The myth of Sisyphus
Chapter 12: A fridge filled with ginger ales, the town where Shelley died, the mistress and the mother, Tumblr at 5am (sublimation), the heir to the Italian jam throne, the title of the book
Dear reader,
This week on the internet I learned about the girlbossification of Sisyphus. You’ve probably seen the video — it’s a warped neoliberal take on Camus’s 1942 essay. Lately I’ve been wanting to revisit some old recordings. Maybe I’ll start posting them on here, because this already feels like 2012 Tumblr. On Tumblr I’d post the shittiest songs that weren’t even close to done. I had so much fun. Anyway here’s a crunchy little demo I did two Februaries ago, a rough lullaby called Sisyphus (absolutely ungirlbossified). Needs work! Love you all, always, xo.
My overnight shifts in the ER can last over twenty-four hours. Usually I’ll get about two or three hours of sleep, and if it’s busy I won’t sleep at all. If you look at the electroencephalogram (EEG) of a person drifting from wakefulness to sleep, you can watch their brain waves change. In our waking state, the EEG tracing is mostly beta waves, which are dense little scratches across the screen. As we get more relaxed, the waves stretch out and get slightly taller. These are alpha waves. In university I thought I wanted to be a neuroscientist, and I worked in a lab that did experiments with EEG. I’d recruit study participants and spend thirty minutes attaching electrodes to their scalps. This involved a soft plastic cap with sixty-four corresponding electrodes that I’d attach while trying not to tangle the wires. I’d explain that the electrodes were recording the electrical activity at the surface of the brain. I’d explain the computer task they would perform as I monitored their waves. Essentially they’d click a button whenever they noticed an image on the screen disappear. The task took about an hour and was extremely boring. If I saw their beta waves drift into drowsier alpha waves, I would pause the experiment and offer them a ginger ale. The lab had a fridge filled with ginger ales and nothing else. I was never allowed to drink them. Alpha waves also appear in states of “flow”. Our brains produce them when we meditate, or when we become absolutely absorbed in a task, in a blissful sort of way.
The VHS tapes of my early childhood portray a smiling baby in her mother’s arms, reaching quietly for a cone of gelato. I was born in Italy, in a small town on the Ligurian riviera. My brother is also in the shot, a lanky teenager, and we’re sitting in a sun-dappled café by the sea. My mother says she bought me a tiny focaccia every day, a focaccina, and for dinner she made me pastina, which is a tiny star-shaped pasta. Strangers would say they’d never seen a happier baby. I know from my family that those were hard, sad years. But they still talk about how beautiful it was: the smell of jasmine in the street at night, grilled fish at the restaurant by the marina, the thirteenth century castle on the cliff. Our town is where Percy Bysshe Shelley died. He was shipwrecked in a storm after a trip to meet Byron, in Livorno. Byron died two years later in Greece. In the hospital where I was born the nurses called me La Greca, because that was where we were from. Our town was a place where pleasure was so constant, so obvious, that I wonder whether it held us together a bit longer. But I’m not sure, we moved when I was too young to remember it.
When I was twenty I went to live in Italy again. This time I lived in Bologna, where I learned Italian properly. There was a restaurant in the city that everyone liked, which was a tavern in a basement that looked like an ancient cafeteria. Bologna is a city of students because it’s home to a famous medieval university founded in 1088. There are many things to do, but not enough Roman or Renaissance art to attract much tourism. That was why I went. The painter Giorgio Morandi lived in Bologna, and he painted over a thousand still lives of glass bottles and ceramics. His apartment is now a museum, which is filled with glass objects, vases, and vessels. It’s surreal to witness the physical objects he painted from, after seeing them in paintings hundreds of times. In Bologna I shared an apartment with a 40-year-old Italian woman who loved yoga and didn’t speak English. She was dating a man who worked in the city but lived an hour away in a town with his wife and teenage son. She was his mistress. Sometimes I’d see him coming out of her room and I’d dread having to speak to him. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She didn’t have kids but she could have been my mother. On Sunday afternoons we’d paint still lives together in the living room, and on weeknights we’d make pasta and sing along to Mina, her favourite singer. When I left Bologna we wrote emails back and forth. By then I was deciding between grad school in neuroscience and freelance writing. To my mother’s horror, I chose writing and went to grad school in the humanities. Around that time my Italian roommate wrote something I still remember: “Continua così, vedrai che capirai sempre più per cosa sei fatta.”
Sometimes a new song will appear in my head out of nowhere, usually in a dream or in the shower. When this happens I’ll spend a few minutes humming voice notes in my phone to capture the mental sound before it disappears. In the evening I’ll start recording and mixing the first draft, building the initial impression into a scaffold of vocals and instruments. Sometimes I’ll work for ten, eleven, twelve hours without stopping. In those hours I imagine the surface of my brain emitting a flood of alpha waves. In my early twenties I’d record a demo in a single night, and post it immediately on Tumblr. Some nights I’d stay up until 5:00 am. The process itself was euphoric. But the song always sounded better in my head. The more I made it real, the further it felt from the dream. Real instruments can rarely do what they did in my head. In the dream there are notes and chords that don’t exist in real life, because I don’t think they’re actually sounds, but feelings. It’s not surprising I went into psychiatry. To sublimate a feeling, in a sense, is to render it sublime. I don’t post my songs anywhere anymore, because they never feel good enough to show. But I miss showing them. I don’t know, must be the mortifying ordeal of being known. I think this is why it’s hard for me to finish songs. But honestly I should really just post them, like I used to do on Tumblr at 5:00 am.
In Bologna I met a law student with whom I quickly became infatuated. He was from Alto Adige, the northernmost province in Italy. His family was one of the largest producers of jam in Italy. They were famous; he was the heir to the Italian jam throne. When I told my roommate about him and said his full name, she said “aspetta — like the jam?” My crush on the jam magnate was visceral to the point of physical pain. Before he and I became friends I’d sit and read under the porticos outside university buildings, waiting for him to come out so I could pretend to run into him. I think everyone did this when they were twenty. His English was good because he’d had an American girlfriend a few months before. My Italian was good, and I liked that we moved comfortably between languages. We’d go for long walks and drink Czech beer in small dark bottles. I’d get on the back of his bicycle and ride across the old city to have tagliatelle al ragù with cheap red wine. One weekend we drove to Rome, with his mother. I sat in the back of the car while he drove us, and I watched his right arm shifting gears for hours, the way I used to watch my father when I was small. The whole thing was fantasy. I barely remember what we talked about. I told my roommate how much I liked him, and she said if he liked me back I would know. After I left Italy and all the coiled up eros of those months, I sent him an email to confess my crush. He said he didn’t feel the same because he wasn’t over his American ex, who’d moved back to California. We still have each other on Facebook, and the last I looked, which was years ago, he’d dropped out of law school and spent most of his time warning his followers about the evils of vaccines.
There is a manic quality to the last hour of an overnight shift. It’s a mild euphoria, a grandiosity, a frantic energy while presenting the cases you saw overnight to a room full of doctors. In those moments you feel more articulate and poised than you ever have before, even as you stumble through the stories of people suffering in the chairs and stretchers of the ER. The long night is over, you’re about to go home, and you feel so relieved. The people who know me know that my purest state is a state of barely rational joy. It’s a feeling in which everything is fantastically beautiful, while remaining firmly commonplace. It’s why I love the dump, the old men in burgundy scooters, the Italian cookies that felt holy. The glass bottles Morandi painted hundreds of times. It’s a feeling you might have in a song, for a single moment, when you hear the perfect note. The note fills you with so much feeling that you listen to the song again, just to feel that one moment repeated. You can’t fast forward because the moment doesn’t exist in isolation. It relies on the sounds before and after it to exist. I think joy isn’t joy until we’ve lost something. We lose the people and places and health we took for granted. Joy doesn’t exist in isolation, it relies on the feelings before and after it to exist. It sounds sad, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels sublime. It feels like the real song on the recording, not the sounds I heard in the dream. It’s the regular pleasures we had in our beautiful town, even as everything was ending. What else could we do? We laughed and reached for the cone of gelato.
Love,
E
P.S. Here’s ‘Sisyphus’ :)