Rising like smoke from the mystical fire of the heart...”
- Bruce Cockburn, Messenger Wind
Those lyrics have been engaged in some flagrant, go-ahead-and-try-but-we’re-not-going-anywhere-street-corner-lamp-post-lingering-around in my brain lately.
Word loiterers.
Verbal stray cats.
Lyrical dark alley vagrants.
A dear, old friend did it to me.
Committed the ear-worm crime.
Turned me on to that Cockburn tune and those lyrics.
“One more voice...in the human choir...”
“One more voice...rising like smoke...”
“One more voice...from the mystical fire...”
“One more voice...of the heart...”
One.
More.
Voice.
My last ‘Rona Tale entry was February 2.
That’s like 10 months ago.
Dam.
That’s a blog-o-sphere eternity.
Every intention, desire, and urge to write again has lurked, surfaced, submerged, and routinely ghosted me.
Every self-imposed-promise-and-self-threatening-deadline was in place to write again and more, lots more, much, much more and much, much sooner than now.
To take advantage of my Tale’s momentum, so to speak.
To ride my story wave, such as it is.
To not lose a single, on-the-edge-of-your-seat, riveted reader.
To...to...to...what’s that sound?
Crickets.
And here we are.
A quiet, silent, gray, Fall afternoon.
I feel guilt.
The difficulty, I think, is embedded there in the plot.
The plot of voices.
Lots of voices.
1,000 voices over time.
Voices I wish I could hear again.
Voices I could hear right now, in the present, with a call.
Kind voices, sweet voices, beautiful voices.
Voices I wish would dissipate, never to be heard, ever again.
Take the lyric of the old War song, “Spill the Wine”, and instead of girls, apply it to voices:
“Long ones, tall ones, short ones, brown ones,
Black ones, round ones, big ones, crazy ones…”
Voices.
My voice.
If it helps, back up, pull up and read up on the previous ‘Rona Tale.
Yes, the one from February 2nd.
The one where the plot took a weird turn.
The one about my lung thing, the vocal paresis/paralysis thing, the structural change in my anatomy thing, the not-so-much-glitter thing, and the chaos of moments thing.
That one.
The plot of voices.
So many voices.
My voice.
I’m not insane.
I hear voices all the time.
If you’re alone and honest, so do you.
Real, ghost-and-bone, spirit-and-flesh, human-choir, moment-in-time-people-I’ve-known-and-now-continue-knowing voices.
I scroll through my memory, stop, pick a face, and I can hear a voice.
The tone.
The phrasing.
The laughter.
The timbre-pitch-tonality-resonance-and-emotional color.
Voices.
Always present.
Always heard.
Actually, this stop-and-pick-a-face-voice-recall has a name.
“Musical hallucination”.
It’s a neurological reality that was discovered in 1964.
In a classic study from that year, researchers asked subjects to close their eyes and imagine hearing Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas.”
Try it.
Seriously.
Stop reading and imagine hearing the Christmas Crooner do his thing.
Following 30 seconds of silence, over half of the subjects said they had heard the song playing in their head.
Five percent said a record had been playing.
The psychologists concluded that an auditory image could be generated from imagination alone.
Modern brain scanners have confirmed the “White Christmas” test.
In a 2012 study, subjects were shown lyrics of popular songs.
Half of the subjects heard the song as they read the lyrics, and the other half imagined the song as they read them.
Pretty wild.
(From The Necessity of Musical Hallucinations, Issue 20, The Nautilus Science Journal).
A voice is a powerful thing.
A memorable sound trigger.
A gentle, fickle, grace-infused, formidable instrument.
A provocative gift.
A.
Gift.
It’s still rough.
My voice, that is.
I still struggle with singing.
Thinking about it.
Wanting to do it.
Doing it.
Thinking about doing it.
Wanting to think about doing it.
Not doing it.
Avoiding it.
Pre-covid-and-covid-related-chaos in my life, there were things I never thought twice about doing.
Regular, routine, run-of-the-mill, mundane, life-things.
Signing my name, for instance.
A second-nature task if there ever was one.
Endorsing a check recently, I had to stop for a few seconds to let my head and my hand cooperate.
Reacquaint themselves.
Get their act together.
A Covid-related-stroke-brain-fog-mental-physical-connected glitch.
A truly authentic WTF moment.
Moving a paintbrush around, that’s another never-think-twice-about-it-life-thing.
Pretty important activity for me these days, post-near-death experience.
Until and unless something else materializes, it keeps my family fed and a roof over our heads.
Real-world activity.
Sometimes the motion just stops, mid-brush-stroke.
A twist or two, a pause, a hiccup, a lull requiring a reset.
A just-push-play cue.
Happens a lot.
Enough that it’s frustrating.
Discouraging-ish.
Head and hand stuff again, making pit stops to check in with each other.
A “dam, what’s next?” suspension in time.
And the voice.
My voice.
My little gift.
My little broken gift.
Just to be clear, when I write about “my voice”, there’s nothing career ending going on here.
I didn’t collect enough paychecks from singing to survive.
Not good enough or lucky enough.
Depends on perspective, I suppose.
(The checks came from another career, a spiritual one, one I sense I’ll start writing about next…)
Truth is, if no one ever heard another note float from my throat, no tears would be shed.
No one would notice.
No one would be sad or feel empty or, if I’m being brutally honest with myself, really care.
That’s not a bid for pity, that’s a cold stare at reality.
Life is rolling on.
It’s me.
All me.
It’s a fallen piece of me I can’t seem to remedy.
“A pursuit outside one’s regular occupation, usually for relaxation”.
That’s the definition of “hobby”.
Never cared for that word.
Stamps, butterflies, coins, model railroad cars, bonsai trees.
Hobbies.
Not that there’s anything wrong with collecting or creating or curating any of those things.
Singing is just, so, so, non-detachable.
Non-collectible.
Non-I’ll-buy-more-add-more-make-more-trade-more-find-more-able
We get one.
One voice.
One.
It’s an anatomical thing.
A one-of-a-kind, physically built-in instrument.
Cultivating a voice feels like a word other than “hobby” should apply to.
But like the saying goes, at the end of the day…singing was my bonsai tree gardening, I suppose.
So, no.
No job-ending crisis transpired here.
Just what once was a regular, routine, run-of-the-mill, mundane, life-thing for me, interrupted.
Or to slightly alter the words of a Jack White tune, “corrupted, disrupted, interrupted”.
A shift occurred.
A repositioning.
A movement.
A moment.
A passion-dampening-identity-tampering-that-was-a-huge-part-of-me-this-sucks-what’s-happening-mind-fuckery.
That’s all.
No big deal, right?
“Hobby” halted.
I’ve played out a couple of times, but guarded.
Like bumper bowling, only for singing.
Like singing with somebody else’s voice.
Like opening somebody else’s gift.
Like losing something and not knowing where to look for it.
Like being afraid of what you’ll find if you look too hard.
“The quickest way to become a joyful singer and artist is to accept that…you sing differently than the greatest opera singer in the world, that you sing differently than whoever is at the top of the charts, and that’s just amazing in itself. Your voice is a unique blueprint…your voice will always offer clues to the heart.”
So writes Emm Gryner in her book “The Healing Power of Singing”.
I read about Emm - one of David Bowie’s backup singers - ordered her book, and I’m reading it now because, well, voices.
She’s right.
“Your voice is a unique blueprint…your voice will always offer clues to the heart.”
Unique.
Clues.
Heart.
Healing.
One.
More.
Voice.