Hugh, Hew, and Hue: a lament fit for a liar
ὦ πότνια πότνια μᾶτερ,
οὐ δάκρυά γέ σοιδώσομεν ἁμέτερα·
παρ᾿ ἱεροῖς γὰρ οὐ πρέπει.
Oh my dear lady mother, I shall not tender you with my tears for they are not proper at holy rites.
— Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 1488–90
“With this faith we will be able to hew out of a mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
— from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech
Τούτων τοίνυν δεῖ χάριν τοῖς φθόγγοις τῆς λύρας προσχρῆσθαι, σαφηνείας ἕνεκα τῶν χορδῶν, τόν τε κιθαριστὴν καὶ τὸν παιδευόμενον, ἀποδιδόντας πρόσχορδα τὰ φθέγματα τοῖς φθέγμασι· τὴν δ᾿ ἑτεροφωνίαν καὶ ποικιλίαν τῆς λύρας, ἄλλα μὲν μέλη τῶν χορδῶν ἱεισῶν, ἄλλα δὲ τοῦ τὴν μελῳδίαν ξυνθέντος ποιητοῦ, καὶ δὴ καὶ πυκνότητα μάνοτητι καὶ τάχος βραδυτῆτι καὶ ὀξύτητα βαρύτητι ξύμφωνον [καὶ ἀντίφωνον] παρεχομένους, Eκαὶ τῶν ῥυθμῶν ὡσαύτως παντοδαπὰ ποικίλματα προσαρμόττοντας τοῖσι φθόγγοις τῆς λύρας, πάντα οὖν τὰ τοιαῦτα μὴ προσφέρειν τοῖς μέλλουσιν ἐν τρισὶν ἔτεσι τὸ τῆς μουσικῆς χρήσιμον ἐκλήψεσθαι διὰ τάχους.
So, to attain this object, both the lyre-master and his pupil must use the notes of the lyre, because of the distinctness of its strings, assigning to the notes of the song notes in tune with them; but as to divergence of sound and colors in the notes of the harp, when the strings sound one tune and the composer of the melody another, or when there results a combination of low and high notes, of slow and quick time, of sharp and grave, and all sorts of rhythmical shadings are adapted to the notes of the lyre, — no such complications should be employed in dealing with pupils who have to absorb quickly, within three years, the useful elements of music.
— Plato, Laws 812d-e
Sifting through the countless volumes
Of afropunks and electric ballrooms
Carving out rhythms for anyone to hear
Within the theatre of their inner ear
Not always knowing what one is unearthing
Or endless potential that this might be birthing:
New music synthesized into new forms
Accomplishing anti-platonic new norms.
— v ness, CRATE(R)-DIGGING: or picking through the archive… (deleted lyrics, full poem to be published in 2022)
A year ago today, my grandfather passed away.
He’d recently turned 89 and he had a fall in the night. In the morning, an ambulance came and took him to Swedish Hospital on Cherry Hill (where my own father works as a chef) and it was determined that he would be put to rest by the end of the day. He was surrounded by family until the very end.
I haven’t really been okay since my grandfather passed away. It’s hard losing a loved one in any context, especially one you’re particularly close to. Grief is difficult and overwhelming, and I’ve never been particularly good at dealing with it — in fact my track record plays along the lines of seeking forgetfulness, oblivion, literally anything else.
But…as I’ve gotten (slowly) older, I think that I don’t want to forget as much anymore. And even when I ignore my grief, it has a way of digging through me like mycorrhizal hyphae to make me process and digest what I’m actually going through. Plus…I guess after all these years, I feel like kind of a hypocrite studying Greek tragedy because it gives me a language to process my own grief that I can’t seem to find within myself.
My siblings and I were all incredibly close to our grandfather (or Gramps, as we called him), who in turn had a very close relationship with our mother, his daughter, whom he moved in with in 2017 to live out the rest of his life. He had a way of meeting each of us where we were at and finding mutual interests. For myself, it was classical music — I was the only one of his kids or grandchildren who became a classical musician, and we loved going to concerts together. As YouTube became a thing, I delighted in showing him endless access to performances of so many of our favorite pieces. It was one of few things that gave me some semblance of peace last summer in the wake of protesting and organizing.
My grandfather’s love of classical music came from a love of bombast. It’s the word he would exclaim in his booming voice with a righteous fist shake when we’d talk about our favorite types of composers. He was the only person who could regularly get me to listen to Beethoven (I’ve had a longstanding dislike of classical composers whose last names start with B — Bizet’s corpus and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique being the ONLY exceptions — since I was a teenager that I now maintain more-so out of tradition than my youthful indignation) and we regularly debated which Respighi Rome series was better— him with Pines, me with Fountains. Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Mahler were three big shared loves between us. And I’ll never forget the summer of 2009 when we saw Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle at the Seattle Metropolitan Opera over the course of a week — probably the closest thing I’ve witnessed in person to the four-play theater of the Attic stage.
When my grandfather died, it was right when I was agreeing and starting to think through composing my first ever soundtrack to ancient Greek lyrics — for the BCAD production of Iphigenia in Aulis. My original imagining of the musical soundscape for the play was something more along the lines of jazz, because I really wanted to dive into comparing the saxophone and the aulos. But after Gramps died it was like nothing sounded right in my head anymore. I have a sort of background radio always going through an undercurrent in my brain that I tune in and out of; and it was like it was suddenly all white noise.
Meaning started to crack and shift around me and I found it hard to grasp what the point was to…well anything in existence. I was good at pretending there was meaning, but I’ve also always been diligent in my self-deception.
And I wasn’t grieving. It was like I was holding it off — in fact it was Gramps dying that made me decide definitively that I was coming back to NYC at the end of the summer. I didn’t know how to contain or express what I was feeling.
A year ago, when I was sitting in that small hospital room with my family (that we’d been able to finesse even with a pandemic raging because my father worked at the hospital and had used his weight with the staff) I couldn’t find the words to express what I felt, what I wanted to express to my grandfather. Because my throat was so choked off by guilt.
Because, the truth is, I had been awake that entire night before. After keeping my mom up late watching Beyonce’s self-titled digital album (my mother had long been a fan of Lemonade, and I wanted to explain some of the broader musical and celebrity contexts to her) and a dozen other music videos, I’d pulled an all-nighter writing “O Father, Where Art Thou?” — Patriarchal Poetics, Athenian Mechanics, & Kitchen Intuition as well as an educational thread to parallel it on Homer’s Odyssey and Jordan Peele’s Get Out:
And…the worst part is that I genuinely can’t remember. I can’t remember if maybe I did hear him get up and then not get back into bed. I was in the family room, which was directly below his bedroom, and I have a habit of intensely tuning out any form of sound when I’m trying to concentrate on something.
To make matters worst, I’d been trying to finish that written piece for over a month — my father had requested that I write it for him on Father’s Day, and I finished it over a month later. It felt like a brief intermission to a lot of what I was hoping Corona Borealis could evolve into last summer — just a piece that I needed to finish for my own personal stuff before I could dive back into the broader systemic issues that I loved.
But just as I was finishing typing up the piece and getting all my images for the Twitter thread, I heard my mother and brother’s panicked voices and movements and felt a knot hit my stomach just as I was feeling that high from finishing a piece of writing.
That knot stayed until I was sitting by his side in his hospital room, knowing that he was going to die, knowing that…there actually might have been something I could’ve done about it if I hadn’t been so hyper-focused on my own work (and was there even a point to any of the work I was doing?). I remember opening my mouth and gasping and not knowing what to say or how to express how sorry I was and instead the parados from Euripides’ Herakles poured out of my mouth in sobs instead:
ὑψόροφα μέλαθρα καὶ γεραι-
ὰ δέμνι᾿ ἀμφὶ βάκτροις
ἔρεισμα θέμενος ἐστάλην
ἰηλέμων γέρων ἀοι-
δὸς ὥστε πολιὸς ὄρνις,
ἔπεα μόνον καὶ δόκημα νυκτερω-
πὸν ἐννύχων ὀνείρων,
τρομερὰ μέν, ἀλλ᾿ ὅμως πρόθυμ᾿,
ὦ τέκεα τέκεα πατρὸς ἀπάτορ᾿,
ὦ γεραιὲ σύ τε τάλαινα μᾶ-
τερ, ἃ τὸν <ἐν> Ἀίδα δόμοις
πόσιν ἀναστενάζεις.For this high-roofed house and the old man’s
bed, easing my weight
about my staff, I have set out,
an aged singer of lament
like some bird of white plumage.
Mere words am I now and an insubstantial
vision seen at night,
trembling, but full of eagerness,
children, children, of father bereft,
and you, old man, and you, unhappy mother,
who mourn your husband
in the house of Hades.
— Euripides, Herakles 107–118 (trans. Loebs)
It was all that would be expressed, the lyrics cascading down in choked stutters. My younger brother — the actual rapper/singer of the family — had stopped speaking to me a few weeks back, but gripped my shoulder tightly as I lamented. It brought me back to the last time he’d done that when we’d both been crying — at our Aunt Gayle’s funeral (Gramps’ youngest sister) back in 2012 when he grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me into one of the fiercest hugs I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. The power of our embrace was the only thing that kept both of our legs from giving out.
I find grief difficult to deal with because all I want to do when it happens is dissolve. And too often I simply can’t, so I ignore it instead. Or, as in cases with family members dying, I focus on the grief of others, even as it begins to overwhelm me. I think that’s why Gramps dying was such a catalyst for me leaving my family — I need space, even if I’m not always the best at articulating it.
But, as I said, grief usually has a way of expressing itself below the surface. And it has a clarity — there’s not a whole lot of over-thinking one has to do with grief. I’m reminded of one of the first in-person meetings I was able to have with Elizabeth McNamara, the director of Iphigenia in Aulis, in a socially distanced tent at Columbia last autumn. She was going back and forth about Iphigenia’s switch at the end — she spends most of the lead-up to the finale railing against her father and what’s being down to her before she decides to whole-heartedly embrace it and instructs her mother to conform in a similar manner, even going so far as to forbid her from lamenting her death:
Κλ. ὦ τέκνον, οἴχῃ;
Ἰφ. καὶ πάλιν γ᾽ οὐ μὴ μόλω.
Κλ. λιποῦσα μητέρα;
Ἰφ. ὡς ὁρᾷς γ᾽, οὐκ ἀξίως.
Κλ. σχές, μή με προλίπῃς.
Ἰφ. οὐκ ἐῶ στάζειν δάκρυ.Kl. Daughter, are you on your way?
Iph. Yes, never to return again.
Kl. Will you leave your mother?
Iph. Yes, as you see, all undeserving.
Kl. Stop, don’t leave me!
Iph. I forbid you to weep.
— Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 1464–6 (trans. Loebs)
Iphigenia’s insistence on stage-managing how her loved ones would grieve actually resonated a lot with me. Her biggest request of her mother is that she doesn’t hate Agamemnon (1454) and that she raises Orestes (1450) to manhood — these two requests highlighting the tragic irony that Clytemnestra will do neither, and has repeatedly done neither on the Athenian stage for decades.
Yet I don’t think it was just for the sake of dramatic irony that Euripides has Iphigenia do this about-face, as I discussed with Elizabeth. There’s something so…naive and human about believing that you can take yourself out of the equation with no impact. And there’s also a lesson here that each one of us has to internalize at some point: just because you feel okay with something traumatic happening to you doesn’t not make it trauma.
Iphigenia tries to make everything okay with her mother precisely because she can’t handle her mother’s grief (1435f) and worries that she won’t be able to complete her final performance leading up to her death. She’s a figure trying to undo the tragic nature of her demise which only highlights just how tragic her position is.
Similarly, as I tried to focus on my composition and ignore the grief that was threatening to engulf me, the lamenting just came out through composition — I wrote a classical score, not a jazz one.
So many of Gramps and my favorites are strewn throughout:
Parados: Mahler’s 5th mov. 4, Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite №2 “Pastorale”, Beethoven’s 7th mov. 2
Stasimon 1: Phillip Glass’ Mishima soundtrack, Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” and “Moi milenki druzhok”
Stasimon 2: Goblin’s Suspiria, Yann Tiersen’s Amélie, Javier Navarrete’s Pan’s Labyrinth
Stasimon 3: Mahler’s 5th mov. 1&2, Prokofiev’s “Death of Tybalt”, Holst’s “Uranus”
Monody/Finale: Anna Conser’s Herakles parados, Shostakovich’s 5th mov. 1, FKA twigs’ “Mirrored Heart”, Wagner’s “Liebestod”
Iphigenia’s final monody was cut for our production so that it started on the quote at the top of this lament — “o potnia potnia mater…” echoing the previous sentiments of not wanting her mother to weep for her. I ended up going back to Anna’s parados to model some of the sounds that I wanted to express because I felt that was one of the most embodied experiences of ancient Greek lamenting that I’d experienced. And I added Shostakovich’s 5th as well, one of the last symphonies I’d played for my grandfather. Wagner because (despite my shortcomings with a lot of his impact) of our week-long epic back in 2009. And FKA is always nice for eery lamenting solo and choral music.
Right as I was finishing up composing, I had another family member die. My great uncle Larry — Gramps’ brother-in-law — passed away in February. While I wasn’t as close to him as I was my grandfather, he was still another family member that I’d bonded with over classical music (and in fact, we’d even seen Wagner’s Die Walkure at the Metropolitan Opera in 2012 together, shortly before Aunt Gayle died). And with his death, it was like the floodgates finally burst forth.
It was through music and composing and piecing everything back together that I was able to finally work with (maybe not through yet) my grief and try to make it make sense. It’s the reason why I’ve decided to embark upon my (perhaps foolhardy, but someone’s gotta try something new, right?) Euripidean composition journey — theatrical music is the main way I think I’m processing things right now.
And I know I’m not alone — I’m working on Alcestis at the moment and I was so glad to read Jon Hesk’s piece this week on the play and grieving a recently lost loved one: “Greek and Roman Grief: what it does(n’t do) for me”. I’ve also been reading Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being slowly over the past months and have been very attuned to her multiple uses of “wake” (the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness) and how useful I’ve found that lens to be towards Alcestis in particular, as highlighted by Maria Combatti’s dissertation on somatic landscapes in Euripides. From “Chapter One — Alcestis: Embodiment and Tactile Sensations: 1.2 The Statue, Bilge Water, and The Bed”:
The expression βάρος … ἀπαντλοίην ἄν is a nautical metaphor indicating “the bailing out of the bilge water to lighten a ship and keep it afloat.” This water imagery conveys a full sense of Admetus’ affliction; in fact, in tragic contexts words derived from or connected with ἄντλος are often used to express adversity and misfortune […] Although the theme of bilge water and shipwreck is a conventional trope in Greek tragedy to describe states of distress, in Alcestis, I think, it has a more subtle significance in relation to the play’s water imagery, which Euripides often deploys to highlight the protagonists’ emotional experiences.
I’m still draining the bilge water out of my soul and trying to understand what being in the wake means for me, particularly given my disposition to oblivion.
But…to lean on Sharpe and Euripides a little bit…perhaps the answers have always been there for me, in lessons taught to me by my grandfather. Because, I’ve always loved the way Gramps’ given name has sounded. Hugh was first a name to me, before it was a word. And then when I was seven, I had to memorize a section of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech, which introduced me to the type of hew that Gramps would’ve been all-too-familiar with as a kid, having been one of the youngest whistle-punks in Aberdeen, Washington. And it wasn’t much later that the hue interrogating the richness of color came to my attention either.
All of those nouns have a nice sound. A sound kinda sound, you know? Almost like the sound you make when you’re in a sound sleep. Or a whale’s eery song before it sounds back down into the Sound.
Gramps, you always taught me that there’s something to learn in the sound, in every definition of that word, and I love you so much for it. I’m so sorry that I didn’t figure out this composition thing faster since you’re the person I wish could listen to it the most. Because I don’t think there’s a person in this world or the next who can really hear it like you do.
