Unstuck: An Epic for Artists
written by Gala Flagello
Bahlest Eeble Readings Cycle 15 Fellow
You are stuck. Beating your head against the wall; throwing things at the wall to see what sticks; interestingly, a lot of wall metaphors in this kind of scenario. Perhaps let’s make this a literal, unscalable wall: You’ve been trying to climb for hours—days? Weeks? Months?—but your shoelace came untied and your foothold isn’t secure and your hands are aching and you’re sweating. And once you reach the top, you’ll still have to fight a giant roaring monster named Editing or Approval or good old Doubt, and it happens to take the form of that one teacher/colleague/family member who made you feel like you can’t do this.
Little bits of rock start to crumble treacherously off the wall and fall 10,000 feet to the ground below you—and by that, I mean you stare at your screen for the 10,000th hour and contemplate giving up and what that might entail. You feel the shame and guilt, the anger and fear, the resignation. The what-will-they-think; the of-course-this-would-happen; the I-can’t-do-it.
And then a voice, so tiny, so soft: You are never stuck.
On the wall and at your desk, you perk up. That faint glimmer was a figment, you think, shaking your head grimly. An unreliable hope; a specter of a past, overly optimistic version of you. But then it sounds again, reverberating for far longer than it has any right to, crescendoing even. It’s getting denser and more emphatic. It fills the valley around you, echoing: You are never stuck! You are never stuck! You are never stuck! Even the Editing/Approval/Doubt monster at the top of the wall seems to hear it, squinching its eyebrows in annoyance, snorting angrily. It peers down at you to check that you haven’t gotten any stronger or bolder.
And you haven’t. In fact, you’ve become more doubtful. Somehow your other shoelace is now also untied, there are gnats buzzing around your head, and the sweat is dripping into your eyes. How dare that voice encourage me, you think, your indignation growing. I have no track record, no abilities, no experience. The booming voice gets even louder at this, and a scroll appears out of thin air, unfurling grandly, the paper reaching from where you are halfway up the wall all the way down to the ground. Rolling your eyes in disbelief but curious, you start reading the scroll.
It’s not a letter, a treaty, or a warning. It’s not a spell or a sign. It’s a list. Neatly bullet-pointed and 10,000 feet long, the scroll enumerates every project you’ve done before this one, big and small, recent and long ago. As you read them, you remember with surprise and delight that you actually liked some of these. One makes you smile, you chuckle at another, your eyes widen at a third, remembering how that one in particular taught you process, purpose, perseverance. Thinking back, you learned something from each of these, regardless of if the wall you scaled was as tall as this one or much shorter. You take your eyes off the scroll momentarily to look around. You’re actually closer to the top than you thought, and the monster up there is slightly smaller than you recall. In fact, there are only a few gnats left now, and although both of your shoelaces are untied, your foothold feels a bit sturdier.
You’re still skeptical. You wonder how this can be as your eyes return to the scroll, spotting a few more projects that Past You completed, remembering the ups and downs of each, the height of the walls, the muscles that each made stronger. As you keep reading, the ink shimmers. You blink your eyes, thinking you’re imagining things, but no, the ink is turning gold, the letters of each project title rearranging themselves. In a matter of seconds, every line reads You are never stuck.
You laugh and shake your head, a mix of possibility and confidence and hope bubbling in your stomach. The monster above you seems to start roaring, but curiously it’s more of a sustained, persistent squeaking now. All 10,000 feet of the scroll rolls up swiftly and disappears with a light pop. You check your foothold—better. As you look down, you see that your shoelaces are tied, though loosely, and you blow away the one gnat that’s left. You look up and make eye contact with the monster, who is now the size of a pomeranian. Wait, it actually is a pomeranian! It seems your reward for scaling this surprisingly short final segment of the wall is petting a dog. Oh and there’s a big glass of water and some snacks up there now too; that’s nice.
As you stand at the top, a breeze swirls softly around you. You think you hear a few pianissimo choruses of You are never stuck but you’re not sure. The water is cold and refreshing; the pomeranian prances around, demanding more pets. The sun shines despite a few storm clouds in the distance, which you notice have asserted themselves directly over another mountainous wall, that one rockier and more jagged than this. But that’s for Future You, and, with a fluffy dog yipping merrily at your heels, you hear it inside your head this time:
You are never stuck.
Gala Flagello (b. 1994) is a composer, educator, and nonprofit director whose music is “both flesh and spirit, intensely psychological without sacrificing concrete musical enjoyment” (I Care If You Listen). She is the Festival Director and co-founder of the contemporary music festival Connecticut Summerfest.
Gala is the 2021 Promenade Opera Project Composer in Residence and was recently commissioned by the Albany Symphony, Hub New Music, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Keene State College Concert Band. Other accolades include first prize in the 2020 Sinta Quartet Composition Competition and the 2020 Michigan Music Teachers Association Commissioned Composer Prize.
Gala holds a BM in Composition degree from The Hartt School, MM in Composition degree from the University of Michigan, and is currently pursuing a DMA in Composition at the University of Michigan.
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