Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not.

The Effect of the Mozart Effect, one could call it, or the Mozart Effect Effect—is tremendous and undeniable. The Mozart Effect Effect thrives in a realm that is neither science nor art, a realm that is

far more organically American: marketing.

But, of course, the real effect from Mozart in your life comes not from any enhancement to your IQ but from the fact that Americans increasingly believe in the tangible benefits of classical music, while simultaneously knowing less and less about the art form.

A violin is not a mere musical instrument but the body and the blood, the dead Madonna and her dead baby, the corpse of the beloved, the orphan, the gypsy soul, the fuck object, the ultimate weapon against communism, the “perfect marriage of science and beauty” (The Red Violin

They’ll never know that the violin part was composed by a twenty-three-year-old amateur violinist working for free, and not for love of Jesus but for love of Dolly Parton.

It dawns on you that you will not be performing in the five-tiered auditorium with velvet seats and diamond chandeliers, but outside on the sun-bleached concrete. Who could have guessed Lincoln Center doubles as a craft fair campground?

a world in which most people don’t go to college at all—which is not, not, not the same thing as being lazy or stupid. Let us say that people in Appalachia are no smarter or dumber than people from other places. Even as you tried to impart this information, you failed miserably.

you will discover the ER at three o’clock in the morning is not full of blood and gore but women in their twenties having panic attacks. There is a particular, feminine shame in the act of crying “I’m dying” when nothing is actually wrong. Panic attacks serve as confirmation of the very things women spend their lives working to negate: suspicions of female silliness, stupidity, hysteria. Panic attacks involve the removal of the mind’s control over the body, and in this way are

aftershocks of an earlier mind-body separation—the moment when adolescent girls realize that no amount of brains or charm will save them from life in the body.

Yes, you were “a very easy person to work with”—The Composer thought so, too. But perhaps this had less to do with some winsome personality trait and more to do with your pliability, your utter desperation to succeed, your need to be loved by your superiors, no matter how ridiculous or ill-advised or fraudulent the thing was that they were asking you to do.

The up and down of the sales monitor mimics the up and down of the notes on your sheet music until they seem like one, a national symphony of commerce, the most authentic-sounding American music of all.

The same invisible army that puts a USA Today under my hotel door and stocks the bathroom with fresh towels does the same for the president and his challenger. And, in a way, we are all selling the same thing: Listen to us, we say, and you will feel safer and calmer, more relaxed in a world full of unspeakable

dangers.

Morris’s favorite track on the CD is a vocal ballad called “Rodrigo Martinez.”

“It sounds like they’re singing Rodrigo My Penis,” Debbie points out. And once she says it, it becomes impossible to hear anything else.

The titles of The Composer’s compositions, you come to realize, share the same marketing strategy as flavors of herbal tea: Soothing; Energizing; Sleepytime; Tummy Tamer. Sometimes the customer just wants to be told what to feel.

Any living that sounds too perfect to be true, any living that appears not to include failure, any living that seems easy and unsmudged by shadow, you know now, is fake.

you will come to recognize as the universal pose of the American teenage girl: half-sassy, half-pleading.

No reason for suicide seemed more compelling, no reason was more black-and-white, case-closed, than pregnancy. The ultimate curse of life in the body would be accidentally getting someone else’s life literally inside your body.

none of the girls you interviewed will actually appear on MTV. And yet, you feel that your final list of girl caricatures does matter, for it is a testament to a certain cultural desire to make American women, yourself included, seem simple, stupid, slutty. You know this desire well, for you spent your own teenage years swatting it away with a violin.

In green: Curiosity is insubordination

in its purest form. — Vladimir Nabokov

Like most people who find themselves in a blind rage, what you really feel, beneath the anger, is helplessness. Americans, you now realize, are no better at sniffing out bullshit propaganda about weapons of mass destruction than they are at detecting bullshit musical performances.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. —Friedrich Nietzsche

What I did, instead, was apologize. Perhaps I did this because immediate apology is the default female response to male rage (survival mechanism). Perhaps I did this because The Composer was my boss and I was his employee (The Money). Perhaps I did this because I was one of many young female musicians The Composer employed, many of whom were more attractive than me,

Not expressing anger was what made me “a very easy person to work with.” I hadn’t yet learned I could be so much more than that.

For the Mall of America is the national shrine at which it is most possible not just to see America but to do it, to perform its sacraments. To drink its caffeinated, carbonated

blood. To inhale the national incense: french fry grease, fabric softener, the sour chemical smell of fresh ink on a sales receipt.

Yevgeny was able to state—simply and without fanfare—that The Composer had almost killed him. It would take me years of drafting and revising this book to say essentially the same thing.

Since then you have begun to learn what it is like to live life in the body. What it’s like to despair so much at the prospect of life in the body that you almost chose to end that life. “Jessica has big lips,” says a boy in your seventh-grade pre-algebra class. “That means she gives good blow jobs.” Life in the body means that no physical part of you—not even the lips that you have no choice but to bring with you into prealgebra class—is left unseen, unremarked upon, uncalculated for sexual potential.

There is something in the world far more terrifying than humiliation or failure or death. And it is just like FDR said: Fear itself. And if she doesn’t murder the bastard, this archvillain called Fear, she’s going to be toast for real.