When the wind dies down in the evenings now I go out and record sound effects for the “Diffcult Loves” music project with Jim and Dave. Tonight, it was a baseball game at the University. I experienced it entirely as sounds. The gravel beneath the shoes of the players, the smack of the ball in the catcher’s mitt, the umpire calling balls and strikes, the ring of the aluminum bat, train cars decoupling in the dark behind the center field fence in the distance. I felt a bit like an intruder. I wasn’t there to watch the game the way the other people were. I was only there for the sounds as raw material for the project. I even secretly fantasized about stealing sounds away from the people, about getting impossibly close to capture the sounds as they actually are when no one is aware that you’re recording. Being invisible perhaps and sneaking through the scene like a ghost, like the smoke from the cigar that I smelled. This is how I participate in the world. A person who has lost direct contact with life and nature and, unable to react with pure instinct to experience, reconstructs it for himself formally as a kind of ideal. A parallel, manufactured reality like dreams or memories. Maybe this is part of why I’m living alone again now. That was me, writing in my journal in the summer of 1993, 30 years old, documenting my moods and activities as my first marriage fell apart. This is me presently at age 55, reflecting back on that time. We are the two narrators of this story, in some sense getting acquainted with each other. My writing at 30 depicts a dramatic disruption, a sudden doubt about the past, about my place in the world and about the future; a crisis, pretty typical for that period of life. From the vantage of middle age, it’s tempting to consolidate one’s personal history into these seismic discontinuities, a series of before and after moments that make you feel as if you’ve been multiple people. This perspective, from a later point on the chronological timeline, implies too that one has evolved into greater maturity and self-awareness. But successfully arriving in 2019 for me clearly depends upon the transformative despair of 1993. The thirty-year-old helped author the present identity of the fifty-five-year old by means of a determined response to his crisis, suggesting that there is continuity between us. One predominant trait that I still share with that self-conscious collector of sounds in the journals is an inclination to process my experience through creative projects, so I’ve conceived of this audio piece. Since I’m working with my current musical collaborators Reid Kruger and Jonathan Zorn, it made sense to track down the music album that I recorded in 1993, “Difficult Loves.” In the fall of 1992, two other musician friends, Dave Kapell and Jim Clifford, had also coincidentally been dumped and so we started writing a break-up album together to create an outlet for our disillusionment and to bond over our sad situations. When I found the “Difficult Loves” CD in a box in my basement, I also found related song demos and rehearsal tapes, which led me, in turn, to the obsessive journals that I had maintained at the time. Here I now sit with a wealth of documentary materials, a concrete representation of my memory in sound and words. I’m in contact again with the thirty-year-old version of myself, our perspectives orbiting each other, confounding the linear distance of 25 years that presumably separates us in time. It’s probably best to start with the story, or rather the film, about the end of my first marriage.

As we approached thirty together, my wife Sayer was writing her first feature-length film. We were both filmmakers, so I read versions of the script from time to time and gave my feedback. In the story, a woman in her late twenties was married to a decent, but self-absorbed, man in his late twenties. The protagonist, despite the fact that she loved the man, began to question the value of a heterosexual relationship and, more specifically, the limitations of maleness, which was characterized as emotionally primitive and inarticulate. The woman ultimately left the man to experiment with romantic intimacy between women. As the screenplay developed, I asked Sayer, “Is this about us? Are you planning to leave me for a woman?” She answered that, of course, she was drawing on elements from our life as material, but her writing was just creative exploration for character development in the movie. The script was finished, the film was cast and when the shooting began I was sometimes present on the set, documenting the production behind the scenes with a video camera. Sayer’s sister had traveled to China shortly before this time and had bought me a pair of silk pajamas as a gift. During the scene in which the protagonist tells her partner that she is leaving him, the actor, ostensibly playing me, was wearing my silk pajamas. That night I again expressed my uneasiness with the resemblance between the film and our life and Sayer again reassured me that I had no need to feel threatened. But at the end of the shoot in early October, 1992, Sayer packed a suitcase and told me she was relocating with our dog to New Orleans for a while; she had fallen in love with the lead actress, who was essentially playin g her in the film, and said that I should find my own apartment by the end of October when she returned. Sayer had written and directed the end of our marriage, just as I had feared, and we were merely actors in the scenario. The day after Sayer left I went for a walk on a rainy fall afternoon, feeling out of control, searching in my mind for some meaning that might radiate outward through all of the apparently unrelated details, something I could use to revise the story. I wanted to change the headline from “man dumped” to “man’s remarkable transformation gives him second chance.” But nothing emerged and I concluded that, though we think we’re writing the story of our own lives, we’re actually blindly stumbling through our predetermines roles, generally at the mercy of someone else’s intentions. Actually, I don’t know if I thought that. I’m adding that now, looking back from the vantage of 25 years remove. All I probably thought at the time was that my life was ruined and I felt really bad. I walked past a General Cinema theater and saw that a movie called “Waterland” was scheduled to start in ten minutes. I bought a ticket and took a seat in the semi-darkness with one other man. In an empty theater, I inexplicably chose to sit in the same row with this man, leaving five or six seats between us; he took notice of me and indicated discomfort. The details of the movie have faded from my memory. What I presently remember most clearly from the screening is the General Cinema preshow film, which I’d seen dozens of times in this early 1990’s form. Against a starry background, a calming, baritone voice said, (actual voice from the trailer) “Welcome to General Cinema where we bring you the finest in motion picture entertainment.” Then candy and popcorn floated forward accompanied by carnival-like music. The General Cinema logos had always generated a grinning, Pavlovian, good cheer in me. In my state of emotional exhaustion, however, this euphoria quickly induced a catastrophic mental chaos and I began to sob convulsively. I felt as if I were a primitive man, unprepared for the revelation of cinema, sent forward in time to witness the miraculous opening of a giant window, and that this experience of the large window opening into another life, or deeper into this life, was overwhelmingly beautiful on its own terms. The specific content of any movie was irrelevant in the face of this fundamental recognition. I turned to my companion, the only other person in the theater, sitting six seats to my right. He glanced at me nervously because I was now crying quite audibly. I beckoned to the stranger in the flickering light of the General Cinema preshow trailer and I felt an immense connectedness with him. We belonged here together. I loved him. Between sobs, I gasped with great conviction, “We’re all in this together!” He smiled and nodded as if to say, “That’s absolutely true” and, to his credit, remained in that seat throughout the film.

A glass jar full of teeth and wedding rings Sits with jars of other things And still it rains outside on another summer’s day. The dog still sleeps in her favorite chair I suppose she wonders why I’m not there And still it rains outside on another summer’s day. I don’t know why I’m laughing to myself. Jim and Dave and I have decided to record at the end of August before teaching starts again for Jim. The tunes sounded reasonably good last night at our rehearsal, though not as good as the demos we recorded a couple of months ago. Dave may have a point when he says that music can be over-rehearsed, especially when the song depends on a particular mood or feeling that starts to get too familiar. I fell in love with a laughing heart I don’t know why I’m laughing now that we’re apart And still it rains outside on another summer’s day. I don’t know why I’m laughing to myself.

At the end of October of 1992, I rented two rooms in an older woman’s house, a bedroom and a work room for drawing my animation. During the first night in my new place, which was Halloween, I sat uncomfortably on my bed trying to read “Othello.” I couldn’t keep my focus, so I put the book down. I resisted the urge to drive across town to our old apartment and plead for another chance. I didn’t think I was clear enough to draw, but I picked up a pencil and instead wrote a poem about Sayer, quickly and without revision. I had intended to turn it into a song for the “Difficult Loves” album, but for some reason never did. A quotation from Carson McCuller’s comes to mind – “there’s nothing that makes so you aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished” – so I feel compelled to write a song to the words now. “Her Hands” Her hands are crooked as roots, Drawing memory out of deep Wide-woken wells of sleep In the soil of her childhood, Where she nursed her father Off her mother’s blackened breast And drank up all the noiseless space Like rare, dark water. Her hands are weathered as bark, Broken, split and worn Tough by the shock of storm And the worm-wound darkness, In which she masturbates Anxiously, she desires To force some quiet nails through The loud skin of sensation. Her hands are small as leaves, Folding on the morning Light in early spring When they fall on me, And I know this beauty, wrought In struggle with itself, above All else it bears the love That’s suffered and has fought.

In addition to getting dumped and living in a strange room, I’ve run out of money. I bought some new shoes and got a haircut with my last few dollars and found a job through a temporary agency. I’ve just worked three days, filing forms in an insurance company office. I look occasionally at the pieces of paper and the names on them and then realize that many of them are notices that someone has died. David Meyer deceased, November 14, 1992, policy cancelled. Passed away. Officially gone. Tedious, depressing work that only occupies my hands and allows my mind to obsess freely about Sayer. And just to help my preoccupations along, in case I might accidently have a moment of peace, (segue into “Hurricane Andrew” from “Difficult Loves”) there is a radio station always playing in the office that seems to be devoted only to broken-hearted, love gone wrong songs, she’s never coming back songs. It’s painful, awful, demoralizing to the point that my attitude ultimately breaks through the absurd pathos into comedy. I watch myself playing my role in this new sitcom, the comedy of despair. And that is encouraging in its own bleak way. Because I’m working in this environment for four hours at a time, I’m doomed to go through whatever awful mood has got hold of me. There’s no other option; all my choices are being made for me. And because I have to go through it, I find that there is another side, like a boat crossing a lake. The other side might not be any better, might be swampy and unstable in its own horrible way, but at least it’s different and represents a strange kind of freedom. I recognize that if I’m patient, I will eventually end up in a better sitcom. If I could somehow magically present an image of my current life to the doubtful young man that I was in 1993, perhaps inserting it into one of his dreams, he would have certainly been relieved. But it’s exactly because of his attitude of comic detachment, that the younger me does end up in a better sitcom, the one that I’m writing right now, of which this project is an episode.

I’ve been having a lot of dreams that seem like specific allegories of the chaos in my life. For example, I’m in the former apartment with Sayer and we let in a woman who shows up at the door. She, in turn, invites a big Manson-like crowd of hippies in who start turning the place upside down, digging through our closets and refrigerator. I’m full of anxiety trying to regain control of the place. (Segue into musical theme 05) And then I have inscrutable dreams like this: I was on a cruise ship with my family. It was like a family trip when I was young, going to a lake in Minnesota in a station wagon together, but this was in the Mediterranean. I got off the ship on a Greek island, leaving my family for a while. I walked along the sea and came to a little café, where I ate sausages and drank beer. The guy who ran the café spoke English and we immediately took to each other. We left the café together and ended up on a street corner where he performed magic tricks for the tourists who passed by, putting out a hat for money. Somehow the hat was my pants, so the café owner gave me his pants. When it was time for me to get back to the ship to meet my family, I realized I was wearing my new friend’s loose brown pants and I started crying. He said “wait a minute” and then quickly sewed a sheet into a ridiculously baggy pair of pants. His own family came out and laughed at my makeshift pants, which cheered me up. They asked me to stay for dinner, but I said that I had to go meet my own family and I left.

I haven’t written in a while. Sounds like an apology you would write in a letter to someone you’ve fallen out of touch with. Why am I writing every day? I guess you would call it a journal. It’s journalism, reporting the events as I see them, as well as moods and dreams. Though the compulsion to write every day takes on a feeling that acts wouldn’t exist if not written about. What I think it ultimately amounts to is simply writing the story so that it might happen and that it might happen to make sense. The big picture, like something composed rather than accidental, something that has a design. To whom is the story addressed? To myself, I imagine, many years from now. Yes, exactly, and I did receive the letters. I’m reading them now. Strangely enough, with the first big arts grant that I got a couple of years later after finishing “Desert Dive-Inn,” I used some of the money to travel to the Greek Islands for a few months, eating sausages in little cafés much like the one I had dreamt about. Adventures like that profoundly expanded my manner of thinking and being in the world. Maybe in some mysterious, subconscious way I was writing the story of my life by creating desires and expectations that I would eventually realize in action, ultimately becoming who I am now. I remember my twentieth birthday ten years ago exactly, walking around Appleton Wisconsin where I was in college, kicking a stone on the sidewalk, a piece of crumbled paper, that, when I open it, turns out to be a child’s note with a child’s drawing of the sun. At the time, I didn’t know that my father was going to die two weeks later. I had a dream about my father recently. I was sick in the hospital and he came to check on me. When he walked into the room I remembered that I used to practice walking like him when I was young. I watched him walk down the halls of the clinic where he had his office and I wanted to walk just like him. He said “I used to have a first name . . . can you help me out here.” I told him it was Daniel and he said “Yeah, that’s it. Thanks.” Then he looked at me and said seriously “You are doing okay, Tom.” I paused and then said honestly, “I guess that I’m going to be fine.” As he left the room, I realized that he was actually an older version of myself, coming to tell me that everything would be okay in the future.

It’s clear now in reading the journals that the separation from Sayer was a very necessary kick in the butt for me. I even recognized this at the time, writing, “Ironically, this whole experience will probably be more useful for me in the end than for Sayer.” In addition to finding better day jobs, meeting new people, imagining myself travelling, I reestablished my work routines on my second animated film “Desert Dive-Inn.” “The Goldberg Variations” Glenn Gould mewls and squeaks Like a child who’s seen a cat Peek through a window and then leave. He can’t yet walk across the room To see what happened next, So he voices his frustration with a sound. He’s in the sustained present tense. I wonder how long can he carry it through? Actually I’ve heard this record A hundred times before And I know that he arrives successfully. Or that a clever engineer Created this illusion By cutting takes together in New York. Columbia Records Studio The Goldberg Variations, 1955. Now it’s 1993 I’m drawing in a still strange room Feeling adrift and fatherless. I’ve trained myself to animate At night and only to this music No other would suffice. The pencil pursues its path It follows the piano Distracts my thinking from lost love. And from the end of my twenties and the hopes That are no longer suitable for me. Glenn Gould searches for his Perfect articulation When everything fits in its place. And instead he captures That accidental human sound That makes the struggle really live. I push aside a ruined drawing Of a fish in flight One twelfth second in my film. But before I crumple up The wasted sheet of paper I write along the bottom of the page: June 10, 1993 12:17 A.M, I am not alone tonight.

After a struggle to let go of my old ideas of me and Sayer that really took years, I managed to move on. My account of Sayer writing the end of our marriage as a film is only a description of events, not an explanation. The marriage really ended because our identities had been too unformed when it began; we had simply been too young, auditioning a version of love that had been culturally sold to us in the films we’d seen and in the books we’d read. We had searched for adult versions of ourselves in each other and found only partially focused images of our desire reflected back. The only thing that could have prepared us to be together, as I see it now, was the end of our marriage, but that led us apart on different paths. I just left the character in my film hanging in mid-air, in the midst of his triumphant dive. He’s going to accomplish it. But before he accomplishes it, I have to accomplish it. I have to figure out how to draw the damn movement. And I left him hanging because I couldn’t get it right today. I saw Sayer yesterday for the first time in weeks. We went out to the meadow that we like above the Willow River in Wisconsin and we buried a photograph of ourselves. It was one of the first pictures of us together. As the dirt began to fall on those innocent, smiling faces that had been the younger version of us, I had the urge to dig them out again and I said to Sayer, “Oh, shouldn’t we save them?” But we didn’t and a moment later I felt happier and relieved and simply walked through the meadow hand in hand with Sayer, not talking. We’re not together anymore; everything has changed. Even the river that we knew has changed. The dam that we used to walk across is gone. I have a strange sense tonight that somehow none of this is personal or even real. That there is a larger pattern at work that drives us through the changes necessary to us. Falling in love with Sayer and losing my connection to Sayer are just waves in the pattern. We are the momentary shape, the medium in which the wave takes its form, but we are not essential to the energy. If I could just relax into the necessity of it, the inevitability, it would be easier than trying to chase down a goal, trying always to force circumstances to my purpose.

And then finally, on another rainy summer’s day in 1994, I stop fighting and give up. I had a dream about Mexico. I’m going there in a month, to the sea. It will be my first trip out of the U.S. I had the dream last night after Sayer and I stood in the rain and decided to get officially divorced. I’m ready. What else can I say? I grabbed her white shirt Bus door opening up behind Her against my chest and Smelled us sweating both And when her lips left mine Were wet with hers I stood under the sun until they dried. I knew and she did too That this one big embrace In being almost late Had fixed our faith secure. She sat alone holding her ticket Forty minutes absently Staring at passing farms While all around her older folks Who’d watched the scene We’re pleased that love Was still this recognizable. They knew and she did too That this one big embrace In being almost late Had fixed our faith secure. For a while that wasn’t true. I forgot and she forgot. Three decades quickly passed Through other kinds of love and doubt. Today I found a piece of paper In the middle of a book with A description of this scene from years ago Her white shirt and our common passion, The hot sun and the bus. I knew and she did too That this one big embrace In being almost late Had fixed our faith secure.