Two days after the 2016 election, when the air itself seemed suddenly denser and harder to breathe, I got together with my band, The Jaybirds, and sang a bluesy version of “I Can See Clearly Now,” by Johnny Nash. I’m guessing you know this tune; you’ve likely heard its infectious pop-reggae beat piping through the speakers of your big-box grocery store. Nash debuted it in 1972; it hit #1 on the Billboard charts, where it stayed for 4 weeks. Since then, it’s been covered by musicians including Ray Charles, Holly Cole, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Jimmy Cliff. But nobody sings it as freely as Johnny Nash. Listen to his silky tenor soar over the long series of chord changes at the bridge. Or watch him on YouTube, moving fluidly in his 70s-era afro and bell-bottomed suit, repeatedly unleashing his perfect dimpled smile. When he sings, “It’s gonna be a bright, bright, bright sunshine-y day,” you can fool yourself into believing him.
I’d gone to bed early the night of the election, unable to face the results as state after state tipped for Trump. The next morning I woke to a dream that Clinton had won. I leapt out of bed to check my phone, and was greeted with the triumphant grin of the new President-Elect as he stood at a podium, backed by a row of American flags, his face a mask of cocky entitlement. The man who had been caught on tape boasting about grabbing women’s pussies, who had called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, who idolized dictators like Vladimir Putin, whose hate-filled rhetoric whipped his followers into angry chanting mobs, and who mocked the dire forecasts of climate scientists—this man was going to be our new president. I climbed, trembling, back into bed, and scrolled in shock through my Facebook feed. It seemed the country I thought I knew had suddenly transformed overnight into a proto-fascist nation. What is this world now? I posted on Facebook. A man I didn’t know commented: “Now all you neo-liberals will get what you have coming. Watch the world crash and burn.” I blocked him.
Two friends and I had formed the Jaybirds earlier that year, and we got together once a week to play, building up our repertoire. We’d started as a jazz trio—bass, guitar, and vocals—but had begun to branch out, picking up pop tunes we liked and infusing them with our own sensibility. “I Can See Clearly Now” was one of these: a tune with a simple chord structure, cheerful percussive chunk-ing on the offbeats, and a roaming, syncopated bass line, as well as an expansive major key and an upward-striving melody. Two days after that bad November morning, when I sang Nash’s lines—I can see clearly now, the rain is gone / I can see all obstacles in my way—I felt the tune working on me like a medicine. It was as if by singing those phrases, I was bringing them into being. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. When the song was over, I felt somehow released. Of course, everything was the same—my country had still betrayed me, its apocalyptic future still quivered in my vision like heated air above a fire—but I felt momentarily free.
~
Singing starts with a breath, as we do. I inhale: my diaphragm contracts, air rushes to fill the resulting inner vacuum. My ribs expand, my blood flushes with fresh oxygen. A phrase rings in my imagination. As my diaphragm relaxes, I send my outflowing breath through my closed vocal folds, which vibrate, creating sound. The Latin for breath is spiritus, spirit—the airy self, that immaterial animating force, which also somehow holds our essential being. Science—or maybe scientism—has taught me to be skeptical of such an idea: it’s too ineffable, impossible to test, and therefore dubious. But it remains a useful word for describing inner experience. If spirit is breath, then when I breathe in, I transform air into spirit. The air that becomes breath penetrates my cells and rearranges their molecular composition, becoming, in the process, me.
If spirit is breath, then when I sing, I am sounding my spirit on the air.
~
As it happens, “I Can See Clearly Now” hit #1 the same month I was born. During my last weeks in utero, the air hummed with radiowaves carrying Nash’s hopeful melody. That was November, 1972, just after voters reelected Nixon in a landslide, a year and a half before his impeachment hearings. When I was a few weeks old, the astronauts aboard Apollo 17, NASA’s final manned mission to the moon, captured the iconic image of earth from space that we now know as the Blue Marble: our planet, swathed in clouds, hanging in all its vulnerable beauty in that vast dark.
My parents were 25 then, two years married, working at a halfway house for troubled teenagers in Hagerstown, Maryland. I was a colicky baby, often inconsolable. Music helped. They’d walk me up and down their little apartment, filling my ears with songs: “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” “I Been Workin’ on the Railroad.” When my father got into graduate school out in Claremont, California, they erected a portacrib for me in the back of their red Dodge van and drove cross-country. From their post in the front seat, they sent me melodies: Ian and Sylvia’s “I’m a Rambler, I’m a Gambler,” Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack.” A couple of years later, when I was old enough to talk, I’d lie awake in my crib at night, returning the same melodies like tiny sound-flares shot into space. I’m here, they said. I’m still here. Where are you?
~
Before the Blue Marble came Earthrise, a 1968 photo taken by astronaut Bill Anders as Apollo 8 rounded the moon: the swollen half-earth gleaming blue and white against the blackness of space, hovering above the pocked grey lunar surface. The image blasted into the world amid the pages of Life Magazine, accompanied by poet James Dickey’s words:
And behold
The blue planet steeped in its dream
Of reality, its calculated vision shaking with the only love.
Dream in Old English meant joy. Also, song.
~
In Claremont, 30 miles east of L.A., we lived beneath a semi-permanent greenish-brown haze. Photochemical smog—rich in fossil fuel emissions and poisonous ozone—had been a feature of Los Angeles life since the early forties, when residents mistook its first appearance for a gas attack. Most days in 1973 the smog obscured Mt. Baldy, the highest peak of the neighboring San Gabriel mountains. On particularly bad days, we’d receive smog alerts announced via loudspeaker from a buzzing helicopter, spewing yet more pollutants into the already-saturated air. Mornings, my father would strap me into a seat on the back of his bicycle, and ride me to daycare. I arrived coughing and wheezing. My father developed headaches.
Stratospheric ozone protects us from too much UV radiation; tropospheric ozone chokes us. Made from three atoms of oxygen, and generated by the mixing of volatile organic compounds, nitrous oxides, and sunlight, ground-level ozone is a major contributor to smog, which can irritate the throat, make you cough or wheeze, and cause pain or tightness in the chest when you inhale. Prolonged exposure to smog can damage the alveoli, shrinking lung capacity. Autopsies reveal the lung tissue of smog-breathers to be not a healthy pink but a sickly yellow-gray, streaked with black. Breathing bad air can cause asthma, heart disease and stroke; it may also trigger cognitive problems like dementia, Alzheimer’s, and even depression. Depression itself, and its close cousin, grief, can inflame the lungs and constrict the breath.
If taking a breath transforms air into spirit, then breathing is an act of self-realization. But how can you realize a self when you can’t take a deep—or clean—breath?
~
I can’t breathe. The last words of 43-year-old Eric Garner, former employee of the New York City Parks Department, father of six, neighborhood peacekeeper, and a severe asthmatic, whose labored breath was choked out of him in the hot summer sun on a Staten Island street by an over-zealous cop. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Before he went limp, Garner chanted it eleven times, like a litany, like an incantation. After he died, his neighbors and friends erected a street-side memorial on the spot where he’d been killed—Mexican prayer candles, soda cans, packs of his favorite Newport cigarettes, all arrayed around a piece of paper on which were printed the words, in big block letters: I CAN’T BREATHE. In the very center of this display was Garner’s inhaler.
Downwind from New Jersey’s smokestacks, full of exhaust, the Staten Island air that Eric Garner breathed fairly dripped with ozone. The cop’s lethal chokehold finished what Staten Island’s ozone had started.
~
The same year “I Can See Clearly Now” debuted, the same year I was born, the editors of the journal Atmospheric Environment published a letter from a scientist named James Ephraim Lovelock. In the letter, Lovelock proposed a new metaphor for earth: it was not a spaceship, tenuously provisioned against the vacuum of eternity, but a living organism, with the creaturely ability to self-regulate to maintain its own life-sustaining conditions—such as a livable climate, or breathable air. “The purpose of this letter,” Lovelock wrote, “is to suggest that life at an early stage of its evolution acquired the capacity to control the global environment to suit its needs and that this capacity has persisted and is still in active use.” He named this Earth-sized organism Gaia, after the Ancient Greek goddess, mother of all life.
Years before he wrote that letter, Lovelock invented a device called the electron capture detector that measured trace pollutants in the air. Sampling the breeze at his family’s home in western Ireland, he discovered a substantial amount of smog-sourced chlorofluorocarbons, also known as CFCs, which later were found to deplete stratospheric ozone. The CFCs polluting Lovelock’s Irish air had likely blown clear across the Atlantic. The following year, sampling Antarctic air from the deck of a sailing ship, he also detected CFCs, blown southward from the opposite hemisphere. Earth’s atmosphere, it seemed, was like a vast circulatory system, with wind blowing air across the globe as the heart pumps blood throughout the body. One city’s air pollution, then—or one wildfire’s smoke, or one person’s virus-laden exhalations—ultimately belonged to everyone.
~
There is, of course, no air in space. As you travel through the layers of earth’s atmosphere, the air thins, and the concentration of gases grows more dilute. In the exosphere, the outermost atmospheric layer, the concentration of gases is so low that individual atoms can travel hundreds of miles before colliding with another. Some travel so far that they leave the exosphere altogether and become swept up in the solar wind.
The Hubble Space Telescope orbits earth at an airless 340 miles above sea level. NASA positioned Hubble precisely there to avoid the distorting visual effects of earth’s atmosphere. The turbulent mixing of air in our atmosphere bends light, making stars, for example, appear to twinkle. This effect is known as astronomical “seeing.”
Except in this case, “seeing” means “mis-seeing.” It means perceiving an illusion.
~
On December 2, 1993, the space shuttle Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center. On board were seven astronauts with a mission to fix a flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope’s optical system . Since its launch in 1990, Hubble had captured only crashingly disappointing images. Rather than appearing as a sharp point of brilliance, for instance, a star’s light would blur outward from its core like a diffuse halo. This was not a good result for a project whose cost had swelled to almost twelve times its original budget. Hubble was looking like a spectacularly expensive failure. Comedians ridiculed NASA; politicians fumed; citizens rolled their collective eyes at yet another waste of taxpayer dollars. NASA officials, scrambling to save the decades-long project and their reputations, determined that the problem was a spherical aberration on the telescope’s primary mirror. The mirror, which had taken two years to assemble and was the key element in Hubble’s viewing mechanism, had been polished 2.2 micrometers (about 1/40 the thickness of a human hair) too flat. Expert engineers designed a fix: a new set of mirrors with inverse properties that would correct the flaw, almost like a massive and mechanically-intricate contact lens.
The Endeavour’s seven astronauts were to install the new system that would correct Hubble’s blurry vision, as well as perform a series of other necessary maintenance tasks. To accomplish it all, two separate teams of astronauts would space-walk a total of 35 hours and 28 minutes. It was crucial that they remain on schedule. Every morning, mission control down in Houston would wake them with a song piped through the Endeavour’s speakers. On December 7th, the day after two of the seven astronauts successfully installed the fix to Hubble’s optical system, mission control woke them with Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now.”
And it was true: the fix worked. Hubble could see. The telescope now returned images in sharp focus: the spiral core of the distant galaxy M100, for instance, once fuzzed with a milky wash of light, now appeared as crisp and clear as a puddle of water, rainbowed with oil, at your feet. The late-night comedians relented; politicians kvelled over the returning astronauts; NASA’s reputation was restored.
Within a year, Hubble’s corrected vision allowed astronomers to more accurately measure—based on the pulsating brightness of M100’s Cepheid Variable stars—the galaxy’s distance from earth, which in turn allowed for a closer estimate of the age of the universe (13.8 billion years old). Hubble’s clarity of sight could penetrate the deep past, and its continued discoveries—like the fact that the universe’s rate of expansion is accelerating, due to the mysterious anti-gravitational forces of dark energy—allows us to see into the future. And what do we see? Apocalyptic visions. Comets hurtling through spacetime, crashing into any celestial object in their path; stars just like our sun flaring into supernovas before going cold, foretelling earth’s eventual frozen fate; galaxies spinning faster and faster away from each other, or, as in the case of our Milky Way and nearby Andromeda, colliding and merging, sending stars into new, unpredictable orbits.
Of course, these are distant catastrophes, billions of years away. It’s the nearer apocalyptic visions—like democracy’s supernova, flaring forth in its own hate-fueled inferno; like the sea levels rising alongside global temperatures; like the increasingly virulent hurricanes, the out-of-control wildfires; like the global reach of a death-dealing airborne virus—that make seeing the here and now such a paralyzing terror.
But fear, like air, distorts. Which makes me wonder: how is my fear distorting my vision? What exactly am I mis-seeing?
~
For most of us, the word apocalypse connotes disaster on a grand scale, a final catastrophe of epic proportions. But the word comes from the Greek for “unveiling” or “revelation.”
Spacetime, then, is a kind of apocalypse. So is a life.
So is a song.
~
Johnny Nash owes the spectacular success of “I Can See Clearly Now” at least in part to Bob Marley, whose music Nash discovered at a 1967 Rastafarian gathering in Kingston, Jamaica. At the time, Nash’s musical career had stalled. Reggae became the creative ignition he needed.
I don’t know exactly how things went down the night he met Marley, but I’ve done some reading that’s helped me imagine it. In my mind’s eye, I see a clean-cut, uptown-dwelling Nash as he wanders warily through the twilit streets of Trench Town, looking for the party. Insect shells crunch underfoot. The air smells of woodsmoke. People sit on upturned buckets outside shanties made of lumber scraps and squashed tin cans, poking at their bonfires, eyeing him. Maybe he’s listening for music to find his way, or maybe he’s following the sweet, thick scent of ganja smoke to its source. Maybe dusk is deepening, lit only by those bonfires and a handful of kerosene lamps winking on like dim stars. Soon, drawn, perhaps, by the heart-quickening sound of polyrhythmic drumming, Nash finds the yard and enters a circle of dreadlocked Rastas, smoking spliffs and sharing ideas. Among them is the young Bob Marley, his short locks just beginning to grow.
Nash must have stayed a long while, listening to Marley’s rough tenor, backed by the tight harmonies of Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, as together they breathed out their soulful melodies born of shantytown life and Rastafari philosophy. Trench Town simmered with generations-old anger at being kept down by what the Rastas called Babylon: white Western post-colonialist society, the system within which—years later—a malefactor like Trump could represent the pinnacle of success. Through his music, Marley chanted Babylon down, singing away its poisonous greed and materialistic striving, liberating his spirit from its insidious and far-reaching mechanisms of enslavement. Marley sang to keep himself free.
After that night, Nash and Marley became collaborators. Nash and his partner Danny Sims recorded Marley and the Wailers in their studio, while Marley wrote music for Nash to perform. They sang together; on Nash’s I Can See Clearly album, you can hear Marley and the Wailers backing Nash when you listen to the title track.
~
“Singing is a spirit,” Marley once said. Science may dismiss spirit, but it can’t dismiss air. Though invisible, air is measurable, sampleable, detectable, and its sources are plain. It is our life-giving, wind-mixed global intermingling of exhalations—the breathed-out spirits of all respiring creatures on the planet: phytoplankton, bacteria, plants, trees, animals, and human beings, everyone we know and everyone we don’t. And air is not just an inert amalgamation of gases, but an agent of creativity. It hangs like a humid curtain, making us sluggish and stupid. Or it dries our skin as we leave the lake, cooling us. It toys with our hair as we sit watching a summer sunset, or whips itself into tornadoes, lifting trees by their roots, homes from foundations. The air frisks with a kite or tickles a cheek or sears an exposed finger with frost. It delivers to us the intoxicating scent of verbena, the choking smog of a trafficky city, the aerosols of an incurable virus, or the soothing notes of a drifting melody. The air makes things happen, creates, through its movement, the conditions of our lives—and our deaths.
And if this is air, what is a song, besides a dream, besides a joy? A song shapes the air into a perceptible form, however evanescent--a form that can remind both singer and listener of the evanescence of every living thing: of Bob Marley, who died, cancer-ridden, in 1981 but whose prophetic music still resonates through the air on radio waves and via wifi signals all over the world, inspiring freedom seekers everywhere; of Johnny Nash, who eventually left the Babylon of commercial music for a quieter life, running a ranch and helping to raise his grandchildren; of Eric Garner, whose eloquent last words gave righteous voice to a still-burgeoning liberation movement; of my own sweet and idealistic parents, aging into their seventies now; and of me. A song can be a revelation, a reminder of the continual apocalypse that every living moment brings into being: the now that ends with each phrase, the new now that begins with the next. A song can cut through the smog of fear we breathe each day, helping us to—even if momentarily—see more clearly. A song can peal through the reaches of earth’s wild atmosphere, scattering its wisdom (from the Indo-European weid-, meaning to see)—perhaps even as far as the exosphere, toward the solar wind and the source of that bright, bright, bright sun-shiny day.
Amy Hassinger is the author of the novels Nina: Adolescence, The Priest's Madonna, and After the Dam. Her writing has been translated into six languages and has won awards from the American Best Book Awards, IPPY, Creative Nonfiction, Publisher’s Weekly, and the Illinois Arts Council. She’s placed her work in many publications, including The New York Times, Sierra, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Amy teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, and in her free time enjoys singing with her band, The Jaybirds, and bothering her children.
Photo by Hubble Space Telescope / ESA on Foter.com / CC BY