Music for Desks: “Road, Horse, Illinois” by Nick Admussen
My three-year-old boy wants to know why I’m listening to Anna Tivel all the time.
Baba?
Yes?
What is “the reverie is sweeter in the dark?”
Can’t really say, kiddo.
Baba?
Mm hmm?
What is “Illinois” about?
It’s about driving in the car when you’re sad.
Why is Anna sad?
I want to say that Anna is the storyteller, and even though the person in the story is sad—had driven cross-country to find a place to settle down with a lover, was rejected by that lover, and now has to drive back home, alone—it is not necessarily a sad thing to tell a sad person’s story. But then I look down at the little irony-free zone that is my son and think no, that’s just an evasive rationalization. When Tivel wrote the song, she was probably sad, whether the incident happened to her or not. When she sings it, she makes her voice sad. The song is sad and the person is sad, even though they might be sad in different ways. It’s not that complicated.
I don’t know exactly why.
Ok. Tell a story.
There is a beautiful thing in the songs that is not sad, this incredible puzzle-piece-clicking of rhyme into rhyme, an arc, a story. “Illinois” has a rolling rhythm that lulls you a little bit, and when the end comes you’re not ready for it to snap shut, but the silence after feels absolutely complete and earned. A moment in which all that structure expands, intricate and smooth, to the point that it becomes the only thing that’s happening. As the last chord unfolds, the hope of driving to Illinois is cocooned by the memory of the defeated drive back. The dream of finding a home emerges in its true shape as a hunger to be anything other than alone. I guess it is a bit complicated.
Tell me a story about when you were young.
It’s not music you can write to. It’s music you put on when you think you should be writing and leads you to thinking, how can I do that? And then after some replaying, it convinces you that the way she probably does it is to work and work and work until the voice and the guitar and the story and the rhythm all fall into an unbreakable, self-evident relationship. That she puts her life into the system of the song, her good years, the energy given her in each irreplaceable, unrepeatable day. I want to tell him: I am young now still, young enough at least.
Tell a story about a sad car that talks.
I write poems, and mostly my work doesn’t weave itself whole. There are no rhymes; no child would ever demand to hear it during snack. If I have anything resembling a signature move, it is to write something and then write an additional part—sometimes this becomes the introduction, sometimes the conclusion—that explains why the other sections don’t hold together. I wrote a book called Movie Plots that ended by insinuating that all the movies I’d described were just light writhing on a blank sheet. The afterword read: “my art… should be as good as movies… but these poems are not that good…. It takes a whole cloud of people to make a movie, but these were written by less than half of me.” This wasn’t just self-flagellation: I was trying to open a space that included both the book and the reader, to place them in the “cloud” of the poem. There’s a line in “Reverie” that goes, “And I don't know which way I'm bound to believe/The story itself, or the space between.” I write the space, or at least I used to.
Tell me a story about the boy and the horse.
These days, the main thing I’m doing instead of writing the spaces is watching the boy, little gold-hearted raptor. School has been off-and-on since the pandemic, and he got exposed to COVID in classes last week (tested negative!)—so now it’s on pause again and we’re all at home.
In the episodic bedtime story I tell him, a child and a horse are walking on an ill-defined quest down a long road to the land of the giants, where there is no time and nobody speaks or dies and music is the sound of the wind through the giants’ manes. The boy and the horse never get to the land of the giants, they just have little adventures and help people along the way. The child in the story has the name of my child. I am the horse, but he doesn’t know that yet. The horse speaks many languages, owns nothing, and loves books but can’t write them because he doesn’t have any hands.
The writing I do for myself is not competing particularly well with the rest of the work I do. I can’t even keep my time open, much less use it to open a space in words. Occasionally I put on a Tivel album and stab at the keyboard with my hooves. I’m not listening to the music as a writer: I’m one of her characters, a laid-off construction worker sitting by the riverside hotel he helped build, a singer cleaning a movie theater.
Keep telling.
So nothing’s working, but I’m working all the time. The people in Tivel’s songs are gutting it out. Sometimes they get what they want and mostly they get something else.
The kid is gutting it out, too. Implicit in the question why is Anna sad is the otherwise unaskable question what is it that’s making you play this stuff all the time. I am a front in the weather of the house: my son didn’t ask for it, but regardless he is forced to reorganize his expectations around it. How are you feeling? he asks, so often that it’s like a little protective spell. Hourufeelin? I pause with the hairbrush or the jacket zipper: gently, now.
A month ago the bedtime story’s hero and his horse crossed a great desert. It was difficult for them to get water, and this led my son to realize that they couldn’t go home whenever they wanted, that their families were not close at hand. He flipped out: no deserts, he decreed. Make them a way to get home. Ok, fine, of course. No endless journey: I made his hero a simple magic portal back to parents and a warm meal. A loop, a rhyme, a story made to hold him: a comfort. This year gets to be the year he can hear the beauty and hope in the form of “Illinois.” It gets to be the time he has no idea about what’s wounded in it, when she sings, “nothing hurts like crying the long ride home/nothing’s worse than hiding in the dark alone.”
Next year, maybe: the desert’s expanse, the thirsty horse kneeling. No. Later than that. I can go further. I can tell another one.
Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University and the author of five chapbooks of poetry, most recently Stand Back, Don't Fear the Change from the New Michigan Press. He is also a translator and essayist. You can learn more about him at nickadmussen.com.
