From Maenad to Christian

The young journalist Tara Isabella Burton, both a polymath a fine writer, has a compelling conversion story on Catapult that is very much worth reading. She details her quest for the power to pull back the curtain of ordinariness covering the world, in order to glimpse what she believed to be the enchantment lurking beneath the surfaces of things. In fact, Burton's quest reminds me a great deal of my own younger life (though my own questing entailed fewer trips to Europe and a lot more subway rides to botánicas in the outer boroughs). My main complaint about her longish essay is that it spends itself in romping through such rites of magic as are preferred by flowing-haired moneyed college girls and skimps on the punchline, which is her conversion to Christianity, leaving it essentially unexplained.

Nevertheless, her article contains some pointed insights about the desire for meaning in modern life, spun from the perspective of a certain kind of twee aestheticism, with the surprise that all of Burton's searching ends in Christ.

I sacrificed all of myself. I emptied myself out. I hit bottom, in a thousand different ways, and got what I wanted, in a thousand more, and then, somewhere in the middle of my seeking a vague and generic sense of Poetry, I found a specific one.

One rooted not in a vague sense that magic was real and that the world could at any time be an enchanted one, but in a concrete sense that at one particular place, at one particular time, the laws of nature had been suspended.

I don't mean to be hard on Burton. As I said, she could be me with more money. I too spent years trying to pierce through the dull veil of ordinary time in order to live in a vague world of endless beauty, and used similar tactics. I wanted to be special, to live in a special way, and to surround myself with special people. I wanted to drift through the mean streets where I lived unscathed, a kind of wraith from a Cocteau Twins song. I too dyed my hair this or that color, read Tarot, and abused alcohol and other people. I too made terrible mistakes and sacrificed everything good that I had, though I didn't know at the time that it was good. I too had a conversion, and for me, the conversion is ongoing, as I hope it is for Burton.

I imagine Burton's readership is more interested in the details of her novelistic life in Trieste, with its Passion, Heartbreak, and Blood, than it might be in the daily humiliations I imagine are required for a mind like hers to make common cause with the demands of our faith, not to mention with the unwashed and unlettered hordes of other believers. Indeed, one of the most painful and salutary things about my own ongoing conversion has been embracing the everyday humiliations of my un-special day-to-day life, the life in which I work harder than I ever have at anything for seemingly minuscule gain, and in which the haunting, shadowy beauties of my past pagan life recede ever more into the distance.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the old things in New York City: a lamp I used to have, my old kitchen table with the sun streaming through the window's metal safety guards, a closed theater marquee on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, countless walks through Central Park undertaken just in order to get across town, a collection of blue glass bottles in my voice teacher's apartment -- random scraps of memories of the ordinary things of everyday life, which, when I lived it, I strove to see as pieces of a pattern, a riddle to solve, the road map to a more magical realm -- a life beyond life, though temporal, where everything was radiant and where I would be able to see things as they really were.

As Burton notes, however:

Fridays mean that Christ died and Christ is risen and that Christ will come again. So does rose quartz. So does a full moon.

In other words, the meaning of the natural world, and of all phenomena, and also of the dullness and pain of our everyday lives, is that Christ has redeemed and is redeeming all the scraps of ordinary existence from the clumsy and ineffectual grasping of people like me. Things are what they are, but what is real, and what is hidden, all point to him and to his ongoing restoration of all nature and all humanity. And minds like mine, which long to ascend to the stars, must content ourselves with gazing upon the one whom Burton calls "this unprepossessing carpenter," and about whom Isaiah says: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." In this mortification of clinging to beauty without beauty lies salvation for people like me, and perhaps like Burton.

Artists in the Kitchen

Among other Sisyphean pursuits, I've spent the summer culling books from my chaotic "library." It's been an anxious and painful task, because it's forced me to confront my neurotic used-book-buying habits, and to recognize the ways I've attempted to create a kind of escapist utopia in my house by populating it with library discards. I discovered early on in our sojourn in northern Appalachia that there are fantastic library book sales here, and it's hard to pass one by when hardcovers are $.25 (I suppose this says something about the reading habits of northern Appalachia or of post-industrial America in general, but that's for another post). Those library discards -- some of them truly wonderful books -- have then gotten unpacked and placed in half-hearted, meandering subject order on various already-groaning shelves around the house, with the result that, when I search the shelves  for a book, I can't find it, and I panic. So my first step this summer was to cull the duplicates, of which there were more than I care to admit -- because, if I find something wonderful that I already have, I always purchase it, because it's wonderful, and no one else will want it, and I might lose the first one -- a thought process that has ended up, more than once, with me not being able to find either copy of the book, and then buying another on Amazon.

I grappled with most of this, and ended up donating 17 boxes of books to the library for their next book sale, which I am planning to not attend, or at least to drive by with my knuckles white from my death-grip on the steering wheel.

There is one category of my collection, however, that I will not be culling. It is my two shelves of vintage spiral-bound community fundraiser cookbooks.

It's hard for me to explain how I feel about these books, which were published from the 1950s to the 1980s, produced by such organizations as the Women's Service League of St. Paul's Episcopal Church of Burlington, Vermont; the Valley Calligraphy Guild of Harrisburg, Oregon; and the St. Joseph Altar Rosary Society of Endicott, New York. Looking through them gives me a sense of excitement and anticipation, as if I've discovered a secret passage back to a lost world -- not only a time, but even a place, of wisdom that I lack: a world where a budget-stretching, wholesome meal made from cans of soup, packets of Jell-O, and bouillon cubes would draw a family together in a near-mystical communion, giving all its members the strength and comfort they needed to face the confounding exigencies of the world beyond the kitchen table.

I love to read the names of the recipes in my spiral-bound cookbooks. There is Priest's Goulash; there are Lasagna Rollups. There is City Chicken; there is Grandma's Waistline. There are Orange Chiffon Pie and Cottage Cheese Cake. There are many, many casseroles. Some of them from the late 1950s and very early 1960s are hand-lettered in an artistic, leftward-slanting calligraphic hand that must have been popular at that time, since it is found across vastly distant regions. Some of the hand-lettered cookbooks also include little pen-and-ink drawings by the recipes' authors, generally the cooks' own idealized images of times that were long past even during their own lifetimes.

I also cook from these books, and it is a great pleasure for me. The best of them recipe-wise are, perhaps unsurprisingly, compilations in support of big-city cultural institutions: I have, for instance, a cookbook produced by the staff of the Library of Congress; another, called Artists in the Kitchen, by the Women's Council of the the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; and two published by the Junior Committee of the Cleveland Orchestra. One of my favorites, however, was created in 1973 by the staff and board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum (pictured above). It contains a short foreword:

It is a little-known and indisputable fact that museum people devote a great deal of thought and time to food, and the fare at the tables of colleagues is more often than not of the highest quality. We hope that you will enjoy this collection of recipes . . . the Museum's first venture into the culinary aspect of the arts.

And the recipes are redolent of a mythical New York City past. There are such 1970s-era staples as hot crab meat, Roquefort cheese ball, and tuna casserole, and there are still hints here and there of the rapidly-fading favorites of an earlier spiral-bound era, like green rice baked in a mold. There are also some bizarreries that, in my fantasies about what "museum people" must be like, I could not have imagined -- such as this one for spaghetti sauce:

But most of them are charming, interesting, and even touching -- like this one, whose name, use of Teflon, and offhand acknowledgment that it "will do for a light supper," combine to make me sigh with longing for an easier time -- a time in which an omelette with a bottle of white wine and a green salad would have made a lovely Sunday supper, and in which you would have eaten it with someone who loved beauty and simplicity, as you do.

But this one treads, for me, uncomfortably close to pathos. Mr. Hawkins was a bachelor, who nevertheless "[impressed] his guests with this spectacular dessert." I think about Ashton Hawkins. Was the notation of his bachelorhood a signifier of gayness? Or was he, perhaps, just lonely? I think I would have liked to have sat at his table and been impressed not only with his spectacular Calvados Soufflé, but also with the wit and mirth of his company and his colleagues'.

And it's not just the bachelor Ashton Hawkins. It's also Margot Feely, who submitted a recipe for "Desperation Shrimp," a lifesaver when dinner guests show up unexpectedly. It's Katushe and Danny Davison, who "have lived in London for the past several years and have found themselves in the enviable predicament of having their freezer bulging with pheasants," and who, to clear some space, invented the "excellent dish" of Pheasant Hash. It's Edward M. H. Warburg, who avers that his Veal Casserole with Peas, and his Curried Eggs, "are amongst my wife's favorite recipes."

Where is Mrs. Warburg now? Where is Ashton Hawkins and all of his colleagues? As Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his 1936 poem "Encounter":

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

I Hear the Bronx Singing

A student at my alma mater published this poem, a sort of homage and reply to Walt Whitman, in The New Yorker this week. It made me nostalgic.

Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing

I heard them and I still hear them
above the threatening shrieks of police sirens
above the honking horns of morning traffic,
above the home-crowd cheers of Yankee Stadium
above the school bells and laughter
lighting up the afternoon
above the clamoring trudge of the 1 train
and the 2 and 4, 5, 6, the B and the D
above the ice-cream trucks’ warm jingle
above the stampede of children
playing in the street,
above the rush of a popped fire hydrant
above the racket of eviction notices
above the whisper of moss and mold moving in
above the High Bridge and the 145th Street Bridge
above mothers calling those children
to come in for dinner, to come in
before it gets dark, to get your ass inside
above them calling a child who may never come home
above the creaking plunge of nightfall
and darkness settling in the deepest corners
above the Goodyear blimp circling the Stadium
above the seagulls circling the coastal trash
along the East River and in the Bronx
young men are singing and I hear them,
eastbound into eternity even
as morning destars the sky.

-- Ariel Francisco

Death = Love

Pierre Bonnard, The Breakfast Room, 1930-31.

A long time ago, back when the only thing that mattered was whether or not I might be able to persuade him to love me, M. showed me a book of essays by the New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling. The introduction to the collection was by the mid-twentieth-century novelist James Salter, and M. said that he found Salter's writing so pretentious and gratuitous that he had cut the pages out of the book with a razor (which was, now that I recall it, very much an M. thing to do).

I found a Salter novel, Light Years, being thrown away by the library a few years ago, and, though I remembered M.'s caveat, I picked it out of the discard box because it had on its cover my favorite painting of all time, Pierre Bonnard's The Breakfast Room, which hangs at the Museum of Modern Art. I've always loved this painting, and when I was a very young woman and could get into the MoMA for free with my student i.d., I used to visit it frequently. Bonnard, an artist who contended with his fair share of suffering, has nevertheless painted an image of a world in which all is well: there is breakfast, with a loaf and a teapot, on the table; there is the window open to the park, and the buttery light of morning falling on the clean white tablecloth. Bonnard's world seems suffused with goodness, a place in which, as Elizabeth Bishop wrote, "Somebody loves us all." The only note of darkness in this abundant canvas is the figure of a woman half-hidden in the shadows on the left, her eyes downcast, holding a cup in one hand while the other hangs listlessly at her side.

So I read the book I had fished out of the bin. I found it so disturbing that, while I didn't take a razor to it, I threw it away when I was done. On a recent trip back to New York City, however, I was seized with the desire to read it again. The Kindle book was four dollars on Amazon, so I downloaded it for the journey home and tried again. I'm almost done with this second go-round, and I see the book in a different light now. It's less disturbing to me now than it is mildly bewildering, and, while at first reading I found the preciousness of Salter's prose maddening, I now see much of value in it.

Salter's style is both glorious and risible, lapidary and sophomoric at the same time. Light Years reads as if it were written by a man grown wise through longsuffering, detached from the passions of everyday life, able to see things in the luminous light of their true meaning, who's decided to collaborate with a precocious teenager whose primary literary output is confiding in her diary. It's hard to even tell what the book is about: is it about a marriage? Is it about a family? Is it about failure? Or is it about the surfaces of things, the way things look, the beauty of everyday things that can never really be penetrated or grasped? Salter's prose seduces and baffles at once.

He writes in the voice of a distant narrator who nevertheless seems to be intimately familiar with the interior lives of his characters, the pretentiously-named Viri and Nedra Berland, wealthy bohemians who live in one of the more artsy suburbs of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. Spoiler alert: they have affairs, they get divorced, their friends suffer various tragedies, their daughters grow up, and Nedra dies young. However, there's no real plot, just intricately described snapshots of various points in their lives. Salter's dialogue-writing is laughable; here for instance, is just a fragment of a longer speech:

You are cold . . . I will warm you . . . you are not used to winter, not these winters. These are something new. They can be cold, more cold than you can imagine. In your nice English shoes everyone thinks you are warm and content. Look, how nice your shoes are, they say, such fine shoes. Yes, they think you are warm because you look nice; they think you are happy. But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It's very difficult to find. It's like money. It comes only once. If you're lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there's nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.

While the character who delivers this and many other tedious monologues is not a native English speaker, everyone in the book talks this way. Everyone is wise, and peppers their conversation with poetic observations and witty bons mots. Everyone knows how to cook, dress, and drink. A whole chapter is devoted to Viri ordering custom-made shirts from a tailor. When disasters happen, the beloved friends to whom they befall fade from the narrative, and, one presumes, from Viri's and Nedra's thoughts as well. Viri and Nedra are at first admirable, enviable, but throughout the course of the novel Salter destroys them bit by bit.

And yet Salter describes the drive home from New York to the suburbs like this:

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

It is really Salter's beautiful descriptive writing, his devout attention to the surfaces of things, that make the book compelling. In a sense, Light Years is not really about Viri and Nedra; it has little in the way of narrative, or even of cohesive plot. It's a book, instead, about things, objects, what they look like and what they reveal. Salter pulls no punches when it comes to his intentions, informing the reader from the outset about Nedra:

I am going to describe her life from the inside outward, from its core, the house as well, rooms in which life was gathered, rooms in which the morning sunlight, the floors spread with Oriental rugs that had been her mother-in-law’s, apricot, rough and tan, rugs which though worn seemed to drink the sun, to collect its warmth; books, potpourris, cushions in colors of Matisse, objects glistening like evidence, many which might had they been possessed by ancient people, have been placed in the tombs for another life: clear crystal dice, pieces of staghorn, amber beads, boxes, sculptures, wooden balls, magazines in which were photographs of women to whom she compared herself.

It is the things that matter, the things that tell us the story, the attention to the things which makes it occasionally hard to tell whether Salter loves or despises his characters, who, for all their beauty and wit, are selfish, cruel, and self-deluded, just as it is the things in Bonnard's painting that convey the sense of an entire world -- a world whose surface shimmers with goodness, but whose ambience of contentment is undermined by the shadowy figure in the corner. Things speak, they tell stories, but, Bonnard and Salter both seem to suggest, the stories they tell may be untrue: if we heed those stories, if we let the beauty of this world guide us, we are in danger of being led astray. Things are beautiful, but they are unreliable narrators.

I think this is what prompted me to throw Light Years away the first time I read it. My own life -- my old life -- had been outlined and limned with a devotion to things, with the way things looked and seemed, with what I thought they meant and conveyed. The ugliness of the world around me, the inadequacy, the injustice, was nevertheless suffused with beauty for me. In my old life, I would have given up, given away, thrown away, a great deal for a pearl of great price; the problem was that I mistook artificial pearls for real. The selfishness of Salter's characters cut me to my core, convicted me.

As I finish Light Years for the second time, however, I'm also reading Sister Wendy's Spiritual Letters, in which she evinces her own early devotion to the thingliness of this world, the beauty of it, in the art that so moves her. She writes to a friend who is in physical pain, about to undergo a feared operation:

I can't feel anxious [for you]. It seems so clear to me that this is pure Love giving Himself in a way you must learn to accept Him in. Either you say: "Come my Love, anyway. You choose." Or you make it impossible for him to come at all . . . Love can't take hold under these restrictions . . . Didn't your insight into Duccio's Annunciation tell you that death equals love?

Duccio, Annunciation, 1308-11

The first time I read Light Years, Salter's metaphor for death unsettled me:

The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs.

But now, reading it in tandem with Sister Wendy's book, I feel differently. Salter's gorgeous descriptions of the thingly world are ultimately devastating, for things cannot save one. Sister Wendy, however, posits the things of this world -- especially the beautiful things that make the heart leap for joy --  as a kind of orthodox exegesis of God's unfailing goodness.

Death equals love. We must go down to that dark place, the dark earth, the underground river, and know that descent to be lit up by Love Himself.

Into Those Bitter Waters

The secretary of the department in which my father taught for many years was Greek Orthodox. In other words, she Took Lent Seriously.

One day during Lent, my father bought her some bunches of daffodils sold for a charity fundraiser. When he gave them to her she burst into tears, explaining that her Lenten fast had been a kind of spiritual scouring-out of the depths of her soul, a purging of all attachment to beauty, and that the shock of he daffodils' scent and color completely broke her.

I remember this as I slog through teaching music history in the metal-gray days of late February. Coincidentally, I have begun reading Sister Wendy Becket's book Spiritual Letters, which is a collection of letters she wrote from the hermitage where she spent most of her adult life. Sr. Wendy, of blessed memory -- the Art Nun, famous lover of beauty -- writes to a friend in a different religious order:

I do feel that the grain of wheat never dies until, or unless, it accepts to fail. More than just accepts, goes down contentedly into those bitter waters, putting all its hope, now, in Jesus . . . God is always coming to us, as totally as we can receive Him, but from every side . . . the natural tendency is to romanticize the way of His coming. . . And he says: No, - I can't give myself, not fully, in any way that gives self a foothold. Nothing romantic or beautiful or in any way dramatic; nothing to get hold of, in one sense, because it must be He that does the getting hold. A terrible death in every way, destroying all we innocently set our spiritual hearts on: all but Him. So utter joy, in a sense that 'romance' can never envisage. There are depths of self-desire . . . that He must empty so as to fill them.

It seems to me that my father's secretary knew the pain of this hard and pitiless kind of self-emptying.

The thought of that pain reminds me of another gunmetal-gray late-winter day, when a long-ago boyfriend and I were crossing Seventh Avenue. We saw a tiny woolen mitten lying abandoned in the middle of a slush-puddle at the curb, and he grabbed my arm. "This," he cried desperately. "THIS is why I can never have children." And -- though that was one of the reasons we eventually parted ways -- I got his point. Because it breaks one utterly to have to cope with the devastating small losses and goodbyes that one must negotiate every single day with children.

Last week, as I drove past a block of early-twentieth-century houses constructed in a jumble of styles in my old, small-city neighborhood with little J., , he piped up from the back seat: "I love this place. Just driving past these houses makes me happy." My heart started beating fast, both from bewilderment and from recognition -- bewilderment because Who Is This Kid? And recognition because This Kid Is Me -- the kid who saw beauty where it was not, who pulled other kids' discarded drawings out of the trash to smooth them out and admire them, who thought the crumbling urban sidewalks were built with diamonds because of the way they sparkled in the streetlights. Only now my memories of that kind of encounter with the world -- an encounter of breathless wonder -- are hazy, and in fact I'm not sure such an encounter can do anyone any good. Should all beauty, and all pretense of beauty, be stripped away so that we can encounter God without any semblance of beauty? Perhaps; but Isaiah reminds us that when we did encounter him thus, we turned our faces away.