Rhapsody in Mid-Winter Blues

The snow melts in rivulets on the windows, the streets turn to brown mush, undefined precipitation pelts stinging droplets on skin – winter decays. Communication declines down a dimmer, words and phrases repeat, and when someone says it’s just that time of year, the stunted locution cuts straight to some mutually understood, anguished center. In the aerial shot of Lake Michigan on the news, the creep of ice across the water  corresponds to the slow advance of the mid-winter blues.

Carver is working on a bottle of Old Crow and giving us commentary on Raekwon videos while Jonathan diligently mounts pictures on poster board – beside him, Katie fitfully combines pumpkin cookies with milk and pieces of chocolate in a mug. I’m sitting against the refrigerator, looking at an unopened beer and wondering aloud if I really do want to go to this music cooperative performance thing. Nobody answers my non-question. Minutes later, when Carver inexplicably turns the lights off and turns on a Blondie song and the ceiling fan, we continue our crafts and pondering for long minutes before we acknowledge anything has changed. Watching Katie stir her sugary whims, I open my beer. When Veronica comes to get me I tell her I’ve decided not to go, then find myself following her out the door anyways, pockets stuffed with pumpkin cookies.

Huron street has become a whistling thoroughfare for winter wind, and as we made our way to the Yellow Barn, squashing accidental pirouettes in the slush, Ari claps her hands over her exposed ears and retreats from conversation, maybe regretting her half-shaved head, or the careful braid that binds up her remaining hair. I remember the cold hitting my own shaved skull two years ago when I braved the dark January morning walk to Mojo to do battle with the dish room. I remember singing Lana Del Rey softly into the howling dish machine as I burned my hands on the residual hot water left in cereal bowls: Heaven is a place on earth with you/tell me all the things you wanna do.

“What a band of outsiders,” says Veronica as she walks back to our huddle from the ATM on Main street. Un Bande Apart, in dress as in personality: Let’s wear something crazy, Ari had said an hour ago, at dinner. I hadn’t really meant to participate, but a hairy, scabbed knee was now poking out of a large run in my gray tights. I had walked into a sidewalk jaw and knee first last weekend, and my last pair of intact tights had split on contact with the pavement. Over the past month, the icy world has marked me with an accumulation of bruises and scabs on my knees and elbows, visible accompaniments to the deeper bodily pain from the bone-rattling of so many falls.

I don’t mind walking, especially not now, to this show, but I suddenly remember that I do miss driving in cars. I miss the way that sometimes windshield wipers screech to life when you turn the ignition on a clear day, and you remember that it rained last night, or the way that the frozen wiper twitch and groan against its shackles. Most of all I miss the calm role of the backseat rider, who helplessly surrenders to the currents of music and conversation in the front seat and finds herself left alone to touch hot breath, then hot fingers to the cold window, to marvel at the resistance of the frost on the other side to fog-inscribed hearts and initials. In high school, we would fly in rattling hand-me-down cars across the freeway that cut through downtown Grand Rapids from my neighborhood to the west side, passing at the joint of exits (the exits we only took in summer, the exits that heralded that smooth sunny cruise to Lake Michigan, the exits where Julia would say, “Okay, now!” and I would turn on Sufjan Stevens Chicago, or Jimi Hendrix Gypsy Eyes) the place where the crows circled and screamed around the scaffolding of a church steeple. Why are the crows always here? Why only here? I would think to myself. But I was always in the backseat in high school, engaged in my window-activities, and I never said anything about it. Besides, there was something about the sloping elevation of the highway that seemed to compel the presence of the crows. Hadn’t I read a book where the narrator heard laughter from under a bridge? Were the crows maybe the mosquitoes to the still water of some presence that lurked, eternally laughing, beneath the speeding cars?

We pass the YMCA, which feels wrong, and Jay and I start debating whether the Yellow Barn is even on this street. After we try the doors of an abandoned warehouse, I peer around the corner and see the venue, exactly as I remembered it from my melancholy experience at an EQMC show a year ago. The boy who had taken my ticket at that other show had already been a kind of phantom of my past, and we exchanged ghostly smiles when he stamped my hand. I had left that show early, wondering if the time that I knew him had been a kind of painful last adolescence, after which I wouldn’t have such acute feelings about small things. I wondered: were the repeated, numbing fingertip burns of the hot dishwater inevitable? Should I have worn another pair of gloves?

The boy who stamps my hand at this show is a stranger and he processes our transaction in complete silence, using unexpectedly confusing hand gestures.

The crowd is respectful, and family friendly – a baby wearing tiny noise cancelling headphones sleeps soundly through the entire first act. Before intermission, there are several acts: a dancer accompanies a bassist with a scorchingly sweet voice, our friend Isaac plays acoustic guitar to accompany stories about how, by scavenging out of panda express dumpsters, he sometimes tried to bring down the system by eating it (the audience/stage setup placing his conversational insanity within a properly appreciative context), and a man plays keyboard composition with an aching, fluid theme.

After the intermission, a man materializes at the microphone and explains that he is going to tell a story. This particular story is from the Ramayana, and will describe how Hanuman, servant of Lord Rama, demonstrated his love and devotion for Rama by taking a mighty leap of faith across the ocean from Southern India to the Himalayas in order to rescue Rama’s lover, Sita.

Finished with his introduction, man begins to sing – first of Rama’s perfection, of love for Rama, of Rama’s trials, of Rama’s love for Sita. Two drummers follow the narrative with precise, quickly changing rhythms, and voices appear from nowhere, chanting, humming, singing in synchronized harmony with the performer. The lights flash, and a disconcerting fraction of the people sitting on the floor rise and dance wildly between the seated audience and the performer, as though to willfully hide him, allowing us to see only the story and adulation of the story. Where is that voice from nowhere?

The nuances of Hanuman’s feats may have escaped me as the rhythms overpowered me, but I heard that he loosed himself against the empty sky, that as he rose to leap, ‘a thousand trees rose with him. I heard the gasps of the choking animals of the earth when Hanuman’s father the Wind protested his death. I heard the wind cry, “My heart is broken. My cup of rage is full.” Like the most carefully composed piece of musical theater, the temper of the melody corresponded to the narrative; meanwhile, the drumbeats fell like the invisible punctuation of a line break, imbuing the words with poetic syntax. I felt a familiar pain when Hanuman landed on the mountain, and his jaw struck first. Mine too, I thought, rubbing the bruise on my jawbone, and not too long ago.

The performance ended to a standing ovation. Still clapping, exchanging excited comments on the performance, my friends and I drifted unconsciously from our seats to the front of the crowd, trying see what was behind the dancers, to grasp at the last threads of the story – but all that remained were the drum kits, lit by flashing pink and red lights.

By the time we left, the winter night had cast off its decay. The snow was falling crystal-bright, new and hard. The temperature had plunged, and the cold stung my exposed knee as if in mockery –  you thought winter was done? Just because everyone’s got the blues?

I imagine that I am leaping across Lake Michigan to rescue Rama’s lover. I will find her in the backseat of Ravana’s car, tracing her own initials inside of a frosty heart, dreaming of spring.