This Mess Must Have A Meaning

PS March 14 I’ll be performing in NC with my friend Peter Askim and the Wilmington Symphony Orchestra. Much of that work, which Peter orchestrated, was found in collected objects.

PSS Follow along with the Gables renovation @thegablesraleigh !

A few days ago, I dumped out across the floor a box that had been sitting in my office for something like seven years. It had been covered with a striped textile, remnants forgotten, labeled (in mind only, not really) FROM THE GABLES. My aim was to figure out why I had kept all this stuff from a boarded up motel. Nobody else wanted it. I narrowed the box contents, with difficulty, before a threatening hurricane, and trusted that one day far off the contents would tell me their secrets.

What a mess of mislaid pieces lay before me in my office. Why had I been immensely attracted to the story of this waylaid hotel and its artifacts? Bright orange lettering, beveled thumbtacks, ink and stamp, company envelopes, handwriting, a tiny colored vase, a flowered tea cup – the liturgy of place spread before me like a strange family table. I plunked myself down to meet the cousins. The mess must have a meaning.

I am, of course, a similarly incoherent constellation, chipped and akimbo. I’m looking for messengers, totems, kindred spirits, something familiar on the floor. I’ve written a lot of stories where nothing happens, where I would, for instance, travel a great distance internally via mundane objects in a green office. But this time, much – at first very, very slowly and then somehow very quickly – has happened since I first packed this box. My two year old became a fourth grader. The Gables rezoned, planned, permitted, sat dormant. A pandemic and a banking crisis halted hopes. Facts died, realities polarized, headlines blazed and elementary school remained the center of our little lives. I paid the bills and packed lunch somehow but hardly. And while the objects rolling around inside of me included regret about the sometimes underwhelming sex life of single mothers and some basic human loneliness, happiness and spontaneous laughter seemed more where I fixed my gaze. I took the kid on a tour, the hotel got a loan, I made a record. Jean and her friends told me I laugh too loud. The accidental poetics tumble across the floor marking the chapter even if I still can’t tell you what the story means.

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My own materiality, quick, incongruent motions, trace something around me in an unknown language. I spend my days chasing it – the worn in and worn out wearings of care — for the fleeting seconds where it all lines up and the overture comes in. Whatever goes or went wrong, the day to day showing up trying hard makes a mark I like running my hand over. The last song I tried to write before going into the studio was about how all the best things that have happened to me had no bragging rights. They were humbling moments, not showy victories. It seemed worth singing out loud that being part of something larger than ourselves is the best we get and more than enough. (True to theme, I didn’t finish the song, I just had a good time rolling around in it.)

But there’s no getting around that everything here is on the messy cusp and soon I have to say finished and mean it. An album years in the belly, a motel collaboration years in the making, a child turning ten. The album left my body nearly urgently. The child is still a child but not really. The hotel is a long list of decisions in spreadsheets, electrical sockets longing for lamps and leftover glasses.

I’m trying hard to enjoy the just before the before and after, but I honestly hate it. Outcomes make me nervous. I’m southern: optimism invokes curses; celebrating is hubris. The final moments of the race and the results are disorienting; I’d rather live in the doing with my head down. The end in sight part reminds me how I have no control of anything and soon, I’ll have to find some new question worth tracking.

Artist Anna Schuleit first told me about the Buddhist principle “good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” Finishing energy is specific, frenetic, a touchpoint with larger questions of meanings and, worst of all, value judgements. Even if I bury myself in liner notes, tour what ifs, opening dates shifting, floorboards and construction meetings, I cannot put off for much longer that life moves forward. In the transition, I will have to confront the misgivings of the present and my place within it. To be without my silly cocoon of meaning and the routines of the last chapter scares me. Isn’t that funny? I’m writing a story about staring at a pile of inanimate objects, I can’t get through my list of things to do and ultimately, I’m terrified of that list running out. Cue the overture.

Outside, the day is warm and spring is upon our little town. I find two lawn chairs, pull them across the Gables construction site. Through the weeds, through the mud and gravel, in front of the new windows and beside the old beat up sign, I place them carefully. It seems a great distance has been traveled in about a hundred steps. I am in search of a sleeping porch, a napping partner, the feeling of a chair in the sun with someone beside me. I call a friend to sit with me at the edge of the mess, as if it were a seashore where we will sit without words, or a few words now and then. Will you come sit with me, I say, as if it is a most important job. We watch the traffic go by as if it is a most important ceremony. When no one is looking or talking, after a certain number of cars go by, I relent to the plan I cannot see. I relent to whatever comes next, without fanfare. The mess has a meaning, and isn’t so much that I know what it is but the street is the ocean, and the precipice is just where we dangle our legs.