Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein

Author:Peggy Orenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Something Blue

MUSIC IS A MADELEINE. WHEN I am ninety-four—if I am ninety-four—and the details of my life grow hazy, I am certain I will still be able to call up every lyric to Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the way my dad, even when otherwise incoherent during our wool-carding sessions, would rally to “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Blue was the first album that grabbed me by the throat, the first vinyl record that I actually wore out. A budding guitarist, I pored over Joni’s open tunings and chord shapes, trained my voice to sound like hers, or as close to it as I could get. My vocal range has narrowed and dropped with age (as, to be fair, has Joni’s), but I can still warble a creditable “Carey.” Nor do I have to wait until senescence for the songs to hurtle me into the past. When Blue pops up on my Spotify, I am instantly transported to my chilly childhood bedroom, the lights shut off, cloaked in early winter twilight. Behind me, taped above my headboard, is Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” scrupulously copied out in multicolored Flair pens—would I remember that detail without the prompting opening notes of “River”? The record changer arm is up so the disc plays on repeat. My sixteen-year-old self listens to Joni and cries, the sort of luxuriant tears only available to those who have not yet experienced real sorrow. “I’m so hard to handle,” Joni croons, “I’m selfish and I’m sad.” Yes I am, Joni, that younger me thinks, yes I am.

These days, I don’t have time for a romantic wallow. No, that’s not true. Of course I do—especially during quarantine: it’s not like I’m going anywhere. There is plenty of opportunity to brood and languish. It’s more that now, closer to life’s end than its beginning, I have to be careful, parsing out my blue in small bits that won’t overwhelm: the azure of paths not taken; the midnight of standing at my mother’s grave; the cerulean of watching my daughter fill out college applications; the slate of days long past, and the cobalt of knowing how long past they are. That’s what it is with blue. The color forces contemplation, wrapping you in an almost—but not quite—pleasant quilt of wistfulness, remorse, reverie, regret. It is not black—blue is gentler, less resigned—but it is close. Goethe wrote that blue’s power is that it perpetually recedes, not meeting us, but forcing us to move toward it. Picasso, of course, had his blue period, Wallace Stevens his blue guitar, Leonard Cohen his famous blue raincoat. Jazz standards assure us that blue skies smile and bluebirds bring happiness, yet that is at odds with the truth of the blues: of “Mood Indigo,” of Kind of Blue (another album I wore out), of Billie Holiday and Howlin’ Wolf. No one, by the way, knows for sure how the blues got its name. One theory holds that it comes from the indigo-dyed cloth some West African cultures traditionally wear when they’re in mourning.

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