Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
I love this poem, perhaps because I know so well the delicate balance between misanthropy and the kind of bewildering love for humanity that forces you to your knees . I also love the punning title, which is also the last line of the poem. Happy new year to everyone.
I love mankind most
when no one's around.
On New Year's Day for instance,
when everything's closed
and I'm driving home on the highway alone
for hours in the narrating rain,
with no exact change,
the collector's booth glowing ahead
in the tumbling dark
like a little lit temple
with an angel inside and a radio
which as I open my window,
a little embarrassed by
my need for change
(until the silence says
it needs no explanation),
is suddenly playing a music more lovely
than any I've ever heard.
And the hand—
so open, so hopeful,
that I feel an urge to kiss it—
lowers the little life-boat of itself
and takes the moist and crumpled prayer
of my dollar bill from me.
Then the tap, tap,
tinkling spill of the roll of coins
broken against the register drawer,
and the hand returning two coins, and a voice
sweeter than the radio's music,
saying, "Have a good one, man."
I would answer that voice if I could—
which of course I can't—
that I've loved it ever since it was born
and probably longer than that.
Though "You too,"
is all I can manage,
I say it with great emotion
in a voice that doesn't sound like me,
though it must be
mine.
In the 1930s and 1940s, German emigré composer Paul Hindemith was in the habit of writing a spiritual motet each Christmas for his wife, a soprano (who was, incidentally, Jewish), to perform in their home. I have performed the one inserted below, the highly dramatic "Angelus Domini apparuit," which corresponds to today's Feast of the Holy Innocents. The Latin text is the chilling account in Matthew 2:13-18 of the slaughter of the innocents: The angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."
May the Holy Innocents pray for us today, and especially for all those who mourn for their children, "quia non sunt."
When the white stars talk together like sisters
And when the winter hills
Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night,
Somewhere one window
Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.
Hills, stars,
White stars that stand above the eastern stable.
Look down and offer Him.
The dim adoring light of your belief.
Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.
Shall not this Child
(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)
Conquer the winter of our hateful century?
And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib,
Lo, with what rapiers
Those two loves fence and flame their brillancy!
Here in this straw lie planned the fires
That will melt all our sufferings:
He is our Lamb, our holocaust!
And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,
Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,
And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life.
What mercy beyond measure that God should choose to be one of us, and to become utterly helpless, dependent upon His frail, fallible creatures.
O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the new-born Lord, lying in a manger! Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear Christ the Lord. Alleluia!
This is probably my favorite Christmas carol, with a text by Victorian poet and Pre-Raphaelite sister Christina Rossetti. A happy and blessed Christmas to all. In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.
I am just finishing a new book about the lives of the artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,Desperate Romantics, which also spawned a sex-saturated (and rather entertaining) BBC miniseries of fluctuating historical accuracy last year (a still from the series is above). In my doctoral dissertation, which was about the use of music symbolism in Victorian culture to denote spiritual conversion, I analyzed some Pre-Raphaelite canvasses, but, for the most part, my research did not require me to delve into the less-savory aspects of the artists' lives. This book has taken care of that gap in my research, and I now know more about the sodden and depressing love affairs of these men, who started out in the world with such high hopes and such noble purpose, than I ever really wanted to.
One of the saddest threads in the book is the story of the open marriage between the great designer and second-generation Pre-Raphaelite William Morris and his wife, Jane, with whom Pre-Raphaelite gadfly Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also in love, and with whom he lived in a house rented by Morris for that purpose. Everything, however, ended badly and sadly for everyone, and one can't help but feel terrible pity for all the players in the drama, especially those who, like Rossetti, strayed from the Brotherhood's original aim -- to bring a new social realism to art, and especially to religious art -- and began to put beauty for its own sake above all else, a privileging which surely led to Rossetti's mental deterioration and untimely death.
Then I was alerted by my friend Mrs. Darwin to this slice of modern life, which rang achingly true to what I'd just been reading in the lives of the PRBs. The story of this newlywed pair, given prominent place in the Weddings section of the New York Times, begins:
What happens when love comes at the wrong time?
Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten
classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side
school. They also both had spouses.
Part “Brady Bunch” and part “The Scarlet Letter,” their story has
played out as fodder for neighborhood gossip. But from their
perspective, the drama was as unlikely as it was unstoppable.
The rest of the article reads like a brave attempt written by a sympathetic friend to clear the good names of Ms. Riddell (a reporter) and Mr. Partilla (an advertising executive), who are quick to point out that they did not have an affair while they were still on their first marriages, and that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to bind up the wounds their behavior has inflicted upon their children from those marriages. The article garnered many, many more comments than usual for a piece in what are essentially the paper's society pages. While some comments came in the form of well-wishes, a significant number shared the tone of this one:
Claiming credit for not having an affair while engineering the end to
your marriage is like claiming credit for not speeding while driving
drunk and causing an accident.
I actually had nightmares about this article after I read it. The ethos of personal happiness as the highest good, a goal for which one must go through fire (though that fire destroy everything it touches), and summon all of one's misplaced courage to achieve, is one with which I'm all too familiar from an earlier chapter of my life. Though my actions, by the grace of God, did not mirror those of the players in what is essentially a story of personal tragedy (one that someone at the Times inexplicably deemed "news that's fit to print"), I can fully understand the compulsions and the lack of compunction and other social barriers that encouraged Ms. Riddell and Mr. Partilla to blow up their own lives and the lives of all those dear to them.
One thing in the article that struck me as overwhelmingly sad is the theme of the inevitable messiness of life, "messiness" being a sort of unstoppable force that one is advised to accept and embrace, and which rationalizes the suffering of the innocents on the outskirts of the love story:
“This is life,” said the bride, embracing the messiness of the moment along with her bridegroom. “This is how it goes.”
I'm quite familiar with this ethos of messiness; it used to come at me from all sides, and it's larded throughout our culture, and trotted out with alarming frequency to justify a great deal of harmful behavior. Another New York Times "Vows" column that caught my eye last year for the same reasons was this one, with the added interest, for me, of both the bride and groom being opera singers, since I associate that messiness-to-personal-happiness equation with my own opera days. (New Yorkers might recall that the couple's "life coach" and minister, Aleta St. James, is the sister of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, and became a news item herself a few years ago when she gave birth to twins well into her fifties, apparently via a donor egg.)
It strikes me that those who are working to uphold traditional marriage have far more to fear from the credo of life's inevitable messiness, tied to the goal of personal-happiness-above-all-else, than from any other quarter.
We've lived in our new town for two years now, and I've just started to leave behind the feeling of shock and dismay that used to strike me whenever I said my new address, a concrete reminder of the fact that we live here now, rather than there. Though I don't feel a weight sinking in my gut whenever I say the name of my new town now, I still miss there more than I can say, for so many reasons, and especially so at Christmas. Here are some of the things I miss the most at this time of year:
- Shopping for fish for Christmas Eve at Citarella. It's always been traditional in my family to have smelts, linguine with aia'uol (i.e. aglio e oglio), and a salad made from dandelion greens on Christmas Eve, and it was always hard to find smelts closer to home. And then, when I think of Citarella's (in New Yorkese, it's obligatory to add an apostrophe-s to every proper shop name, even if none is indicated), I start to think of my dear friend T. who lived a block away, and who's been dead for almost five years now. I miss her.
- Shopping for Christmas dinner at Prime Cuts, otherwise known simply as "the Irish butcher" (or, rather, "the Irish butcher's").
- The tin boxes of Jacob's Afternoon Tea Biscuits (above) that were piled high in every Arab bodega in my old neighborhood this time of year. Everyone has them out when you go visiting in the neighborhood on Christmas, and they are hella good.
- Walking to the Cloisters in the snow, and viewing the snow-covered Palisades.
How lucky I was to live for so long just blocks away from such a beautiful place. The quiet that descended upon the musing, solitary walker under the snow-heavy branches of trees in Fort Tryon Park always reminded me of this wonderful song, for which you must overlook the camera and recording techniques (and some questionable notes on the piano):
- Walking to the Cloisters the day after Christmas, and getting Metropolitan Museum of Art Christmas cards at half-off, and possibly one or two Met Museum tree ornaments too if I had the extra tin in my pocket.
- Singing all the Christmas Masses at Saint Anthony of Padua Church at the corner of Houston and Sullivan Streets, the same church where one of my Neapolitan cousins had attended Mass when he was working as a laborer in New York, as I found when I visited him in Italy in the late 1990s. I would have Christmas Eve dinner with the Franciscan nuns and priests and sleep in the convent so I'd have no distance to travel for the next morning's Masses.
But missing all of these things is really missing another life, a life that I no longer live. In some ways, it's much better that that life has now been put away. It's not the difficulty of that life, its sadness, its loneliness, that I miss, but the shreds of color, of light, and of sound that it bore, and I miss the companions of yore, some of whom I will never see again. There is so little of the beauty that I miss, and so little of consolation, here. I pray every day that God will allow me and my family to plant seeds, where we live now, that will bear fruit -- seeds of beauty in a place that is starved for it -- and that, perhaps, my consolation will come in this way.
Mother of Darkness, Our Lady,
Suffer our supplications,
our hurts come unto you.
Hear us from absence your dwelling place,
Whose ear we plead for.
End us our outstay.
Where darkness is light, what can the dark be,
whose eye is single,
Whose body is filled with splendor
In winter,
inside the snowflake, inside the crystal of ice
Hung like Jerusalem from the tree.
January, rain-wind and sleet-wind,
Snow pimpled and pock-marked,
half slush-hearted, half brocade
Under your noon-dimmed day watch,
Whose alcove we harbor in,
whose waters are beaded and cold.
A journey's a fragment of Hell,
one inch or a thousand miles.
Darken our disbelief, dog our steps.
Inset our eyesight,
Radiance, loom and sting,
whose ashes rise from the flames.
The Patron Saint Drawing for 2011, hosted by Angela at Where Angels Blog, closed this year before I could put my family's names in the hat. Last year, Angela drew Blessed Zélie Martin for me, who proved to be a most apt and helpful influence in my life in 2010, to the extent that I allowed her to be. Nonetheless, I believe I have found a patron saint for next year: Blessed Pope John XXIII. The reason I'm electing him is that I had an elaborate dream about him last night, in which we had a conversation, and in which, most importantly, his presence emanated love.
I've had one or two dreams that I believe have contained important information for my real life and have changed its course significantly, but in general I don't believe in the prophetic or eternal nature of dreams (in my dream last night, incidentally, Bl. John was a thin young man!). Nonetheless, if a saint or near-saint has a chat with you in a dream, as long as they're not spouting heresy, it can hardly be a bad thing, I suppose. I suppose it stands to reason, too, that my saint would be a fairly controversial figure. Unfortunately, some heretical Catholics have used his name to give their efforts legitimacy, as others from the opposite side of the same heresy have used the name of Pope Saint Pius X to advance theirs.
May Blessed John XXIII, the Good Pope, pray for us all in 2011.
The Divine Infancy in us is the logical answer to the peculiar sufferings of our age and the only solution to its problems.
If the Infant Christ is fostered in us, no life is trivial. No life is impotent before suffering, no suffering is too trifling to heal the world, too little to redeem, to be the point at which the world's healing begins.
The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.
It is true that the span of an infant's arms is absurdly short; but if they are the arms of the Divine Child, they are as wide as the reach of the arms on the cross. They embrace and support the whole world; their shadow is the noon-day shade for its suffering people; they are the spread wings under which the whole world shall find shelter and rest.
Elizabeth Scalia has also commented on Muldoon's piece. Scroll down for a searingly powerful comment left by Heather King, from which I quote in part:
The deeper
point is that IVF--like all the myriad ways we try to "take the
shortcut," whether reproductively, sexually, psychologically,
financially, or spiritually-- bypasses the true crucifixion of
abandoning ALL IDEA THAT WE GET TO SEE OUR LIVES BEAR FRUIT THE WAY WE
WANT THEM TO, the way we envision, the way we think they should, the
way our hearts long to the point of death for. This is the scandal of
the Cross. The scandal of a Savior who died in the prime of his life
without issue, his beautiful body butchered, his life and work an
apparent failure. Nothing to show for all his love. Nothing to "show",
for the life he was offering up--except us...
So it's not that we don't welcome with open arms all children, however
conceived. It's not that we don't fully acknowledge the sacrifice,
suffering and love of the parents of chidren who have been conceived by
IVF. But it is that we're bound by truth to acknowledge that the full
Cross has been bypassed...
As some of my readers may know, my mother is very ill with a chronic degenerative disease from which, barring miracles, she will not recover. One of the reasons I've been so busy this fall is that I've been traveling to see her every few weeks, which has meant mostly standing by helplessly as her condition deteriorates further, and more resources are scrambled for and determined to be out of reach.
My mother is one of the people I admire most in the world, though, until I became an adult, we had a stormy relationship. She was a lonely girl, neglected by her own mother, who had essentially left her children for her one true love, the Communist Party. At the age of fourteen, my mother became a Christian; in just a few short years, she also became a teen mother. She left high school (her principal wept when she told him the news; a gifted student, she was going to be valedictorian) and worked in a factory for several years, later attending night classes and winning a full fellowship to graduate school, where she met my father. She was a petite, dark-haired beauty who, even as a single mother, had many suitors. She loved music, and I suspect it is from her side of the family -- musicians for generations, though she herself is not one -- that the musicality of my own generation is derived. In her factory days, she would buy herself season tickets to the Philharmonic every year -- the cheapest seats available, which were in the top balcony, and which made the experience a mixture of transcendence and penance for her, since she was dreadfully afraid of heights, and the walk up to the top of the house, staggering in high heels and clutching the banister, was always a series of terrors. She attended the concerts each year alone, since her friends preferred rock.
Later, in a sense, my mother left us too. When I was a small child, she was hospitalized more than once for severe depression. I remember my feelings of shock and betrayal when, as a five-year-old, I overheard her telling a friend that her psychiatrist had instructed her not to tell her children about the circumstances relating to her extreme grief. Even if we found her crying, she said, she was not to tell us why, though she could pick us up and hold us. As a small child, I was horrified by the implications of this deliberate withholding, although, nonetheless, I now know that there are some things that parents should never tell their children.
My mother taught me to read when I was three, because, she said, I was ready. As a result, I was writing little books, perfectly punctuated and copiously illustrated, by the age of five. Every day after school she had a project for us: making paper, or soap, or butter; trying our hands at the arts of batik or stained glass. Neighborhood children would come over to make our arts and crafts with us. She was endlessly creative. She was also a gourmet cook, which forced my siblings and me to become good cooks ourselves (one of us became a professional cook, and another semi-professional), or risk a lifetime of disappointment at our own tables. She baked her own bread and made her own pasta, and every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas she made what my father called the Platonic idea of a pumpkin pie. She ran a food co-op out of her tiny kitchen.
I am not exaggerating when I note that this wonderful mother also made some chilling choices, which harmed and will continue to affect her family for generations to come. A deeply flawed woman, she made them out of fear and desperation, out of a lack of trust in God, in her children, and in herself. She was and is, in this respect, what Nietzsche called "human, all too human."
It is one of the great sorrows of my present life to know that she is dying, though no one knows the hour or the day.
“I’ve got 44-year-olds who
show up in my office after trying two months and say, ‘I don’t
understand, my gynecologist told me I was fine,’” says [Dr. Jamie] Grifo. “Now, he
didn’t say, ‘You’re going to be fertile forever.’ But they didn’t hear
that part . . . And for
these women, if IVF doesn’t work, it’s very hard to recover. They have
to grieve and mourn and make a life. These women, the 44-year-olds, are
the ones that struggle the most, because they are so angry. And they’re
angry at one person, but they won’t admit it. They’re angry at
themselves.”
While waiting for the hour-plus-late New York-Boston train, I went to the newsstand and bought the latest issue of New York Magazine for its fascinating cover article, "Waking Up from the Pill." Although most readers here won't come to the same conclusions as its author, Vanessa Grigoriadis, most will agree with her that the Pill has greatly exacerbated female infertility and led to a great deal of heartbreak among women who delay childbearing in the interest of career ambitions and sexual freedom. Even to a pro-sex feminist like Grigoriadis, the Pill has emerged as a tool to control rather than empower women, with disturbing consequences.
I'm back home after a somewhat grueling trip to New York and Boston, where I had a concert engagement. I brought my son along, and while, like so many children on the spectrum, he has difficulty dealing with the mundane disruptions and pettty annoyances of quotidian life, he proved to be a champion traveler, handling many hours on buses, trains, subways, as well as new faces and strange places, with impressive aplomb. We also had the great pleasure of seeing old friends and family, and the time spent with my great friends Rosie and J. made this trip deeply enriching for me on the level of bones, marrow, and soul.
As I walked the streets of my old neighborhood, I was welcomed so warmly by my old neighbors and shopkeepers that I began to wonder if my former sense of alienation there, on account of my for-that-part-of-town ethnic otherness, had been a delusion. Perhaps one of my many flaws, after all, is the sense of being alienated everywhere. (Nonetheless, as my fellow former-Bronxite readers who know whereof I speak can attest, if you're not Irish in the old 'hood, you do become the object of certain amount of suspicion.)
"We wince in fear and shrink back as the fire dances, but those who
enter the furnace in faith, they know the invisible dew of Grace and
how those flames of trial consume the stubble of the passions and leave
behind brilliance."
I'm on the road and don't have time for a proper blog post, but I wanted to share this very moving one from Katherine at Evlogia.
I'm still on light blogging, finishing up the book I'm editing and getting ready to leave town for a concert gig. I hope to have more to say and more time in which to say it in another week or so. A blessed Advent to all in the meantime.
Canadian friend of this blog and all-around cool kitty Lissla Lissar sent in the following:
I wanted to leave a prayer request for you and all your readers- our
good friend (and younger son's godfather) has been hospitalized and
requires major aortic surgery. His wife is asking for as many people
praying as possible.
His name is David and he's 27.
Dear readers, please pray. May God reward you for your prayers.
In a garden shady this holy lady
With reverent cadence and subtle psalm,
Like a black swan as death came on
Poured forth her song in perfect calm:
And by ocean's margin this innocent virgin
Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer,
And notes tremendous from her great engine
Thundered out on the Roman air. . . .
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
At Mass today, the deacon noted that Saint Dismas, one of the two criminals crucified along with Jesus, is the only individual in the Gospels who Christ says is going to heaven. This struck me powerfully. Dismas, "the good thief," makes his confession, as it were, to Christ Himself, seeming to examine the sins of his life in the briefest of moments before admitting that he has been "condemned justly," and then professes, in another brief moment, Christ's kingship. And Christ replies with the beautiful words: "This day you will be with me in Paradise."
This seems to me a profound teaching about the Divine Mercy, the mercy that confounds and reverses every human expectation; as the Elizabethan geographer William Camden is supposed to have written:
Betwixt the stirrup and the ground, Mercy I ask'd; mercy I found.
It's probably safe to speculate that some of the saints of the Gospels -- Dismas, Paul, the Magdalene -- were, in their lives before their conversions, capable of evils as great or greater than those we decry in our contemporaries. It's therefore also safe to assume that God's great mercy is available to any and all of us, no matter who we may be or what we may have done, and at all times.
An anonymous commenter recently called me an "evil bitch," and suggested that hell was holding a special place for me, because my family is pursuing an adoption. As Lora Lynn at Vita Familiae concedes, adoption is complicated at best:
Let’s begin with this: Adoption is messy. The idea behind adoption is
beautiful. But adoption came about because of brokenness. Because of
our fallen world. Injustice is inevitable within such a framework.
Heartbreak is part and parcel to adoption. We knew this on an
intellectual level when we started. But to have felt it, to have lived
some of the injustice, the waiting, the loss… and knowing we’ve only
barely tasted one side of the story… It feels overwhelming.
The New York City Council opened hearings this week on the bill that would restrict and mandate the language used by crisis pregnancy centers. One witness testified, in support of the bill, that the acronym EMC (for Expectant Mother Care, which runs a dozen crisis pregnancy centers around town) "sounds medical" and is, therefore, misleading, while others suggested that unsuspecting pregnant women seeking abortions might think that organizations called Bridge to Life, the Sisters of Life, or Life Center performed them, and would thus, hypothetically, be deceived.
Since no business, i.e. the exchange of money for goods or services, takes place in the crisis pregnancy centers, however, chances are good that the bill will not pass, and that, if it does, it will be challenged immediately on its lack of constitutionality.
I received this email from a Polish friend and wanted to pass it on here, in the hope that someone might know of the right families for these children.
A woman (Anna Maria), who adopted 3
polish children 10 years ago (just recently returned to the orphanage
in Poland for a visit), has been asked by the sisters (Servants of the
Blessed Virgin Mary in Czestochowa) to help get the word out that
there are 2 different sibling groups of four children each (ages
ranging from 2-9) that they are trying to find homes for. These nuns
who run the orphanage do not want to see the children split from their
siblings. If you all know anyone who might be in a position to adopt a
sibling group from Poland, please pass on this information! Anna
Maria's number is 703-203-2901. She is here in the U.S. and does speak Polish. If anyone is seriously interested, Anna Maria said she would be
glad to talk to them.
Here is the oprhanage directress's contact information:
Sr. Alina Syliwoniuk
Dom Malych Dzieci Home of
small children (Orphanage)im. E. Bojanowskiego
E. Bojanowski ul. sw. Kazimierza 1 1
St. Casimir Str 42-200
Czestochowa 42-200
Czestochowa
Poland
Sr. Alina's phone number is (011) +48(0)34-324- 67-51.
Someone just sent me this moving music video by Nick Cannon, the actor, rapper, and husband of Mariah Carey, in which he tells the story of his mother's decision not to abort him.
In spite of their dependence on the African-American voting block, many liberal politicians have consistently misread the feelings of blacks about abortion. This cultural tone-deafness has been expressed in cynical attempts by pro-choice groups to add more members of color to their ranks, in spite of the fact that the abortion rate among black women is far, far greater than their representation in society, that most African Americans are pro-life, and that many consider the rampant practice of abortion in their communities to be a form of genocide.
I'm excited to announce that I've been invited to contribute to a site which I've long admired, Vox Nova. My blogging friends Kyle Cupp and Radical Catholic Mom are contributors there as well, and I feel honored to join them and their estimable colleagues in what I hope will be a fruitful ongoing discussion of art and culture in the Catholic context. I expect I'll be working my regular beats over at Vox Nova -- exploring the theologies of beauty and empathy, and the evocative crossings of music, memory, and faith -- and, in the interest of time, which is limited for the foreseeable future, I expect to be mostly cross-posting.
I'm still tethered to my desk editing a dense musicological tome, but I took a break this weekend to read a book I'd put on my holds list at the local library, Room, by Irish-born Canadian writer Emma Donoghue. We were out of town at a wedding, and I sat on the lid of the toilet seat in the bathroom of our hotel room so as to be able to read it into the wee small hours without waking my family. I found the novel so profoundly affecting that I am taking still more time from my deadline-dependent work to write about it here.
Room is the story of five-year-old Jack, who, as the narrative begins, has lived his entire life, along with his mother, in captivity in an eleven-by-eleven foot room. When the two are unexpectedly thrust into the world, both must learn to redefine their relationship to it, and to each other, in ways that are, in a sense, even more painful and traumatizing than their captivity has been. Donoghue draws freely upon children's "reversal" literature, most prominently Alice in Wonderland, to present the reader with the story of one of the great developmental dilemmas faced by all children -- how to understand, interpret, and navigate reality -- made exponentially more poignant for Jack by the sensory and social deprivation of his early years.
Jack's narrative voice is captivating, and his young mother is a giant of strength, love, and resourcefulness, who, in their imprisonment, has turned Jack's cruelly confined world into one of beauty and adventure. The two are completely dependent upon each other, and the transition to a less-enmeshed relationship is one of the most difficult challenges Jack faces in "Outside." For this reason, I think the book speaks especially to mothers, whose most important task is preparing and allowing our children to stand on their own and to emerge into a world not bounded or defined by us. As the mother of a son approaching Jack's age -- a boy who, like Jack, has outstanding strengths, coupled with significant difficulties negotiating the sensory and social worlds -- I felt an even deeper kinship with the novel's narrator.
In addition to the compelling character of Jack, and the delicately-drawn relationship between him and his mother, Room fascinated me for its description of a child developing in confinement, a topic that has been an interest of mine since I saw Werner Herzog's film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser while an undergrad, and, later, sang the wonderful Brahms settings of poetry by Georg Friedrich Daumer, who had cared for Kaspar Hauser after the latter was found, as a young man, wandering the streets of Nuremberg after a life spent in captivity.
I loved this book so much that I am going to try to sneak in a second read before it's due back at the library.
Here is an interesting clip of Emma Donoghue explaining how she devised Jack's narrative voice.
. . . to Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897-1980), shown above at Mass with César Chávez and Coretta Scott King.
In her own words: [UPDATE: NB: Phil Runkel, the archivist of the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker
Collection at Marquette University, has noted in a comment that Dan
Lynch's essay, quoted below, apparently does not contain nor represent the actual words of Dorothy
Day, who wrote about her abortion only obliquely in her novel The Eleventh Virgin. Mr. Lynch seems, rather, to be imagining what Day might have said about this matter, based on his reading of the novel and her biographers.]
"'[P]hysical
sensations' allured me. I lived a social-activist Bohemian lifestyle in
Greenwich Village, New York City. I think back and remember myself,
hurrying along from party to party, and all the friends, and the
drinking, and the talk, and the crushes, and falling in love. I fell in
love with a newspaperman named Lionel Moise. I got pregnant. He said
that if I had the baby, he would leave me. I wanted the baby but I
wanted Lionel more. So I had the abortion and I lost them both. . . .
I
hobbled down the darkened stairwell of the Upper East Side flat in New
York City. My steps were unsteady. My left arm held the banister
tightly. My right arm clutched my abdomen. It was burning in pain. I
walked out onto the street alone in the dark. It was in September of
1919. I was twenty-one years old and I had just aborted my baby.
.
. . . Lionel, my boyfriend, promised to pick me up at the flat after it
was all over. I waited in pain from nine a.m. to ten p.m. but he never
came. When I got home to his apartment I found only a note. He said he
had left for a new job and, regarding my abortion, that I 'was only one
of God knows how many millions of women who go through the same thing.
Don’t build up any hopes. It is best, in fact, that you forget me.'
. . . . I always had a great regret for my abortion. In fact, I tried to cover it up and to destroy as many copies of The Eleventh Virgin
[her 1924 autobiographical novel, in which she wrote about the
abortion] as I could find. But my priest chided me and said, 'You can’t
have much faith in God if you’re taking the life given to you and using
it that way. God is the one who forgives us if we ask, and it sounds
like you don’t even want forgiveness — just to get rid of the books.' I
never forgot what the priest pointed out — the vanity or pride at work
in my heart. Since that time I wasn’t as worried as I had been. If you
believe in the mission of Jesus Christ, then you’re bound to try to let
go of your past, in the sense that you are entitled to His forgiveness.
To keep regretting what was, is to deny God’s grace."
"[A]fter
becoming a Catholic, she learned the love and mercy of the Lord, and
knew she never had to worry about His forgiveness. (This is why I have
never condemned a woman who has had an abortion; I weep with her and
ask her to remember Dorothy Day's sorrow but to know always God's
loving mercy and forgiveness.) She had died before I became Archbishop
of New York, or I would have called on her immediately upon my arrival.
Few people have had such an impact on my life, even though we never
met."
The deaths of Shirley Verrett and Joan Sutherland have made me think of opera's most scandalous recent loss, that of the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson four years ago to breast cancer at the age of fifty-two. I've written about Lorraine here more than once, and I was outrageously fortunate to have had the opportunity to hear her live on several occasions (though I also bowed out of attending three different, now-legendary performances she gave in New York in the 1990s, for reasons that seem, in hindsight, incredibly foolish). I found myself missing her today, and wondering what she would be singing, and how, if she had gone on living. And, while it may seem strange to miss a public figure whom you've never met, LHL inspired fervent devotion among those who heard her.
The witty, catty operaphile who blogs as Opera Chic wrote a brief and moving tribute to Lorraine a few years back that says it better than I could.
Another sad loss for opera: the death of the great African-American soprano Shirley Verrett, with whom my beloved voice teacher Barbara Conrad sang in the 1970s and 1980s. R.I.P.
Here is a stunning performance by Madame Verrett of the "Liebestod" form Tristan und Isolde.
While my son has been in his special pre-K program for three hours a day, I have been spending my time alone at my desk, editing a musicology book for an academic publisher, taking breaks only to drag my reluctant self to the piano to practice for a very demanding gig that I have next month. A couple of weeks ago, I subscribed to the feed of a blog that I discovered through the process of clicking through links on other blogs, and I no longer remember what the source of the link was, or exactly how or why or from where I started the clicking process. The blog's author is an orthodox Catholic woman who was at the same stage in the adoption process that our family was: her home study had just been approved, and she was waiting for a placement.
I had begun a novena to St. Jude in advance of his feast day, asking, among other things, that he would petition God to add more children to our family. Two days before his feast day, on October 26, I was working on the book when an email came in from the Catholic adoption blog. A new post was up, feauturing a picture of a gorgeous, smiling baby boy, and the news that he desperately needed a home. I emailed the blog author with my phone number, and she called me back within seconds -- from a Bronx exchange. It turns out that she lives about a mile away from my old home in the Bronx, that we have certain salient things in common, and that our husbands are both close friends of a particular Irish priest, a very wonderful man with whom my husband gets together whenever he goes back to New York. The blog author had dearly wanted to adopt the little boy in the picture, but was unable to. She had started the process, and had had a medical specialist examine his file, but, when her plans unraveled, she decided, out of love for him, to find him a good Catholic home.
She sent me his entire file by email. I showed it to my husband, who said, "Aren't there any abandoned children closer to home?" and, then, "You know we'll have to go to China to get him," and then, "What about the money?" As it turns out, because the boy is special-needs, the cost of adopting him will be roughly the same as it would be to adopt locally, as we had planned. I told my husband that, if God wants us to do this, the money will be there (and, in fact, I'm waiting to get paid for the editing job, and hoping the check will come very soon so that I can turn some of it over to the adoption agency). We started praying for the baby boy and for God's will in the matter. My son was especially touched by the fact that little Jude (as it only makes sense to call him) doesn't have a mother or father.
From a purely rational standpoint, our local adoption process can only succeed if a birth mother chooses us to be her child's family, which theoretically might never happen. Here is a baby who came to us in the most unusual way, who needs a family; it just doesn't make sense to turn him away.
He will need at least one surgery, perhaps more, for a condition that's not life-threatening, but which may or may not be quite complicated. By the grace of God, we have access to excellent medical care, including a world-class hospital about a hundred miles away which treats a lot of special-needs adopted children.
I phoned the adoption agency to tell them we wanted to adopt Jude. The coordinator told me another family was considering him, and, because they were already signed up with the agency, she would have to tell them first and give them first priority. I got off the phone, cried, said a decade of the rosary, and emailed my new friend about it. I immediately got a phone call from the Bronx: "You call them right back and tell them that the person who makes the commitment is the one who gets first priority, not the person who's already signed!" So I did that. The coordinator said, "Um, hang on a second," put me on hold, and came back on a moment later, saying, "Congratulations." So now I'm sifting through more paperwork. And I have to enclose a sizable check. Please pray that I'll get paid for my editing job soon!
In considering little Jude's medical problems, I had to reflect on the sense I have of my life: that I'm called to love people not in spite of their imperfections, but because of them. Of course, I have to pray every day for the courage, wisdom, patience, and humility to fulfill this calling.
And it's also true that every gift comes with the cross. Nonetheless, it would be silly to expect a perfect baby when I'm so far short of perfect myself.
Thank you, friends, for your prayers. I will keep you updated.
The matter that was placed before Saint Jude has been embarked upon: we are adopting a special-needs baby boy from China.
I will write more about it over time. It was quite unexpected, since we'd been planning to adopt locally, and still may. But this little boy was brought to our attention in a most unusual and unanticipated manner, and it appeared to have God's fingerprints all over it.
There is a bill now before the New York City Council that would require crisis pregnancy centers to disclose in their advertising -- which is seen mostly on the subway, and in bus shelters -- the services which they do and do not provide, the latter being abortion. The bill was triggered by a recent study undertaken by NARAL, which aims to show that the pregnancy centers use deceptive advertising to lure young women in crisis and . . . not give them abortions. Chris Slattery, a member of my old parish in the Bronx and the director of Expectant Mother Care, which runs pregnancy centers in some of New York's poorest neighborhoods, believes that this proposed legislation is an attack on the work that the centers do, because, while technically it doesn't seem like a bad idea to require businesses to be specific about what they do and don't offer, in the case of the emergency pregnancy centers, this forced disclosure could very likely lead to loss of life. If an abortion-minded woman in a crisis pregnancy goes to an EMC center without knowing that abortion is not on the menu, it's easier for the staff to persuade her to change her mind. This, NARAL says, is a very bad thing indeed. The fact that a woman may be talked out of having an abortion apparently does grievous harm to her freedom of choice.
I was fascinated today to read this article in the New York Times, in which a pregnant newspaper reporter took herself on an investigative-journalistic tour of two crisis pregnancy centers and one Planned Parenthood clinic. She went first to one of Chris Slattery's centers, and was overwhelmed by what she freely calls the love with which she was welcomed. She also admits that Planned Parenthood was the only one of the three places that had "a financial stake" in the choice she made vis-à-vis her (in real life, non-crisis) pregnancy.
But most salient for me in this story were the reader comments -- or, I should say, one of the reader comments, which twisted my heart (most of the other comments were just what you might expect):
I am a pro-choice woman educated at one of the
seven sisters and one of the Ivies. My point in stating this is that I
am a liberal who strongly believes in the importance of privacy in this
decision. I had a slightly different experience.
It was in the early
nineties, I was fresh out of grad school, newly married and looking for
a job in the recession of the early 1990s. I used to go to a clinic on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan for routine gynecologic care because I
did not have health insurance. I occasionally saw people milling around
saying prayers on the weekends (I lived in the area) outside the
building.
Fast forward to when I found myself pregnant at 13 weeks
in a crumbling relationship. I went there to ask about my options. Not
once was I told about carrying the pregnancy to term. I went for an
ultrasound and other than measuring the thickness of the uterine wall,
the technician did not show me the fetus and as dumb as I was I
honestly did not even think to ask. I think they assumed I was there
for an abortion.
They told me to come in late on a weekday evening
to have "something put in" to prepare for the procedure the next day [This would have been a second-trimester abortion which requires a procedure that takes place over two days]. I
was torn about doing it and when I asked the doctor questions before he
put [in] the "seaweed extract," his exact words to me were, "we can sit
here talking about it or we can just get it done. Do you want to do it
or not? You need to make your mind up." So I went along.
It was
only the next morning as I awoke with my warm cheek to the cold steel
of the gurney after the procedure/abortion that I realized I was in an
abortion mill. They rushed to get me off of the gurney even though I
was groggy as anything to put others like me on the same gurneys while
those of us who had gotten of the gurneys sat around on couches mostly
with dazed looks in our eyes.
Fast forward 19 years, I have
three wonderful children and a good life that I am thankful for yet I
think of that fetus/baby every single day. For me this is not about
politics, this is about the personal choice I made and that I have to
live with every day of my life.
In my case I do think there is
something to be said for the concept of post abortion depression. I am
no psychologist, politician or religious person and I can only speak
for myself. I really don't think this should be a political matter. For
myself I wonder if I might have made the same choice if I had the
information I now think I should have asked for and received [emphasis added].
Hindsight
is 20/20 and I take full responsibility for what I did all those years
ago but not a day goes by that I don't think of the fetus/baby. So in
response to your article about the "crisis pregnancy centers," my
experience was that it went the other way as well.
So heartbreaking. And even more so because the writer appears to feel almost apologetic, as if she must qualify her experience as something peculiar to her: "I had a slightly different experience . . . For me this is not about politics . . . I can only speak for myself . . . In my case . . . dumb as I was . . . I do think there is something [to] post abortion depression. I am no psychologist . . . I can only speak for myself," etc. This is hardly the language of empowered womanhood, and not exactly what one would expect from a self-proclaimed pro-choice liberal with an Ivy League graduate degree. The pain of her choice -- a choice that was clearly coerced every step of the way, as so very many abortions are -- is only underscored by the fact that, in her circles, there are few, if any, socially-sanctioned ways to speak about the suffering and regret of abortion without facing scorn.
I pray not only for this woman's healing, but also that other readers of the article will read her comment with care, and perhaps might begin to understand that her story is not some anomaly, experienced only by women "dumb as [she] was" (what a sadly ironic self-descriptor from such a highly-educated woman). If the New York City Council demands truth in advertising, then this woman's testimony should be included in all of Planned Parenthood's pro-abortion literature. And what a great day it will be when pro-choice women -- many if not most of whom in my experience have never had abortions themselves -- come to realize that what is good for one is good for all, and what is destructive to one woman is destructive to each and every one of us.
Today is the birthday of the English writer, mystic, woodworker, self-styled neurotic, and unlikely holy woman Caryll Houselander (1901-1954). I was first introduced to her work through her slim volume The Reed of God, which I picked up somewhere third-hand in the early days of my reversion, and which, in many ways, changed my life.
Houselander was a woman after my own heart -- a revert, a misanthrope, a former bohemian, and even, for a period of her life, in love with the wrong man. Her friend and biographer, the Catholic writer and publisher Maisie Ward, referred to her as a "divine eccentric." She is someone I would have dearly liked to know in life, and whom I hope to know one day in heaven, and I pray for her guidance in my life, as well as for her canonization.
Dear readers, tomorrow is the feast day of Saint Jude Thaddeus, near kinsman of Christ and patron of hopeless cases. If you think of it, would you please pray for my family regarding a special intention of ours which we have put in his hands? I hope later to be able to write more about it.
GretchenJoanna, a wonderful commenter on this blog, has kindly shared a link on an Orthodox site called "Grace and the Inverted Pyramid," about the theology of humility, and specifically the necessity for Christians to take "the downward path." I found it so stirring and countercultural that I wanted to share it here. Please read it: it's short, and galvanizing.
It's a Saturday, and I'm surprised to find myself doing what I used to do on Saturdays for years back in New York City, before I was a mother, before I had fully accepted my reversion back to the Catholic faith (and even then for a long time after), before I moved to the Bronx, a move about which a friend of mine said, "I thought people went there willingly only to die." I am sitting at the enormous sixties-era oak desk that I got for fifty bucks at the apartment sale of a divorcing Argentine woman in my old neighborhood, editing text while I listen to Jonathan Schwartz's weekly radio program on WNYC, on which I know he will play at least one song that will make me want to take to my bed in a paroxysm of tears -- probably something sung by Audra McDonald or Nancy LaMott -- and sleep until my heart is healed, a moment which, of course, will never really come. In those days, however, most of the text I was editing was my own, and I was often longing for love, love either past or ambiguously present, and working against the feeling of shikata ga nai, the sense that everything I was doing was just to fortify my own very small world against the encroachment of despair, so I had better keep working. And then, as now, I was constantly nagged by the feeling that I had to get up from the desk and go over to my little piano and start practicing already, because I probably had a gig or a university recital requirement right around the corner.
Back then, when I would hit the wall and not be able to read another word, I would push up from my mammoth desk and flee the apartment, letting the steel door slam behind me. I would go out the side entrance of my pre-war apartment building and walk to Fort Tryon Park. Now, I slink out the back door of my house and walk through my silent neighborhood, often meeting no one on the street except a young man with Down syndrome, like me an inveterate walker no matter what the weather. Days like this, I miss everything about New York. I miss the colors and the smells. I miss seeing people on the street, even if I didn't want to talk to them, even if I hoped and prayed, as I did on many a day, that I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.
I know there must be a reason for my coming here, besides accompanying my husband to the place where he got a job. When he got the job offer, he told me that if I wanted to stay in New York, he would turn it down. But even I, with my more-than-occasionally faulty grasp of the theory of mind, knew that I couldn't hold him back from what was a step up. Even I had a shred of humility large and sincere enough to swallow hard and accept that we would be leaving everything we knew and many of the things we loved, but that it would be willful and cruel of me to put my foot down and keep it in the city I love.
That was two years ago. It's been a hard, lonely two years. There have been many struggles, and few bright spots. Sometimes it feels as if things are just getting more and more difficult, and as if none of my prayers are being answered in the way I want, not even what seemed like the inocuous-enough one for a friend. I feel like my life is contracting, getting smaller and narrower, rather than expanding, which is of course what everyone wants to happen in their lives.
It is so hard for my prima-donna self to accept this smallness, this forced humility. My heart aches when I think of what might be happening in my old neighborhood. The plane trees are turning yellow and dropping their leaves to the sidewalks. My friend N., the opera singer who lives on the other side of the building, is writing some software code for a design client. My great friend F., who was my recital accompanist before he moved to England, is swinging his book bag full of bottles of Italian wine from Astor Wines and Spirits as he trudges with his idiosyncratic gait up the hill from the subway to his apartment, which is around the corner from mine, and from which he can see a sliver of the river and the bridge out of one window. My beloved downstairs neighbor, Mrs. M., an Austrian refugee from World War II who died last year a month before her ninety-ninth birthday, is walking back from the hair salon, looking natty in a tweed jacket.
But all of this is long ago. My friends are dispersed, and some are dead. And if I remember hard enough, I will see M. on the street outside, waving to me over his shoulder as I stand in the window of our apartment, on his way downtown to work a night shift in a building that was destroyed in 9/11. And then I will remember the day he stopped waving.
And then where will I be? At my desk in Appalachia, my heart aching, asking God that, if He's going to allow me to remember all of this, to let it be for a reason that will be helpful to someone else, even if I never know it. As Pablo Neruda wrote, "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido" -- love is so short, and forgetting is so long. And now I really do have to go and practice.
Here's some music about tears and remembering on this lonely Saturday.
I'm being facetious, of course. But it did cross my mind yesterday, after I woke up in the dark of early morning, and, in a bit of a panic, asked God the Father to send me a hug (I'm not usually that sentimental, but waking up in the dark really kicks the ass of my soul). Later, I turned on the radio, to hear Beethoven's Symphony no. 7 -- again: the last time I asked God for some sort of a sign, the same thing happened, and the same music played (and I was annoyed). So, I thought, is this it? Is this you talking to me, God? I would have maybe preferred the humanity of the Symphony no. 6, the Pastoral, which contains whole worlds of delight and terror and the wistfulness of nostalgia. But the Seventh is awesome in the truest sense of the world, and this was God the Father I'd been talking to, after all.
Then, today, I was helping my son clean up the dozens of empty wooden thread spools we'd been building with (I've become obsessed with this slim series of English craft-and-early-learning books from the 1960s, Learning with Mother, which features all sorts of things you can do with wooden thread spools), and put on the radio again. And this time, I felt as if I were not only being hugged by God the Father, but also kissed by God the Son, for it was Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, op. 80.
I can't explain why I love this piece with the intense passion that I do, but to me, it is the most perfect piece of music ever. I love the simple, anthemic theme, so redolent of human hope, which Beethoven cycles through the sections of the orchestra, treating it with grace, wit, and -- if a composer can be said to feel this way about his own tunes -- heartfelt love, before handing it over to the full orchestra, where it erupts into a swelling lyrical outburst that foreshadows his other great anthem, the "Ode to Joy." The theme starts at 1:20, below.
And then, out of nowhere, what has been, to this point, a piano concerto becomes something else entirely, when the voices suddenly appear as if wafted down from above, singing self-referentially about the consolations of music (about 2:51 here).
I remember hearing the Choral Fantasy fortuitously on the radio one day when I was a lonely new mother, and how I shouted with joy at my newborn, "That's Beethoven!" as if he could understand. Later, when he was two, he was playing the harmonica one day, and I told him he sounded like Bob Dylan. "Beethoven," he loftily corrected me.
Today I did something similar, feeling like a real music geek. I could feel my face light up as I turned the volume higher and explained to my now-four-year-old that the music had been composed by Mr. Beethoven, and then pointed out, one by one, the different instrumental entrances. I know he's going to be really embarrassed by me one day; I was embarrassed by myself. And then, without meaning to and without any warning, when the piece was over I burst into tears. "What's wrong, Mommy?" he said, alarmed. "Nothing," I replied. "Just that the music is so beautiful." "It's not beautiful," he said, trying to comfort me.
I read once long ago, in a book of essays about English literature by an early twentieth-century Indian scholar whose name, like the title, I can no longer remember, that the aim of literature is "the total eradication of sorrows and miseries." God must have intended music to be a similar balm.
(The picture above illustrates a famous incident in the life of Beethoven. He and Goethe were walking together one day in the Schönbrunn Palace gardens in Vienna when they met the Archduke and Archduchess. Goethe made as if to move aside to let the imperial party pass, but Beethoven linked arms with him and made him walk on. They marched right into the midst of the royal entourage, which humbly parted to make way for the two great artists, the true nobility of the modern age.)
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
M., who was of Japanese descent, loved the novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994. A few months after being so honored, Oe gave a talk at the City College of New York, where M. was a student. M. brought several books for Oe to sign, which he did graciously.
On a recent library trip, I found a book by Oe on the free table. Oe's oldest son, Hikari, was born with severe brain damage, and much of Oe's early novels are fictionalized accounts of his attempts to accept the upheaval in his life occasioned by his son's disability. The book I found, however, is not a novel, but a memoir called A Healing Family. I've been reading it in snatches stolen from the big copy-editing job that's taking up much of my time. Oe, who studied European and American literature at university, writes here about William Blake (from one of whose poems Oe took the title for one of his novels, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!):
[He] evolved an utterly original version of the world in [his work,] at the heart of which were two preoccupations. One was his engagement in the crucial historical events of his period, namely American independence and the French Revolution . . . . The other concerned his role as a seer whose visions linked him to a tradition of . . . neo-Platonism . . . . Among the shorter of [Blake's "prophetic" writings] is a strange but lovely poem called "The Book of Thel," which tells the story of an ethereal being who dwells in the valley of eternal life but wonders about her existence there and seeks to find answers to her doubts by questioning a lily, a cloud, and a worm. Finally, having consulted a lump of clay, she manages to pass through the gate leading to the world of men, but one look at this vale of tears sends her fleeing, with a piercing shriek, back to the valley of eternal life.
I found myself recalling this poem when my elder brother developed cancer . . . In plain, precise, and convincing words [Blake] is able to capture the desolation of the land of those doomed to die and the frailty of human flesh; he makes one think of all the hosts of people, with oneself among them, passing through this world only to fall victim to disease or to the ravages of age. My brother's cancer . . . will soon kill him. As if unafraid of this other reality, the two of us used to laugh and sing together once; but now it is another sound we hear -- the cries of pain that mark the true condition of our lives . . .
Then, in a less despairing mood, I go on to think that maybe in a way we are like Thels who ventured down to this world but didn't go crying back to heaven; who, when they made that now-forgotten choice, perhaps told themselves to "just get on with it." In fact, the older I get . . . the more convinced I am that my soul, in that instant when it was first marked with the stain of mortal life, turned to face its fate with the same resolve.
This passage, expressed with Oe's typical modesty and elegance, offers a relatively more optimistic version of the Japanese ethos of shikata ga nai, which, written in Japanese katakana, is the title of this post, and which means, loosely translated, "there's nothing to be done about it." This implies that, therefore, one simply has to go on. I learned about this too from M.
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