My dad used to sing a lot of made up songs, a lot of the
time.
Sometimes they were so absurd that you just had to laugh. He
had a knack for riffing off everyday phenomena, and also for creating peculiar
insular worlds within ditties. One recurring lyrics was “and a bucket of glue”,
which was used as a summarising statement of sorts. I also seem to remember a
lot of fart noises.
One time when I was 15 years old I was looking for something
in his studio space where he was chortling away in a manner that was
particularly relentless. I was irritated and I told him to stop it, in reply he
suddenly yelled at me “IF YOU WERE IN THIS MUCH PAIN YOU WOULD BE SINGING TOO!”
I walked out of the room, stopped on the stairway as my heart
dropped into my stomach and I tried to sob quietly. It hurt so
much to learn that he was transmuting his pain in such a silly and joyous way, and
that I had attempted to shut him up. He was living with heart disease and cancer at the
time, and I didn’t realise his songs had become a way to move through the
paralysing experience of living inside a failing body.
I notice that I also attempt to transmogrify pain, in different ways. When
I feel most lost I draw visual puns that make light of how I feel. Cartoons are irreverent, casual and sketchy, so it's the perfect medium for hiding sadness (or ideally turning it into silliness and exploding it's stranglehold).
