I have a few posts planned, this one among them, where I’m putting down an easy foundation, soft, softer, flexible, firm enough for something like language to stand on, but gentle enough for language to be like paint, soluble, or clay. Or a cloud with just enough form you can see it, wispy, to let the light in. Something I can lean into, wrap around myself. A duvet big enough for us all.
Onward, to a general defining of the scope of this. Loosely. Like unspooled threads. Like wildflowers. Like crocuses, popping up everywhere. Blooming not just where they were planted.
What is the evidence I existed? The evidence I exist?
My students? Once I thought this was the answer. My father’s funeral was “standing room only,” the room packed with his former students, local municipal leaders. I looked back at the crowded sanctuary, marveled at all the people I’d never seen before. The lives he touched.
I thought, “this is the way. I’ll teach myself immortal.”
A poor excuse for comfort in the face of bone-shaking grief.
Memories of me, to die with the memory-holders? See above. File under “things I cannot control.”
My name? I’ve never really liked my name and was amused to learn, as an adult, my father felt similarly about his. When you grow up in classrooms full of delicate “--y” and “--ina” names, “Erin” does not feel regal or charming or beautiful or cute or worthy. We are still sometimes at odds, this name and I. I think I’ll grow into it.
Friendships? Relationships like jewels–cherished or scattered to the wind, broken– or renewed, buffed, or like iron?
Jewel was my grandmother’s name, my father’s mother. I never knew her, but sometimes in a quiet moment, I imagine I can feel her DNA in my cells, see it in my hand, breathe her in through some lingering twentieth-century air.
An accounting of my quirks? This, I am told, would exponentially grow my readership. I am told I am quirky. To me I am me. Breath breathing, a body breathed.
My belovèd would say my hair, ubiquitous, strands in every corner of our home. He would not be wrong. My hair is everywhere.
Papers and journal pages, scribbles, barely legible, on post-its, margins, in diaries. Evidence I saw and heard and thought and felt. Some day, perhaps, like Brahms, I will burn it all.
I didn’t know Brahms in his time but I feel I know Brahms. Ein deutsches Requiem. We sang it in college, my junior year, and one of our professors told us “you won’t understand this piece until you listen to it by yourself in a dark room and cry.” We were baffled. Then, soon, like whispers wavering, tentative, the breath of many chorus members, alone, late, stories emerging. I couldn’t sleep. At 2 o’clock in the morning, I put the CD in and sat on the floor of my living room, empty but for a metal bookshelf, a lamp, and an armchair, wobbly with a rounded back, burnt orange and velvety soft. I leaned against it on the thick beige carpet and in the dim light of a small table lamp, I listened and I wept.
When people ask who my favorite composer is, I tell them that’s not fair.
But if you ask me to name a composer whose music has taught me about being human, I will say this: the first composer whose music taught me what it means to be human is Brahms.
The second movement of his second symphony. The last movement of the fourth. The piano sonata in f minor, Op. 5; he wrote this when he was twenty years old! I was 19 when I cried at his Requiem. The songs.
Nänie, Op. 82. Schiller tells us everything beautiful must die. Impermanence has always been true to itself.
Listen closely to the first movement of the G major violin sonata and revel, as I have over and over and over and over again, at the invertible counterpoint when you hear it, when the violin and piano hand the ends of their sentences off to each other. Let your heart soar. Be held.
My carbon footprint. Say it isn’t so. It is so.
Photographs. Blurry and out-of-context, small particles of a life. Moments. Still life. Memories remembered; I am reminded of myself.
This blog? If only!
A hundred pages of poetry I wrote in the summer of 2020. That summer I wrote constantly. Most of it is what I’d call “rage poetry.” A similar undertaking today might be called “Diary of Despondency.” Instead, ever the optimist, I started this blog.
A dissertation on a dusty library shelf. Oh heavens, how I once thought so. It is imperfect, as am I. Playing–anything–will always be more important than reading or writing about play. But if you want to talk about it, I’d love to. Here? Maybe. But here is where I play with language, not use language to philosophize about play. That is there. Many many many pages, all there.
Someone who remembers feeling cared for in my presence–or someone who felt the opposite? None of us are blameless. No one is unharmed. A sigh. Loss, lost, losses. The people we let go of, drop, hold too tightly, forget we are holding at all, cling to, release. My grasping hands.
Do others really ever feel the depth of our love? We let it go, our deepest love, pour it out of ourselves. We hope.
These things I hold for myself as evidence I exist. I hold them loosely. They fall, slip through my fingers. My hands are small. They cannot hold the value of our shared life.
Crocuses in early spring. Daffodils overflowing. My hair in the dust bunny under the bed. Laughter–we don’t have enough laughter anymore. Don’t let it be a dying art.
Kleenex crumbled on carpet at 3:30 in the morning. A girl who breathes, understands something different now about life, about herself. Who tries hard, sometimes fails. Keeps trying.
A friend asked me what sort of blog this is. I hesitated. “Rambling memoir.”
If something lands for you here, that’s a bliss. A bliss, I imagine, is a whisper of spring rain, a scent in the air, fleeting, a connection, a sip of shared experience. If not, that’s ok, too. I’m glad you’re reading along. I hope you’ll continue.
Let’s ourselves whisper into the spring rain, let it soak us to the bone. Then we’ll warm ourselves with coffee in the Viennese style, think about Brahms. Let a melody—anything—gently pass through your mind.
I’ll close with Brahms, referenced in my way in the last two paragraphs. His 1886 (published 1888) setting Op. 105, No. 1 of the Klaus Groth poem “Wie Melodien” has been an earworm for me these past two days. Forgive my bluntness: it is perfect. The first stanza:
“Wie Melodien zieht es mir leise durch den Sinn Wie Frühlingsblumen blüht es Und schwebt wie Duft dahin.” (Groth)
“Like melodies, to me, it passes gently through my mind like spring flowers it blooms and like fragrance floats away.”
I studied this song in my first year of college. I must have practiced the first entrance, a little tricky, a hundred times or more, over and over, so afraid I’d miss it, miss the whole song, that it would float right past me, out the window, and leave me standing alone in a light-filled practice room.
Thanks again for being here with me, across this blossoming span of minutes and miles and dreams and days.
Enjoying all the twists, turns, neat surprises, and flecks of humour!
Thank you for your mindful writing. A thought that came to me was about impermanence. It can be quite disconcerting for some, sheer terror for others. As I meditate on impermanence, and more specifically my own impermanence, I try to consider what it is. Impermanence is not the end, but evidence of a new beginning. It is simply change. All things change. I change everyday. I should hope I am not permanent. That would be incredibly boring. A song with only one solid drawn out note is not a song at all, but a tone and an uninteresting one at that. The beauty of a song is in the syncopated and rhythmic change that tells a sonic story. I will die one day, but I will still persist as ripples on a lake, echoing through time. I think of Thich Nhat Hanh when he wrote, "Enlightenment is when the wave realizes that it is the ocean." I am both the wave and the ocean. I am indistinguishable from the whole except for in the moments that I am crashing against the shore. My only job in this life is to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ebb and flow and be delighted at every change. It is all so fascinating that any of it is here at all.