"A Man Plays Debussy for a Blind, Eighty-four-Year-Old Female Elephant"

A Note on "A Man Plays Debussy for a Blind, Eighty-Four-Year-Old Female Elephant" from Tom Sleigh:

As I said in last week’s post, I come from a musical family. My mother grew up in a dirt-poor Dust Bowl farming family in western Kansas. She discovered piano by overhearing through an open window a local neighbor lady playing in her living room. She so loved hearing the music that she asked the woman if she could do housework in exchange for piano lessons. My mother was something of a prodigy and quickly outstripped her teacher, learning to play what’s come to be known as the Great American Songbook, as well as jazz, ragtime, and classical. When she went to college (she was the first person in Greeley County, male or female, ever to attend) she put herself through school in part by playing in bars and dance halls. Because her name is Rosamond, she called her combo Rosie and Her Four Thorns. “The bar we played at,” she once told me, “was called The Bloody Bucket. And believe me, it was aptly named.”

When I came across Paul Barton in a YouTube video playing Debussy for an old blind female elephant, it brought back to me my mother playing “Clair de Lune.” Something about the elephant, the intensity of her listening as she flapped her ears, reminded me of my mother’s single-mindedness as a musician. She often played Debussy—and as I listened to Barton playing it for the elephant, the fact that both my mother and the elephant have lived to extreme old age (the elephant into its middle eighties, my mother into her late nineties), that both are blind in one eye, and that my mother exudes a kind of pachydermal calmness and otherworldliness as she plays, made me feel a strangely familial kinship.

As to poets going mad in poems, and their perhaps overhyped tendency to kill themselves, I think of the French thinker (philosopher is too heavy a word) Jean Améry and his concept of suicide as “voluntary death.” Primo Levi accused Améry, who died by his own choice, of being a “professional of suicide”—but of course that was before Levi also killed himself. Some would say that the elephant in the poem, despite her being mistreated most of her life, is a survivor. But Liam Rector, the poet friend of mine who takes his own life in the poem, would also think that he, too, was a kind of survivor: his life may have ended, but like Améry he believed that suicide could be a radical form of freedom, a sort of “road to the open.” And like Améry he knew that such a road led nowhere, and that it was ridiculous even to talk of roads.