The Essentials of Purpose.
A SONOROUS CALL SOUNDS THROUGHOUT THE HOUSE. From wood-cabinet speakers: angelic violin voices in A 440Hz tuning, stirring cello, bass and brass. First-chairs noodling warm up soul rhetorician phrases. Through crackling vinyl, I attend that moment when the conductor's baton rises, sections hush into athletic readiness; silence before the first measure, an entire Berlin concert hall holding its breath in 1967...
Now, a meat-and-potatoes low-E♭ double-bass. Bassoons arrive in vanguard, sounding their B♭ an eternal four measures later. French horns, distant heroic voices beckoning the sun over the far horizon; strings arpeggiate, hawks soaring above gathering, effusive audile dawn. Soon after, woodwinds and flutes have breezed in, throwing in their lot with the sauntering sinfonietta, an upsurge of voices, arppegios accumulate, swifts joining the hawks, swooping and diving throughout a monumental E♭ major triad; a shepherd's tone invoking the infinte... rising, then falling back. A lone French horn saves the day from silence, beckons the brass heralding trombones and we tumble down into the depths of Alberich's abode in Nibelheim, where the dwarves toil.1 This is Der Ring des Nibelungen,2 chosen at random on a chill Saturday morning. Music meant to evoke the creation of life itself, as the orchestra builds and builds, achieving something both abundant and miraculous.
Nothing even comes close to the sound of an orchestra; it posesses essential qualities: a collection of voices, each embodying different tones and timbres. Arrange them in time and order and they become pregnant with implication. Is musicality an essential component of an orchestra? Return to the tune up; the same collection of musical instruments gathered in a hall, all making noise. It's still an orchestra. Does anyone turn up in evening dresses and dinner jackets to listen to that howling cacophony of acoustic chaos? Not for long. We impose order, first in the form of 440Hz, the note A on the musical scale, or "La" in Solfège. All voices submit to it, sustain it for as long as breath holds out–the strings indefinitely3–but a single unified note is neither beautiful nor interesting. Tone and order are essential to the orchestra, but our performers are wanting something. Toss-in variation, E♭ major, the opening chord of Das Rheingold, more interesting, but without motivation no better than that lonesome technical A. The chord must be permutated, built upon. Arpeggiated through triads; Lifted from forte to fortissimo. Now we evoke and the audience bears anticipation, where will this go? Where will this end? Break the pattern, launch a Tristan chord–F, B, D♯ and G♯–and in that moment between measures, anticipation becomes expectation and where there is expectation we have the genesis of something new: meaning.
Essentialist arguementation holds that orchestral essence is polyphonic sound, variation and interpretive meaning. This is unalterable, an orchestra without musical instruments cannot fulfill the essential conditions of the orchestra and is therefore something else. One can have simulacra of an orchestra, programmed into a synthesizer or software; allow that a keyboardist or non-linear editing can produce a fair simulation of what an orchestra sounds like, but it's fundamentally not; it will be called out straight away as a fraud for its lack of dynamic nuance, missing subtle imperfections in a string's vibrato, or the mundane happenings of a perferomer's life creeping into the performance. The technical marvel simulacrum misses out the essentially human.
Voices shift, the strings own the day. I see Ms. Sharapova, my first piano teacher when Temple of Doom was still fresh; chain-smoking Soviet expat, breath like a three-dog-night Russian Winter and a heart of Slavic gold–probably long dead now, come to think of it; she was old even then. We slung Solfège in the attic music room of her Hackney home. The Do-Re-Mis, really a primer in linguistic syntax. She sang ad-lib Solfège phrases and we enraptured pupils were to fill in the blanks, our eyes glistening with anticipation. All pedagogy rests on a human penchant for systematising, the obsessive attachment of meaning to things. Consider essentialism in human terms, adages like, "well, that’s just human nature," having no idea what is meant by "human nature" except in reference to whatever social error must be explained away in the moment. "Human nature" is simply an immutable, eternal constant you're supposed to understand intuitively and accept. What is the essence in Human nature? Is it a condition of good? Of Evil? Cooperation and kindness? Self-Interest and vanity? What in "Human nature" grapples with the big abstractions like purpose or function?
Marketing tills the platitudinal ecosystem (or platitudinal egosystem?). For example, take the notion "finding yourself," no one knows what that means either. Are we all born of some Platonic ether, split-souled, missing the fundamentals of our place in the cosmic calculus? In postmodern, aetheistic ecology how can a being's purpose exist beforehand? An absurd, dangerous notion meant to sell magazines and tired romantic comedies; guilty as charged, I came from that industry myself. I was a serotonin technician engaged in the art of paying my bills with lies of light. Our enterprise is the reduction of people to economic units, an atrocity too quickly laid by utopian magical thinkers at the feet of capitalism.4 Survivorship involves a return to the desert of the real, but without the gurrantee of years previously assumed, every moment is compact, accelerated, hyper-real. Purpose must be renegotiated in that domain, operating as it always did, but I in it am changed by the experience of disease, by the threat of 27% survival odds lingering in my periphery; now I'm far less apt to gamble away my time on maybes.
Pulling into a filling station, stopping my engine, checking my phone. That essential and irritating gesture sending a cold wave of anxiety through me. The world has moved on and I'm out of reach to the undertow. One work colleague's name stands out in the mounting pile of voices neglected, a voicemail about a shoot, which I’m unable to take owing to the port in my chest. In my stomach a split reaction: happy to be considered, horrified the person has no idea what I’d been through the last year and a half. Cancer Stage IV. Death expectation. Hiatus. Amorous desertion. Desolation. He never even got the news... I summarise it all from a bolgia of rage, keeping it to myself did you not know that I have been to Hell and back over the last year! Did no one in this incestuous creative community bother to mention it? meanwhile outwardly calm, ever professional, putting him in touch with another DP who can do the job. It’s important to recognise the comical absurdities couched in the abject horror of life's accidents. I'm mortified that both of those reactions could exist simultaneously; futility tremens in the soil of The Possible.
A cinch, that gross over-estimation of how often people think of you. Our lives are so busy. This doesn’t arise out of malice, just the dizzying chaos of modern life. Our waking hours clouded by obligation, storms of notifications and demands chewing away like sanity locusts. Even if my colleague did know my situation, most don't understand what having cancer means. There is no cure, it never goes away, only dormant; the possibility of rejoinder ever present. I will remain in that anxiety the rest of my life–however long that is. Every scan, body feeling "off," or doctor's glance thick with uncalm. It’s elementary to underestimate cancer's traumas. I coexist with solemn masculine shame in each neural explosion punctuating the aftermath; paranoia over future abandonments–Justine's mark on my psyche fading unhurried. Huck barks, tossing me out of my skin with a yelp. cPTSD stealing into the synapses. Where was the time to process? I've been in survival mode 18 loitering months. Now a partial remission I thought would never come, the anxiety of time re-opening. Cancer rocked up in the prime of my life, stomping bloody vandal hooves into the comforts of my existence, cellular rape dripping with the betrayals of my own body. Meanwhile, every thing and every one cracked on with life.
As I release the shoot, an inevitable wave of gloom rushes into the vacuum. Why am I not happy to recieve calls for work, even if I can't take it right now? To be useful to the business is to be seen. Once utility is compromised, the business moves on out of necessity. This isn't calculated, merely habit of the species informed by 40,000 years of hunter-gatherer Darwininan pressure. This is the essentialism of industry, everyone knows me as camera department. Imposed by an accident of health, I am unable to satisfy the essential conditions that define Corey Drayton, DP or 1st AC, and so I make my bed on the heap of obsolecence. I express my attempts to affect a lateral move to writing, or some other creative domain, meeting only shrugged shoulders and a unsettling lack of imagination. How simple as ABC, accepting the systematising of people, wages of the Prussian factory education model that comprises the bedrock of Western industry; "people are what they do," another lexical prison. If I return to the industry, that morass of frenetic uncertainty where every day is frought with anxiety, will cancer re-assert itself? Can I ever go back to the work I love? Recalling the months before diagnosis, that unending slump into irrelevancy, the decline of my business, "where is this relationship going" fights with Justine, guilt borne of never being able to plan or promise; feeling a schmuck, a phoney; then an exile from everything I've worked 20 years for; adrift in a sea becalmed.
I worry about returning to this world of inherent contradiction, recurrence guaranteed by the industry. None of the people buzzing around me, going about their work, know the urgent panic of life-interrupted which has its way with my thoughts. I'm adept at masking my true state behind a veneer of calm affability. Meanwhile, my insides resemble something out of A Farewell to Arms; my shellshocked guts convalesce resplendent in Elia Kazan Milanese hospitals, milking their reprieve from The Western Front, their last nerve out to lunch.
The fuel pumps away, otic cold water snapping me out of my interior daze. An old man, parked alongside leans against a massive 'Merica pickup, admiring my dogs sat alert in the backseat, canine cab fares. He makes sharp ears above his head with swollen construction hands, laughing impressed by their wolfy pricked-ear visage. I smile back semiotic acknowledgement with this complete stranger, his blue-collar Carhartt swagger, grinning through a Visigothic biker moustache and a Trump Pence 2020 bumper sticker loud and proud over one salt-of-the-earth shoulder. The denizens of my industry would sneer down their noses at this man; to them he's the enemy. For all their immersion in ways of seeing, few would see the truth of this moment: just two human beings sharing a love of man's best friend. For an instant, I feel seen; like part of a civilisation again.
The pump clicks closed, the teenaged station attendant hustling back to remove it on beanpole legs. I stop him with a glance and send him to service the old man; he was here first. The man smiles and salutes, the sun glowing through back-lit ruddy skin. I throw back a thumbs-up in return, warmth and connection spreading through my insides. These are the unspoken contracts between gentlemen that oil civilisation. He followed Forester's dictum, took a sliver of time to reach out, connect. I returned the favour, offering up the gift of my own convenience. It's the only weapon we have against atomisation.
“What I take from my nights, I add to my days.” Rotrou in Venceslas, 1647. Photo by: Corey Drayton
At dusk, chasing the setting Sun into Portland's West Hills; chasing after a night of boxing. Against my introverted nature, I force myself to say "yes" to social gatherings. How does one rejoin the creative world and all its insincere grandiosity after 18 months of cancer treatment? There is no dignity in week upon week of radiation. How do I explain that I'm not working on any shows or projects because I spent the past year and change in chemo? Nothing inside the same; all drama and politicking that flavours early middle-age bellyflops in the shallow end of the pertinence pool, followed by a tsunami of tedium and guilt, inundating the shores of my civility.
I sing the quiet song of the sigma male, abandon reality for a moment, off to a place where no one will ask me how I'm feeling. The primacy of a sacred and holy masculine space where my burdens, while set aside for a time, are only my own and not the tribe's. I park, stopping the engine, on an alley that may as well be a paved goat path high above the city skyline, texting Vera, letting her know I made it. Every minute feels naked without her presence. Somehow there are streetlights, even up here on this 1920s Model-T alley. Their glow graces the sable lines of my car with Sodium vapour caresses. Backtracking down the alley, pausing between new houses, black like monoliths, framing a shot of the city skyline. I snap a photo, bringing Vera to my landing.
Not far off is the split-level condo, I promptly ring the wrong doorbell. Something that happens frequently now as more of my energy is spent beating back the hypervigiliance Portland lends me; I have too much history here. From beyond neo-brutalist steel doors barks an English bulldog. It's dinner hour and I don't mean to annoy his master. It takes the man eternity to come to the door, I know I'm in the wrong place and could just leave a mystery in my wake, but don't. Politness demands a schlemiel's apology. A shirtless gay torso emerges through the crevasse between door and frame, I offer my friend's last name pointing at the stairs down, apologising with my eyes. I'm sure it happens all the time.
Passing through a wide open front door, following the sounds of testosterone gathering emerging into a living room that would make Teddy Roosevelt blush. A familiar hush falls on the room: As usual I present the only dusky face in a room full of blank expressions. A pheromonal and semiotic, “what the fuck is he doing here“ passing unverbalised through the air of the room. It plays microcosm for my professional stagnation: the only people my colour with whom the citizens of such a space interact pester for pocket change on MLK. I gird my armour–the perfecto motorcycle jacket I wear everywhere, polished to perfection and worth their rent. While not the blatant bigotry of the Jim Crow past, there remains a breach of expectation, a feeling of un-belonging; ironic from the orange man bad camp of least resistance that rules the creative roost.
My host rescues me with a gentleman's back-pat, offers me a drink. I take a little burbon to settle my nerves, thank the gods my oncologist cleared me for it. I need a little liquid courage to travel, from the social hinterland to these upscale spaces. I watch a boxer, the heavy amongst heavyweights, keeping more of his scouse cadence than I did, praying like a knight before battle. His opponent, fullfilling every African-American stereotype, raps his way unintelligibly to the ring. Now seems ideal time for strategic smorgasboard withdrawal. I don't even come from that culture, yet the habit of easy-bake associations proliferated by my own industry are tough to shake. Progressive on paper if not in practice. Collective association is necessity to a modern psyche so burned out on high Allostatic load. Anyone in the room who asked would know instantly my deeper kinship with the scouse boxer belting God Save the Queen into the Las Vegas night–against bromidic American sneers. How to position one's self against the inevitability of perception, the hasty fiction of complete strangers? A constant awareness that judgements are based in a curated reality that I as an individual cannot change. Pangs of shame like glass shards; how many people in the room question my belonging in their class, while a supporting argument plays out on live TV for all to see? Two years before, I was shooting for Rolling Stone, now I'm nobody's second cousin, twice-removed. All my big shows have come from elswhere; my Portland is one of run around ambivalence. No one would guess the things I've seen, the ground I've trod, the luminaries whose air I've shared; the commonalities clouded by paltry assumption. I come from beyond their ken, from the platonic ether of the other, where the map is the territory. It feels a curse to have a type of mind trapped in the wrong body; breaks the verisimilitude of the world. Chuckling to myself in my solitude in the crowded room, recalling "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate..." and like that hallowed replicant, I'm an alien everywhere.
These instances thicken the resistance I have to returning to old trodden paths. The cult of relevance and the American obsession with lanes. Something can be quality, can be creative, can be visionary but is it relevant? Since when did relevance become the primary metric by which to judge the worth of a thing? Relevance has metastesised into the essence of everything. "That’s cool," they exclaim, "but is it relevant?" This is the new opiate, the perceptual vice excreted from post-modernism where everything in the universe has to have some value of social critique. Where is the relevance of cancer survivorship to those who just haven't been there? I step out into the cool air of the balcony, look down on the city like Zeus from Olympus. Reaching out to Vera in the dark, ordering Salmon and potatoes in a faraway Shasta hotel. In our cancer, we can be real across the distance, technicolour where so much else is in black and white.
With me as I move unbidden through the Portland Night is a fichu of melancholy, wrapped about my shoulders. I see Eryn, two years dead now, wishing she was alive to help me divine the path. In ten years I never managed to carve out a place here. Feeling estranged in my own city, a precariat vagabond pitching a shit-eating grin at everyone he knows, "never say die," while hustling in obscurity. There are no straight lines in The West Hills. Everything is steep, narrow swtichbacks and blind corners through a haphazard strata of time and architecture–1920s here, 1880s there. The switchbacks evoke life, we can see our general direction and destination, sometimes the road hairpins back upon itself around a blind corner. We grit our teeth, commit to the turn, hoping there will be no collision on the far end of the arc. Down, down the Hills I go, sodium vapour city lights returning to view, my exit vector–the rare 1926 catelever Ross Island Bridge–sleek in phthalo blue and deceptively close. The lee banks of the bridge once the site of a depression era Hooverville, and may yet be again. I turn, putting the skyline to my back, loving this city for its eclectic beauty and hating it for its indifference.
My thoughts drift to another of my favourite Wagner operas, Tristan und Isolde, its prelude unfolding in the warm space of my car wending down where The West Hills meet Goose Hollow, inline six cylinders hum and purr in an alloy of precision and flair, almost as if they can hear their nation's music and sharpen up, swelling with Bavarian pride. They say this is the music Dali died to, saturnine and inevitable. My thoughts drift to my cello, resting unplayed in the hallway of my temporary home. I blame the chemo neuropathy in my fingers for its neglect, but the decline initiated much earlier in Justine's complaints; she hated the savorless music stand, the intensity of my music boiling her weaponised PTSD day-after-day. As I leave these sheer West Hills behind, joining the skyscrapers rushing past thinking, How many make unholy compromises to hedge dereliction? Therein lies the seeds of resentment, creeping and thorny. At a red light I finger the pattern of a C major scale on the steering wheel with my left hand, imagining the divits in my cello's fingerboard from years of practise, ashamed of my vaporised devotion. I'll have to start from scratch again here too, just as with everything else.
The night rolls on; moonless, dry for February in the Pacific Northwest, cool and electric. Vera waits-up in hotel room corporate light and there's enough time to connect by phone before she surrenders to sleep and I stay up awhile, thinking, puzzling out a way forward elsewhere.
FOOTNOTES & REFERENCES
TC = 0:00 - 11:00
(WWV 86) Richard Wagner's cycle of German operas written from 1848 to 1874. consisting of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.
I can’t help but to be something of a strings supremacist since I play the Cello.
Who cares if the sheep are owned by one group of shepherds or another? The sheep are still owned.