Instrumental. James Rhodes
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were childhood sexual fantasies of being the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust and wandering around the streets pulling women out of cars and doing unspeakable things to them, getting aroused at the thought of being held down and having to beg for my own life, and a host of other weird and wonderful kinks involving torture, control, pain and God knows what. All before the age of nine.
And those flashes of anger. Corroding, all-consuming anger at everything in the whole world. Anger at happy fucking families, broken families, families, sex, success, failure, sickness, children, pregnant women, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, schools, hospitals, shrinks, door locks, gym mattresses, authority, drugs, abstinence, friends, enemies, smoking, not smoking, everything and everyone, ever.
Most of all, anger that I really, truly know that I cannot ever make what happened disappear completely. It’s one of those hideous faceblot stain things that children stare at and adults look away from. It is just there all the time and nothing I do can or will ever erase it. And I can try as much as I like to make it ‘my thing’, the reason I am special, a permission slip to behave however I want and to feel like a wannabe, spastic Holden Caulfield even at thirty-eight, but I know all the time, every day, that there is nowhere I can put it, no way I can frame or reframe it, nothing I can do with it to make it bearable or acceptable.
There is an inbuilt mechanism in our psyche that helps with that, and it is dissociation. The most serious and long-lasting of all the symptoms of abuse. It’s really quite brilliant. It started in the gym all those years ago.
He’s inside me and it hurts. It’s a huge shock on every level. And I know that it’s not right. Can’t be right. So I leave my body, floating out of it and up to the ceiling where I watch myself until it becomes too much even from there, and then I fly out of the room, straight through the closed doors and off to safety. It was an inexplicably brilliant feeling. What kid doesn’t want to be able to fly? And it felt utterly real. I was, to all intents and purposes, quite literally flying. Weightless, detached, free. It happened every time and I didn’t ever question it. I just felt grateful for the reprieve, the experience, the free high.
And ever since then, like a Pavlov puppy, the minute a feeling or situation even threatens to become overwhelming, I am no longer there. I exist physically and function on autopilot (I assume), but no one is consciously inside my mind. ‘The lights are on but no one is home’ is the perfect description. As a child that wasn’t good because I couldn’t control it at all, it happened all the time, and it meant I was labelled as spaced-out, difficult, gormless, not all there. I would wander around in shades of grey and disappear for ages. I’d be sent out to the shops to pick something up for my mum and not return for hours. When I did I’d be astonished at the panic and worry I had caused – time just seemed to disappear and I would have ended up hanging out with some random stranger or going somewhere entirely different from where I had meant to go.
Or today I will be chatting to my best friend and discussing, in detail, his plans for Christmas when five minutes later I’ll say ‘So what are your plans for Christmas?’ Not that chatting with a pal about mundane shit is threatening in any real sense of the word, but it has become so in-built, such a part of me, that I often disappear, without even realising it, at even the barest hint of a threat. Like potentially having to commit to seeing someone at Christmas when it’s only November and I may be dead, on holiday, busy, wanting to be alone and safe instead.
Key moments in my life are missing because of this. I look at my passport and know that I’ve been to certain places. I meet people who claim to know me, sometimes know me quite well. I go to restaurants where I’m welcomed back, tell people stories they gently remind me I’ve told them before or were there with me when it happened, and nothing . . . No fucking clue.
On the plus side it means I can watch the same movie and TV show several times without realising it; on the minus side I come across as rude, inconsiderate, a bit stupid. And it is fucking annoying not being able to remember almost everything to the point that it takes me several minutes to figure out what I had for breakfast, why I left the house, what day, month and year it is.
All the more weird that I can remember over 100,000 notes in a piano recital. All the more amazing that sat in front of a piano is one of the few places I am truly grounded.
I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. As a kid dissociation was the only way the world could be vaguely manageable. If you don’t remember you can’t be terrorised by the past. Our psyches are fucking brilliant – designed to deal with any and all eventualities, at least until they are overloaded and break in two. And yet, even then there is often a way back to something approaching a working state.And my closest friends are aware of it and they don’t get upset when I ask them the same question twice in forty-five seconds or have no recollection of a holiday we took a few months or years ago. Which is exactly why they’re my closest friends and why I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
TRACK FOUR
Bach-Busoni, Chaconne
James Rhodes, Piano
(shut up, I’m proud of this one)
Bach wrote several groups of pieces in sixes – six partitas for keyboard, six for violin, six cello suites, six Brandenburg Concertos and many more. Musicians are weird like that.
There was a piece of music that Bach wrote around 1720 which was described by Yehudi Menuhin as ‘the greatest structure for solo violin that exists’. I’d go much further than that. If Goethe was right and architecture is frozen music (what a quote!), this piece is a magical combination of the Taj Mahal, the Louvre and St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the final and longest movement of his second (of six, of course) partita for violin. It is a set of variations (sixty-four of them, I counted) on a theme that drags us through every emotion known to man and a few bonus ones too. In this case, the subject is love with her attendant madness, majesty and mania.
Brahms said it best in a letter to Schumann’s wife: ‘On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’
THE SEXUAL ABUSE WENT ON for nearly five years. By the time I left that school aged ten I’d been transformed into James 2.0. The automaton version. Able to act the part, fake feelings of empathy, and respond to questions with the appropriate answers (for the most part). But I felt nothing, had no concept of the expectancy of good (my favourite definition of ‘joy’), had been factory reset to a bunch of fucked settings, and was a proper little mini-psychopath.
But something happened to me bang in the middle of all of it that I am convinced saved my life. It remains with me to this day and it will continue to do so as long as I’m alive.
There are only two things I know of which are guaranteed in my life – the love I have for my son, and the love I have for music. And – cue X Factor sob-story violins – music is what happened to me when I was seven.
Specifically classical music.
More specifically, Johann Sebastian Bach.
And if you want to be ultra detailed, his Chaconne for solo violin.
In D minor.
BWV1004.
The piano version transcribed by Busoni. Ferruccio Dante Benvenuto Michelangelo Busoni.
I can keep going with this for a while yet. Dates, recording versions, length in minutes and seconds, CD covers etc etc. No wonder classical is so fucked. A single piece of music has dozens of extra little pieces of information attached to it, none of which is important to anyone other than me and the other four piano-mentalists reading this.
The point is this: in anyone’s life, there are a small number of Princess Diana moments. Things that happen that are never forgotten and have a significant impact on one’s life. For some it’s the first time they have sex