Sometimes, I think it won’t ever get any better than a far-off night on the roof of a friend’s dorm, a group of us watching a storm come in. Oh, and eagerly listening to each person’s completion of a particular challenge: get from situation A to B to C in exactly six sentences. Maybe you’d have to make a clear path from the biology lab (A) to a one-eyed dog (B) to Alice Cooper (C), or the cathedral spire to a stack of pancakes to a zoo-fleeing lion. It goes without saying that creativity and cohesion of narrative were prized—but they weren’t the point, and this wasn’t a competition. It was simply that we were there, that we had no qualms about anyone hearing what might come out of our mouths, and that we were stupidly enthusiastic about doing whatever we were doing, together.
The diversion morphed at some point into a related, paper-based lark I would only later discover had a unique history, and an unusual name to go with it: exquisite corpse. The Surrealists first adapted an old parlor game called consequences, turning it into a sort of collective improvised drawing experience—but then thought using words would be just as amusing. All you did was write a sentence down on a piece of paper and pass it to the person next to you. As you carried out that latter step, you’d also be receiving someone else’s phrase. Everyone would then add their own sentence, fold the paper so that only the most recent phrase could be seen, and pass it along again—and so on, until you reached the end of your respective sheets of paper, said paper was unfolded, and each person read the full story, top to bottom, with predictably hilarious results.
It all came back to me the other day as I read another essay by Roland Barthes. In “Musica Practica,” the author talks about the difference between “the music one listens to, [and] the music one plays.”(1) As opposed to the latter, in which music is something physically enacted and therefore, physically felt—fingers on the keys, chin steadying the violin—hanging around listening to the radio, or even sitting in a symphony hall, is a passive activity. Enjoyable, sure, but not lived in the same way that making those notes come out of a piano or oboe or your own mouth is. Barthes also asserts that as the (European) aristocratic and/or bourgeois customs of playing with and for others faded away, so, too, did the presence of amateur musicians. As a result, we have amazing professionals, but are left without the longing those amateurs, performing right in front of us, stirred: “the desire to make that music.” We’re left now with “the technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing.”(2)
Well—OK. What I’m about to say is probably not what Barthes had in mind (his statements were the prelude to a larger argument about Beethoven), but I can imagine that when faced with these professional technicians, part of the problem is that they’re so very good that making any sort of attempt to do what they’re doing seems impossible. And then the thought of singing alongside them, even if you know you won’t attain their level, even if it’s just at a dinky party where everyone’s belting out “Happy Birthday,” just seems entirely pathetic, sad. Why even try? You’ll only humiliate yourself. I want, then, to include in that amateur-inspired yearning to make music (or any form of art) the additional belief that we’re capable of producing it.
Look at how that belief might be fostered in situations it seems Barthes has discounted in his lament for the bygone amateur: the small-town local band everyone calls on for weddings and fish fries, the church choir, the drum circle, the jam sessions. Small bars and live music venues that count on office clerks who just like getting together and playing for beer money, or for nothing but the chance to play, period. I’m guessing if you called these performers technicians, they’d rightfully take it as an insult—because what they’re doing isn’t about perfection, but something more participatory, more inclusive—maybe not even totally about the tunes themselves. Not that the musicians aren’t practicing every chance they get, or that they don’t wow the audience with an amazing solo now and then—but if that audience is doing nothing more than studying closely how effectively chord changes are being made or a harmony followed, if they’re not dying to dance or get up there and sing, or just tap a foot, feel it in their bodies, something’s wrong.
In college, I went to a hole in the wall on Tuesday nights—for the band, yes, but also for the crowd that loved them, for the one ancient guy who’d just stand in the middle of the floor in the midst of jumping kids, one arm held high and wrist doing its own sort of funky homage for a solid two hours. On a good night in a good honky-tonk, even if you’re just leaning in a corner and nodding along, even if you’re just swaying one frail hand in the air, you’re still helping to create the atmosphere that’s keeping everyone there, the very feeling that brought all these people together in the first place. You’re still helping keep the music alive.(3)
Honoré Daumier, Trio d’amateurs. Public domain image courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts and Wikimedia Commons.
I remember all these amateur musicians, and I think about writing. I think about all the workshops and classes and readings I’ve attended; I think about all the online venues I’ve tried to figure out—including the one that’s hosting this essay. I don’t regret having gone to or made use of any of them; some of them have probably even helped me sort out what to do about the fact that I can’t not write. But it seems all those programs aimed at churning out Successful Writers, or celebrating those deemed to have achieved that title, weren’t doing anything to feed that amateur-sparked desire to produce one’s own creation, much less instill in us the belief that we were capable of writing at all. Faced with one more round of take-downs being passed off as honest—hence, noble—critique, what I inevitably sensed instead was that the goal was to create technicians of an accepted style or form of writing, and make the others who wouldn’t get in line feel so bad about themselves in comparison, they’d just drop out of the scene altogether.
Of course, Barthes had a sense of what writing was; in this essay, it means knowing what to do with the music you were hearing, “Just as the reading of the modern text… consists not in receiving, in knowing or in feeling that text, but in writing it anew, in crossing its writing with a fresh inscription.” I have the sense many a workshop truly believes it’s giving participants the tools to do just that; as Barthes says about good composition, it “is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write,” writing meaning taking some sort of remainder, as he calls it, that hangs around after the music’s been played, and getting to its heart by tinkering with it on your own.(4) Instead of accepting a piece of music as is, hearing it, and saying yep, done, and going your way, for Barthes, good composition—and, I’ll say good writing—wants us to keep wrestling with what we’ve heard, pass it on after our hands and hearts have messed around and left their mark, have changed it in some fashion. That doesn’t mean pushing the bassist off the stage and offering up your interpretation of a solo, or furnishing unsolicited advice on how he could improve a few bars—but I’m guessing it might at least mean letting the music burrow into you, accepting the music’s offer to participate if not in its performance, at least in the continuation of its existence.
I’m looking back again at those rounds of exquisite corpse: being handed a thought, and being expected to run with it. Being asked to do nothing more than keep the story, or the game—the writing—going, to leave your mark and get the next person to do the same. Had anyone suggested how to improve upon the process, how to maximize the hilarity; had anyone tried to be king of the stylistic hill, the magic would have crumbled, resentment wafting around at the good, easy thing we’d had going, now gone. No one was there to create a masterpiece, and a successful game required a solid cluster of players; no individual, regardless of how spectacular, could carry the thing alone. If you wanted to be the star of your own story, you could go off in a corner and play Mad Libs. You could park yourself in the other room and write your big novel.
Is this why so much writing can feel so alone, and so vulnerable? You’re left there in a solitary corner, after all, with only your own mind to do the work, no conspirators to toss you a bone or laugh delightedly at the product’s beautiful imperfections. No audience to take your music and dance as you’re playing it, no friendly phalanx to defend against a world of critics. You’re left there to feel the full strain of amateur playing, tension twisting every little sinew into overthinking knots. If you were a technician, though—would it be any easier? Or would you just look more polished while the anxiety and frustration ate at your bones, still wondering what you were handing off, and whether anyone would really love it enough to make it their own?
(1) Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” in Image–Music–Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: The Noonday Press, 1977), 149.
(2) Barthes, 150.
(3) I admit the chances of Barthes’s having known of, much less experienced, a roadhouse, would have been slim. I would love to have seen him in one.
(4) Barthes, 153.