A Hand In Repair
“How bad is it?” the ER doctor asked me on Monday night. I was clutching my hand, bandaged in paper towels and sport tape, bleeding from a gash via a broken wine glass. “It’s bad,” I said, slightly terrified. The doctor and nurse slowly unbandaged my hand, examining the cut. They exchanged a look. Then they laughed. “We have different definitions of bad.”
Different definitions of bad: a good philosophy to live by. Six stitches later, I’m convalescing, and finding it annoying that I can only use one hand. You could graph out the emotions from a debilitating injury: shock, terror, anger at bad luck or clumsiness, annoyance at the inability to function normally, anger at the slowness of healing, and then, maybe, just maybe, acceptance.
A few years ago, I got a concussion and broken nose. Even a “mild” concussion like mine required me to be bedridden for a week. Light hurt my eyes. Any sound above a whisper felt like jackhammers plugging away at my head. I was despondent for a day or two, and then I gave up and gave in. I just laid on the couch and listened to Leonard Cohen at an ambient volume, watching the Mexican Sycamore tree outside slowly sway in the day.
This convalescene, I’ve insinctually turned to Brian Eno’s Music For Airports. It’s quiet, somber, and open-ended and -hearted. Midway through listening, I remembered Eno created his first ambient music because of his own hospital visit in the mid ‘70s. When my aunt died four years ago, I also turned to Music For Airports, long before I learned that Eno created it partially with death on his mind. Annoyed at the cloying music played in a German airport, he thought, “‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane.” The body knows before the brain remembers.
“At its core, Music For Airports moved to meet worry with relief, a response that lasts longer than any cutting edge ever can,” writes Grayson Haver Currin. It’s returning music to its spiritual roots, less concerned with “function,” more concerned with heart.
Eno’s original liner notes: “Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.”
Music For Airports was created via a system: tape loops of varying lengths, allowed to overlap in a non-repeating, non-composed way. Like clouds, like water. For all of its technical trickery, it’s a handmade album, requiring spliced and stitched tape to make its way through a few tape machines spread around a room.
It reminds me of weaving, the connection between wow and flutter and warp and weft. Hands stitching, repairing. Anni Albers and her systematic textile designs, full of detail, the handmade. Repair as “high art.”
Weaving has long been demeaned as “women’s work,” as “craft,” not “art.” Similarly, healing is demeaned. Healing doesn’t lubricate commerce. It requires time, slowness, a space separate from the capitalist sphere. It’s threatening. And both weaving and healing have been industrialized, made to fit the awkward and life-denying mandates of capitalist assumptions. The ER doctor said it would take about two weeks for my hand to heal. “You can go to your GP to have the stitches removed, or just look it up on YouTube and do it yourself.” Seeing my aghast expression, he reasoned, “hey, just trying to save you money.”
Tikkun olam: the Jewish concept of the moral duty to repair the world, “to return the sparks of Divine light to their source.”
“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.” Mark Epstein (from Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective)