{"id":2352,"date":"2021-01-03T18:31:50","date_gmt":"2021-01-03T18:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2352"},"modified":"2021-01-04T16:10:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-04T16:10:06","slug":"2020-opera-extraordinaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2352","title":{"rendered":"2020: Opera Extraordinaire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>

I was given to lying prone on the living room carpet, pencil in hand, contemplating my topic sentence. It was a strange luxury: the blank page and a sentence-to-be.\u00a0 In my mind\u2019s eye, I knew it had to be multiple. There couldn\u2019t be just one angle, one point of view or concept to explore on a sixth-grade paper.\u00a0 It was a good thing I had a stack of paper handy.

Skipping ahead, how many voices, or topic sentences would we need to write about 2020?\u00a0 The mind splits under the pressure.\u00a0 It\u2019s been a behemoth of a year, and any rational attempt at \u201cmaking sense\u201d is a slippery, doomed adventure, without multiplicity.\u00a0

Better to imagine the year as a screaming, overstuffed, opera, exhausting in its sheer number of plot lines and tonal shifts.\u00a0 You didn\u2019t want to cry but there you were crying at something sentimental that now rang true.\u00a0 There was sacrifice, there was love against all odds. Death always in the background, or on the other side of the flimsy stage door.\u00a0 That\u2019s what made the singing so moving, the sorrow, even in love songs, so poignant.\u00a0

When the opera quiets at intermission, you are soaringly happy, with inner circle, with friends.\u00a0 I was happy with a square of grass, a flower, a word.\u00a0 When I listened to the mute language of things.\u00a0

Sometimes from all the screaming and confusion, my mind got fuzzy.\u00a0 I seethed from the cage of futility.\u00a0 I raged, scoffed, then laughed at national farce. \u00a0 I bled, then tried to be nourished by things as they are.\u00a0 The same image of my physical self on a film strip would be repeated, with only the color radically shifting according to mood. \u00a0

One thing I\u2019m grateful for: to have been saturated with emotion, saturated with experience.\u00a0 Things mattered.\u00a0 Chaos mattered.\u00a0 At the edge, we did small things, though we were charged with personal accountability.\u00a0 We found lightness at the center.\u00a0 When we pack our suitcases to take forward into the future, they should be lighter and filled with an open weave of memory and desire, of fierce attention, of strong beauty.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[923,957,1056,1058,1054,1055,1057],"class_list":["post-2352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-923","tag-covid-19","tag-making-sense-of","tag-opera","tag-summary","tag-topic-sentence","tag-year-end"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-BW","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2352"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2360,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2352\/revisions\/2360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}