Losing Music by John Cotter

Author:John Cotter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

—ALICE NOTLEY, IN THE PINES

The Trauma Test

Albert Camus called the feeling of the absurd—the feeling, for example, that my ears might be dying for no real reason; that I didn’t cause this, or that few of us cause all the misfortune that befalls us, or particularly deserve it (nor would we particularly deserve reprieve; we don’t deserve each morning’s sunrise)—a sensation of “sin without God.” In Camus’s metaphysics, the only thing to do in the face of the absurd is to revolt: to look the absurd in the eye and to carry on, to insure the absurd does not break you.

How could I look the absurd in the eye? I had one idea. Lighthouse was sending teachers to a homeless shelter in eastern Colorado as part of a community engagement program. A new shelter, Fort Lyon, had been a prison when I first fell ill. Before that it was a VA hospital, and before that a mental institution, and before that a cavalry fort, the one from which the Sand Creek Massacre was launched in 1864. A hundred and fifty women and children and elderly peace-minded men of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were slaughtered in a matter of hours. The stables where the cavalry’s horses had been fed and watered stood in back of the fort, the oldest buildings on the site. Colorado Coalition for the Homeless was bussing people into the fort from around the state: Grand Junction, Pueblo, Trinidad. They needed teachers. I needed a change.

Before I signed up I paid a visit to my psychologist, Carolyn, a worldly woman in her seventies who dressed sharp as a dart. She settled tidily into a plush chair and crossed her legs. I told her I hoped a month among people who’d suffered extremities of loss might help me to feel less alone. Teaching at the homeless shelter might make me feel useful.

I had a good home with Elisa, but disability is a well-traveled road to homelessness. I thought also of those ninteenth century Ugly Laws: if you were disabled displaying yourself on the street, you were presumed to be begging. My own trauma had been easier, so far, than that of the residents at Fort Lyon, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have plenty to learn from people so intimate with loss.

“I worry you’ll be lonely at the shelter,” Carolyn said. “You might feel very lonely, even abandoned.”

I barely listened. “I’m lonely here.”

When I first started talking to Carolyn, I’d faked a kind of bonhomie in her office until I started to feel myself really becoming that way around her, and then around others. It was probably medicinal. And it freed me up to expand our catalogue of subjects. It was Carolyn who first told me about John Speke, marooned on an island of Lake Tanganyika in 1858, spear tip of the imperialist assault. Speke convinced himself an insect had flown into his ear, one that began “with exceeding vigor, like a rabbit at a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum.

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