Write your way out

When I was in New York a few weeks ago, I saw Hamilton (the Musical). Although I bought the tickets months ago, I made it a point not to listen to it before I actually saw it in person. I'm not sure why - it wasn't exactly about "spoilers," because, well, I know what happens in that story. I think it was more wanting to try to see it without all the hype pushing in and, for the most part, I think it was a good decision. I enjoyed the show - it's smart, and impressive, and tear-jerking, and thought-provoking, and brave, and a little bit weird.

But, I think I'd like to see it again, somewhere in the distant future, when it feels less like an event and more like something I can relax and enjoy. For one thing, the audience seemed to be older and wealthier than most other shows I have seen. My impression is that Broadway audiences tend to skew a bit older in general, I imagine because of cost, distance, and other issues involving access. Given the intense popularity of Hamilton, all of these issues seemed to be exacerbated and the audience was definitely older, and whiter, than a lot of other shows I have seen. Those things aren't necessarily a problem, but they are particularly noticeably with a show like Hamilton, that itself is so diverse, and young, and "scrappy."It made it feel more like a see and be seen kind of thing, rather than an experience with an audience that was really loving it.

Also, it was hard to enjoy it outside the hype, despite my efforts to the contrary. I'd waited so long, and heard so much, and I was just trying to soak it in and experience it all. That type of pressure makes it difficult to be transported by the performances, no matter how great they were,  The immediacy, the music, the small audiences, the intense emotions - all of that is often conducive to the kind of rapture I want from musical theater. And some moments in Hamilton got me there, most noticeably in the songs from the Schuyler sisters. and in the whole Unimaginable sequence. Overall, the second half affected me a lot more than the first, though again, the whole thing is very impressive. I think it just got me more on a cerebral level, which I enjoyed, but which didn't transport me the way it has many other people.

That said, I've been listened to the music the last couple of days, now that it is available through Amazon Prime, which has only confirmed my initial impression that it is the most textual musical I can think of, especially in that second half. There are numerous references to both the prodigious amount of writing that Hamilton produced (the Federalist papers, the Reynolds pamphlet, his work as Secretary of the Treasury), Hamilton's compulsive need to write "as if he is running out of time," and Hamilton's fixation on his own legacy. As he puts it,

    I wrote my way out of hell
    I wrote my way to revolution
    I was louder than the crack in the bell
    I wrote Eliza love letters until she fell
    I wrote about the Constitution and defended it well
    And in the face of ignorance and resistance
    I wrote financial systems into existence
    And when my prayers to God were met with indifference
    I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance

Here, writing is both public and private, something that defines Hamilton in all the spheres of his life. In fact, the above song "Hurricane" is prompted by Hamilton's own impending personal scandal. His response? "I'll write my way out."

Most interesting to me, however, is his wife's response to this Reynolds Pamphlet. Eliza sings "Burn," where she too acknowledges both the seduction of writing -

    You and your words flooded my senses
    Your sentences left me defenseless
    You built me palaces out of paragraphs
    You built cathedrals

And it's potential for betrayal -

    You published the letters she wrote you
    You told the whole world how you brought
    This girl into out bed

Eliza's response? In contrast to her earlier plea "to be part of the narrative," she now refuses not only Hamilton, but future historians, access to her body, her feelings, her thoughts, by refusing them access to her own writing:

   I'm erasing myself from the narrative
   Let future historians wonder how Eliza
   Reacted when you broke her heart

She burns Hamilton's letters as a response to both his desire for a legacy and the present's prurient desire to know the most intimate details of the lives of public figures. In other words, she refuses writing, or more precisely, refuses to be written (even, of course, as we are enthralled by Miranda's writing here and throughout the musical).

What really got to me, however, was when writing went from something to be refused to something inadequate (even, again, as that inadequacy is evoked through song) in "It's Quiet Uptown." As that song starts,

   There are moments that the words don't reach
   There is suffering too terrible to name

And from there, concluding with the female survivors taking the reins of the narrative in which masculinity generally dominates the story. There, at the end, Eliza and Angelica write the story of Hamilton - here, Eliza says that she put herself "Back in the narrative" - even as the refrain of "who lives, who dies, who tells your story" echoes. It's an interesting irony, because even though the dominant theme seems to be asking us to think about who tells the story, the song itself starts off with reminding us that we have "no control" over that story-telling. So, we might wonder who tells "our story," but really, that narrative is beyond us; we'll all be written by someone else, regardless of whether, like Hamilton, we are writing like we're running out of time.

The Islands

So, I am sitting in my hotel room in Honolulu. The windows are shut, air con on. I am wearing a hotel robe, munching on dried seaweed, responding to portfolios. My luggage is back on Kona, though I am on Oahu. My driver's license is back at the Macy's in Sherman Oaks, though I fortunately had my passport. My credit card is also at that Macy's, but that's okay, because a few days earlier, someone in Canada stole it and began their lifelong dream of committing fraud to shop at Wal-Mart and McDonald's. Oh, and my luggage is on Kona because the plane taking me from LA to Honolulu blew an engine in the middle of the ocean and so had to chug it's way to the nearest stop (sorry, Kona!).

It's been a day.

But it's my first time in Hawaii. As I like to tell friends/family/random people, it's one of the five states I have left to visit. It's also a state that has moved across my imagination from time to time in various and oddly juxtaposed ways: most of my immediate family has been here (without me), which is a bit of a twist; the fourth chapter of my dissertation focuses on a text (Juliana Spahr's The The Transformation) that is partially set here; Dog the Bounty Hunter took place here. I'm not even joking about that last one - what shows like Dog and Storage Wars and Parking Wars all have in common (for me) is that they show how the "reality" of a place is far more than it's postcard promise. It's the same pleasure I get from crime novels: these are what the streets actually look like, these are how the people actually live, this is what it means to actually survive. All kinds of texts give us that "actually," but not all occur on places that are seemingly so at odds with the mundanity presented. Storage Wars in California is interesting, but in Texas, not so much. And Dog the Bounty Hunter fell flat when he went on the hunt in Colorado, but in Hawaii, I was intrigued.

So, now that I am in Hawaii, I have that so-called realism echoing around the back of my head (the meth, the repeat drug offenses, the glimpse of indigenous people living and working and navigating the complex colonial history of Hawaii as it plays out in tourism and drugs and poverty) combined with Spahr's own haole anxieties about academia's (and language's) colonizing force combined with my family's simple, nostalgic love for what truly is a beautiful, foreign and familiar place (and which, of course, is not without its own colonizing effect).

In her essay "In the Islands" from her collection The White Album, Joan Didion talks about coming to Hawaii with her husband in lieu of getting divorced. They stay at The Royal Hawaiian and she looks at the other rich people (the people "like her") feeling disconnected from them and herself. She then gives an account of the hotels history before moving onto a discussion of a cemetery for the dead from first WWII and then Vietnam. The essay, though, is really about how people own places through language, how certain places are forever associated with the writer who gave them life (she lists Hemingway, and Faulkner, and, in reference to Hawaii, James Jones).

I think she's right, in her way, because many of us do associate places with writings about them. One of my favorite habits is to read a crime novel in the place I am visiting. I like the kind of ownership those books display about a local place and that I can then vicariously feel. But I also think Didion's "being right" is also what makes Spahr and even Dog (the show) "right" - Hawaii is a place taken over (for me and for, I would imagine, most of its visitors) by all the forces that have permeated it over the last century, so much so that the only reference to native Hawaiians I encountered today was in the numerous complaints people made about the difficulty in pronouncing the street names.

My Grandparents' House

The house my grandparents' lived in for over 70 years has been sold. My grandmother died in January and, as my grandfather has been gone a few years now, maintaining the house, located as it is in rural Missouri, isn't the most sensible thing to try to do. So, my mom and aunt decided to sell, a decision I know has been difficult, as my mother spent her childhood and then a good amount of her adult years in that house. It's quiet there, rural, along a gravelly-road, and it has been the only place I've ever known my grandparents to be. There's a lot of memories: my grandfather making breakfast; my sister and I walking with him out in the woods; my nephew and I picking blackberries, hearing grands and grandma in their bedroom, talking softly at the end of the day; all of the times they welcomed so many people into that quiet space.

Now, with the closing in less than a month, we've been trying to go through the house. It has 70 years of memories, which means it also has 70 years of things. Some of it is amazing, like the trumpet my grandmother played in middle school or the black and white pictures of my grandparents, and of their parents and grandparents, going back at least 100 years. Some of it is touching, like the drawers of unused cards that my grandfather kept around to make sure he didn't miss any occasion. And some of it is like stepping back in time:

What gets me about this cabinet is not so much the fact that my grandparents kept black pepper and tumeric for decades. It's that these aged spices weren't crowded out by newer replacements. There are not rows upon rows of tumeric and salicylic acids, hoarded away. There's just these one or two containers (with maybe a few other types of acid). But there isn't the present-day accumulation crowding out and overwhelming these relics of the past. There's just this small collection of spices - and kool aid? - from decades ago.

I like that it feels like a snapshot in time, but it also feels a little ghostly. Removing clothes, going through papers, sorting through photographs - all of that is sad, and emotional, and difficult to do. But going through the kitchen, with its half used products and familiar breakfast dishes and echoes of so many meals spent around that table? That feels like saying goodbye.

I've been thinking about that more lately, what it means to say goodbye or to keep saying goodbye. A few weeks ago, I stopped by the cemetery where they are buried. I debated whether I would stop there from pretty much the time I went through Springfield. The cemetery is not far off I-44, but I wanted to get back to OK before it was too late. I also wasn't sure exactly why I wanted to stop: I don't believe my grandparents are there in any spiritual sense, I don't believe they can see or hear me, I don't believe my stopping there does anything for them. But I did stop, because I felt like I should and I felt like I wanted to. And, as I sat there alone, I sensed that being there did bring me closer to my grief, even if it didn't bring me closer to my grandparents themselves.

I was in Oklahoma when my grandmother died in her hospital room in Missouri, Although it was already late, my sister and I drove up there. That was another moment I wasn't quite sure why I was going somewhere, to see someone who no longer could respond to being seen. I knew I wanted to go up there for my mother, who had spent so much time and love caring for first both my grandparents and then my grandmother, and who now would be without them both. But why did it matter to see grandma? I don't know. It feels wrong, disrespectful to talk about seeing her body, still in her pajamas, still with her nails painted, and it saddens me to think of her last days being in a cold, sterile hospital room. But I think that maybe, in those last few moments before the funeral home took her away and the business of burial began, being there felt like keeping a promise, that even with them gone, they wouldn't be left alone.

Which is all to say that grief, unsurprisingly, is selfish. From my grandmother's death to the graveside visits to the clearing away of their beloved home, it's all about how I say goodbye, or let go, or come to terms, or feel crushingly sad, about their deaths and all the deaths that their deaths make me consider. And, surprisingly to me, that grief rose to the surface in opening a cabinet to find a row of spices that no one had used in many, many years.