This is my guitar. It’s a Yamaha acoustic. FG-365s II. It sits atop a small table with removable drawers that I bought after my divorce for my new home. When I initially ordered it, I thought the table was big enough to be a regular-sized coffee table. It is not. It is too short to be a coffee table, but it is the right size to place a guitar on top of. The guitar is to the right of where I write and do academic work in my home office. Sometimes I take a break from being a department chair in my home office, and I play a song or two. The table was a mistake. It now serves a purpose. I had to imagine it anew. We pass through so many mistakes in our lives. So little changes or so much changes depending on the mistake, whether it is an incorrect purchase or something more significant. My guitar, though, remains the same as it was when I first got it. It hasn’t changed at all. I don’t imagine it as anything other than what it is: my guitar. I wonder if it imagines me?
I’ve had this guitar since I was 15. I have three other guitars in this house. I play none of them. One guitar I bought for my daughter a couple of years ago, hopeful that she would learn how to play and we could be a father/daughter duo, hanging out in the backyard, playing John Prine and Elvis Costello songs, bonding over music. I imagined all the music we would play together. She took a few lessons and quit. I have a Fender Stratocaster I talked my father into buying for me when I was 16 in exchange for a self-proposed deal that I would get straight As. He was reluctant to agree to the deal. My third guitar is a Vantage electric I haven’t played in over 30 years. It was my first electric guitar. Even though it is in a case where it has sat unplayed for years, I still remember the smell of the steel strings on that guitar. I remember sitting in the back of a Kendall music store where I took guitar lessons on that guitar, the instructor figuring out the songs I brought in tapes of and showing me how to hear what I couldn’t hear on my own. I have thought about buying a new guitar to accompany my new life. But I’m not a great guitar player who already owns four guitars and plays only one. I shouldn’t buy a new guitar. This guitar is often out of tune. I neglect changing the strings in a timely manner. I’ve taken it across the ocean many times where I refused to put it in baggage. I’ve tried to impress women with this acoustic guitar. I have memorized almost 0 songs. I used to know how to open tune to G and play slide. I don’t think I remember anymore how to do that. When I did, I often played Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” I was a 15 year old kid with Slash like long hair playing “I Can’t Be Satisfied” with a slide. Even I struggle to remember myself like that. I struggle to imagine myself once like that. I struggle.
At various stages of our lives, we imagine ourselves as someone or something else. Most 15 year old boys with long Slash like hair and denim jackets and earrings, as I was, imagine themselves as rock stars or maybe as blues legends like Muddy Waters. We want to be somewhere different from where we were or are, such as a suburban Miami, Florida neighborhood where I grew up, so far away from the imagined real of Chicago’s southside. We imagine. Touring. Playing. Creating. Impressing women. I was once in a band. We played one gig. One of the songs we played was “Rock and Roll All Night.” I mostly now play in my office, reading a song’s tablature on the computer or iPad since I can’t memorize any songs, my kids shutting the door so that I don’t drown out the TV or the video game being played in the other room.
On my guitar case are various stickers, most of them put on the case over 30 years ago. They do not reflect my personality the way stickers on a laptop or water bottle might for others. I used to try to impress my ex-wife by playing John Lennon’s “Woman,” his tribute to Yoko. She would usually get up and leave the room. A few months ago, I played guitar with a lovely woman sitting beside me on the couch signing along to the songs I picked out and read on the iPad since I am unable to memorize any of them. I have the tendency to play the same songs over and over: A slowed down version of “Seven Nation Army,” “Slip Sliding Away,” “Brokedown Palace,” an incorrect but still satisfying version of “Tumbling Dice,” the mournful “Far Away From Me,” “So Central Rain,” “Buttercup,” “Whipping Post,” “Karma Police,” “Can’t Find My Way Home.” These songs and my choice of them likely project something about my personality the way stickers on a laptop or water bottle might do for others. I used to play “Tangled Up in Blue” all the time. I seldom do now. I probably have my reasons that deal with what I can hear now about life but once couldn’t hear at all.
During this pandemic, many academics began recording themselves singing or playing instruments and shared those recordings on Facebook. I did too. Doing so, I was embarrassed. I felt stupid. I have moved from stoic to vulnerable in this last year. By posting videos of myself, I let vulnerability release me from that stoicism. I felt stupid to be playing guitar and posting a video to Facebook, but I still did it. I played “Bell Bottom Blues” and a country version of “Get Off” and a slowed down version of “Just What I Needed” and “Crazy on You” without the long intro and “Make Some Noise” which I made up by playing the Jimi Hendrix chord over and over while I read the lyrics off of my computer screen, and many others. I don’t know why I shared these videos. I don’t know why any of us do the things we do. Not knowing is fine. Not every moment or idea must be explained or rationalized. Some people think they know, but they are only imagining. Stuck inside most of the time, uninspired to work on my book, disappointed in everything around me, I started recording myself playing the guitar. But I didn’t show my face. My long, uncut strings dangled in front of the camera. A bookshelf sat idly behind me. The ceiling fan spun around and around. It’s very banal. It is hardly impressive. A 15 year old kid with long hair and rock star ambitions would have never considered playing the guitar as a banal activity. Today, I do. Woody Guthrie claimed his guitar killed fascists. Frank Zappa stated that his guitar wanted to kill your mama. Guitar Army is the title of Detroiter John Sinclair’s revolution. Radiohead said that anyone can play the guitar. George Harrison wrote about his guitar gently weeping. I often play that song. The guitar serves as a focal point for declaration, ambition, and eventual downfall and disappointment. The cheesy and ridiculous “Shooting Star” offers up that symbolic gesture: Johnny was a school boy when he got himself a guitar. Now he’s in a rock and roll band. Tom Petty’s Eddie experiences the same moment when his girlfriend teaches him some chords. Chuck Berry’s Johnny could play a guitar just like a ringing a bell. Their ends did not match their promising beginnings. They couldn’t hear what they should have heard. They couldn’t reimagine their life mistakes anew. These song characters lived for the flash and to be impressive and ignored the banal. Such is music. Such is writing. Such are relationships. Such is everything, it seems.
Keith Richards is a great guitar player. But so is Paul Simon. Neither are known for flashy solos, speed, the ability to bend strings, long solos. Both, however, can play intricate songs, compose, move from complex chord structures to other complex chord structures, match lyrics with music. They understand the guitar. After 37 years of playing the guitar, I really don’t understand it any more than I did when I began at 13. Most people understand “great guitarists” as those who are the flashiest and the most impressive. Eddie Van Halen. Jimmy Page. Stevie Ray Vaughn. I’ve never cared for flashy. Within the banal, instead, are the intricate and delicate moments of life, the daily inspirations, the sudden ability to notice, the slowness of composition and the gentle nature of touch. Flashy tries to impress. The banal understands whether or not it impresses. I think of the guitar work on “Hearts and Bones.” That subtle, almost banal, riff that carries the song’s tale of heartbreak along. That impresses me more than a ten minute guitar solo does. I also can’t figure out how to play that riff. I don’t understand it.
What do I understand right now? Sometimes I feel as if I understand very little. I write in order to understand the way a song writer may write in order to understand his or her life and its various disappointments. I often think of my professional life: few people who write about the university understand how a university works. I often think of my personal life: so many people understand the pain of divorce. I often think of my parental life: what the fuck am I doing, and how do I know if I’m doing it correctly? My daughter is 13. She doesn’t know how to play the guitar. My son is 9. I bought him a keyboard last year. He doesn’t know how to play the keyboard. They don’t understand how to do what I sort of understand how to do: play music. We listen to music together. I test their rock and roll knowledge all the time. We watch music videos together. They are not impressed, though, with their guitar playing father.
Is the guitar the most impressive and romantic of all instruments? Can we really impress women with the guitar as opposed to the trombone or xylophone? I tried to talk my daughter into learning the guitar by suggesting she would “be the hit of the party” if she learned. She’d rather write “Band of Brothers” fan fiction on her phone. Once when I was much younger, I took my guitar to downtown Haifa and played while a couple of friends hung out with me. Nobody left me any money. Nobody who passed by was impressed. What is impressive about music? What is impressive about writing? The question applies to both. We get contemplative. We may imagine ourselves in a different life, in a different role, in a different time, a different body, in a different relationship. “And you may find yourself,” David Byrne once sang about this process. I do not play “Once in a Lifetime” on my guitar. I sometimes play “Take Me to The River,” which is an Al Green song Byrne covered with The Talking Heads. “Take Me to The River,” too, traces out disappointment. In “Once in a Lifetime,” Byrne sang:
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
This is the point of banality. How did we get here, to this moment, to this writing, to this space, to this thought, to this memory, to these objects which surround us and live with us like guitars we play or do not play. And you may find yourself. Can you hear where you are? Can you see what plays around you? So much is written about objects. Objects, we often believe, have agency. The affect us. They interact with us. They cause. They generate. Think of a coffee shop or taproom where the chalkboard menu or reclaimed wood causes you to believe you are in a specific space as opposed to another space. In that belief, you feel comfort or anxiety or desire the way you would not somewhere else. That is how objects and writing work as well. This guitar causes me to believe something about the space I am physically and mentally in. Writing, whether I write it or read it, performs similarly. I play a slowed down version of The Black Keys’ “Lo Hi,” for instance, and I enter another space than my home office or Lexington, Kentucky. How did I get here? I sometimes think. How. A year earlier. Two years earlier. But now I’m here. No longer there. I ask myself, but I don’t understand completely. I’m in a completely different physical and emotional space.
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
There is nothing flashy or impressive about where we really are usually. We imagine ourselves elsewhere all the time: in our Facebook and Twitter posts, in our fantasies, in our daily trips to a store, in our travels, in our outrage, in our children, in our heads. We imagine because like that Muddy Waters’ song, we typically cannot be satisfied. This, too, is the narrative of the guitar hero I briefly mentioned. He had it all. He rose to the top. He couldn’t be satisfied. He imagined some better place, but that place does not exist. Our cultural narratives depend on such a tale. It’s typically how we imagine ourselves and how those we know well imagine themselves.
I pick up my guitar. I stop writing. I do not record myself this time. I flip through some tabs online thinking about what I might play or what is easiest enough for me to understand how to play. My daughter comes into the room. “Let’s go somewhere and write,” she says. She’s a writer, too. She’s not a guitar player, though. I imagine these two points about our father/daughter relationship. I size up her request. To go somewhere else. Like a mistake. Somewhere else can now quickly become a mistake the way all that past imagining once was for me and my life and my failure to impress. Let’s go somewhere is a question that once fit every moment of our lives, and now no longer fits at all. It’s a question that should be banal but that now is too big for this pandemic and our current situation. I ask myself if being a writer and not a guitar player is a more satisfying result of my parenting than the other. I’m not sure I know or understand, but all I can say is: We can’t. Nothing is open right now.
