[book thoughts] coming through slaughter

[hwarium]

hwa: he blew his trumpet

ondaatje:

He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth will drag a net of air in and dress it into notes and make it last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

Read this if you want to learn how to write music in the most loving, soulful, consuming way.

I loved Ondaatje’s storytelling in Cat’s Cradle and Anil’s Ghost, he feels like an uncle in the village inn retelling stories to a close friend and you find yourself eavesdropping for an hour. (He also wrote English Patient, which is next on my list after A Dictionary of Maqiao). He writes characters with vivid lives that don’t center around the protagonist. It’s completely delightful because there are all these minute mundane details that is brushed into the plot and you can spend rereads unpicking where each thread goes, but you don’t have to.

I didn’t realise he started off as a poet. That is, very visible in Coming through Slaughter. For worse, because I didn’t enjoy reading it. And for the better, because I immensely enjoyed rereading it.

The premise is New Orleans, 1900s. It’s an outlandishly liberal retelling of the life of Buddy Bolden, one of the first pioneers of jazz. It goes through his manic descent into alcohol psychosis so the prose is experimental and poetic. In my head somewhere I understood it’s stream-of-consciousness designed to imitate both jazz improvisation and schizophrenia but I just didn’t vibe with it. The writing itself is beautiful and I kept earmarking pages, but the plot never took on momentum for me. It might be because I read this over several commutes and the scenes were nonlinear and the perspectives kept changing. This kind of writing is best read in one manic session where you get in the zone and stay in the zone.

Summary: One day, Buddy goes missing and his wife hires a private investigator (Webb) to go looking for him, asking his friends and searching the whorehouses, trying to piece together a picture of the man. Webb meets Bellocq, who photographs whores (and scratched their faces out while the print was wet, also based off a real person (warning: nsfw)). Bellocq is also obsessive and he ends up burning his house down with himself in it. So there was a theme there of creativity and self-destruction that’s supposed to be reflected back onto Buddy. Ondaatje, I see you, I hear you, you are valid (but not vibing).

Two things I loved about the book. One, the way he wrote music was incredible.

On his last night Webb went to hear Bolden play. Far back, by the door, he stood alone and listened for an hour. He watched him dive into the stories found in the barber shop, his whole plot of song covered with scandal and incident and change. The music was coarse and rough, immediate, dated in half an hour, was about bodies in the river, knives, lovepains, cockiness. Up there on stage he was showing all the possibilities in the middle of the story.

With every sweet stylised gesture no one could see he aimed for the gentlest music he knew. So softly it was a siren twenty blocks away. He played til his body was frozen and all that was alive and warm were the few inches from where his stomach forced the air up his chest and head into the instrument.

But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot—see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.

When I played parades we would be going down Canal Street and at each intersection people would hear just a fragment I happened to be playing and it would fade as I went further down Canal. They would not be there to hear the end of phrases. Robichaux’s arches. I wanted them to be able to come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased and somehow hear the germs of the start and all the possible endings at whatever point in the music that I had reached them. Like your radio without the beginnings and endings. The right ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

Plus, the scenes about music-making, jazz-making. Of ragtime mixed into gospel, of the conversations between cornet and trombone, improvising on top of guitar. Making music from life, making life into music. Loving music so much that even when you go mad, and lose your mind, you don't lose your music.

He found himself on the Brewitts’ lawn. She opened the door. For a moment he looked right through her, almost forgot to recognise her.

Second thing. My favourite scene in the book, the one that will stay with me, is this moment of infidelity. Buddy’s wife is sleeping with Tom Pitchett, Buddy attacks Pitchett, then runs off to stay with the Brewitts.

You didn’t know me for instance when I was with the Brewitts, without Nora. Three of us played cards all evening and then Jaelin would stay downstairs and Robin and I will go to bed, me with his wife. He would be alone and silent downstairs. Then eventually he would sit down and press into the teeth of the piano. His practice reached us upstairs, each note a finger into on our flesh. The unheard tap of his calloused fingers and the muscle reaching into the machine and plucking the note, the sound travelling up the stairs and through the door, touching her on the shoulder. The music was his dance in the auditorium of enemies. But I loved him downstairs as much as she loved the man downstairs. God, to sit down and play, to tip it over into the music! He would wait for half an hour as dogs wait for masters to go to sleep before they move into the garbage of the kitchen. The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on.

Oh my god. Oh my god!!!! I’m going insane at the triangulations (yes risa I see your 17hols prompt and it has latched on like a parasite). The act of playing the piano downstairs while your wife fucks another man!! But your music being heard = being present during the act of infidelity. What /gets/ me is Buddy loving music so much that he hears the music and understands. After days of paranoia and violence, he has a moment of clarity. He’s physically connected to Robin, but mentally he’s with Jaelin. (scream)

Reminds me of this quote (a 2021 17hols prompt haha)

Not the weight of the body but the fact of the body. Not the shape of the body but the needs of the body. How inconvenient to be made of desire. Even now, want rises up in me like a hot oil. I want so much that it scares me. I don’t know what I’m made of; I wish I did. That I could gut myself like a fish or a fruit.
—Abject Permanence, Larissa Pham

I had a different reading then, but now I’m understanding it as the animal and rational sides of a person. The rational side knows what good for you, but when life is hard, mental illness strikes, you go back to the animal. You take what your heart wants.

In terror we lean into the direction that is most unlike us.

That’s what happens to Buddy in the middle of the novel. He lashes out at Pitchett (by cutting his face and slicing off his nipple. Ondaatje, really?) because he’s angry that Nora is sleeping with him. He runs away because he becomes paranoid and anxious and takes another man’s wife because he wants the WAP. But in that deep moment of hysteria the piano pierces through and holds him down like a hand. ;____; Wow. It was such a powerful scene that showed how music is so intrinsic to his soul. I’m definitely stealing it.

I enjoyed this book so much more on the reread because I understood what was happening in each scene and what Ondaatje was trying to do. And I knew what I wanted out of it, so I read more deliberately in the scenes I wanted to understand. I also didn’t read the last 20% again :’D (he deteriorates in a mental hospital. not fun!!)

(goodreads | Michael Ondaatje wiki)

unrelated but related. I’ve been looping the medley for the anime movie, Belle all day, including while writing this post. Please listen to it, every time I watch the MV I cry.

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