Leanne Mya's Audition, BGT, May 2019
Toward the end of March we took the theme "disappointment." This is what I wrote.
Disappointment
My first thought was, “What is ‘appointment’?” How can
I think I understand disappointment when I don’t know its root word?[1]
I don’t go in for disappointment as much as I used to,
though it still runs through the seams of life. Every time I listen to the news
or go on Twitter I’m confronted by disappointing things. How can we make such
bad choices for ourselves and our world, over and over, repeatedly? Why is so
little of the news we see extraordinarily good? How could Robert Müller hand over the
results of his two year investigation to a Trump appointee who of course would
bury them? So very disappointing.
Perhaps that’s why I feed the birds, and make space
for spiders and insects in my home. Why I like to watch joyous auditions on
Ireland’s or Britain’s Got Talent: as a partial antidote to that onslaught of
disappointment, heartbreak, and yes, fear. To see someone throw heart and soul
into a song or dance, then burst into tears when the audience and judges praise them; to watch a Russian crow roll down a snowy windshield for sport, a
longhorn bull play with a giant inflated ball, a long-tailed tit try leaving
the nest for the first time—and change her mind. These tiny singularities are poised
against a supermassive black hole of sorrowful news. Tiny but powerful. They blow
air back into my lungs and life into my soul.
(Click on these photos to see the videos.)
Russian Crows
[1] For the curious: The Online
Etymology Dictionary tells me this: disappoint
(v.): mid-15c., disappointen, "dispossess of appointed office," from dis- "reverse, opposite of" + appoint, or else from Old French desapointer "undo
the appointment, remove from office" (14c., Modern French from désappointer). Whereas: disappointment (n.): 1610s,
"defeat or failure of hope or expectation," from French désappointement or
else a native formation from disappoint + -ment.
