barbara Streisand's recent autobiography. Wrote reviewer Rachel Syme in The New Yorker: The audio version of “My Name Is Barbra” is forty-eight hours long—the longest author-read memoir at Penguin Random House. It is also, I would argue, the superlative way to experience Streisand’s opus. She ad-libs at will; she refuses to say the word “farts.” Sometimes she sounds like a tired bubbe, sometimes a grand dame. But she’s her best, as ever, when she’s singing. In “Gotta Move,” a chapter about her final performance in “Funny Girl,” Streisand trots out an extraordinary archival recording of “My Man,” Fanny Brice’s signature torch song. “Oh, my man, I love him so /He’ll never know,” she sings a cappella, slinking up to the notes like a cat burglar. For the first half of the song, Streisand is rarely on beat, and often she’s not even in tune, but there’s no fear or hesitation in her attack. You sense her slowly bringing something to the surface. She trusts her timing. A pianist follows her lead, then so does a drummer, and then, just as the cymbals crash, she opens her throat with a roar. The sound is pure, exultant catharsis. It will make you believe in something, if not quite as much as the singer believes in herself. For me, I remember still being in college when I took my mom to the movies, perhaps the only time I did so. I had already seen Funny Girl and for some reason, I wanted her to see it; so there we sat in this grand theatre watching that ending song being belted out in 70mm by Streisand. I cried during the scene, and just happened to turn and saw that my mother was crying as well. It was likely one of only two times I'd seen her cry in my life. But that moment etched itself into my head as deeply as any memory I have, not only of her but of my life as well. Music therapy, or whatever you want to call it...
Jumping back to the play Beautiful, the song by Cynthia Weil and Jerry Mann (friends and competitors of Carole King) You've Lost That Loving Feeling starts out as an ordinary standard tune, the opening voice high and steady throughout as if setting the pace for the rest of the song; but then you hear a producer on the side stop the singers and say that something is not right, the key or the pace. "Drop it down an octave," she says. The result is, well, the version made popular by The Righteous Brothers. And maybe that's how we should look at the new year, with a new outlook, and perhaps even a new approach. As one reader wrote to the NY Times, "be a fountain, not a drain." Feel the Earth move, as King wrote; step into another's shoes. With all that is happening it is easy to crack open that door to depression, or even to just look away and pretend it's not happening. Resolutions, not revolutions. In the AARP interview, Ringo was asked if peace and love were still winning (Ringo Starr is known for celebrating his birthday with a worldwide wish for "peace & love"). Replied the former Beatle: The press used to say, "Oh, he's peace-and-loving again." What's wrong with that, brother? The world is crazy, it's ruled by dictators and palace owners. There's a lot we could do. The word is in those resolutions...re-solutions. My wish for the coming year would be Peace, Not War, in 2024...make the world beautiful, everyone. Happy New Year...
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