Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

There is no way “I” am in front of the live microphone, no way anyone would want to listen to “me,” no way anyone has paid to attend this concert starring “myself,” and so I become “you,” and in faking you, I am finally able to say what I want to say.

By putting a violin under your chin—or even carrying a violin case through the puke-green corridors of your high school—it is as if you’re telling the world that you have authority on something, and in having this authority, you are more complex, more consequential than your young female body suggests.

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.

And this, it turns out, is the reeyell gift: It is almost as if, by attaching a violin to your body, you can become a dude.

You much preferred the fiery Louisiana nights of Robert Penn Warren, the biscuit-hot Arkansas of Maya Angelou, the rabid Everglades of Zora Neale Hurston.

An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear.

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.

You’ll marvel at his generosity, his giving America something it would have never given him: a chance to be heard as its full, rich, complex self.

You work very hard to impress Nicole because, at the end of the day, she has somehow found a way to be an artist (she makes films—gorgeous, critically acclaimed films on important topics) while also living a sane, healthy life, the kind you desperately wish you could lead but somehow cannot.

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.

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, and because of this I often felt unworthy of the job (life in the body).

For the early twenties, a particularly cruel age to be struck down by fear, is a stage in life when tremendous bravery is required of a woman—the bravery to discover what she wants, what she cannot abide, what she needs to make a living and be among the living.

All of these people doing this complex, gorgeous work, all to produce a few notes that ring like a call from the sky. It’s enough to make you proud to be a member of the human race, a civilization that could think up such a wonderful process, a process with no value at its end other than the pleasure that sound brings to the human ear. If there is a true definition of making a living, this is it.

You even fake yourself, zipping your person into the straightjackets of various pronouns. This allows you to pretend, for a while, that you are not really writing about yourself until one day you are able to look down on the page and say, well hell, this sounds like me. It is me.

“It helps to play about things. It helps you to know how it really feels.”

The most ridiculous of tics and habits of human nature—eating only Cap’n Crunch, fleeing a room several times to check to see whether one has to pee—are based in the deepest, most sincere feelings: the desire to be loved and praised. The desire to be recognized for a special talent, a reeyell gift.

Titanic is a movie that argues less for the promise of romantic love than for the idea that horrific events can, through storytelling, be contained and controlled. That even when the most unimaginable disaster strikes, there will be survivors to tell its tales.

To hope that somewhere, in the future, was an older version of myself able to transform disasters into stories.