my body: my prose
My mother has always said I’m a musical learner and maybe that’s why my heart beats faster than it should and why I close my eyes to regulate my nerves when musicians are especially talented.
I tried to learn the bongos and my hands cramped like they do when I write for too long or just long enough. Or maybe I just tap out before I get to the good stuff (I haven’t written a poem in a while. I think I’m scared of rhythm’s honesty).
In my West African Music and Dance class recital I played the Dundun drums. With each repetition my jaw clenched and my body tensed and I got dizzy until it was over. Something about being liable for the beat of a song brings me to the edge. Something about being liable for the beat of a heart.
It took me a while to realize back when I first lost my body – I think because I never had a good hold on it. I never traced my finger along every crevice or stared for hours at different angles in the mirror. I colored it with razor blades but I never looked inside the wounds; the blood rushed quickly over the unfamiliar.
I know my blood, though. What it looks, tastes, smells and feels like. I know it’s not very gushy, it’s tame. I know my veins give easily to doctor’s needles but not my own. I know it’s working very hard and sometimes it doesn’t make it to my feet.
Love is supposed to get your blood pumping (?).
I know that when I lost my body, my blood unlearned the disowned parts of me. My blood does not respond to hands, or lips. It responds, instead, to the beat of that deadly drum and the tremble of my right arm.
I can't tell if it's orgasmic or torturous – the route through which a tight drumroll and never ending solo drives me. I can’t be a witness to both the bass and the flare. I can't tap my foot and let my arms move freely. Rhythm and beat, beat and rhythm. Heaven and Hell, Heaven and Hell.
EMDR therapy is like this. I remember moments that make me squirm with nausea while my thighs cramp and my toes wiggle and my palms cross my chest tapping furiously on my shoulders. My eyes shoot around the room until they’re so tired they close and they close so tight they burn.
“When it feels right to you, find a moment to pause.”
(All of it) None of it feels right to me but I know I’ll have to do it again so I pause the second she tells me I can. Next time she makes me do it for longer but never long enough to get to the breakthrough; the orgasm; the final solo.
Do I always tap out before I get to the good stuff?
I follow good music like a chick follows her mother (my body trembling is getting worse). My new favorite font is Arial Narrow because it reads like the way my vision closed in on itself at the Santana concert, when Cindy’s drumming stretched the length of the last year of my life.
It (i.e. blood) (i.e. love) should not be able to ignore the hands of a lover. Even when they tremble.
I keep asking people what instrument they’d play in a band. Many say drums and I wonder if it is for the same reasons I’m inclined to say drums, too. But if I’m being honest I could never be in a band. I could be the drummer’s or guitarist’s or bassist’s girlfriend. I could maybe be the singer but then I would have to sing, wouldn’t I. I could stand backstage and dance. I could be the number one fan.
And, if I’m being honest, I would have to be the drummer because I am already a writer — I rely on (am addicted to) the tremble and the tension. I rely on the distance between flesh and blood and love. Otherwise I’d have nothing to disturb my empty pages. I’d have nothing to wreck my nerves.
There would be no panic.
I’m taking a class about essays. Specifically The Film Essay. The kind that is cinematic in its writing but it’s not poetry and it has a point but you’ve got to search and dig and read over and over to find it. And of course, it sings about cinema.
James Baldwin said something about the cinema of his mind. My cinema is in my dreams. When I was little my dad died and then my brother and then my dad again and once my mother, but that story was quite deceiving. Melodrama. Tragedy.
What I’ve learned so far in this class is that I have to write like I’m dreaming: blood is pumping to all the wrong places/heart is beating/limbs are trembling/eyes are closed/I’m dizzy/it’s narrow. I have to write like rounds of EMDR reprocessing and Cindy’s drum solo. I have to swing my head back wincing in pain-pleasure, squeeze my fingers in and out of fists, repeat words and melodies until the rhymes pours out. Expel expel expel.
I have to write a song about my cinema and put it on paper. I have to be the drummer. There she is: my body: my prose. I found her.