Bones

Art, Pain, and YoYoMa

When I told the surgeon I had fallen while I was out dancing, she said, “That’s the best way to go down!” After she fixed my wrist with a metal plate and eight screws, I spent the next five days and nights on painkillers. Like the proverbial 25 Inuit words for snow, I had 25 different kinds of pain. Counting the minutes until I could take my next pill, I narrated my sensations to my husband in real time: now it’s searing bone pain on one of the fracture sites, now it’s shooting pains in my fingers, now stabbing pains in my palm, sharp pins and needles where the screws are, and on and on.

To distract myself one night at 2:00 in the morning, I listened to YoYo Ma playing Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites. More than merely distracting me, it focused the music in my body, like a magnifying glass catching the rays of the sun and lighting something on fire.

Two, three, deep, rich notes sounding at once, intertwining passages sometimes rising and falling at the same time. Long meandering phrases like slow sighs suddenly becoming rushing, leaping, breathless rhythms. The haunting, minor chord harmonies tapering off into a single note.

I would listen every night for an hour or more – sometimes much more – hanging on to it like a life raft. My brain was fascinated with where each note, each run, would go next. 

I would be awake and in pain, plug the music in, and immediately I would cross over into the land of the cello. 

I dozed, woke in pain, caught a minute of that indescribable beauty, and then went under again. Night after night for about 6 weeks – long after I stopped the opioids – the music accompanied me through night time waking and sleeping.

The strands of twisting, rising energy, the bow digging into the vibrating strings — somehow this all connected in my brain to my wrist and hand. It all became one thing: the lusciousness of the music, the taut strings, the tendons, the crisscrossing muscle fibers, veins, and nerve pathways. Perhaps it was a kind of synesthesia, where colors and sounds get all mixed up in the brain. It was as if the music had merged with the material of my body.

That sensation of the music and the sinews of my hand being one and the same thing would arise during the day even when I wasn’t listening to the music. And then it would evaporate after a few minutes. After about two months, the sensation stopped happening during the day and became less intense at night. Three months later, it was just a memory – although a vivid one.

These paintings were done five months after the surgery.