Be Mine

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.

-- Paul Hostovsky, from Bending the Notes. © Main Street Ray Publishing company, 2008. 

H/T:  The Writer's Almanac

Above:  "Two Big Black Hearts" (1985) by Jim Dine (DeCordova Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts) 

Vox in Rama

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."

A Christmas Card

This poem gave me chills when I read it excerpted at Karen Edmisten's blog.

A Christmas Card

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.

-- Thomas Merton (1947)

O Magnum Mysterium

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!

In the Bleak Mid-Winter

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.

Desperate Romantics, Then and Now [UPDATED]

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.

H/T:  Korrektiv

UPDATE:  Good analysis of the Times article here.

UPDATE 2:  A well-written analysis by someone who's been there, which also references one of my favorite movies, The Squid and the Whale.

Christmas for Nostographers

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.

Winter-Worship

   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.

-- Charles Wright, from Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems © Macmillan, 2001.
H/T:  The Writers Almanac

My Patron Saint for 2011

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.

Healing the Suffering of the World

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.

-- Caryll Houselander, The Passion of the Infant Christ

"IVF does not heal" [UPDATED]

". . . nor does it serve the greater good of children and families around the world."

Catholic theologian and adoptive father Tim Muldoon explains why the Nobel Prize awarded to the developer of IVF technology represents a turning away from the plight of the world's abandoned children.

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...

Mother Mo Chroì

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.

This is for her.  You'll have to turn it up.

The Pill and its Discontents

 “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.

(Cross-posted at Vox Nova)

Back, Safe, Home Again

(I quote, of course, from that great work, Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.)

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.)

More later.

Wrought in Flames

"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.

Light Blogging Continues

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.