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When Something Breaks

10/21/2017

A long time ago, a few lifetimes ago I’d even say, I had a somewhat mean-spirited and oppressive boyfriend. (Sure, he had good qualities too). In text-book manner of emotional abuse, he had a way of blaming me for everything that went wrong.   We had an argument, one of a thousand. I left the room upset, and slammed the door, and the mask that was hanging on it, a mask that had belonged to his late father, fell off the nail, hit me on the face, fell to the floor and broke. I seem to remember having a nosebleed but it might have been brought on by crying. It was the kind of moment that split time into sharp awareness.
He told me it was my “energy” that had caused the mask to break, and was, of course, upset about it, because the mask had been his father’s, and therefore one of his treasured possessions.
I left that relationship with more ideas about energy than I had going in, and I believe in energy to this day, but my retrospective take on that incident is that it was his energy, or rather, the energy that his father had passed on to him, which was quite unkind to a supposedly beloved woman. I believe that, physics of doors slamming aside, it was that energy which caused it, because it was that energy that needed breaking.
Since then, other things have broken, and whether it’s been parts of my body that pulled or buckled, or objects around me, I have never lost the notion that when something breaks, a certain energy causes it, a certain tension. I always stop to think about what it might be.
And of course, as a songwriter, it is my core belief that there is a metaphor in everything.
Recently, while on tour in Nova Scotia, my foot fell into a rabbit hole. There was no white rabbit rushing me. It was just a careless misstep, and in one moment I was on level land, and the next, I was up to my knee in earth. My foot was caught, and I knew from a previous injury (to the other foot a few years before), that just because it didn’t feel hurt, didn’t mean it wasn’t. I knelt on the other leg and put my hands on the ground, glad there hadn’t been anyone to see me, and I took a few breaths to recover from the shock of it before slowly freeing my foot. It was bleeding a bit and was sore, but it was pretty much fine. I knew I could have easily hurt myself more and was grateful I didn’t.   It stayed swollen and sore enough for a while to remind me of it.   My metaphorical mind told me that something was going on in my life that I wasn’t being careful about. Something about my footing.
And then, I broke my guitar in Newfoundland. No airline to blame, it was just me, ready to head out to a gig, swinging the case over my shoulders, realising as the horrible crashing sound of the guitar against the hardwood floor filled the air, which seemed to happen faster than a second but also in slow motion, that I had forgotten to zip up the case.
I had forgotten, because in the middle of my usual, autopilot routine, I had to leave the room for a while and catch my breath. In the room was a guest of the homeowner's I was staying with, who was horrifically offensive in the way he spoke about women.   I hadn't known how to deal with it, because I was a guest too. I guess I never know how to deal with it.   It was the same week that the #metoo movement started. Just a few days earlier I saw my first hashtag, wondered what it was, and then began to see woman after woman friend of mine post it too. As did I once I understood what it meant. This guy, in that context, and without it, was unbearable. When I came back to finish getting ready, I'd forgotten about the zipper.
The sound of the crash went right through me, and when I picked it up and saw the missing pieces where wood once was, it felt like it was my own body. I was in shock. I must have said, “Oh my god,” loudly and repeatedly for about an hour. My heart was pounding and I was full of adrenaline. A big part of me knew it was fine, and I said so to my friends who were trying to figure out how to comfort me. It’d get fixed or replaced, one way or another. Obviously, I need a working guitar. And obviously, it is still just a thing. I can be very rational and pragmatic, even when I'm panicking. Another part of me admitted I never truly loved that guitar. There had always been something kind of rigid about it.
When the guitar broke, I broke. The drama of the moment had me in shock. It took a long time to calm down and I was worried, of course, that the electronics were busted and that I wouldn’t be able to plug it in and play it, and the show was within the next couple of hours, and I had more shows coming.
I was relieved, in soundcheck, that it still played. In fact, it rang better than ever.
The guy who booked the room offered to take it for me so that he could drop it off at the music shop first thing in the morning, but I was reluctant. I knew I didn’t have time for glue to set. But more than that, there was a part of me that didn’t want to fix it. I wanted to keep the hole.    As I played my set, there was something about it that felt right. With the chunk of wood missing, it somehow felt more like me, more mine than it ever had before. I finally felt the connection with my instrument that had been missing.
I have been expressing myself my whole life, more officially and steadily and publicly than most. But the truth is, there is still more un-expressed, yet to be expressed, than I can even wrap my head around.
The hole in my guitar reminds me, with a combination of jaggedness and fragility, that tension leads to bursting. It reminds me of the pride I have in my various wounds and scars, and of the serious amount of work that lies ahead of me.
And yes, one way or another, I will fix my guitar, but I am hoping to do it in a way that doesn’t hide or mask the damage done. Because maybe when something breaks, the idea isn’t to fix it as though it had never been broken. The breaking itself is a lesson worth preserving, remaining attentive to, honouring the rupture.

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The Beautiful Ugly

10/20/2017

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This essay was submitted to SEITIES photography magazine, on the theme of Portraits, and was titled Portraits: Mystery, Confrontation, and Identity.

They say, in Kabbalistic wisdom, that God is concealed and revealed simultaneously, never one without the other. That is how I feel about portraits. Our faces are beckoning, moving mysteries of constant expression, layered with meaning that comes as much from without as within, and is just outside our cognitive reach.   What does it mean to take a portrait then? Can we capture someone’s essence? Their nature? What meaning does a portrait carry? Why is it beautiful? And what is it about portraits that is somehow confrontational? Why do we stop and stare at portraits with a sense of being challenged, even, and perhaps especially, when they are of ourselves?
I have been staring at my own face since the first time I encountered my reflection and recognised it as my own as a toddler. I should know by now what I look like, and yet, somehow, I don’t. I mean, I recognise myself, of course, in reflections and in pictures, but it is always with the sense of both surprise and reassurance, as if I had forgotten, or hadn’t been entirely sure. I can, (and God knows I often did as a teenager), sit or stand still in front of a mirror, stare directly at myself, and still not be sufficiently sure. The question of what I look like is as much, ‘What do I look like to others?’ as it is, ‘What do I look like to myself?’
The question used to be, and to a large extent still is, Am I beautiful? Am I pretty? I most certainly wanted to be. I played with expressions and angles in the mirror. In some I was hideous, in some, if I held just the right angle and made just the right expression, I was worthy of portraiture, black and white, preferably, classic. But where had my template for beauty come from?   I know that when I looked like my mother, whom I have always thought of as beautiful, I felt reassurance. The notion of family resemblance enchants me to this day. But, every once in a while, when I figured I looked almost like a movie star, my ego would feel quite content. ‘Could I be pretty enough to be a movie star?’, was as engaging a question to my young mind as, ‘What does falling into lava feel like?’ and ‘Are killer bees a real thing?’
I felt both hideous and beautiful most of my life, though the hideousness has somewhat dissipated over the last few years, due, to a large extent, to some crucial utterances I consider myself lucky to have heard. One was a sentence a friend spoke about a movie he’d seen: “The characters’ faces were so ugly they were beautiful,” he’d said, and I instantly knew what he meant, and loved it. It made me consider how and why conventional ugliness can be exquisitely beautiful.   Another was a professor of mine, telling of her first meeting with her new dormitory roommate, whom she thought was very ugly upon first encounter. They became good friends, and she said, “I’ll never forget the realisation that her wonderful personality and my love for her made me see her now as totally beautiful, as if a light had been turned on.” I had had similar experiences with friends, and if love had something to do with beauty, it became clear to me that my sense of my own beauty and ugliness might have to do with the fluctuating levels of my love for myself.
My sense of my own ugliness had to do with two major forces. I was bullied in school. The mean girl flat-out told me I was ugly, and I believed her. I was also a new kid from another country, did not have the brand name outfits, and my body was bigger than the average kid’s.   I was told I need braces when I smiled. It didn’t help that I had freckles. It certainly didn’t help, a few years later, that I had pimples. I felt bulky and awkward. Puberty did not help my sense-of-beauty cause. I had unwanted hair. It didn’t help that I was surrounded by a society in which most every other girl and woman shrieked, “oh my God, I look terrible,” upon seeing herself in a photograph. “I look fat.” “I look stupid.”   It didn’t help that ugly people were called beautiful because they were popular. They were the ugly beautiful, as opposed to the beautiful ugly.
Pictures back then were not digital, and therefore, very few and far between. If yours was an ugly photograph you were stuck with it until a better one was taken.   Sure, there were some redeeming mirror-moments in between, but the photograph was still a grim reminder you were ugly. A roll of twenty-four, used on some family vacation or class trip, we’d wait until it was ready for pick-up at the store, eagerly flip through the sticky rectangles, and at most of them, we would cringe. In these photos, I never looked like the pretty version of my reflection I had hoped would appear in them. Only in a rare few was I pleasantly surprised.
The second force of my ugliness had to do with racism. It never really occurred to me until my big nose was teased in a racial context in high school. This was magnified when I moved to Montreal at twenty-four years old and was recognised by my neighbour for my race. It scared me. She had not said it in a friendly way, and I became more self-conscious about the give-away aspects of my appearance.
When I was younger, I imagined an older version of myself brimming with confidence. I never once thought I would be held back in life because I was too ugly, and I wasn’t. I did think I might never have a boyfriend, but I ended up with quite a few. And, when I wasn’t dwelling, or being made to dwell on my apparently flawed visage, when I was enjoying myself in play, in dance, in day-dream-filled solitude, immersed in my work, in the loving glow of my family, (who told me I was beautiful), or in the sensual embrace of a man, (who implied if not outright told me I was beautiful), I was able to feel beautiful. It came and went.
I drew. I drew self portraits in notebooks. I made thick eyebrows, and a pointy nose, rounded shoulders, not-skinny thighs, and I tried to articulate myself into something I could see and understand visually. I tried to draw my beautiful self. I tried to draw my ugly self too.
I did other things too with my time, like graduate high school, leave home, attend university, work for my living, write and play songs, attempt grown-up love.
It wasn’t until I started singing professionally that being photographed became commonplace in my life, and photos began to appear of me where I was decidedly pleased with the presence of some beauty. There had been the odd one in the past that was alright, and now with increasing number, I would treasure these good portraits of me as if they were my key to everything that was holy: Proof I was pretty. In the photos of me singing I found the most elegance, the most timelessness, the most grace, and that is what made me see beauty. And though that indeed sounds sublime, when asked by a photographer what made me like certain photos of myself as opposed to others, I had to admit, to myself, and then to her, an awful truth: The photos in which I appeared, thin, white and western, were the ones I loved the most. I was ashamed that I felt this way about myself when I did not in the least feel that way about others.
Something else became apparent.   Like young Narcissus at the water, I could not get enough. As more photographs came in, I became fascinated with my own face. Was it insecurity? Was it, indeed, narcissism? Or was it the fact that looking at my own portraits elicited a profoundly uneasy sense of question. Was it an acknowledgment of and discomfort with time itself, passing in incremental moments, possibly traceable from photograph to photograph?
One way or another, the question that hits me each time is, Is that really me?   It is interesting that this question hits me more when I think they are beautiful portraits. With the ugly photos, it is easy to self-identify. In the pretty ones, I almost feel underserving of the representation. Or at least I used to. It took awareness of the social importance of broadening beauty standards to begin to accept good portraits of my ugly self, as beautiful too. It took seeing several beautiful portraits of others to love my own humanity. And there have been some surprising aspects of my own face which I had somehow never seen. Hundreds of photos and still one can come along where I think, “I look like that?” I am grateful for that experience.
What is the magical quality that some portraits have, that turn them from a plain old picture to a mysterious marvel, a window of truth that commands attention? A good portrait is a strong moment made still. It is filled to the brim, almost bursting, with authentic human emotion. It is clear, and if it is blurry it is because blurriness is intentionally being depicted. A portrait knows it is not the full picture, but it makes you want to see more and engage. It is the precise space that hovers in between the now and the eternal. It conceals, as well as reveals. It tells us something we know, and yet brings us into a heightened state of question. There is intense familiarity, yet at the same time there is a total sense of otherness.   The great philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that the encounter with a person’s face is the “event of ethics,” because it brings us outside of ourselves, in attentiveness to the ‘other.’   This seems to be the case even when we look at portraits of ourselves. Portraits, then, demand ethics.
It is no wonder the digital age has unleashed a frothing sea of selfies. The phenomenon is sociologically and philosophically fascinating, and to me, quite understandable.   The great shame of them is that they reveal the ubiquity of sameness. Few are ‘great portrait’ selfies.   A photographed face that demands to blend into a commonplace trope is not nearly as enchanting as a face that breathes its uniqueness through the truth and originality of its expression. It is hard indeed to come up with an original costume, but the naked face is already original. It is a profoundly unique culmination of specific genetics, language-formed musculature, experience, emotion, thought, confidence, and insecurity. It demands to be identified as singular, and by doing so, it reminds us of what is common about our own humanity. Pouty bathroom selfies never do this, because they are significantly unoriginal.   Good portraits make faces new again.
It is for this reason that the art of portraiture is crucial. It is identity-building and challenging, and it asks us to break open our lazy sameness, our norms of beauty, by capturing that exact mysterious moment where the specific and the eternal meet. No matter how many faces and portraits there already are, a new one of value still surprises and engages us. This in itself is as mysterious and miraculous as the fact that a sunset can take our breath away every single time anew.

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When Something Breaks

The Beautiful Ugly

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