Retrograde
Grief & Facing the Music
Just a quick note before reading- this writing is about grief. If you are overwhelmed by grief in this moment, it’s okay not to read this right now. But if you’ve been going through grief for awhile and want to reflect on that experience, this reading may be helpful.
“When you see black, lay back”- that’s what my college band director would always say. “Black” represented a dense passage of rhythmic notes when you look at a musical score. “Lay back” meant to relax, play the phrase, not focusing on each individual note. Find the pocket or the groove.
Musically speaking, playing while locking in sync with the beat is called ‘in the pocket’ or you can picture the motion of someone marking time with the beat. Getting a little off the beat, but still in phase with it is called syncopation. Syncopation can create a sense of groove or the sensation of wanting to move when listening. According to Victor Wooten in the book ‘The Music Lesson’, imagining the groove allows you to feel the music before you listen to it.
But what is a musical term for fighting the beat? There is no musical concept for that, because that’s not music. According to Stravinksy, music is defined by its forward motion and its succession. It’s pertually moving forward and it moves us forward with it. We couldn’t imagine music moving backwards or us moving backwards against the music. But if it was possible and there was a term for it, to move in direct opposition to the beat and the groove, perhaps it would be retrograde.
Grief
I’ve been sitting with myself, trying to understand my journey over the last couple of years, and not just with the pandemic. As it happened, I was wearing masks and quarantining before COVID-19, while receiving treatment for Leukemia in 2018 and 2019. While it was no laughing matter, I still kept it light as much as possible.
At my local hospital, as they initially told me that I had a probable Leukemia diagnosis, they said something like ‘we’ll have to send you to the Oncology center at a hospital two hours away to confirm and receive treatment. You’ll have to take an ambulance.’ My immediate response was to the effect of ‘y’all must got me fooled, I’m not gone die TODAY, and I’m not gonna pay for an ambulance ride, either. I mean, did I lose the ability to drive because I have too many white blood cells?’ Thankfully, a dear colleague of mine drove me to the hospital and sat with me for awhile as I transitioned into treatment.
Fast forwarding to today. I’m here and I’m healthy. But something changed in me within the last few years; with the cancer treatment and recovery, but also with loved ones dying, a complex relationship breakup, professional concerns, and being completely overworked as the earth said slow down. Because of the layers of my experience, many of which you might relate to, I’m talking about both individual and collective grief in this writing.
It’s been a confusing and disorienting experience for many of us in a myriad of ways. Some have been blessed to have a job and be healthy, but even with that, perhaps it has seemed like we have continued to move totally against nature’s rhythms during the pandemic. We are all in retrograde.
We knew what life was when there was a sense of daily rhythm. It was in the pocket or perhaps there was a little uncertainty- but still some type of groove. Even when life was not great, the regular rhythms that we came to expect shaped some feeling of normalcy. But what happens when grief and uncertainty become our grounding? When nature’s and our bodies’ rhythms are saying slow down, but work and capitalism are saying keep going and speed up? Or when there is little rhythm to move me forward? Sometimes you have no choice but to turn back and walk through it, to be discomforted, to question…..everything. To face the music.
“Show Me Why You’re Strong”
The Music — in this case, is James Blake’s 2013 song/video ‘Retrograde’. If you haven’t heard it, stop and listen to it now, and then come back…..
The aesthetic foreground of the song isn’t the lyrics as much as it is the engrossing music and the deep feelings it brings you as a listener. But after experiencing that feel, which I’ll talk about more below, you might make some sense of certain phrases.
To me, “show me why you’re strong” and “don’t let the hurdle fall” feel like the voice of survival telling you to keep going. Maybe you had been building towards something and now grief is here to stop you in your tracks; or perhaps you were told by your employers, administrators, or teachers to keep working to maintain a sense of normalcy. “Be the girl you loved”- translation- hold that shit together even though everything around you has changed.
While going through the pandemic, it seems like several people I’ve spoken with have had the experience of watching a television show where a bunch of people were standing close together with no masks, and having a cognitive dissonance- like, telling the people on the TV, “y’all need to be put some damn masks on.” But the ‘Retrograde’ video doesn’t give that sense. Even though there are no masks, the aloneness in the video resonates with the isolation of the pandemic.
“Suddenly I’m Hit”
Make It Make Sense
“Suddenly I’m hit, it’s the starkness of the dawn”. The lyrics here function well to index the story, but they are not the essence of the experience. It’s the music. The sound that comes in at the 1:44 mark of the video, almost leaves the person who’s been trying to be strong to say ‘I’ve tried to hold it together, but now I’m hit in the face with this wall of overwhelming feelings; and it’s also sliding in from under my feet; and enveloping me from this side and that side.’ It is utterly stark- “striking”, laying me “bare”, but also it’s “distinct” and “evident”.
Immersed in this sound, I don’t have words as thoughts, but I do have sensations and feelings that might have some word fragments attached. It has laid me bare, to sense and to be, at once, “breathless”, “trembling”, “tense”, “frozen”, “open”, “electrified”, with a “heaviness”, a space to breathe, and in some ways “relaxed”.
Some of these words obviously seem opposed to one another. There is an incomprehensibility to grief. Or rather, there are series of experiences that don’t make sense. There is so much feeling and music to face. And sometimes there is numbness. And sometimes you are stuck.
It’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to do nothing but be in silence. It’s okay to ask for help. Many times it feels like too much.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
The incomprehension of a retrograde experience is partly because of how the world used to make sense. There was direction for movements, language for experiences, and instruments for sounds. But now, as Maya Angelou stated in ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’, “the world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve.”
It’s interesting to me that the sound in Blake’s Retrograde, as alluded to at the end of this performance, required an instrument (the Moog Taurus 3) that is scantly recognized and seemingly could not have been produced in any other way. Similarly to Samwell Tarly finding out about the significance of dragonglass in ‘Game of Thrones’ or Lekan communicating his encyclopedic knowledge of maji history and ritual in ‘The Children of Blood and Bone’, I wonder in what halls of which proverbial grand library they came to find this perfect sonic source to voice the unspeakable?
Almost as if they had asked, what instrument can express such depth and range of feeling? Both intensity and vulnerability? A sonorous drone, but not one that is vacuous, but rather spacious, allowing for the sounding of one’s voice, even in the midst of the confusion with the unspeakable.
The quality of the sound made room for the hum of the voice. Within the confusion of grief, where expression (particularly of words) can seem meaningless, it’s the hum that says, ‘I’m broken, but I’m still here’; at the beginning of the song, perhaps the hum represents the holding of and being with oneself in the aloneness. It’s what kept me going. That hum was my voice in the tension between trying to hold it together and learning to let go. The intensity of the drone sound almost consumed me, but in the midst of it I found a way to acknowledge and hold myself.
“We’re Alone Now, We’re Alone Now, We’re Alone Now”
In grief, I acknowledged the existence, the importance, and eventually the expression of my feelings. In navigating the most intense parts of that process, though I was learning how to be alone, I didn’t do it alone- but with a lot of therapy, support from family and friends, and journaling. As Hip hop artist Saba expresses about grief in the song ‘Calligraphy’, I learned to “Write it away, write away, I just got tired of running away, running away”.
Grief stays with you to some extent. As many people say, you don’t get over it, but you learn to move forward through it. And in the midst of grief, you find refuge, defined as “a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble”. It’s the idea being safe from pursuit for me — of finding shelter from the external pressure to keep going and the safety from the internal pressure to run away. I’m talking about the shelter from expectation of being anything different from finding your own rhythm and facing the music in the way that you can, when you can. But also knowing that you indeed can face the music. In retrograde, you may find some type of refuge. Not getting over it, but refuge within it to continually go through it.
Through grief, I learned about vulnerability, empathy, being present/holding space, acknowledging myself and my feelings, and about humanity. So now I don’t only carry grief, but I carry those things with me. While not celebrating going through grief, I’m a more grounded person for having gone through it. And if you’ve experienced going through it in a different way or are still in the thick of it, it doesn’t have to look or feel this way. Your experience is valid.
But I do hope that someone has found more than just words in this blog post. I hope something was meaningful. I hope that you can acknowledge and feel valid in your humanity in whatever experience you are in, and in whatever place you are in within that experience. And that when you are ready, you’ll find your expression of it. It’s not the words of me or anybody else that will mean the most in the end, but it is your voice and your expression. As Maya Angelou stated:
When told the following — “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.” she wrote, “I memorized the part about the human voice infusing words. It seemed so valid and poetic.”
As I leave you with that, here are some things to breathe through and process any big feelings you’re experiencing right now:
If Beale Street Could Talk Soundtrack (One of my favorites to relax and breathe through)