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March 3, 2020
Carol Ann Davis's Playlist for Her Essay Collection "The Nail in the Tree"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Carol Ann Davis eloquently explores timely and timeless themes in her essay collection The Nail in the Tree.
In her own words, here is Carol Ann Davis's Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection The Nail in the Tree:
I have a confession: I sing in the car, mostly hymns I learned as a child in church and certain albums my six older siblings loved that I was bathed in before I was twenty. Another confession: I consider this singing the closest thing in my adult life to going to church, whether the song is a hymn or not. A third confession: sometimes I get hooked on one song and listen to it continuously, singing along but also studying its structure, eventually taking it back into the back brain where it collides endlessly with those old church hymns: “Holy Holy Holy,” “In the Garden,” “Amazing Grace.” This singing in the car predates my own driving. I remember doing it with my family on trips—all of us piled into a station wagon speeding down the state highways of Florida with the windows open and the radio high, or hauling off a capella as we peeled away our Sunday layers, anticipating an afternoon of dinner and the ocean. Years later, alone in the car in New England, these songs come to me, it seems, to help me experience the emotions I know are roiling from the experience of living and raising my boys in Newtown on the day of and in the aftermath of the shooting there.
Because The Nail in the Tree begins with the day of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and then moves around in time, from two years before the shooting to moments in the years afterwards, I anticipate the experience of encountering the essays in the collection is immersive and, at times, frustrating, in that it examines moments of intimacy that naturally evaporate and come to exist somehow outside of narrative structure. In this way, it imitates the experience of one of its major subjects, parenting, that strange animal that is always on the edge of disappearing from the record, forever.
Because of the book’s structure, the playlist moves around inside those times the way the essays do, and each meant something different to me in the seven years during which I wrote this book. I’ve noted the essays here as the collection does, by their time from the shooting.
Preface
“Uncloudy Day” Doc Watson
The sound of this song, Doc Watson’s voice and fiddling, has been with me so long I had to ask my sister if this was one of the songs my father sang in the four-part bluegrass band he quit singing with when I was about three. She said yes, and its old-timey sound, as well as its lyrics, continue to be a through line for me. The song speaks of a day in heaven, an “uncloudy day,” when the troubles of this life will be put away. I chose it for the preface of this collection because only in those few opening pages do I look to my boys’ future, their possible adulthoods, and away from their early childhood, with which the book is mostly concerned. That a song from my own early childhood accompanies them, sung by my father, a man who was dead before they were born, speaks, I think, to a tenet that guides me—the notion that those who are lost accompany us in our trials.
Parenting, like faith, begins in no-knowledge and reveals to you in beautiful and difficult ways that it’s possible you know even less. “Uncloudy Day” signals this lack of knowledge by a small phrase that repeats each stanza: “they tell me of a place where my friends have gone/and they tell me that mine eyes will behold...” That small phrase “they tell me” shows how little one can know, how one proceeds on hearsay. Lived experience, its emotional truth, is not composed of knowledge but of a mix of unknowing and love. So I began with that.
Part I: the day of the shooting
This essay narrates my experiences on the day of the shooting, including picking up my older son at Hawley School, the elementary school nearest Sandy Hook School, and heading home to where my husband and other son (then in kindergarten) awaited us. Each of the four songs referenced below deals with some aspect of the day’s sensations—which if I could I would make simultaneous with each other. Though really there’s no describing it, music comes nearer than most things.
“Angels” Sam Baker
Sam Baker experienced extreme violence in his own life, when was on a train in Peru that was bombed by the Shining Path in 1986. His music bears those scars, fingers permanently damaged by the explosion and a voice marked by it. His song “Broken Fingers” off his album Pretty World narrates the loss of a boy sitting nearby him on the train as the bomb exploded. In “Angels,” Baker sings, “Everyone is at the mercy of another one’s dream.” He wrestles with the facit that should it be the dream of one to do violence to you, that violence will be done. This sobering truth is met with Baker’s conviction that “angels flutter around the heart/love can heal they softly call/when trouble comes to the ones we love/her angels come.” As beautiful as it is, it is a wishful thought compared to the argument of the chorus.
“Hurt” Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash’s devastating rendition of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails is the closest I have come to the numb feeling of that day. It’s also an act of musical empathy—a song from one era called back toward its roots and reinterpreted by the elders. So it’s devastating and also beautiful and generous, all at once.
“Living Waters” Silver Jews
Letting David Berman’s hangdog singing follow Johnny Cash at his rawest may seem a choice I made because David has just left us; he died by suicide in early August 2019. David was the first friend I made in my graduate program at UMass in 1992. We were thrown together in one of those teaching-how-to-teach week-long workshops that artist types have to endure to get their stipends, and then we were in every poetry workshop that year and the next. I taught with and studied with him all through his writing of Starlite Walker (1994), on which “Living Waters” is the penultimate track.
Upbeat and sweet, full of a poppy hopefulness combined with a droll self-deprecation (“people are good and people are bad/I never know which one I am”), David’s is a sort of civic comity—his music was welcoming, an old friend. And when he sang “Come in, out of the storm/what you need is an imitation of home,” I knew that if I imitated home long enough, my own might turn back into something I recognized. A strange thing happens when you suffer—you love everyone more. David reminded me (as he had so many years earlier when I first listened to the music of this fellow poet) to lean into the layers of my feelings, each one related to the best part of what I can be.
Part I: two years after
“Ring of Fire” Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash
In the couple of years after the shooting I was often visited by the intensity love: for my sons, my husband, my new friends in Newtown who were bearing so much love for each other through many difficult months that turned into years. This short essay narrates a small domestic scene with my son Luke in light of reading Héléne Cixous’ interpretation of the suffering of the slaughtered ox by Rembrandt combined with some lines by a Hungarian poet who died on a forced march during World War II. In other words, it seeks to approach the idea Johnny and June sing about: that love is a burning flame/and it leaves a fiery ring.
Part I: in the year that comes after
“Won’t Back Down” Tom Petty
This longer essay takes place between the day of the shooting and the above essay. I don’t know exactly why the book is not totally chronological except to say that the experience was one of visit and return, so the book is too. This essay, which is titled “The Practice of School Buses and Hummingbirds,” looks to the natural world to find its way into a new reality in which putting my children on the bus seemed like an irresponsible and even unnatural act. Some days to walk that hill, or worse, to watch them walk up it alone, I needed a little spine, the kind only Tom Petty at his most defiant could give me.
“Harvest Moon” Neil Young and Crazyhorse
Even in that post-shooting year, there was tenderness. It was the first year my family and I were back in New England—the first time my sons lived in New England and the first year since we’d first met and fell in love that my husband and I returned. The struggle and difficulty of that year was attenuated but didn’t dampen the sense of homecoming we felt. “Harvest Moon” seemed to call to me from those moments. It’s pure, long-term love and lyricism, practicing a brave and life-giving nostalgia in its assertion that “I’m still in love with you.”
Part I: two years after
“A Love Supreme, Part I: Acknowledgment” John Coltrane
This essay narrates a time of restless sleeping—not insomnia so much as an early morning restlessness in the years following the shooting. For many months it felt like I woke before the birds and watched the light come, listening for the garbage truck, or the plow, or the early buses. Like “Harvest Moon,” I’d listened to Coltrane endlessly while I was pregnant, and I returned to its loping energy and the conversation of horns and drums as a reminder of my own heartbeat, my many working parts. And of course I lived and breathed Coltrane’s bold assertion at the end of the seven-minute drive, his repetition of a love supreme a love supreme a love supreme a love supreme
I learned I could swim inside his voice.
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” Bob Dylan
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun…
During this period there was also a flight reflex some days—a sense of needing escape, especially while the boys were at school and I couldn’t see them. But the lines are a paradox—as if leaving meant lasting—as if there is a way to keep anything close to you in this world of ours. This song, its
tenderness, the lament of Dylan’s harmonica, brought me back to the early days, to Joni’s voice in “Blue,” and revisiting I was washed in deep-water grief and love. Bathed in it. And then there’s the matter of that “orphan with his gun/crying like a fire in the sun,” not exempt from Dylan’s tenderness but part of it. That seemed like a spiritual lesson to be learned, his insistence, his use of the figurative at that moment.
To be true to the experience of this period, I’d suggest playing “A Love Supreme” once more after this—they could loop back and forth for many hours. They have a tenderness in common.
Part I: two years before
“Our House” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Another reason to loop Coltrane and Dylan before moving on would be because moving on is moving back: this is the only essay in the collection from before, written when my boys were very young and examining the nature of brotherhood and crucifixion, principally the desire of Thomas to suffer in Jesus’ place. A song from a beloved brother’s wedding mix first heard when my oldest was in utero, and written by Graham Nash while he was living with Joni Mitchell, it narrates a sweet simple domesticity, for me the shining domesticity of then.
Part I: four years after
“Fireflies” Owl City
The first spring we lived in Newtown took place after the shooting. Hawley School had a new music teacher, and among the songs he chose for the fourth grade chorus was “Fireflies.” We parents looked straight ahead at the assertions our children were making as they sang this totally light and beautiful ode to child-mind—I’m weird cause I hate goodbyes—and hearing them we tried to hold it together. Then Mr. K, the new music teacher, closed the last note, turned and smiled, and we erupted in applause. What a gift he’d given to remind us of before—that our children were our children before as after. And they were just that: children.
“Let the Mystery Be” Iris DeMent
Willem was in the fourth grade when the shooting happened. Luke would be just finishing up the fourth grade, four years later, at the time I wrote this essay, the occasion of which was our finally telling Luke the extent of the tragedy, its reach, its method and numbers. The essay is called “Loose Thread,” and it worries the idea of tying up loose ends, of trying to find meaning inside such an event. Hence the inclusion of “Let the Mystery Be.” DeMent’s reasoning and musicality are both plaintive and undeniable, a line I walk when I talk about violence—past and coming—with my sons. No one knows for certain,and so it’s all the same to me,/I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
DeMent makes her reasoning sound light as a stone skipping across still water, but hers is a wild restraint.
Part I: three years after
“Too Sick to Pray” Willie Nelson
This essay examines war-time Picasso making sculptures in occupied Paris. It also returns to the bus stop, and the practice of putting the children on the busses, of waiting for them to come home knowing others won’t have that luxury. Nelson’s is an ode to a god he can’t always visit because of his sickness, his lack of faith, his hope he will recover long enough to pray. So, yeah.
“More than This” Roxy Music
But also, there’s more than this, more love, more to feel, deeper water to swim in. This was a song from the early days of my relationship with my husband, even from the summer before we met, when I was a dispatcher for the lifeguards (a major subject of Part II of the book), and it’s a sweet laid back argument for the more of love. Also, loss.
Part I: after five years
“Time After Time” Chet Baker Sings
This essay is the last in Part I, last before I stop keeping time with the tragedy—the after, before, and since. It’s called “No Sheltered World,” and it wrestles with admitting that children won’t find shelter. It also examines the art of Agnes Martin, an abstract painter that “lived inside” the hand-penciled grids she made and then painted, but otherwise lived shelterless, a possible example for them and for me. “Time after Time,” haltingly rendered in Baker’s smooth velvet, then followed by the expressive glass of his trumpet, seems right for the close of this part of my life. Baker suggests love’s a shelter too, one made of straw, to be sure, but shelter nonetheless.
“Pretty Eyes” Silver Jews
“Pretty Eyes” is the last track on The Natural Bridge, the Silver Jews’ second album. I read a rare interview in which David and some of the bandmates who helped him make The Natural Bridge in—no lie, a defunct Colt .45 factory in Hartford, CT—recall how difficult it was for David to make that album and especially to get to the guitar riff at the end of “Pretty Eyes.” “Final words are so hard to devise,” David sings. I couldn’t end this part of my book, either. And speaking of shelter, the song contains the lines:
All houses dream in blueprints
Our houses dream so hard
Outside you can see my shoeprints
I’ve been dreaming in your yard
The work of accommodating loss is the work of putting up and taking down walls. I think of myself hiding under a desk during the early seventies, near the ocean where my teachers were convinced Russian subs were inching closer to the coast to get near NASA, just south of us through the estuary. I think of my sons told to hide where the shooter can’t see you at lockdown drills, and I allow all of it to be met by the delicacy of David’s image, its wistfulness—our houses dream so hard. The gift of his tender vigilance, a kind of dreaming he spent his life doing, is there in the line I’ve been dreaming in your yard. That we could all feel some of that shelter, that we might we all so openly love.
Part II: “Of Morning Glass: Becoming a Swimmer”
“Blue” Joni Mitchell
Part two is a departure into as close to the present as the book can be, lopsided as it is; all that time and pages inside one thing, the second half is a shorter time spent underwater, in the company of three songs that try—without varying degrees of success, to breathe again. I revisit my life in Florida before I met my husband, when the idea of children or even an enduring love existed only in blueprints and shoeprints. But all that it would mean to love like I would come to love them was already there, it turns out, in my experience of the ocean. So, back to “Blue,” which also seems like the essential song asking life to drop you in some deep water.
“Down to the River to Pray” Alison Krauss
Back to the fiddler who played while my father sang the old hymns at church picnics, even in the early seventies a throwback, the lyrics driven by the twin engines repetition and an assertion. Like Krauss, I pray best near the water, with my brothers and sister around me. On YouTube this track is accompanied by many total immersion baptisms of the kind that were common at a certain point in the south. I’ve seen them off Flagler pier, where I worked as a lifeguard dispatcher, a job I recall in this essay. The local church did them at sunrise. I listen and I want that world back, most of it gone now. When I think of those baptisms, and the life that surrounded them, I can approach something like what my sons feel, thinking of the years that are suddenly gone, everything different now.
“Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” Bob Dylan
Who doesn’t dream of leaving the one who hurt you (or the thing that hurt you) and not looking back—and this song is the anthem of that feeling as well as its folly: the unachievable wish to be done with love, once and for all. Through so much bitterness, Dylan swims toward a kind of recognition of the beauty of its undoing. Maybe he never gets there in the lyrics, but certainly in the sound of the last chords he gets close to acceptance. I love you anyway, through everything, he seems to say. You let me down, but I love you.
Carol Ann Davis is a poet, essayist, and author of the poetry collections Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011), both from Tupelo Press. The daughter of one of the NASA engineers who returned the Apollo 13 crew from the moon, she grew up on the east coast of Florida the youngest of seven children, then studied poetry at Vassar College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A former longtime editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse, she is Professor of English at Fairfield University, where she is founding director of Poetry in Communities, an initiative that brings writing workshops to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence. She lives in Newtown, CT, with her husband and two sons.
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