Happiness Is A Chord and I Don’t Know It

“You’re not gonna be able to get that on a plane with that.”

My mother was looking at my guitar, which, strings undone, I was filling with all the clothes I owned. Booklessly, friendlessly, I was reluctantly traveling, not out of joy, but because I didn’t know what else to do. What happens when sadness overwhelms you? I’m not wise enough to say. The cheater’s way is to keep on moving, and so I was moving, from Philly to anywhere and everywhere, on a destination-less road. My guitar was my new home, my new suitcase, my new paper-world and friend. I’d developed an unreasonable, almost morbid attachment to it, like a Catholic church that clings to a dead saint’s hand.

The funny thing was, I couldn’t really play it. I’d traveled with it through four different countries, and before that, four different states. People kept assuming I was a musician — “Play me a song, baby girl!” — and I always had to disappoint. Not only was I still learning but under eyes I become paralyzed, unable to play. I’d named the guitar in the name of courage, Prince Andre from War and Peace, a character who in my mind was always running, armed with only a flag, into an enemy crowd.

I’d bought Prince Andre in a moment of blissful happiness, and now carried it like a talisman. It drew people towards me: musicians, artists, people from the crowd. In the New York bus terminal a drunk Mexican homeless man started serenading me, singing me a Spanish song about a weeping guitar. In Philadelphia, hearing I’d bought the thing in New England, my friend performed an exorcist on it, to purge it of Super Bowl bad luck. Prince Andre drew magic, and I needed all the magic I could get.

Five months back, something terrible happened — My four year relationship ended suddenly, abruptly, with a betrayal, and I learned I’d been long living a lie. I was devastated, far more devastated than I could have imagined, spending night after night sobbing, overcome with pain. Even worse, it didn’t get better, only contorted, turning into a depressive stupor, a loveless depression, a heavy, hanging, desire to die. I wore it like a stone around my neck, and it dragged me down constantly — into sleep, into lazing, into staring out the window for hours on end. Over the last few months I have felt more pain than I thought it was possible to feel — every day seems to mark a new instrument of torture created in my imagination, a new way of feeling pain. It’s meaningless, sourceless, and seemingly endless. It’s humiliating and cruel.

What makes it worse is that it has no reason for being there: My life, in every sense, is wonderful. I hate the ungratefulness of the pain, a kind of egotistical distortion, and the great well of self-pity that I seemed to have found. But I have long known there is no ‘why’ to pain.

I limped to Vancouver, visiting one of my best, oldest friends. I hated the city as I’ve hated no other place — there was a beige feeling about it, a sterile security that made me feel mad, mean. I missed Philadelphia desperately, couldn’t understand why this friend from Philly could like the place over our grimy, vital home. Greg had always been effortlessly happy, which has the unfortunate effect of making me feel like a bad lab experiment when I’m down. Amongst his friendly, happy, successful friends I felt like a weird, evil flower, snuck into their paradise.

Greg, nevertheless, tried ceaselessly to rouse me. One day I stumbled upon a book on color theory, and seeing that I’d been distracted from my usual semi-catatonic indifference he launched eagerly into discussing it.

“Oh this is one of my favorite parts,” said Greg, flipping to a particular page. It was on color relativity: the author had taken an image of the color wheel, cutting out a triangular section to represent a pallet. The center of the triangle, wherever it landed in the wheel, was the neutral, and would appear so in any given painting. White, in a golden-lit room, would appear golden, and blues turn to greens. In this transformation, your mind reads blue as blue, white as white, but if you hold up white or black paper you see it is something entirely different.

“Every color is entirely relative to those around them,” said Greg. “Blue can look red, depending on those around it, you see? Seeing neutrals as always whites or greys or blacks is a trick of your eyes.”

Greg had gotten together a little band of fellow artists learning instruments, and they’d hold jam sessions. I, too embarrassed, too depressed, would mostly watch, except in smaller groups. He was playing something called the omnichord, and he’d shout out notes to the others to keep them on track:

“And then the happiest chord of all — C!”

I smiled to myself. In all the sad songs I knew, C was never happy, and I thought it was just like Greg that he’d think of C as happy, and just like me that I’d think it had a tragic sound. It began Bob Dylan’s ‘I Threw It All Away,’ a sweet note to demonstrate a lost happiness. In Johnny Cash’s ‘I Still Miss Someone’ the dead leaves are C, the cold is in C, and he remembers lost love in C. In Cash’s version of ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails, the needle is in C, he tries to kill the pain away in C, and everyone he knows goes away in the end, all in C. When Bob Dylan starts knock knock knocking on heaven’s door, guess what note the final knock hits?

But there it was, some shitty Catholic gene I’d gotten stuck with (no wonder the religion that ensures your suicidalness also forbids birth control, otherwise the Church would’ve died out generations ago) had established the chord as a sad one in my mind, a happy one in his. There I was, stuck in my blue pallet, him in yellow, him with Rebecca Sugar, me with country songs. My favorite chord was E minor, the two-fingered chord, resonant and deep, dark, pulling at one’s core. I was attached to the sadness, to these sad songs, to this sad chord.

Sadness like that puts a strange film across your eyes, and I’d gaze at my yellow-palleted friends like I was a spider in a zoo exhibit, envying a liberty I could only observe. Every obstacle that confronted them they’d overcome easily, every thought seemed to come with sugar on top. One mean word, a glance, and I was writhing with anger and envy, with hatred that filled me, stinging me inside. I wanted to curl up into every shadow: I was an ugly, hateful, harmful thing.

There are moments, many moments, when I feel so very broken, I feel that I should die. I watch my life narrowing, feel my own sadness so self-consciously, a burden to all those around. The best I can hope for, I think, is a limping mediocrity. For some, success is a struggle, and for me, even living is.

I limped to San Francisco, staying, again, with a friend. Brian’s roommate turned to us, interrupting our conversation: “Anyone have any good ideas for a funeral?”

His friend had shot herself in the bathroom of a donut shop. Me and Brian speculated: I said people could all share stories, Brian spoke of a Chinese funeral tradition, where you burned little objects that represented the deceased.

“The worst part is that her dad cremated her,” said the guy. “It only costs six grand to cryogenically freeze someone. It’s just a matter of time before someone comes up with a way to revive people — there’ s no scientific reason, no law of physics that calls for the necessity of death.”

“Would you want to live longer?” I remember asking. “I can’t imagine wanting to come back.”

“Really?” he said, staring at me blankly.

“Yeah, I feel like one life is more than enough.”

He looked at me for a moment before returning to his laptop.

Right, I remembered. Some people actually wanted to live. It’s impossible for me to conceive of, fantasizing, night after night, about being dead. The most I could accomplish, it feels like, is outliving my parents. Or planning some way of killing myself where no one knew I was dead.

I limped to Beijing, this time barely saving Prince Andre from sure destruction in the baggage check. On a friend’s couch I returned to the guitar, my fingers stumbling poorly through the chords. With the stone around my neck everything felt symbolic — My friend, perhaps the least artistically minded person I knew — took it up, and, having not played it for ten years, played perfectly the chords to ‘Blackbird.’ Then he put down the guitar, disinterestedly, returning to his phone.

Well fuck me.

I’d begun feeling a nauseous embarrassment when it came to the instrument. I stopped playing my guitar. I stopped writing, singing, eating, stopped everything. I realized, once I did, that all the songs I knew were sad ones, and all the words I had were sad ones, and all the songs I could sing were sad ones and I’d rather not eat than eat alone. When I was happy, living and writing in Bulgaria, surrounded by animals and trees, the songs would add a new texture to my happiness, a depth.

“Aural emotion.” A philosopher, Feuerbach, described music as such. A note pulls out a feeling in you, it ‘pulls on your heart strings.’ My favorite note to play was E minor: Two-finger, resonant, dark and deep. If Greg was the happiest note I was the saddest. I played Cash because I loved the feeling of his deep notes in my lungs, his dark thoughts in my head.

Last year there’d been a switch inside me: Music, which I’d put away for years, had opened up to me again. My fingers stumbled on my instruments but it was opening up my mind: I was learning the connection between emotion and the vibration of a string. Feuerbach, his ‘aural emotion’ — I listened with fascination as the insipid lyrics of Kanye’s “Famous” passed by meaninglessly, but as the Sister Nancy sample hits an unreasonable happinesses would rise up within me, an ecstatic joy. How could sound be so much more powerful than words that come before it? I played my simple chords over and over again, trying to find out.

Through my four chord songs I figured out how verses could change their whole meaning depending on if they end in a D or a G. One can feel triumphant, or sad, on the floor. A quicker strum — up five frets up or down, we’ve turned tragedy to triumph, triumph to tragedy: Johnny Cash is now on the run from the police, and fuck his girlfriend because he thought he was her daddy but she had five more!

“And then C — The happiest note of all!” I pay attention to it now, following it through songs. And I realize something: Here the C is happy, here the C is sad. Here it is a launching point, and here it is a let-down. It changes color depending on the colors surrounding it: It can be blue, it can be yellow, or pink.

Alone in Beijing, I pick up an old four-chorder that my friend the Exorciser taught me. It’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel — he made me laugh by imitating to perfection the warbling high notes of their singer. I like to joke that it’s the happiest song I can play— a song about Anne Frank. It’s a fast-paced, strumming song, that gives you a sense of wonder and joy, if you like it. I play it for the first time in months.

And there’s one part that goes like this: E minor, C, G D. As I was moving from E minor to C, the saddest note to the happiest, and the words — now we sleep where we don’t know — moving perfectly, with ‘now we sleep where we’ in E minor, ‘don’t know’ in C, as I played that bit, something broke in me. I’d cried almost every day for a few weeks, but this time it didn’t feel like bottomless pain. This time, it felt good.

It may sound silly, but I realized, viscerally realized, that these notes together, those enemy notes, sounded so beautiful. The depth of E minor, so sad, was a kind of stone-bottomed valley through which I leapt to that sunlit note, and the feeling of joy, the feeling of triumph, that constituted that leap.

And I realized that there is no why to pain, that pain is a gift from God. That it is the place we launch ourselves into ecstatic joy, carrying that gift lying from within the darkness, the gift that makes the A chord on the piano make me cry, and yet feel so happy, feel so good. That the pain that had been hanging like a stone around my neck for months was not dragging me under water, but the keystone that connects me to others, that helps me read pain in someone’s eyes. That E minor followed by C is the happiest sound in the world: it is no miserable depths of one grey sound or the saccharine emptiness of only good things. It is the reason we have words like ‘ecstasy’ which is the mixture of the greatest joy, and greatest pain, the emotion brings us close to God because it reminds us that the earth is more wonderful than any heaven, with all its horror and pain. We are born, not soft, but hard, and as the Talmud says, “For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.” But it is sometimes so hard being crushed.

My fingers play upon my instrument at random, songlessly, picking the notes to feel them vibrate through me. Sometimes I wish that chord existed, the happiest chord, one I could find and play, one that would shatter all evil thoughts from my head. But life is not a color or a chord but a painting and a song. And even in pain, I am grateful.