Great Outdoors

Afterblues

Santa Cruz Mountains

“In order to show you how a big symphony orchestra is put together, Benjamin Britten has written a big piece of music, which is made up of smaller pieces that show you all the separate parts of the orchestra.”

—Eric Crozier, narration to The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten

I. Woodwinds

I feel rather blue.
I’d like to say that the outdoors heals the soul, or that its natural stillness brings a metaphorical peace along with a physical peace, or that I meditated somewhere out there and discovered something new or somehow truer about myself, in a sort of anti-technological way. But it’s not that easy. All I know is that I was tired and sad, and then I felt better, maybe.
The great outdoors does not tend to be very accessible. Through deft deployment of imagination, one might find pieces of it in backyards, but usually it involves some sort of road trip.
The road trip, for all of its youth, lives wonderfully in the American imagination. Maybe it’s the heavy symbolism—a person goes somewhere and finds themself along the way. Not the destination but the journey. Or the friends made along the way. Something like that.
My destination is a set of lodges and one small conference center, built with rusticness in mind but only going as far as thought, set in the Santa Cruz Mountains and surrounded by redwoods. This modernism is not due to a reluctance to sleep, but rather out of the fact that this trip is for the university orchestra’s semesterly retreat. This place also doubles as a venue for Christian retreat groups, so we see them around.
I can say much less about the journey. I sleep through much of it because fatigue and semi-soft seats take their toll. It’s an uneasy sleep, and I drift between splotches of color and sound. I can’t tell whether those sensations are from my dreams or my fellow passengers and what is outside, but I know that I should come closer to some ideal tranquility.
So this is about color, and what I can see and feel and hear. This is about blue and red and the green of the trees in the mountains which change with the wind and rain.

II. Brass

My favorite color is blue. I love the blue of the sky in all its variants, but only the color. The poet Stephane Mallarmé, after a lengthy agony, began to substitute “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his work. I dare not approach such methods; I fear the static, depthless sky.
I have no such fear today. The sky is overcast, and the cloudy texture draws me in. Raindrops splash across the windshield. We cross the Bay Bridge, snarled in traffic, and I’m tempted to dig out a book from my bag to help kill time. Some carsickness hits, though, and so I listen to the ongoing conversation instead. There are four people here, and I am the only undergraduate, and so I might as well learn something. The words slip around me and into me, and I feel pleasantly warm.
What I do fear, though, is the incorporation of my affair with blue into my identity, with all associated thoughts and acts, such that I lose myself. A blue corpus—that brings me back to when I would describe myself as a musician, when music dragged up against every other responsibility in my life and general stress, and when the very real prospect of losing it all after graduation left me emotionally shattered at nine p.m. in an office park in San Diego before my longtime cello teacher.
I was reading Autobiography of Red. The cover is blue. The protagonist, Geryon, is a winged red boy living on an Atlantic island. There’s a torrid affair and a disquieting childhood. It’s dark and very gay. I am interested chiefly in his autobiography and his redness though. In his travels and his loves. In himself, his identity.
So then when Herakles, two years older than Geryon, steps off of a bus from New Mexico (“and there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness”)...
The linguistics grad is talking about his work in remote areas of Peru trying to preserve endangered languages. It’s tremendously interesting, but the past week has been rough, and so I fall asleep. I wake up to something about technological progress from the EECS grad and vibrant greens everywhere I look. We’re in the mountains now, navigating hairpins, and the greens seem to bleed through the sides of the car, such is their intensity.
I’ve always liked rain for this. It brings out the light in colors. Rain brightens the air, and the wind enlivens.
I’ll grant that great variation in color can be found in our human constructions, like the houses of the Amalfi coast and the rose window of Sainte-Chapelle. But those colors do not live and sound. This green I see now vibrates. I like to imagine a perpetual musical pulse through the earth, and that pulse, too, exudes green.
After we’ve arrived, eaten, and rehearsed, the sky is pitch-black and the rain bangs on heavier than ever. Water runs down through rills that bar paths. The wind nips but does not bite, and I could dissolve into the air if the electricity went out.
In the morning, the worst of the storm has passed, but there’s a drizzle. In bits of free time, I gnaw at my book more. Geryon and his boyfriend separate. He flies to Argentina and adventures with psychoanalysts and dancers.
I wonder how the Christian retreat group feels about our intrusion. We’re the ones banging about with timpani and brass and making a ruckus out in these quiet woods. We have a bass drum and a full brass section, and at times it seems like we’ve repelled all the local wildlife with all the crashes and booms and fanfares.
We’ve gone to a quiet place to make noise. Maybe it’s good noise. We’re working on making it good noise. Music is supposed to heal, or something like that. Tell that to me about two years ago, though, and—no. Music can cause incredible pain, and the silence of the woods makes the music in my head so much louder.
There’s an enduring trope that nature is the ultimate creative inspiration. Being there, it’s hard not to imagine why it seems true, but I still feel trapped, and when I look up at the sky, the grey starts giving way to blue. It’s not a friendly blue. It merely is.
It is difficult to hear birds here. There might be one or two in the morning, singing, but I’ve never seen them.
Someday, I will.

III. Percussion

I’ve been to retreat twice. When I first came, though, the sky was not blue, but a suffocating smoky grey, and the wind carried ash with it. The car ride was silent, and we arrived late, in darkness, and I felt isolated throughout. Returning, we took the 280, and rolling hills yawned and stretched before us below a very blue sky. And when we crossed the Bay Bridge, we saw the East Bay wreathed in grey—either fog or smoke, but unappetizing either way—and I so suddenly wanted to be back in the mountains, making music. Maybe it’s the romantic in me. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome. Practicing is never relaxing; it’s an active effort. But the idea of playing outside, with piney scents in my nose and wind in my hair, with l’Azur above—
Wind. Could be a storm. Could be traffic.
I love the blue of the sea when it shines a full teal under the Southern California sun and when it retreats into a stormy blue-grey.
I love it so much that I found a lyric essay on blue by Maggie Nelson (Bluets), read it, and now its chords thrum through everything I see. The sea seems sapphire-like. There is blue in the green of the redwoods. It’s pretty, it’s peaceful, it’s familiar, but blue in leaves I shirk from.
“Who can a monster blame for being red?” says a woman to Geryon. His passions and loves and identities all wound up—I love blue, but I hope not to be blue. It pervades my life. I seal my letters in blue envelopes.
Nelson: “…But while [blue] may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.”
I can see the blue of the sea, though. I can touch it and taste it, and though the blue disappears when I approach, maybe that will be enough.
On break, I went with a few friends to Half Moon Bay, on a whim. We had wanted to go to the beach. Descending, I saw more of green and more of brown, but then cows! And the grass was so green! And full of life! And then there was the sea, fully grey, lashing about furiously in the storm, round two. So the soul goes; so the heart sings.
We never did go to the beach. We splashed about in the rain, but looking at the sea was enough. The whitecaps were deadly. The waves were huge. Such tumult—the rolling of the waves, the steadfast cliffs, the—the laughter of friends, the—
Also, the noise of bagpipes, but I’d rather not think about that.
I may not have wanted to swim in the sea, but I did want to embrace it, to consume it and be one with it. Give me those blues and greys and greens.
So while both retreats were in winter, this retreat made a better winter. Lighter. Cooler. Lovelier.
Maggie Nelson, in her lyric essay, considers the lapis mines of Sarm-e-Sang in the mountains of Afghanistan. How empires have fought over blue. Consider the journey lapis took from the mines, around the tip of Africa and up to Europe to adorn a scepter. Indigo, in a fit of protectionism in favor of woad, was called the devil’s dye. Before it came to color stained glass in churches, blue symbolized the Antichrist.
We ascend in the darkness, shooting back to retreat. The only blue I can see is that of the lights on the center console. Damn lapis and indigo and woad, damn the sky and the sea. The only blue I want is an imaginary comforting, loving blue, with the sound of friends and smells of contentment. This blue I can touch. I think I can understand Geryon’s redness now, obliquely.
He’s in Peru now, by the way. Lima. He’s there with Herakles (they met again in Buenos Aires, on a day when Geryon’s face was puffy) and Herakles’s new boyfriend Ancash, and they’re staying on the roof of the boyfriend’s mother’s place. It is a cold winter, and the stars shine. He is healing, slowly. Later they will ascend into the Andes, to Jucu, where one can look down into the volcano of Icchantikas through holes used to bake bread. Skeptical?
In Jucu, Geryon trails after Herakles and Ancash, mouth tasting of red pepper tamales. And then there it is. “Volcano in a wall.”
“And now time is rushing towards them/where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces/night at their back.”

IV. Strings

After retreat ends, the whole orchestra traipses home via a tacquería in Pescadero. Parts of the road are flooded. The sun is shining bright, and the sky is clear. The food is good, and I do not feel like doing much of anything.
We take the 1 back up, and the sea is calm now, a deep blue. If I squint, it’s wine-dark, like Homer’s Aegean, and it seems so ancient and magical. My heart swells, and I smile. If I could fly and touch that blue, and the red of the sunset somewhere over the sea, and examine them for that magic so I could hold it forever—
But take a frog. It croaks, it swims, it catches insects. It is adorable just as it is, if slimy. One might wish to understand it. Dissect the frog, though, and perhaps one now realizes just how large its liver is relative to its body, but now the frog is dead.
I fall asleep again.
A few hours later, walking to a friend’s apartment in West Berkeley, I can’t help but notice all of the flowers. They are pink and orange and red, but the blues and purples catch my eye the most. I am submarined in color, and there are—no—and I am transported, momentarily, back to the Santa Cruz Mountains. I am listening to Taylor Swift in the car coming back from Half Moon Bay. I am spinning in circles with a friend to Anaïs Mitchell on a lawn in Berkeley under the harlequin skies. I am rehearsing duets with a different friend on the banks of the Rhine. And all that breaks some dam in me and floods through, and my cello shatters and releases a soundless energy, and—I can sing. I can sing. I can sing.

Words: Stephen Yang