11/13 - Roller - The Rose Has Teeth

Upon Reading "The Rose Has Teeth" by Terrance Hayes

"No, there was too much reverberation. There was an echo which gave me a sound all over. In other words that square is kind of—it had a sound all over." 

-Abraham Zapruder, testimony after filming the assassination of J.F.K.

"But I can’t say it like I sing it / And I can’t sing it like I think it / And I can’t think it like I feel it / And I don’t feel a thing"

–Pedro the Lion, “The Fleecing.”

"6.522:  There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical."

"4.1213:  Now we understand our feeling that we are in possession of the right logical conception, if only all is right in our symbolism."

"3.032:  To present in language anything which “contradicts logic” is as impossible as in geometry to present by its co-ordinates a figure which contradicts the laws of space; or to give the co-ordinates of a point which does not exist."

            -Ludwig Wittgenstein, excerpts from “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.”

When I started to take lessons on how to play the electric bass, the guitar itself was nearly the same size as me, plastic feeling, and bright Christmas red. My arms and fingers had to lurch uncomfortably around its large body. There were moments when it didn’t seem that the pursuit would be worth it. My fingertips were chewed on by the wound metallic strings, and often bled. That bug-like space-sound you hear when you scrape something along the wound rivets was a companion of fighting friction against my cause to learn. It was all very physical and defeating at first. But what really hooked me to keep playing the thing was an exercise my instructor introduced to our lessons in my second week of learning. He put away the music book we’d been sight-reading from and told me, “I’m going to just play something simple and you go ahead and try improvising on top of it.” I was caught off guard and asked him how; he said “just play what you hear…” I felt a little like Luke in Empire when he tells Yoda, “you want the impossible.”But I decided to keep my apprehensions to myself and go for it. What I produced wasn’t much more than fumbling around, but a few of the notes lined up and I’d made a unique melody. Something out of nothing. It was strange then, but it was just a toe in the water. I didn’t realize I was learning a new language of expression that would develop, and follow me for as long as I would continue playing music.

Terrance Hayes’ wrote a poem (“The Rose Has Teeth”) that I first encountered when it was included in The Best American Poetry (2012). Upon reading it, a certain chord of awe was struck inside me. In the poem he, so fluidly, describes the moment of emotional synapse in a musician’s playing; the invisible area between any sort of heart ache and writing a blues song; the un-mappable location of energy from where a guitar solo breaks forth; the songs you might feel but never find a sound for, etc.…  In the “Contributors’ Notes and Comments” section of the book (p. 177), Hayes writes: “My poem found its breath at the piano I have been trying to play since 1999, the year my daughter was born.” And the lines he writes capture that span of time. Repeatedly, he writes about what he’d been “trying to play.” The phrase is repeated with so many different accompanying situations that the passage of time becomes palpable; and his relationship with the piano grows deep through the narrative: “I was trying to play the twelve-bar blues with two bars. / I was trying to fill the room with a shocked and awkward color,”—“I was trying to play the sound of an empty house / because that’s how I get by when the darkness in my body / starts to bleed. I was trying to play ‘Autumn Leaves’ / because that’s what my lady’s falling dress sounds like to me.”—“I was trying to play / the sound of applause by trying to play the sound of rain.”—“Because I wanted to be invisible, I was trying to play like a woman blacker / than an unpaid light bill, like a white boy lost in the snow.”

Hayes chooses descriptions with backwards juxtaposition; they contradict themselves. It’s seemingly not possible to play the actual “sound of applause by trying to play the sound of rain,” on the piano. My first reading of the poem gave me the same feeling as discovering a new musical artist. I connected with his words like they were jazz. The logic of his comparisons felt just as mysterious as music can when it leaves an indescribable impression. It was a clarifying moment, where another musician had described something about music that I’d felt before, but where I hadn’t previously possessed the right kind of words.

If you read “The Rose Has Teeth,” you might see what he saw (feel what he felt) when pressing on the teeth of black and white: robust, honest, snapshots of his humanity transformed into Technicolor through a piano. Or perhaps, you will hear the music, how he was “trying to play” it, as he beautifully describes it with a different instrument: language in black ink on paper, in the form of a written poem. 

Before you, Piano, I was just a rap of knuckles on the sill. I am filled

With the sound of her breathing and only you can bring it out of me.  

–Terrance Hayes.

You can hear Terrance read the poem here.