Emery Marc Petchauer

Emery Marc Petchauer

Time Traveling and Not Cleaning Up the Mess

Here’s my favoirate thing I wrote this year. It’s a short piece about sound, young folks, teaching, and a rapper. Much of what’s here is material that got squeezed out of an academic article I wrote in the same year. But I’m happy it did because what I mostly wanted to do was share the little exchanges among youth that thread through the article: how they tuned into what they were hearing, how they took matters into their own hands, and even how they hurt my feelings sometimes. I wanted to share these things without having to step too far away for some kind of academic analysis.

What I like most about the piece is the ending. Here’s why.

Pieces like this that reveal tensions in education spaces often end with neat recommendations. They try to clean up the mess they made. Cleaning up can be good. I tried to for a long time. But it didn’t feel right, mostly because I still don’t have those kinds of answers to what is in and around the text. So instead, the ending turns back on me and how “the strikes and blows of these reverberations hit me too because of the relational ties I hold with these artists.” With that approach, I think I stuck the landing, especially with the final sentence that keeps things unsettled.

Sada Baby stays in motion even now, echoing through my writing as I toggle over to his Soundcloud page, press play on his songs, and wonder if I will hear something that makes me tune in differently to the young people around me.

But here’s something else: I wrote that final sentence four years ago in Memphis on a writing retreat. I wasn’t writing this piece yet — far from it. I was working my way through sound studies readings in anticipation for writing the larger academic article this piece would be cut from. The sentence is a description of what I found myself doing in Memphis. It’s in a blue notebook with pink and orange sticky notes flying out of the pages. In fact, the sentence probably started on a sticky note.

This is one of the ways “writing is a form of time travel.” That sentence traveled with me for a period of four years. Or rather, it’s likely more accurate to say I traveled four years back to it in order to finish this piece. Or maybe, in Memphis I traveled four years ahead to write it, and the end of this piece is when I finally caught up with myself.