Till human voices wake us, and we drown
By
That’s the last line of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It came back to me as a particular thing happened while I was playing jazz chords to “All The Things You Are,” one of the songs I am trying to learn well enough to use as a base for improvising.
If I hold my mind in a certain way, in which I play the chords and don’t think about them, just let an unconscious facility direct them, I get them right. But randomly I wake and can’t even recall which chord comes next. As I get better, these waking episodes will go away.
It occurred to me as I looked up the poem that it’s a problem we’re having now. It’s easy to continue on the old unconsious assumptions, feelings, paths, and hard to wake to the reality of what the US has become. Many people continue to refuse, but the reality is helping break that down. Some will continue with the mermaids.
My colleagues have touched on all the very good articles that have appeared today, except for one that they have kindly left for me. At TPM, David Kurtz is Mourning All We Have Lost.
I’ve tried to post pointers to these feelings on Bluesky, but someone always (ALWAYS!) tries to drag us back to the chambers of the sea, of seaweed red and brown, in the comments, and I delete my post. Kurtz does a good job of describing.
This isn’t a lament. It is not self-excoriation that my hair isn’t sufficiently on fire 10 years into the Trump era. It’s not resignation. It’s an observation that over the course of a decade, the response to repeated losses, the next more serious than the last, takes on certain patterns.
The initial gut punch. The disbelief. The shock, but not really anymore, of another setback. The immediate urge to do something in response and finding few good options. Casting about for someone or something that explains what is happening better than I can. Coming to grips with where the new battle line must now be drawn, but with less confidence each time that it will hold any better than the last one did. Not feeling enervated exactly, but finding it harder over time to direct my energy productively.
Each setback brings its own constellation of losses, often deeply layered and spreading outward until they get entangled with all the others you haven’t yet fully processed.
Last night’s losses are staggering, even when seen through the prism of history, which usually mellows the perspective: a constitutional amendment born of the carnage of a civil war; a century of enduring Jim Crow’s base indignities; a grand mid-century civil rights movement; another half century of painstaking work to try to hold on to those gains.
Seen through a personal prism, the losses are of a small scale but no less difficult to fathom, a jumble of disparate anecdotes and the flickers of fading memories.
There’s a lot more there, definitely worth reading. Jamelle Bouie’s column this morning resonated with me too (gift link). I’m working on a broader view for when we take back a trifecta and have a draft almost ready to share with you. I’m thinking I’ll post relatively rough drafts to get feedback. It’s a project for all of us.
That undersea way of being works for jazz. But what we’re waking up to now requires much work before we can get back to it and live every day without thinking about the damage the President is doing to the country.
If you want to struggle along with me not to drown, help keep LGM going! Many thanks if you’ve contributed already, and the cats would like to know why you haven’t if you can.