tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55544981682644778842024-03-05T13:33:03.545-05:00PentimentoBrothers, 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)Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.comBlogger804125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-7211302965776767382019-11-18T07:30:00.000-05:002019-11-18T07:31:45.656-05:00From Maenad to Christian<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWEYKoZszOvknVZhOQCtyE4Mb4E9R1VuyE-cf5MYU2cQgixiUrwe7U7GZDwOSn2Caxnq2hJjmndqwfd9fI_zFocthggc9tcVrfv8ME4nhfe4fd6onjDZXOPByD3s1XRRApNEHd3-Url_z/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="289" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWEYKoZszOvknVZhOQCtyE4Mb4E9R1VuyE-cf5MYU2cQgixiUrwe7U7GZDwOSn2Caxnq2hJjmndqwfd9fI_zFocthggc9tcVrfv8ME4nhfe4fd6onjDZXOPByD3s1XRRApNEHd3-Url_z/s400/1.jpg" width="267" /></span></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The young journalist <a href="http://www.taraisabellaburton.com/">Tara Isabella Burton</a>, both a polymath a fine writer, has a <a href="https://catapult.co/stories/i-spent-years-searching-for-magici-found-god-instead-tara-isabella-burton">compelling conversion story on Catapult that is very much worth reading.</a> 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<div class="after-ad" data-p-id="0b3d3a5c-d11a-4651-a274-04eb0ab9f026" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<i><span style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; line-height: 30.600000381469727px; white-space: pre-wrap;">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. </span></i></div>
<div class="after-ad" data-p-id="0b3d3a5c-d11a-4651-a274-04eb0ab9f026" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<span style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; line-height: 30.600000381469727px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="after-ad" data-p-id="b894ae13-5798-4bb1-9fe0-15f7aeb585f3" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<label style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; font-family: "times new roman"; line-height: 30.600000381469727px; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>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></label></div>
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
As Burton notes, however:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "millerdisplay" , "times" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Fridays mean that Christ died and Christ is risen and that Christ will come again. So does rose quartz. So does a full moon.</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "millerdisplay" , "times" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "millerdisplay" , "times" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">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 <a href="https://biblehub.com/isaiah/53.htm">about whom Isaiah says:</a> "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. </span></span></span><br />
<br />Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-22863804730489091722019-08-17T11:08:00.000-04:002019-08-17T11:13:53.781-04:00Artists in the Kitchen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGmDt60EQg7JhKzGlYSLj4xXAk7XIVc4In8eAGuhuFZB28O1iA8_9vi_KDaJCLP3f3VhAxPuHOgovz575yQf4ZawLBLfei5pqxk5WD_UNcijYn1z26AZSFex2IQ3PH7JnDUNyoupORNbIX/s1600/20190817_090101.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGmDt60EQg7JhKzGlYSLj4xXAk7XIVc4In8eAGuhuFZB28O1iA8_9vi_KDaJCLP3f3VhAxPuHOgovz575yQf4ZawLBLfei5pqxk5WD_UNcijYn1z26AZSFex2IQ3PH7JnDUNyoupORNbIX/s400/20190817_090101.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Artists in the Kitchen</i>, 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:<br />
<br />
<i>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.</i><br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLCn6-saP7bkQH2qkmTxDtbkCY3hwi4DSnm7bVdnSuxB13mqChyPw9P0g_Vlrh2VdSQCyIPP6PlcagAyoPnX-rWeJLj0YUAr3Jk163h4MtEIfzydO6yl-JEbhPpo7pb3cVa70ttaCJ-xte/s1600/20190817_090013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLCn6-saP7bkQH2qkmTxDtbkCY3hwi4DSnm7bVdnSuxB13mqChyPw9P0g_Vlrh2VdSQCyIPP6PlcagAyoPnX-rWeJLj0YUAr3Jk163h4MtEIfzydO6yl-JEbhPpo7pb3cVa70ttaCJ-xte/s400/20190817_090013.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEjRUQ6ozrzBnBBXBL6SxbESpBtGfTe2DRZBzRVE3tlCeDUjqYFNCZt0E_sgi32EL9Hl1BDMUj5qvcHzBoZeEy5VRGILzgLWfyxXanzrwggbVW0nJhn3KI9PXBpdQozYMkvyYL240kDNBg/s1600/20190817_090028.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEjRUQ6ozrzBnBBXBL6SxbESpBtGfTe2DRZBzRVE3tlCeDUjqYFNCZt0E_sgi32EL9Hl1BDMUj5qvcHzBoZeEy5VRGILzgLWfyxXanzrwggbVW0nJhn3KI9PXBpdQozYMkvyYL240kDNBg/s320/20190817_090028.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
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'.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDvjK6OEyRYllN7O3xu5zpjLwiQUh8wCDKAwOYsaR0zndKJKo49lThr4tCxc6XneafjrLLeApoYsgBg4y8ke6_hPd1GXzsiXIPjjjIMB2M-fX8awA6xmhqzKrsi0fAY0Mlf7CbqkCkLGLx/s1600/20190817_085936.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDvjK6OEyRYllN7O3xu5zpjLwiQUh8wCDKAwOYsaR0zndKJKo49lThr4tCxc6XneafjrLLeApoYsgBg4y8ke6_hPd1GXzsiXIPjjjIMB2M-fX8awA6xmhqzKrsi0fAY0Mlf7CbqkCkLGLx/s400/20190817_085936.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
Where is Mrs. Warburg now? Where is Ashton Hawkins and all of his colleagues? As Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his 1936 poem "Encounter":<br />
<br />
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.</span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">A red wing rose in the darkness.</span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">And suddenly a hare ran across the road.</span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">One of us pointed to it with his hand.</span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,</span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.</span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">O my love, where are they, where are they going</span></i></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.</span></i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-6575854069483251992019-03-22T16:24:00.001-04:002019-03-22T16:24:25.255-04:00I Hear the Bronx Singing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCYCxgHRXGCbTmhM4JvwPahXx72wb6z4cesitvvk_pruHlbDKjEUvoAmLpEEEOSK7fZNmPUveQ7WdO7I2KRNb8vrcsW4hxfe8C-PeQcph-kZHF_WNTuZs8WyMySqbDyUpaRxYzJPflMx1K/s1600/126_Whitman_New_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="280" data-original-width="286" height="391" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCYCxgHRXGCbTmhM4JvwPahXx72wb6z4cesitvvk_pruHlbDKjEUvoAmLpEEEOSK7fZNmPUveQ7WdO7I2KRNb8vrcsW4hxfe8C-PeQcph-kZHF_WNTuZs8WyMySqbDyUpaRxYzJPflMx1K/s400/126_Whitman_New_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
A student at my alma mater <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/18/along-the-east-river-and-in-the-bronx-young-men-were-singing">published this poem</a>, a sort of homage and reply to Walt Whitman, in <i>The New Yorker </i>this week. It made me nostalgic.<br />
<span style="color: inherit; font-family: "Irvin Heading", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 44px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: inherit; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing</span></span></div>
<section class="PageContainer__pageContent___1xERg PageContainer__article___136yK" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; padding-top: 108px; widows: 2;"><article class="Layout__layoutContainer___2gtig" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 1220px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px;"><div class="Layout__twoColumn___1sIWV" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; font-family: sans-serif; margin-left: -20px; margin-right: -20px; position: relative; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
<main class="Layout__content___5vVe9" style="box-sizing: inherit; flex: 0 0 58.33330154418945%; margin-left: 101.656px; max-width: 58.33330154418945%; min-height: 1px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; position: relative; width: 711.656px;"><div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
<div class="ArticleBody__articleBody___1GSGP" data-template="two-column" id="articleBody" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Adobe Caslon", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; line-height: 1.43; margin-bottom: 20px; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
I heard them and I still hear them<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the threatening shrieks of police sirens<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the honking horns of morning traffic,<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the home-crowd cheers of Yankee Stadium<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the school bells and laughter<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />lighting up the afternoon<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the clamoring trudge of the 1 train<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />and the 2 and 4, 5, 6, the B and the D<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the ice-cream trucks’ warm jingle<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the stampede of children<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />playing in the street,<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the rush of a popped fire hydrant<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the racket of eviction notices<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the whisper of moss and mold moving in<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the High Bridge and the 145th Street Bridge<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above mothers calling those children<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />to come in for dinner, to come in<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />before it gets dark, to get your ass inside<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above them calling a child who may never come home<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the creaking plunge of nightfall<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />and darkness settling in the deepest corners<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the Goodyear blimp circling the Stadium<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />above the seagulls circling the coastal trash<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />along the East River and in the Bronx<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />young men are singing and I hear them,<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />eastbound into eternity even<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />as morning destars the sky.</div>
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;">
-- <a class="Link__link___3dWao " href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/ariel-francisco" rel="author" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; font-family: -webkit-standard; text-decoration: none; text-rendering: geometricPrecision;" title="Ariel Francisco">Ariel Francisco</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</main></div>
</article></section>Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-24024500703779446852019-03-08T10:50:00.000-05:002019-03-08T10:50:04.019-05:00Death = Love<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0IamjyxEDrYm2rQCVyK5pz-5pcX_MovWkgYhQhUpQLowfaWjaro2d9h9jteAFNeU0toP7lMXRcyTb_7o9MIfqxSwm1bKwD0o-BQcsMIQRdwYMmnVFS3oUgRypyiZ9CeXARJoCH8QeY7X5/s1600/bonnard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="350" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0IamjyxEDrYm2rQCVyK5pz-5pcX_MovWkgYhQhUpQLowfaWjaro2d9h9jteAFNeU0toP7lMXRcyTb_7o9MIfqxSwm1bKwD0o-BQcsMIQRdwYMmnVFS3oUgRypyiZ9CeXARJoCH8QeY7X5/s400/bonnard.jpg" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: small;">Pierre Bonnard, <i>The Breakfast Room, </i>1930-31.<br /></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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 <i>New Yorker </i>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).<br />
<br />
I found a Salter novel, <i>Light Years,</i> 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 <i>The Breakfast Room</i>, 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, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52193/filling-station">"Somebody loves us all." </a>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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Salter's style is both glorious and risible, lapidary and sophomoric at the same time. <i>Light Years </i>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.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<i>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.</i><br />
<br />
While the character who delivers this and many other tedious monologues is not a native English speaker, <i>everyone</i> in the book talks this way.<i> </i>Everyone is wise, and peppers their conversation with poetic observations and witty <i>bons mots. </i>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.<br />
<br />
And yet Salter describes the drive home from New York to the suburbs like this:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;"><i>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.</i></span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
It is really Salter's beautiful descriptive writing, his devout attention to the surfaces of things, that make the book compelling. In a sense, <i>Light Years</i> 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:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;"><i>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.</i></span><br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
I think this is what prompted me to throw <i>Light Years</i> 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.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
As I finish <i>Light Years</i> for the second time, however, I'm also reading Sister Wendy's <i>Spiritual Letters</i>, 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:<br />
<br />
<i>I can't feel anxious [for you]. It seems so clear to me that this is pure Love giving Himself in a way you </i>must <i>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 </i>Annunciation <i>tell you that death equals love?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhedMJ0kCx9MQidfebESzvPQ7poaa6G2RMwBeiGonU-SEywQKeLyYonkE34bKtWzIIE9olLzpOPR9b7dzC0v2wPdwFar1MUGnnwPMdq5mLSetMaGtTruqtOoBU6q-8lNSGgpjiDjl5NHdb2/s1600/duccio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="775" data-original-width="800" height="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhedMJ0kCx9MQidfebESzvPQ7poaa6G2RMwBeiGonU-SEywQKeLyYonkE34bKtWzIIE9olLzpOPR9b7dzC0v2wPdwFar1MUGnnwPMdq5mLSetMaGtTruqtOoBU6q-8lNSGgpjiDjl5NHdb2/s400/duccio.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Duccio, <i>Annunciation</i>, 1308-11</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The first time I read <i>Light Years, </i>Salter's metaphor for death unsettled me:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;"><i>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.</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;">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.</span></span><br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-61250382940876488102019-02-20T14:08:00.002-05:002019-02-20T14:10:46.277-05:00Into Those Bitter Waters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijC249qFIdo6VI4Fzty23OJ-lX73loqXBdgE_k-HclDb8il8ng7E9IDa9lLdosjD1Bgx1qQVYAjr-iqm6mdwfXpinXSD1tIvEZK0f8sWj7D29Pv3BNsXYtKtFTMpH0u8wB8l3prQGBdCDi/s1600/7883438-6534279-image-m-76_1545956990176.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="430" data-original-width="634" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijC249qFIdo6VI4Fzty23OJ-lX73loqXBdgE_k-HclDb8il8ng7E9IDa9lLdosjD1Bgx1qQVYAjr-iqm6mdwfXpinXSD1tIvEZK0f8sWj7D29Pv3BNsXYtKtFTMpH0u8wB8l3prQGBdCDi/s320/7883438-6534279-image-m-76_1545956990176.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The secretary of the department in which my father taught for many years was Greek Orthodox. In other words, she Took Lent Seriously.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Spiritual Letters, </i>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:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<br />
<i>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 </i>from every side<i> . . . the natural tendency is to romanticize the way of His coming. . . And he says: No, - I can't give myself, not fully, in </i>any <i>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.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
It seems to me that my father's secretary knew the pain of this hard and pitiless kind of self-emptying.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-12558459630730899082015-09-19T12:15:00.000-04:002015-09-20T09:35:43.828-04:00Music and Memory, Part 36: Walking Away<span style="font-family: inherit;">After a long illness, <a href="http://pentiment.blogspot.com/2009/06/please-pray.html">Christine</a>, the wife of my friend and former opera colleague G., died a couple of weeks ago, just shy of her fiftieth birthday. I wasn't able to go to her wake or funeral because of my teaching schedule here in Northern Appalachia, but I've spoken with G. at length in the days since. G. is a wonderful lyric tenor, and, beyond that, truly one of the best musicians I know. For a number of years he sang in many of the great opera houses of Europe and America, but he withdrew from all of his contracts a few years ago to care for Christine, and because opera gigs are scheduled at least two years out, that meant his career was effectively over. A late bloomer who grew up in a working-class Irish-American family and spent his early adulthood tending bar and giving guitar lessons, G., after walking away from the opera stage, never looked back. He now lives and sends his daughters to college on the proceeds from his church job and a small income earned teaching music to the disabled.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've known G. for a long time. We studied with the same voice teacher, and on Thursday nights we would meet at the <a href="http://www.liederkranzny.org/index.html">Liederkranz Club</a> on East 87th Street, which was around the corner from his house (but far from mine), to work out the opera arias we sang at our auditions with a quirky but gifted stage director. "I can still see you twenty years ago," he told me recently. "I can see what you were wearing, and your hair. You were this hilarious, talented Italian chick who just said THESE THINGS." I remember G. picking me up and driving me out to Long Island one evening to run through obscure arias with a brilliant pianist whom I'd never met and never saw again. "I don't coach my repertoire," he said that night, with a cockiness that, in his case, was wholly warranted. "I just know how the music is supposed to go." He was on the cusp of a great career, and I was on the cusp, for reasons still not completely clear to me, of using my career as a tool in the blowing up of everything in my life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">G. has what I would call -- though he does not call it this -- a visionary gift. Since childhood, he's been able to correctly intuit certain people's fates, including those of relative strangers. He's often able to discern whether someone is going to die, and roughly when. In fact, he and his wife both had the foreknowledge, years before she became ill, that she would not live to see her fiftieth birthday. But this gift -- or call it what you will, and he's often prayed that God would rescind it -- comes in the context of his deep, even mystical, Catholic faith, a faith he and Christine shared. Because of this faith, the death of his beloved, though it's devastated him, hasn't utterly crushed him. He has a kind of palpable, tactile, tangible knowledge of God's great love for him, for Christine, and for all of us, and he talks about it often. It was G. who told me about the <a href="http://www.prayerflowers.com/54DayNovena.htm">rosary novena</a> after I came back to the faith, and I have prayed it during some momentous times in my life. While I'm not sure the novena has always "worked," it has changed my life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I thought of all this recently when I read some caveats going around the internet against praying the <a href="http://www.theholyrosary.org/maryundoerknots">novena to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots</a>. Someone knew someone else who had prayed the novena, upon which the supplicant's life had rapidly started coming apart. A hard-line Catholic apologist I used to date mentioned once that he was terrified to <a href="http://www.christian-miracles.com/prayerstostrita.htm">pray to Saint Rita</a>, because, according to popular legend, she would give you what you wanted, but it would come wrapped up in unconditional awfulness. And more than one friend has told me to be careful about praying the <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/Devotionals/prayers/humility.htm">Litany of Humility,</a> because that prayer was bound to be answered in particularly humiliating ways. But all of this goes back to the great fallacy of American Christianity across creeds: that when you embrace Christ, your life will get better. This is only a slight variation on that other characteristically American conclusion: that, if your life is good, it's because you deserve it (and conversely, if it's bad, it's because you don't, a faulty maxim upon which much unfortunate policy has been based). It's some combination of gnosticism, paganism, exceptionalism, and fatal self-regard, and it's so pervasive in our culture that, in spite of my own status as a miserable sinner, I have to remind myself multiple times a day that if my life has any good or happiness in it, it's not because of my relative merits. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">But if I lack merits, which I do, why do I possess or experience </span>anything<span style="font-family: inherit;"> good at all? So many people I know have little, or even nothing, in their lives that is good. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
When G. and I became friends, I was married to M. He was an
artist, and he strongly encouraged me in my singing. I wanted to get at something -- I used to tell myself it was the truth -- in and through my singing. I asked M. once if he would still love me if I stopped singing and did something else, say, became a lawyer. He didn't even entertain the question, because (he said) if I weren't a singer, I would no longer <i>be</i> myself. Ironically, M. is now a lawyer himself. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Apparently one of THOSE THINGS that I said back in our aria class was along the lines of "I used to be Catholic, but no more." G., whose father is a deacon, took note of that statement. He brought it up recently, and reminded me that without my life blowing up, I would never have come back to the faith, which is true.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Towards the end of his short life, Henry David Thoreau, the great naturalist and visionary in his own right (one scholar has written <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300089592">a book about Thoreau's "ecstatic witness"</a>) seems to have lost his vision, the hypersensory awareness of the indwelling sublime that formerly had colored all of his encounters with the natural world. The mystic of Walden, who called the telegraph wire that ran along the railway "the telegraph harp," and wrote of it: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/>
<w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/>
<w:OverrideTableStyleHps/>
<w:UseFELayout/>
</w:Compatibility>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="276">
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="59" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><a href="http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-telegraph-harp-thoreaus-journal-23.html">The telegraph harp sounds strongly to-day . . . I put my ears to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is as if you had entered some world-famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ. The fibres of all things have their tension, and are strained like the strings of a lyre. I feel the very ground tremble under my feet as I stand near the post. The wire vibrates with great power . . . What an awful and fateful music it must be to the worms in the wood! . . . such vibrating music [must] thrill them to death</a><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
by the end of his lifetime had reduced his writing to dry journal notations about the seasonal changes of various plants and animals.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have in fact been praying the Litany of Humility for a long time now. My hope is that God will give me the humility to walk away from the dreams that damaged my life and the lives of those in my midst, and to do it with good cheer. You'd think this would have happened by now; we've been living in Northern Appalachia for almost seven years, and my professional energies have mostly turned from performance to teaching, which I love. But I still reflexively try to assuage my loneliness in this small (and in some ways sad) place with the old thoughts of my talent and the delusion that it gave me special privileges. I pray that I will be able to walk away simply, as G. did, because, as he knew, in the estimation of God there was something better and far more important to do.</div>
Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-26346914750593697402015-07-12T08:41:00.001-04:002015-07-13T07:59:03.938-04:00Music and Memory, Part 35: Lorelei<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq_2wThvnSgKf6fyLqXv-MF0JHN78lciHgg1HLg4MIcfCaDY_q_lsZqcmYER6wtq3UynaqmOt6c-4F7qmOiDVNImjUHaZxRWODJoUe4ytUdoKpqEk90D79C_dFu1ymAxya85XsYs9RRMlZ/s1600/Waterhouse%252C+La+Belle+Dame+sans+Merci.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq_2wThvnSgKf6fyLqXv-MF0JHN78lciHgg1HLg4MIcfCaDY_q_lsZqcmYER6wtq3UynaqmOt6c-4F7qmOiDVNImjUHaZxRWODJoUe4ytUdoKpqEk90D79C_dFu1ymAxya85XsYs9RRMlZ/s400/Waterhouse%252C+La+Belle+Dame+sans+Merci.jpg" width="312" /></a></div>
One summer a long time ago, I was a waitress at a popular restaurant in the publishing district. Late at night, at the end of a busy and generally lucrative shift, I would take a cab home with my tips rolled up in my little black waiter's apron. I was living at that time in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is now impossibly expensive, but was then a sort of African-American bohemia. A legendary experimental jazz musician lived nearby, and I was over at his house fairly often, because his girlfriend was a friend of mine. Spike Lee lived around the corner, and I would pass him walking his dog on my strolls through the neighborhood.<br />
<br />
My apartment was at the back of the third floor of a brownstone, and it was quiet, which was nice, because I stayed up late in those days after winding down from the intensity of a busy night shift, and consequently I slept late in the mornings. It was a beautiful thing to be able to sit up in bed in the mornings and look out of the window and see not a concrete-paved airshaft, but the lush vegetation of old-growth trees-of-heaven filling the small lot that was my backyard, though I had no access to it, and the backyard of the brownstone on the block behind me. The fern-like branches of the trees -- <i>ailanthus altissima, </i>the eponymous tree of the great novel <i>A Tree Grows In Brooklyn</i> -- seemed to be piled up in the condensed space of the lot, frond upon feathery frond. They emitted a dark, dusty vegetable smell, the fragrance, to me, of a New York summer. I would get out of bed and make a quart or so of strong coffee in my little Italian stovetop espresso maker and drink it all, sitting at the table in my kitchen-slash-living-slash-all-purpose room. Then I would practice. It suited me to work at a night job, because I felt like I was giving the best energy of my day to my singing, and whatever was left over could be tossed casually into the hungry jaws of the chi-chi-restaurant-going public, which seemed to me, as Enid Bagnold wrote in another context in the wonderful book <i>National Velvet</i>, "like a million little fishes after bread."<br />
<br />
I lived alone, and while the solitude felt rich and redolent, it was also devastatingly lonely. I was in love with M., and he had treated me cruelly. In my anxiety and sorrow I didn't have much of an appetite; besides the coffee -- Café Bustelo, which I made so thick that it could probably have been classified a foodstuff -- mangoes and Italian bread were the mainstays of my diet. One night, I recall, I sat alone at my table drinking Wild Turkey -- M.'s favorite libation -- while listening to Joni Mitchell, which, by the next morning, had caused me to swear off Wild Turkey forever, if not off M. or Joni Mitchell.<br />
<br />
All during that summer and into the fall, a man sang in one of the apartments in one of the buildings on the block behind my own. Each day, across the thick, weedy verdure of the back lots, I heard this man's stentorian baritone boom out as he sang along to recordings. He would keep it up for at least an hour, and longer on Sundays -- sometimes the entire afternoon. I don't know what it was that he sang, or what he was listening to; the music and the words were indistinct, muffled by the distance across lots and absorbed by the dense urban vegetation. But it was something anthemic and simple -- likely a soul ballad, from what I could make out -- and he sang it over and over again. I can still hear his voice rising the interval of a major sixth, with a flourishing crescendo, at the chorus.<br />
<br />
Rather than annoying me, I found the phenomenon of the invisible singing man and his incomprehensible, repeated song strangely comforting. It gave a rhythm to my day. Perhaps I was, for him, also an invisible singing presence, with my caffeinated late-morning vocalizing. I remember that during that time, I was working in particular on the song "Waldgespräch" by Schumann, about a man journeying through the woods, who is seduced and entrapped by the Lorelei; she tells him, in the last vocal statement: "You will never leave these woods again."<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aY9KkRcnvVg" width="420"></iframe><br />
And perhaps I identified with the Lorelei, that siren of the Rhine who enchants men with her song. Believing that my own singing was a tool, likely the only one I had, I honed it in the hopes that it would precede me into the world and bring me back the things I wanted: security, peace, happiness, and love. But it didn't. And I was not the Lorelei. I was the hapless man in the legend, enchanted by myths of love and illusions of my own power. And everything that, at the time, I thought real and vital turned out not to be, though it took me many years to grope my way out of those woods -- even though they were not really woods at all, only Brooklyn back lots overgrown with weeds -- and see it.<br />
<br />
Above: <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>, J.M. Waterhouse, 1893.Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-37360572282747859962015-06-29T11:10:00.000-04:002015-07-11T11:17:46.915-04:00Music and Memory, Part 34: Mister Softee<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjULQkGcsYofPmRUW83aEkZ0QGIR3FtIir38E5NAXbYVRhaSz0PipFL5fBIBoywdj2RroC3CZlrabZ_33bRPth3gInUyH09heq45h8Mecv_zEUoiao1LZFzSLu5VrAxR4tuvL63VlDmWr-U/s1600/bb_bar_frozfruit_coconut.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjULQkGcsYofPmRUW83aEkZ0QGIR3FtIir38E5NAXbYVRhaSz0PipFL5fBIBoywdj2RroC3CZlrabZ_33bRPth3gInUyH09heq45h8Mecv_zEUoiao1LZFzSLu5VrAxR4tuvL63VlDmWr-U/s400/bb_bar_frozfruit_coconut.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I've been having an ongoing conversation with my friend Ex-New Yorker about the ways that New Yorkers, when they are transferred to other regions of the country, are often revealed to be functionally incompetent. It's not just the not-driving; it's also the inability to perform the sorts of common workaday tasks that other people seem to know how to do instinctively, including any kind of home repairs more involved than changing a lightbulb. I suppose people's fathers teach them how to do such things; but if your father grew up in an apartment building, where the super was routinely called in to fix minor problems, neither your father nor you would ever have learned.<br />
<br />
When I moved here, I assumed that most things would be essentially the same as they were in New York, only smaller and with a more primitive public transportation infrastructure. However, while the smallness and the poverty of transportation infrastructure were as I envisioned them, the rest wasn't true at all. We rented a half-house at first; I had imagined that renting a place would be much the same as it was New York, only that you would get more space for less money. But, while that part was in fact true, nothing else was. Before we found a livable place, we saw many that were in shocking disrepair; I told one landlady that her building ought to be condemned --the kind of candor, I soon learned, that does not seem to be appreciated outside of New York City.<br />
<br />
At the start of our first summer here, though, I heard the familiar sound of the Mister Softee truck making its way up the street, and I figured I knew what to do. Well, actually, it wasn't the familiar sound of the Mister Softee truck, that great nostalgic jingle that sounds as if it's being played on some transcendent child's music box that never winds down.<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2nqvjFQN7ZQ" width="420"></iframe><br />
It was really just a bell repeating the same note over and over every three seconds or so, but, coupled with the sound of a truck going slowly up the street, I got the message and ran out of the house with a couple of bucks in hand. I still remember, strangely, what I was wearing that day. I asked the ice-cream truck man for a coconut Frozfruit, the creamiest and most delightful summer treat known to man. He pulled one out of the freezer case, I gave him my money -- a lot less, incidentally, than I would have forked over in New York City -- and all was well.<br />
<br />
The next time he came up the street, I ran out again and asked him for the same, but he didn't have them. Nor the next time, nor the next. After a couple of weeks of this, I asked him why. He explained that he had only had coconut Frozfruits that first time as a fluke: in New York on other business, he had loaded up his truck at the legendary <a href="http://thelemonicekingofcorona.com/">Benfaremo's, the Lemon Ice King of Corona, Queens</a>. Frozfruits were apparently an urban treat, not to be had in the hinterlands. Crestfallen, I got some cardboard-y regional ice cream instead, and stayed indoors the next time I heard that single-note bell coming slowly up the street. I have since found coconut ice-cream bars at the grocery store, but, gluey and too sweet, they're nothing like coconut Frozfruits.<br />
<br />
That winter, when I still got everywhere around this town on foot, I was walking down the gray, shabby Main Street when I saw a New York City bus driving past. It really was an actual New York City bus, without a number or route listing. I stopped and stood there staring; it was like seeing a ghost. It made me ecstatic for a brief moment, and then plunged me into back into abject homesickness as I resumed trudging through the slush, realizing that I was about a million miles away from my old life. I later found out that the New York City hybrid buses were built by a local manufacturer.<br />
<br />
But memories of the old life are not exactly like cash in hand. They're outdated currency, and the more I trade in them, the more I feel like I'm trying to pass off Confederate currency in a Union state, or trying to substitute an Irish pound for a Euro. Time has gone by, it is summer again, and the world is not now as it was. And the strains of the old Mister Softee truck anthem, to take T.S. Eliot out of context, "echo/Thus, in [my] mind,"<br />
<br />
<i>But to what purpose</i><br />
<i>Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves<br />I do not know.</i><br />
<br />Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-15457367574720641932015-05-19T21:37:00.003-04:002015-05-19T21:51:39.539-04:00Music and Memory, Part 33: The Key-FlowerI was thinking today about a man I dated for much longer than was reasonable, because it is his birthday. The last time I saw him was from the window of a bus going up Madison Avenue about ten years ago. On that day, as I was gazing idly out of the window on my way uptown, I happened to see him, my former love, driving a pedicab against traffic and hand-signaling a left turn with a vaudevillian flourish. After my first son was born, I mentioned to a new friend with a same-aged baby that I had once dated a pedicab driver, and she told me later that my revelation had shocked her. Since I'd done a lot of worse things, I wondered why.<br />
<br />
I suppose it was because I was a serious classical musician, at that time pursuing my doctorate in music, writing my dissertation, teaching in the music department of one of the four-year colleges of the City University of New York, and gigging out. I was also, by then, a married mother, living in the Bronx in a leafy working-class neighborhood with freestanding houses and well-gardened postage-stamp yards. On the face of it, I must have seemed a nice hardworking girl, and nice hardworking girls, one would think, don't date scruffy downwardly-mobile alternative-transportation fanatics, nor, moreover, those whose lives are foundering in the mire of extreme past trauma (sexual abuse at the hands of a close relative from the age of five; drug abuse from the age of nine; and all this in a nice middle-class family from New Jersey). In short, intellectual women who spend the better part of their time, talent, and treasure pursuing an elite art are somehow inoculated by their specialness from slumming it with losers, except in novels in which their characters are inevitably doomed, or unless, in real life, they are convinced that they possess some salvific power that will make everything all right.<br />
<br />
In other words, it's really not that shocking. How many of us striving women haven't thought we could save a hapless man? And how many of us haven't thought, too, that, through our special abilities, we could even somehow save ourselves? Although classical music is not exactly the same thing as drug abuse or wanton sex, its relentless pursuit, for some of us, promises a similar sort of escapist release. I have known other musicians who became excellent rather incidentally in the course of running like hell from a troubled past. There was the wonderful tenor whose father had systematically violated every child in the family, and another male singer to whom dark things had been done in his poor Appalachian childhood, who remains to this day one of the greatest musicians I've ever had the good fortune to know. There was the soprano fleeing from an abusive marriage who brought her baby to her classes at the conservatory and later became the chair of a well-regarded university voice program. And I often ponder the preponderance of gay men in our profession. I have no idea how much of gayness is nature and how much nurture, but I do believe that there is a compulsion toward purification in the pursuit of great music: while it generally doesn't work out that way, the urge to cleanse oneself of one's sins through sustained hard work and an ascetic life focussed on high art cannot have been particular just to me.<br />
<br />
My great voice teacher and mentor A.B. once told me a fable in which a shepherd idly picks a flower, whereupon a cleft in the hills opens to reveal a hidden vaulted treasure-room, its coffers open and overflowing. The amazed shepherd goes from one treasure-chest to the next, filling his pockets with gems and coins and ropes of pearls, while all the while an angel hovers near him, exhorting him: "Don't forget the best! Don't forget the best!" Finally he can carry no more, so he makes ready to leave, planning to return with a wheelbarrow. "Don't forget the best!" the angel whispers again in his ear. The shepherd looks about wildly, trying to find a jewel more precious or a coin more brilliant than those with which his pockets are already bulging. Finally, in confusion, he gives up and stumbles out into the daylight. The treasure-room disappears, and the cleft in the hills closes over it as if it had never been. And he realizes with despair that he has forgotten the best: he has left the key-flower behind, the simple flower he plucked that had opened all the treasures of the mountain to him.<br />
<br />
Things get so complicated, so labyrinthine, when you try to make something out of something else, to do something with that something else that it cannot do, that it was not ever meant to do. Art cannot be salvific -- though how very, very close it seems at times. Music is still for me the elusive sacred tongue, the holy language which, when I hear a few words of it spoken here in exile, pierces my heart like a dagger. It is the language whose words at once cut to the quick and heal. It is the key-flower I search for in my memory, which will unlock the riches of the history of the human spirit. It is medicine and elixir. But perhaps it is none of those. Perhaps it should never have been any of those at all.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, if my own great pain and the pain of so many of my colleagues had not driven us to seek its solace and transformation, we would have been fortunate to find ourselves driving pedicabs against traffic down Madison Avenue.Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-63541387521488599792015-03-31T07:56:00.001-04:002015-03-31T21:43:24.956-04:00Lent: Mountains Were MountainsI looked out the kitchen window yesterday during a lull in the afternoon and observed that the sky was gray, the same color, and seemingly the same substance, as the winter-bleached asphalt of the road, which, if there were no other houses in the way, seemed as if it could go on forever into the distant vanishing point and dissolve into that lowering metallic horizon, gray into gray. The unrelenting grayness seems to have seeped into my bones and entered my spirit. Though this happens less frequently now, my mind leapt to compare the northern-Appalachian grayness to what I used to know, in New York City, where on a day like this I would have left my house and walked and walked in the cold and the grayness until it seemed as if the March wind, which howled down certain streets unchecked and whipped scraps of paper into whirlwinds on street-corners, had swept everything contrary and unyielding from me, leaving my spirit as empty as a bare room.<br />
<br />
The other day I was looking to buy some fava beans, but even the large supermarket chain that carries gourmet and ethnic foods didn't have them. I ended up at a little halal corner grocery store in the ghetto where, when I asked for fava beans, I was shown a whole shelf of them -- the Egyptian variety, the Palestinian variety, the Yemeni variety -- and which kind did I like? The shop was like a scrappy, rundown echo of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/travel/18weekend.html?_r=0">Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn</a>, the blocks-long bazaar of Middle Eastern shops and restaurants where long ago I used to shop on Saturdays. I chatted with the owner, a halal butcher who told me that for twenty years he drove the 200 miles to New York every week to deliver his meat to those very shops. "In New York," he mused, "you walk out your door, and everything is handed to you."<br />
<br />
Yes, that is true. In New York, someone has already opened that shop and sourced the gourmet groceries so that you don't have to. You can pay one thin dime, or even a penny, to time-travel and immerse yourself in the parallel dimension of the great artifacts of every culture in history at the Metropolitan Museum; a generous and well-endowed foundation has made it possible for even the broke and the poor to use their own judgment when considering the recommended $25 admission fee. You can go anywhere, you can walk anywhere. And the most beautiful trees bloom in the spring, the flowering pear trees that turn whole city blocks into tunnels roofed with white blossoms. And the gray of that <i>rara avis</i>, the urban pigeon, is illuminated by the lovely purple-green iridescence of its neck feathers as it struts and bobs to devour your half-eaten hot dog.<br />
<br />
A zen master is supposed to have said, "When I was young, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. When I sought enlightenment, mountains were no longer mountains, and rivers were no longer rivers. Finally, mountains are mountains again, and rivers are rivers."<br />
<br />
One of the hardest things for me about leaving New York and being here has been the unrelenting grayness that cannot be swept away with a long walk. While the countryside surrounding this town is beautiful in an unkempt, natural way, there is a distinct lack of the kind of man-made beauty that is fashioned by skill and artifice -- the beauty of <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/3778">Wallace Stevens's jar</a>, which gave order to "the slovenly wilderness." When you go out your door, nothing is handed to you. You're on your own, in alien territory that feels vaguely hostile.<br />
<br />
Back in New York, I sat on the floor next to my baby's crib and wrote my doctoral dissertation while he slept. When he woke up, we went to the neighborhood playground. Here, I despair of getting any serious work done on the book that the dissertation has become; there's no time even to write a blog post. Because nothing is handed to you here, I spend much of my time striving to create a parallel dimension for my children with the books and music and pictures in my own home, and I sometimes have my doubts about whether this endeavor is healthy. Is it creating a bulwark against the darkness of the world that will shore up my children against its cruelties, or is it nurturing futile dreams of beauty that will necessarily be crushed by that darkness? It seems a lot easier when everything is handed to you.<br />
<br />
But I know some young single mothers who are refugees from New York, who see this broken-down, post-industrial former boom-town as a haven full of promise, and who never, ever want to go back. And I imagine that many, if not most, of my fellow citizens live in places like this -- small, decrepit cities that are gradually being invaded by spiritual darkness and <a href="http://scribol.com/anthropology-and-history/detroit-the-ghost-city-gradually-being-reclaimed-by-nature">in some cases even reverting to "the slovenly wilderness"</a> -- and that to have spent the rest of my life in one of the greatest and most beautiful cities in the world, where everything is handed to you, would be to ignore that darkness, to be lulled to sleep by beauty and ease of access, and to do nothing about it.<br />
<br />
I once thought I would do something great; I longed to reveal something of lasting beauty in the world. But instead, I teach music at a sad, down-at-heels community college to hardscrabble working-class students, who seem far less naturally-intelligent and well-prepared than the hardscrabble working-class students I used to teach in the City University of New York system. I feel sometimes like a Lego minifigure whose plastic legs have been swapped out for the short ones, or like the Black Knight in<i> Monty Python and the Holy Grail:</i><br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ikssfUhAlgg" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
But maybe mountains really are just mountains, and rivers really just rivers.<br />
<br />
D.H. Lawrence wrote in his poem "The Phoenix":<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: nowrap;"><i>Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,</i></span><br />
<div nowrap="" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; text-align: left; white-space: nowrap;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i><span class="linenumber instapaper_ignore" style="color: grey; left: -25px; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: 0px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">made nothing?</span></i></div>
</div>
<div nowrap="" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; text-align: left; white-space: nowrap;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i><span class="linenumber instapaper_ignore" style="color: grey; left: -25px; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: 0px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Are you willing to be made nothing?</span></i></div>
</div>
<div nowrap="" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; text-align: left; white-space: nowrap;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i><span class="linenumber instapaper_ignore" style="color: grey; left: -25px; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: 0px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">dipped into oblivion?</span></i></div>
</div>
<div nowrap="" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; text-align: left; white-space: nowrap;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
<div nowrap="" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative; text-align: left; white-space: nowrap;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>If not, you will never really change.</i></span></div>
Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-7574342423501882062015-02-04T11:56:00.004-05:002015-02-06T10:38:03.190-05:00Fear of An Autistic Planet [Updated 2/6/15]<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I've been wonderin' why</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">People livin' in fear<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />Of my shade<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />(Or my hi top fade)<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />I'm not the one that's runnin'<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />But they got me one the run<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />Treat me like I have a gun<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />All I got is genes and chromosomes<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />Consider me Black to the bone<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />All I want is peace and love<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />On this planet<br style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" />(Ain't that how God planned it?)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-- From "Fear of A Black Planet" (Chuck D/Public Enemy)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span">* * * * * * * * * * *</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We are living in fear of an Autistic Planet. This is the primary reason why so many, including Catholics who consider themselves pro-life, feel justified in their decision to risk the disability and death of their children and the children of their fellows by refusing the MMR vaccine.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Of course, they will tell you that this is not the reason they refuse it. They will tell you that the reason they are willing to risk death for their children and others' is that the vaccine was grown in a culture derived from the cell line of an aborted fetus fifty years ago.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is supposed to be some kind of principled pro-life stand. It is not. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here's why:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/measles-are-making-a-comeback-so-what-does-the-church-teach-about-vaccines"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">- The material cooperation with evil on the part of those who use the vaccine is so remote that it is devoid of any of the characteristics that would make it sinful;</span></a><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">- The willingness of self-styled pro-life anti-vaccinators to risk the death, from measles, of those who are immunocompromised and must rely on herd immunity to stay safe is in direct contradiction to any principle that purports to stand for life; and</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">- To deny the good that has come from vaccines, including those derived from aborted fetal stem-cell lines fifty years go, undermines Christian theology itself.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I know that some Catholics are calling vaccine refusal "conscientious objection." It is not. True conscientious objection admits that the dictates of one's own conscience are in opposition to the social conscience, and is willing to accept the consequences, including punishment, of following them. Conscientious objectors to the draft in World War II and Vietnam, for instance, willingly served prison time for their choice (draft dodgers who fled to Canada in the latter war were obviously not conscientious objectors). I have yet to meet or read of a so-called conscientious objector to the measles vaccine who would accept a similar punishment for following what he purports to be the dictates of his conscience. Rather, the argument they make is that one's own self-interest trumps the common good. Can someone explain to me how this argument can be legitimately called either pro-life or Catholic?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Vatican has made it clear that vaccinating is neither an occasion nor a near-occasion of sin (see the link above). If this is so, then what is the real reason that so many apparently faithful Catholics refuse the vaccine, even if to do so announces to the world, in the starkest possible terms, that they do not love their neighbors as themselves?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It's because they fear autism. And because they believe in the debunked and compromised results of a corrupt and amateurish study, published in the <i>Lancet</i> almost twenty years ago, that linked the measles vaccine to a gut syndrome in <i>twelve</i> <i>children</i> and theorized that this syndrome somehow made them autistic (a study conducted by a doctor with undisclosed conflicts of interest, who has since been stripped of his license to practice, but has moved to the U.S., where he is exploiting some parents' Fear of An Autistic Planet for cold, hard cash). Apparently anything, including the death of children, is better than having an autistic child. Can someone explain to me how this fear of autism can be legitimately called either pro-life or Catholic?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I will not link here to any of the so-called Catholic commentary that tries to pass off the championing of personal freedom over the good of all as conscientious objection. Because it's not Catholic. It's libertarian. And libertarianism, in spite of all the recent Talmudic parsing by Catholic libertarians to make it seem Catholic, is not.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But let us be hypothetical for a moment and suppose that all these free-floating fears are justified. Let us imagine that big pHARMa really <i>does</i> want to change your child's genetic neurological structure in order to line its own pockets (never mind the fact that the pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines give millions of doses away to Third World countries and that vaccines are actually a loss leader for these companies). And let us suppose further that, in cahoots with Big Pharma, the governments wants, <a href="http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2014/01/16/jennys-mccarthys-vaccine-narrative-called-into-question/">in Jenny McCarthy's evocative phrase,</a> "the soul gone from [your child's] eyes]," probably in order to take your child from you and make him a ward of the evil state, or something like that.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Such fears, whether trilled in the strident tones of unabashed conspiracy theorists, or spoken gently by well-heeled Marin County parents (in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/us/vaccine-critics-turn-defensive-over-measles.html">a recent New York Times article</a>, one mother rationalized that she had "meditated on it a lot" before deciding not to vaccinate her children; another explained that "[v]accines don't feel right for me"), are really the Fear of An Autistic Planet. Even Catholics, who embrace the birth of a baby with Down Syndrome and heroize the parents of such children, evidently want to keep the soul in their children's eyes, and would rather not vaccinate than risk having a child with autism. I am struggling to understand how this inherently ableist attitude is pro-life.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Finally, it is a denial of Catholic theology itself to insist, against all evidence and clear-cut statements from the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life, that the measles vaccine is evil. I do not deny that the basis for its creation -- using the stem cells from an aborted fetus -- was material cooperation with evil. But our faith teaches us that God can, and does, bring good -- even great good -- out of evil. The crucifixion of Christ was evil, undoubtedly the ultimate evil. But the cross, the Romans' barbaric instrument of torture and death, became the sign of our salvation.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The belief that vaccines cause autism, and that refusing them will prevent autism, is belief in magic. The belief that God can use anything to bring about a good effect, and that the measles vaccine has ultimately proven that God brings good out of evil, is Christian. The fear of autism is pagan. The love of all our brothers and sisters is Christian.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, whose daughter Maria Zita died of measles at the age of six, a year before the measles vaccine was introduced, pray for us!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3s8vMIx4hF9w1UislYoC4jdGrfDkpRCAJ9-FYrEiSvN1ENEbqXJfbljiB3e7XO2W76yts69lomHyE-Ll5YQHqAGYw3wCUIJBhvcstgHcDBlWZ37l1dw5g8byLhujMcTuJcEsaYrI0J-xW/s1600/gianna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3s8vMIx4hF9w1UislYoC4jdGrfDkpRCAJ9-FYrEiSvN1ENEbqXJfbljiB3e7XO2W76yts69lomHyE-Ll5YQHqAGYw3wCUIJBhvcstgHcDBlWZ37l1dw5g8byLhujMcTuJcEsaYrI0J-xW/s1600/gianna.jpg" height="400" width="317" /></span></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-42080268376996091762015-01-24T11:40:00.001-05:002015-01-24T11:42:20.652-05:00Music and Memory, Part 32: Piano Karma<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfTY_SvoZvVePVSU6apjLGw6Ay_YAe2tDDRvkRLlmN8LnyL47RQFEeN4wrRDvN-y8cHSA_awarsXRlrTUEVSQ6rtBRYIMG-SnYgmOs9ZSEpo-R_FcoyTjG0hGHW_OToqWJJv1dWhIrcyol/s1600/-tmp-jpgg1o4ev_1024_9999_fill_water.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfTY_SvoZvVePVSU6apjLGw6Ay_YAe2tDDRvkRLlmN8LnyL47RQFEeN4wrRDvN-y8cHSA_awarsXRlrTUEVSQ6rtBRYIMG-SnYgmOs9ZSEpo-R_FcoyTjG0hGHW_OToqWJJv1dWhIrcyol/s1600/-tmp-jpgg1o4ev_1024_9999_fill_water.jpg" height="400" width="320" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Back when we were struggling singers in New York, <a href="http://pentiment.blogspot.com/2009/11/music-and-memory-part-6-treason.html">my friend Soprannie</a> once mused that everyone -- at least everyone in our station in life -- had piano karma, a principle whereby, when it is ordained that you should own a piano, a piano comes your way. This principle was necessarily tinged with both superstition and fatalism, because it is nearly impossible for a struggling singer to acquire a piano, even a crappy one, in New York. But Soprannie had a piano, obtained under mysterious circumstances. And then one day, my own piano karma came up. An older, richer colleague -- a formidable coloratura soprano who had created the role of Madame Mao in John Adams's opera <i>Nixon in China</i> -- was getting a Steinway, and she offloaded her battered Ivers and Pond console onto me for pocket change.<br />
<div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/kB-EXGJMKwE" width="420"></iframe></div>
<div>
(<i>Trudy Ellen Craney, offloader of my karmic piano, as Madame Mao in </i>Nixon in China<i>. She enters during the ballet scene at 2:27.)</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
<div>
I was entirely grateful for what seemed like a gift from the fates. The piano had no overtones. When it went out of tune, the upper register would go sharp, and the lower register would go flat. Certain notes stuck, others didn't sound, and still others would reverberate on and on even if you weren't holding down the pedal. It had a crack in the soundboard. Nonetheless, it was a <i>piano</i>: a huge step up both in sound-making capacity and in prestige from the three-quarters-size keyboard that I'd had for years, and on which I'd learned all my repertoire. When we moved away from New York, the Ivers and Pond moved with us, over my husband's half-hearted objections. "It's a <i>piano</i>," I reminded him. In fact, the piano was my prize possession. By chance, a friend of mine from graduate school, an academic musicologist, was already living here in northern Appalachia, and was teaching a course in American minimalism -- the music of John Adams, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass -- at the local university. I told him that he should bring his students over to my house to see the piano upon which Trudy Ellen Craney had prepared the role of Madame Mao in <i>Nixon in China</i>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The other day my piano tuner called. There was a piano in the area that he thought would be a good piano for me. It was a Kimball console in mint condition. I should go and take a look at it. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I should note here that, while in New York City a cheap piano can't be gotten for love or money, northern Appalachia abounds in them. People are always getting rid of pianos here. I suppose it's because people die, people move, people go into assisted living; this is the kind of place that has an aging population, because young people with talent and ability leave here for places that have jobs. Pianos are a casualty of this migration, and also of the gradual movement away from the practice of making actual music on real instruments, so small pianos seem to be widely available in this area at prices that would be considered shocking in New York.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I went to look at the piano. It was a lovely little console, about the size of my karmic Ivers and Pond, but in much better condition, with a nice solid action. Evidently it had been rarely played. Kimball was at one time the biggest piano manufacturer in the world; there were Kimballs in many of my elementary-school music classrooms, as well as in the practice rooms I haunted as an undergraduate, but those markets are dominated now by Japanese makers. The Kimball's owner, a former band instructor, was in assisted living, and his brother was sorting out his possessions. The brother was a kind man, well into his eighties himself. His father, unbelievably, had been born in 1868, and had been an engineer on the Lehigh Valley Railroad. We had a lovely chat, I played the Kimball and sang a little, and he gave me the piano for free.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The new, free piano was moved in the other day, and my old Ivers and Pond moved out. The mover was a gruff man, who said in an accusatory way, "I don't know why you're getting a Kimball. You can't get rid of them. They're crap." I blanched for a moment, but I said goodbye to my old karmic piano, the instrument on which a great artist had learned a role that she created in a great and groundbreaking work of art. I imagine that Trudy Ellen Craney had brought the Ivers and Pond from her childhood home in New Jersey to her loft in SoHo; it was that kind of piano, a family piano. Our old voice teacher, who lived in Washington, D.C., used to give lessons at Trudy's loft when she was in town, so, besides being a tool in the furtherance of a great work of art, that piano had accompanied a lot of other great singing besides (I do not mean my own; our teacher had some really fantastic students). I had had the Ivers and Pond for fifteen years, and it had taken me through a new stage in my career -- when I transitioned out of opera and into the concert performances that grew out of my archival research into rare repertoires -- and into new stages in my life as a graduate student, wife, and mother. My older son had recently begun playing it. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I wanted to sing "Vecchia zimarra" to it, but there wasn't time. I wonder where it will go; to a church basement or a VFW hall, perhaps. And no one will ever know the part it played in the creation of a great opera, nor in the hidden joys and sorrows of the lives of a few struggling artists.</div>
<div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/z40PaW4ryyk" width="420"></iframe></div>
Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-55039714938624742572015-01-14T20:59:00.000-05:002015-01-15T10:00:55.747-05:00Thickening the CultureI know. I haven't posted here in ages. I'm really too busy to keep up this blog right now. Homeschooling has been hugely time-consuming, and I have to get the first draft of my book to the publisher within the next very few months. Besides, though my thoughts are often scintillating to me, I doubt that they would be to you. And no one has time to read blogs anymore, right? Where we once all connected, we've gravitated to Facebook instead, which takes so much less thought and deliberation.<br />
<br />
I am guilty of of this too. I read blogs very rarely these days, even those written by my friends. I just don't have the time. I get up at five a.m. to try to do a little bit of research and reading before the day begins, and, once it does, I'm rarely sitting down, unless it's to drive somewhere. (Which means, come to think of it, that I'm actually sitting down quite a lot, since I seem to have become some sort of simulacrum of a suburban housewife, constantly driving to places that neither promise nor supply either satisfaction or rest.)<br />
<br />
But I did read <a href="http://www.thewinedarksea.com/2015/01/13/nobody-likes-tangerines-reinventing-liturgical-year/">Melanie's thought-provoking post</a> the other day, and have been turning it over in my mind. Melanie notes the movement among Catholic mothers -- or at least those who have an online presence -- to revive lost traditions. In the end, she finds herself mourning the loss of a "thick" Catholic culture (a term I love), one that draws American Catholics together in shared celebration, fellowship, and purpose:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;">We create ersatz holidays that have passing reference to the farmer’s world, we yearn to be connected to the seasons in a liturgical way, but most of us are grasping at straws, we have no idea really what we’re yearning for . . . . </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;">We have in our day no harvest feasts or mystery plays, no Michaelmas goose to share with out neighbors. But let us… Let us what? Let us be received? Certainly we are received at Mass, but is that enough? Time and time again I hear that it isn’t. It’s not enough to live the faith on Sundays, it must permeate our lives. And we try, we Catholic mommy bloggers. We try to revive an authentic Catholic culture in our domestic churches. But it seems to me we must do more. We must somehow make these traditions live outside the four walls of our homes, we must make our parishes as well as our homes the seats of authentic Catholic culture</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;"> </span></i></span><br />
<br />
This is a real <i>cri-de-coeur</i>, to which I unite my own. How does one do this? How do we re-create what has been lost? Melanie suggests that we go outside of our homes, that we make common cause with other people in real life. But will we?<br />
<br />
I started this blog in 2007, and the very next year we moved from New York City, where I imagined I'd always live, to northern Appalachia. The difference between the two places, in social customs and much else, is hard to overstate. When you live in a walking-around city, you make friends. When you're shut up in the private realm of your own automobile, you don't.<br />
<br />
I assumed that, in a new place, I'd always make friends at church. But I didn't. There is a vibrant community of orthodox Catholic mothers here, but they did not invite me in; I was so different that i might as well have moved here from Mars. When I received my doctorate and posted a picture of myself in my cap and gown on Facebook (at Lincoln Center, no less, where my university holds Commencement), one of the mothers in this group said to me, "I didn't know you were <i>still in school," </i>evidently a shocking and bad thing for someone of my station. As a matter of fact, it was only this fall, six years into our sojourn here, that I was invited to one of this mothers' group's weekly meetings, and it was only because someone had gotten wind that I was homeschooling; I would never have been invited in if I had kept my older son in public school, evidently (I declined -- not because I'm too proud, but because it seemed futile).<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRbfa-6RGr3HQDokAwtURB_YidpLWLH0Angzhdc0Q5cWEskA0mDLuxiR-2ZGj9unTUSh1evyIVqh_TM5lVvISGhEsPlRjyTGcqg63Ui-_4PNz-MpX1Yy4uKlKag2fq_mjhsh2J2C5biiy-/s1600/47215_426720081934_2335900_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRbfa-6RGr3HQDokAwtURB_YidpLWLH0Angzhdc0Q5cWEskA0mDLuxiR-2ZGj9unTUSh1evyIVqh_TM5lVvISGhEsPlRjyTGcqg63Ui-_4PNz-MpX1Yy4uKlKag2fq_mjhsh2J2C5biiy-/s1600/47215_426720081934_2335900_n.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
(<i>This is an actual real-life picture of me, a first for this blog. Did you know that when you get an advanced degree in music, your hood is pink, and your gown has pink trim?)</i></div>
<br />
I'm convinced, sadly, that syncretizing a newly-vibrant Catholic culture out of recipes and crafts cobbled together from Pinterest and other mothers' blogs is destined to fail, or at least to fail to "thicken," and that the main reason for this is that we are all doing it in our own homes with our own children, and then posting about it on the internet. In short, we are not going out to meet each other -- not even in church, much less in the street. And if we don't meet each other, we can't invite each other over. We are not breaking down barriers; we are, in fact, raising them a little higher with our lovely photos of what we've accomplished and you can too! But comboxes do not make a community, and those crafts, no matter how lovely, are not a substitute for traditions and lore passed down from generation to generation.<br />
<br />
I was particularly touched by Melanie's mention of making challah from a recipe of her husband's great-grandmother. I have often felt wistful about Jewish culture, which, in some ways, is the original "thick" culture. Jews -- at least religiously observant Jews -- have a shared sense of purpose and fellowship. They have jokes. They have excellent liturgical music. I used to sing the High Holy Days services in an eight-voice choir at a well-heeled synagogue near the U.N., attended by many diplomats, and the music we sang truly imparted to me, as a performer, a powerful sense of God's wonder and awe. That hasn't ever exactly happened to me at church. At synagogue, the elders fuss over the youngsters, and help guide them in the faith and inculcate in them a shared sense of cultural and spiritual endeavor. Some oof the ultra-Orthodox, like the Chabad Lubavitchers, have what can only be called a cult of joy. I had a Lubavitcher student back in New York who used to play at all the big Hasidic weddings in Brooklyn -- he was a jazz drummer -- and he often invited me to attend them. I didn't feel comfortable crashing, especially as an outsider, but I longed to witness the ecstatic music and dancing I had heard about. Joy! And what do we have? Well, if it's joy, I haven't tasted it, at least not in our culture or our so-called fellowship, in our music, in our gatherings, or in the ways that we deal with one another at Mass or outside of it. The Catholics here are cold, cold, cold.<br />
<br />
I do not know if it's the same elsewhere. I've heard that midwestern Catholic churches are legendary for their outreach and hospitality; certainly the Protestants have that all over us, too. A few years ago there were some faint stirrings of a new Catholic agrarian-localist movement, inspired by the writings of people like <a href="https://alum.mit.edu/news/WhatMatters/Archive/200410">Eric Brende</a> and the briefly-Catholic Rod Dreher; but I don't know anyone who attempted such a lifestyle or whether it worked out for them.<br />
<br />
I think in the end one has to assess the place where one finds oneself, and try to push into it, to knead it a little -- indeed, to thicken it with one's own flesh-and-blood actions. How do we do this? I don't know, but I suppose each in her own way, utilizing her own gifts. I think we have got to get out from behind our screens and do something in our communities, however small. I think of this often in my car as I drive around my down-at-heels new city (though it's not so new now), looking out at the depressed and impoverished pedestrians walking for necessity, not for joy, against the bleak landscape. Sometimes, at those moments, I find myself chanting aloud: "Make the desert bloom! Make the desert bloom!" I'm quite sure we are called to do this, though I'm not quite sure how.Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-91874028610489125462014-12-23T15:23:00.000-05:002014-12-23T15:23:01.207-05:00A Poem for AdventWho stands at the door in the storm and rain<br />
On the threshold of being?<br />
One who waits till you call him in<br />
From the empty night.<br />
<br />
Are you a stranger, out in the storm,<br />
Or has my enemy found me out<br />
On the edge of being?<br />
<br />
I am no stranger who stands at the door<br />
Nor enemy come in the secret night,<br />
I am your child, in darkness and fear<br />
On the verge of being.<br />
<br />
Go back, my child, to the rain and the storm,<br />
For in this house there is sorrow and pain<br />
In the lonely night.<br />
<br />
I will not go back for sorrow or pain,<br />
For my true love weeps within<br />
And waits for my coming.<br />
<br />
Go back, my babe, to the vacant night<br />
For in this house dwell sin and hate<br />
On the verge of being.<br />
<br />
I will not go back for hate or sin,<br />
I will not go back for sorrow or pain,<br />
For my true love mourns within<br />
On the threshold of night.<br />
<br />
-<a href="http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/kathleen-raine">- Kathleen Raine</a>Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-7490442674078062162014-10-22T13:44:00.000-04:002014-10-22T13:55:53.056-04:00Poem: Psalm<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I loved this poem <a href="http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2014/10/22">when I read it this morning</a> and didn't want to wait until Friday to post it.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">* * * * * * * *</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px;"></span></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.5em; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">on your holy day. The harbor is before me,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Governor's Island, the Verrazano Bridge</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">and the Narrows. I keep in my head</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">what Rabbi Nachman said about the world</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">being a narrow bridge and that the important thing</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">is not to be afraid. So on this day</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I bless my mother and father, that they be</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">not fearful where they wander. And I</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ask you to bless them and before you</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">remember that I always praised your world</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">and your splendor and that my tongue</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.</span></div>
<div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 1.5em; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: inherit;">-- <a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/02/express/a-poetic-life-harvey-shapiro-with-galen-williams">Harvey Shapiro,</a> from </span><i>A Momentary Glory, </i>(c) Wesleyan Press, 2014.</span></div>
Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-77332978702157369222014-09-27T08:59:00.000-04:002014-09-27T13:03:03.254-04:00Autism and The Sins of the FathersIt's been ricocheting around the internets for a couple of weeks now: Catholic research biologist Theresa Deisher -- a rare example of a highly-skilled and -credentialed professional who makes no pretense of her faith, striving instead to use her gifts to glorify God -- published <a href="http://www.ms.academicjournals.org/article/article1409245960_Deisher%20et%20al.pdf">a widely-disseminated study</a> that links the use of fetal DNA in certain vaccines to the increase in autism diagnoses. While the Catholic-blogging-and-commenting cohort have cheered her study, which seems to demonstrate something that they have been hoping for a long time to find, others -- including <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/simchafisher/2014/09/25/rational-catholic-continues-dismantling-the-shoddy-science-in-dr-deishers-vaccineautism-study/">Simcha Fisher</a> and the science moms at a <a href="http://rationalcatholicblog.wordpress.com/">new blog, Rational Catholic</a> -- have picked apart Dr. Deisher's methodology and (cogently) undermined her conclusions. Other Catholics have tacitly accused these critics not only of making <a href="http://www.sbjf.org/sbjco/schmaltz/yiddish_phrases.htm"><i>a shanda fur die goyim</i></a>, but also of being bad Catholics in general, because, evidently, Catholics are supposed to support the work of other Catholics no matter what, and besides, Dr. Deisher's son is very ill, so they should lay off her.<br />
<br />
I will not attempt to pick apart the science here; other have done that far better than I ever could. My discomfort with the praise Dr. Deisher's work has received from lay (meaning non-scientist) Catholics is not about the science, which I'm hardly qualified to speak about. It's rather about what I consider to be a disturbing moral and theological fallacy implicit in Deisher's work. Keep in mind that I'm about as much a moral theologian as I am a scientist; but, as we all know, having zero credentials has never been a deterrent to expressing one's opinion on the Catholic blogosphere, or anywhere else, for that matter.<br />
<br />
I believe Dr. Deisher's work is based on a faulty theological premise, because it assumes autism to be the logical outcome of cooperation with intrinsic evil. The flaws in Deisher's assumption are twofold:<br />
<br />
1. She subtly portrays autism as an evil outcome -- a thing to be feared; and<br />
<br />
2. She ignores the revelation of Christ in the New Testament. I will address this flaw first.<br />
<br />
The basis of Deisher's research is the fact that the rubella vaccine was derived from a fetal cell line taken from an aborted baby more than fifty years ago; <i>ergo,</i> cooperation with the evil of abortion, no matter how remote, will lead to a bad outcome. This is the doctrine of karma, which is not a teaching of our church.<br />
<br />
Deisher appears to have based her assumption on<a href="http://biblehub.com/exodus/34-7.htm"> Exodus 34:6-7 and other passages in the Old Testament,</a> which caution that God "visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation." (Since today's infant vaccinands are roughly the third generation from that aborted baby, perhaps this means that the evil power of the rubella vaccine will have worn off by the time their own children are born, and that no one, in that happy time, will need Fear The Autism.)<br />
<br />
While it is true, of course, that sin, beginning with Original Sin, has ruined the world, we now have a Savior who is merciful and just; even the prophets of the Old Testament offer a perspective on sin and forgiveness that differs from the one in Exodus. <a href="http://biblehub.com/ezekiel/18-20.htm">Ezekiel, for example, say that</a><br />
<br />
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Template>Normal</o:Template>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>41</o:Words>
<o:Characters>236</o:Characters>
<o:Company>Risorgimento Project</o:Company>
<o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>289</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>11.773</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:DoNotShowRevisions/>
<w:DoNotPrintRevisions/>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin/>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>The person who sins is the one who will die. The child will
not be punished for the parent's sins, and the parent will not be punished for
the child's sins. Righteous people will be rewarded for their own righteous
behavior, and wicked people will be punished for their own wickedness.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And while it is true that God does not change, and nor do His covenants or His promises, it is a central tenet of the Christian faith that Christ has fulfilled them, has been our proxy, and has taken the burden of that punishment -- including, I would guess, the punishment of the children's children for the sins of the fathers -- upon Himself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the great mysteries of Christianity is the one that consistently challenges logic: God brings good out of evil. We expect Him to repay evil for evil; justice demands it. But God quite often confounds our expectations. The proof of this is quite simply in the cross itself, the instrument of brutal torture turned into a sign of salvation. In this fallen world we have to work with what we have, and what we have is half-broken, faulty, and tainted, as are we. But God can, and does, bring great good out of these inadequate means. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Is it not possible that the aborted baby whose cell line has been used to save thousands, if not millions, of other babies from death <i>in utero</i> is a type of Christ him- or herself, a type of <a href="http://biblehub.com/john/12-24.htm">the seed that falls into the ground and dies</a>, bringing about an abundant harvest? The death of Christ was a scandal, but the result is the salvation of mankind. On a smaller scale, the death of a baby by abortion is likewise a scandal, but, in this case, the result has been the saving of many young lives. Deisher's work puts forth the idea that evil always brings forth evil, and, while this makes logical sense, we know that it is not invariably true.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What's more, the evil end that Deisher and her supporters envision as the logical result of evil means is . . . autism. This conflation of the intrinsic evil of abortion with neurological difference is, to say the least, highly problematic; I would love to know what Christian autistic self-advocates -- and yes, they exist -- think about it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The takeaway from Deisher's study -- at least as it's being expressed throughout the Catholic blogosphere -- is that autism must be cured (if not eliminated), and that, in fact, autism can be avoided (if not eliminated) if the rubella vaccine, which was derived from the stem cell line of an aborted baby more than fifty years ago, is no longer used. This assumes that autism is a Very Bad Thing, devoutly to be un-wished for, and that it's worth risking the deaths of countless babies (other people's babies; it always is) <i>in utero</i> to avoid it. This is not just theologically faulty; it's morally faulty.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My own takeaway is that, as I've learned over and over again at great cost, evil usually doesn't appear evil. Evil cloaks itself in the trappings of good. Evil is pervasive; evil wants to destroy all that is good in the world. Life is good. Death is evil. The deaths of countless babies <i>in utero</i> from rubella is evil. Vaccination with the rubella vaccine, which prevents those deaths, is good. And God brings good out of evil.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hysterical comments will be deleted.</div>
Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-70770676020982104392014-09-07T22:40:00.003-04:002014-09-07T22:42:58.185-04:00Music and Memory, Back to School Edition: Artificial Pearls<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYLm-CzyNGu7FNsIyG0IWCtPnVYhjuyn6mBcNaP6E_aJWUoTDov5ZlviiPQYaVCWtlAaUpJZQW3Dpp684-JWIjKzIaP0MqOfsKjrGklHyJsu7IgEnkc7cwSwnfm8SIhZPGQfW065xU5l5B/s1600/Grandfather+Twilight+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYLm-CzyNGu7FNsIyG0IWCtPnVYhjuyn6mBcNaP6E_aJWUoTDov5ZlviiPQYaVCWtlAaUpJZQW3Dpp684-JWIjKzIaP0MqOfsKjrGklHyJsu7IgEnkc7cwSwnfm8SIhZPGQfW065xU5l5B/s1600/Grandfather+Twilight+3.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
The music department at the community college where I teach moved to a new building over the summer. This is a good thing, even an excellent thing, since, up until now, the music department has been housed in a building that was apparently designed as a bomb shelter. All the classrooms in the old building were in the basement, and all their carpets were mildewed; I stopped reminding my students not to bring drinks to class, because the odor of stale spilled coffee was a marked improvement over what it could have been. The large number of linoleum tiles missing from the ceiling gave it the appearance of a menacingly-grinning, upside-down clown-smile, and the choir couldn't rehearse in the building, because so many of its members were stricken with mold-induced asthma attacks during practice.<br />
<br />
Last week, before the semester began, we music-department adjuncts (who make up, incidentally, around eighty percent of the music faculty) converged upon the new building to clean it up and make it ready. It was a beautiful late-summer day, and my heart did strange things when I stepped outside the cinder-block building to make a phone call. The Soviet-bunker-style campus is nestled in a depression in the achingly-green northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains, hills that look so gentle, so <i>kindly</i> somehow. I thought about Wallace Stevens's <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/3778">"Anecdote of the Jar,"</a> about how the jar on the hill in Tennessee "made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill," and how, here, the anecdote was turned upside down: how here the hills surround the makeshift slovenliness of the college, but the artifice of man does not add order to or impose mastery upon those surrounding hills. I thought, too, of <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175144">Emerson noting that</a><br />
<br />
<i>The God who made New Hampshire</i><br />
<i>Taunted the lofty land</i><br />
<i>With little men.</i><br />
<br />
* * * * * * * * *<br />
<br />
I've been asked to give a paper at a conference being held in honor of my dissertation advisor, an important musicologist now retired after many years of teaching, an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn with whom I became, during the time we worked together, somewhat uncomfortably enmeshed in a sort of artificial mother-daughter relationship. She remarked to a friend at my wedding that she hoped I wasn't going to take my husband's name, because I had worked so hard to build a scholarly reputation under my own (Italian) name. When my dissertation voice recital was approaching, she, apparently worried over what I would wear, confronted me awkwardly in the hallway of the university, where she was a full professor and I an adjunct, and anxiously enquired how I was planning to do my hair. When my first son was born, she said something I wasn't sure how to interpret at the time about how some people thought you should change your life for your children, and others thought you should fit your children into the life you already had; to this day, I don't know which camp she, a mother as well as a scholar, fell into. I still worry that I'm disappointing her with my hair, my life, and my scholarship, and I still don't know what my paper in her honor is going to be about. But I felt like hanging my head when I saw the website for the conference, and saw my name (the version of it that's trotted out for performance and publication purposes, Italian maiden name first, followed by married name) and my affiliation (northern-Appalachian-county community college) next to the names of well-known musicologists who teach at Case Western, The City University of New York Graduate Center, Harvard, and Yale. I recalled how I wanted to be something great, to do something important, and yet, here I am.<br />
<br />
* * * * * * * * *<br />
<br />
Someone once said that teaching is casting artificial pearls before real swine, which, to the extent that it's true, does not make the thrower of pearls any less swinish than his intended audience. How am I supposed to do this job -- to teach music to my students at northern-Appalachian-county community college? I want to do it, I <i>burn</i> to do it, because, as <a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/asphodel-greeny-flower-excerpt">William Carlos Williams wrote</a> (about poetry, though the same can be said about music):<br />
<br />
<i>It is difficult</i><br />
<i>to get the news from poems</i><br />
<i>yet men die every day</i><br />
<i>for lack</i><br />
<i>of what is found there</i>.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
I turned on the radio the other day while driving through my ramshackle post-industrial town, and I heard the adagio movement of a piece I know well, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major. I know it well because, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother had an LP of it that I would play over and over again. We had bought it while out grocery shopping; I had seen a display near the exit of LPs on sale for something like forty-nine cents, and this one had an image on the cover of one of Marc Chagall's designs for <i>The Magic Flute</i> -- Papageno, the birdcatcher -- though I didn't know this at the time. I begged my mother to get it. While driving the other day, I found that, though I hadn't heard the piece for years, I could sing every note of the piano solo and the melodic orchestral line. I noticed that the performance on the radio was actually played on the fortepiano, a forerunner of the modern piano, and that, delightfully, the soloist interpolated a fragment of Mozart's song "Komm, lieber Mai" into the cadenza in the coda of the last movement.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/I9CJqi6bqbU" width="420"></iframe></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
While singing along to the radio, I saw a shabby-looking, morbidly obese man with dirty legs riding in a self-propelled wheelchair in the oncoming lane. I thought about my mother's LP. Where would I be, who would I be, if my mother had not had it? Classical music is not salvific by any means (I remind myself), but, for me, it's always been anodyne, palliative, hallucinogen, and opiate all in one. It dulls pain, it comforts, it heals, it confers vision. Without it, I would be a miserable worm of a person, even more than I am now. And I wonder if this is true for everyone: if everyone, had he had access to my mother's record collection, would be a better person.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
I thought about my wonderful voice teacher and mentor, A.B., who grew up, as it happens, in rural Tennessee. His parents were mountain people; his father was a self-taught singer who worked for a biscuit-flour company. The flour company would send out a string band to drive around the rural counties in a flatbed truck, from which they would play music, and then give a baking demonstration with a portable oven. A.B. told me about how, as a child, he was given a recording of the <i>Nutcracker</i> on 78s, and he listened to it until the records, as he put it, literally dissolved. He later found a recording of <i>La Bohème</i> at the public library, and played it, too, into the ground, memorizing every word and note of Rodolfo's Act I aria, but -- as he found when he got to conservatory -- memorizing it wrong, because the record had a skip in it that obliterated part of one measure.<br />
<br />
Classical music, discovered as a child, taught me how to live, how to breathe. It did the same for A.B. I wonder if it might do the same one day for one of my students. I think of a recurring dream I've had for years, in which I am walking certain streets in New York that I know as well as I know the Mozart Piano Concert no. 27, but finding them slightly and ineffably altered, and looking for something as I walk -- something that, while I can't quite remember what it is, I know to be the key to everything. There's a beautiful children's book by Barbara Helen Berger called <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Grandfather-Twilight-Paperstar-Barbara-Berger/dp/0698113942/ref=pd_sim_b_1">Grandfather Twilight</a></i>, in which the twilight is personified as an old man who each night takes a pearl from an endless strand and walks with it to the sea, while the pearl grows larger and larger, eventually becoming the moon. I hope that the artificial pearls I offer to my students this semester -- not out of perversity, but because they're all I've got -- might be able to change into something real and beautiful for them, too.Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-38521760263836430702014-08-03T21:37:00.001-04:002014-08-05T22:19:44.666-04:00Beethoven, Schubert, and Consolation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK9s6XjgwjMYzAinkLVP-KYltNMo7Szob35gOADZGU7_aa0doCx_mQx2C0qUwTDEORx70NTWCeFiiVOm3CC4rtpZs1YqygMr0GvTg9bGiWQLgLqElgY-SOS7Rc-v0YdZV5PcMu6LNn-Sm9/s1600/9780618054749_custom-f23c1ae4f606345a55822e86761a2b588de7f5c6-s6-c30.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK9s6XjgwjMYzAinkLVP-KYltNMo7Szob35gOADZGU7_aa0doCx_mQx2C0qUwTDEORx70NTWCeFiiVOm3CC4rtpZs1YqygMr0GvTg9bGiWQLgLqElgY-SOS7Rc-v0YdZV5PcMu6LNn-Sm9/s1600/9780618054749_custom-f23c1ae4f606345a55822e86761a2b588de7f5c6-s6-c30.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></span></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I'm too busy to post. I have a deadline looming for the first draft of my book and a lot of research still to do for it, and I have a copyediting job to start and finish over the next month, and then I start teaching at community college again, as well as doing what I swore I'd never do, <i>viz</i>., homeschooling. All that is for another post. I simply wanted to drop in to share this lapidary paragraph by <a href="http://jeremydenk.net/bio.php">Jeremy Denk</a> in his review of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Anguish-Triumph-Jan-Swafford/dp/061805474X">a new Beethoven biography by Jan Swafford</a>.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Denk writes:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 23px;"><i>I found myself aching to replace the “Triumph” in Swafford’s subtitle with “Consolation” </i>[the book is titled <i>Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph</i>]<i>. Of course we love Beethoven’s movements of triumph: the C major fanfares that conclude the Fifth Symphony, the lust for life in the dances of the Seventh Symphony, the “Ode to Joy.” They are a crucial part of his persona, but not the center. . . The pianist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Fleisher">Leon Fleisher</a> observed that Schubert’s consolations always come too late; his beautiful moments have the sense of happening in the past. Generally, Romantic consolations tend to be poisoned by nostalgia and regret. By the modern era, consolation is mostly off the table. But Beethoven’s consolations seem to be in the now. They are always on time — maybe not for him, but for us.</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What a brilliant exegesis of Romantic music -- the ethos of consolation come too late, leaving the musical protagonist in the sorrow of his regret. The idea of Schubert (who worked very much under the long shadow of Beethoven) composing beautiful moments which seem to have already gone by is breathtakingly apt. One hears, for example, the straining, yearning nostalgia in the opening theme of the Sonata in B flat, D 960, played here by Fleisher himself. In many of Schubert's pieces, there's a tentative quality in the opening notes, the sense that the theme has begun already, somewhere to the left of the first measure, which I think is related to this notion of consolation that has happened in the past, a gentler version of <a href="http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/DantInf1to7.htm">Dante's famous aphorism: "There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery.</a>"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KAJ8OvgwBxc" width="560"></iframe><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Incidentally, former <a href="http://vox-nova.com/">Vox Nova </a>contributor Mark DeFrancisis, a classical-music connoisseur, sent me a recording of <a href="http://www.mitsukouchida.com/">Mitsuko Uchida</a> playing the same piece, and I listened to it while driving, and had to pull over because I was crying too much to see the road.)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/books/review/beethoven-by-jan-swafford.html">Read Jeremy Denk's entire marvelous book review here.</a> He is one of those rare musicians who writes as well as he plays.</span>Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-7562734996152267482014-06-29T12:22:00.001-04:002014-06-30T07:58:29.593-04:00Mother of the Muses<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMEOPUQ0hxXQBkCFDXHOc9SuPZYN0p8ZAcyERdbezS8GYeGkiRH2AjJvjw-mRjSUr3oy8amtuNBhIWW5ehakMP1_3knor23ERru2Ew8-bOiq0ovdvnNUg9SYlnjFALeVEheea-uPJRhzNt/s1600/franny.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMEOPUQ0hxXQBkCFDXHOc9SuPZYN0p8ZAcyERdbezS8GYeGkiRH2AjJvjw-mRjSUr3oy8amtuNBhIWW5ehakMP1_3knor23ERru2Ew8-bOiq0ovdvnNUg9SYlnjFALeVEheea-uPJRhzNt/s1600/franny.png" height="400" width="242" /></a></div>
<br />
I had the strange and somewhat disconcerting experience recently of reading <a href="http://www.amazon.com/My-Salinger-Year-Joanna-Rakoff/dp/0307958000/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top">a memoir</a> about people I know. It was written by a woman who was, at one time, romantically involved with a close friend of mine. Both of them are writers, and her memoir details a time in her life after college when she, a young woman from a privileged background, took a poorly-paid entry-level job at the literary agency that represented J.D. Salinger, and simultaneously moved into a tenement apartment in Brooklyn with my friend (in a building that really should have been condemned; I was there many times). At the end of this time period, according to the memoir, she underwent an awakening that was both literary and spiritual in nature and jettisoned the apartment, the job, and the boyfriend.<br />
<br />
The memoir may sound -- and perhaps is -- a trifle slight and self-serving. It's a coming-of-age story very particular to its time and place -- New York City in the 1990s -- but it's written with an appealing clarity and simplicity, and the author gets so many things right, including the changing seasons in the city; my friend (whom she paints in an unflattering, if fairly accurate, light); and, ultimately, the reality of suffering. One of her job duties at the literary agency was answering the voluminous fan mail sent to Salinger with an off-putting standard form letter. After reading some of these letters, however -- many of them from fellow World War II veterans -- and after belatedly reading Salinger's slim <i>oeuvre</i>, she comes to a deeper understanding of the human condition. She notes that Bessie Glass, the mother of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_family">Franny and Zooey, of Boo Boo, Buddy, and Seymour</a> (as well as of Walt, lost in the war, and his twin brother Waker, a cloistered Carthusian monk), "is in mourning [for her two dead children]. As is the entire Glass family. A family in mourning, never to recover. A world in mourning, never to recover." The book is worth reading just to get to that moment, which comes near the end.<br />
<br />
I didn't know the author that well back in the day, and I don't know whether her heart had always been open to the truth of suffering, or whether that realization was entirely catalyzed by her reading of Salinger. The author's ex-boyfriend has, in private correspondence, cast her compassion somewhat into question, but I suppose it's not really that important. What is important is the truth that art can effectively reveal certain aspects of humanity, including the inescapable fact of its suffering, and can also provide, if not the remedy for that suffering, then at least some assuagement.<br />
<br />
This calls into question the purpose of the memoir as a genre. What is it for, really, and who among us has lived in such a way that merits such public retelling? The Salinger memoir appealed to me because I knew what the author meant. She describes with great care the weather, what she wore, and what she ordered at the deli, all of which are things that I like to know about; attention to such details in my own life is something that has always had great, almost talismanic significance for me. And even if she's not telling the truth about everything -- because who, in a memoir, is? -- she is nothing but truthful about the fact that, beneath the surface of things and phenomena, trouble is roiling, suffering exists, and even the best-intentioned of us cause one another unspeakable pain. If the Salinger memoir has merit, it's primarily because it sends out a slim shaft of light into the brokenness of things: the light of shared pain, of recognized suffering. We possess art, as Nietzsche said, lest we perish of the truth, and is not the purpose of art to alleviate suffering? Goethe wrote:<br />
<br />
<i>Now, Muses, enough!</i><br />
<i>You strive in vain to show</i><br />
<i>how anguish and joy</i><br />
<i>change places in the loving heart.</i><br />
<i>You cannot heal the wounds</i><br />
<i>that love inflicts;</i><br />
<i>but comfort comes,</i><br />
<i>kindly ones, only from you.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/McyvPJPYYJw" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
And Memory, Mnemosyne, is the mother of the muses.<br />
<br />
Perhaps all art is an evocation of Memory, Mother of the Muses; as writers and as readers we summon her so that, as good mothers do, she might comfort us.Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-74896872312521373662014-06-09T11:39:00.001-04:002014-06-10T07:49:40.984-04:00Love and BulliesI've mentioned here before the semi-well-known Catholic journalist whom I briefly dated after returning to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. I declined his offer of marriage, but we remained friends in a distant sort of way until he wrote me a vicious email a few years ago, apparently after misunderstanding something I'd written here. Like most of the journalist's work, this email was meticulously crafted, and also like most of his work, it was a demonstration of his bravura literary skills in the service of a cause he believed in. As in most of his work, too, that cause was the exposure and denunciation of a perceived enemy. In this case, the enemy was a woman he seemingly once had loved, and his tactical methods included attacking me as a wife (though not his), a mother, and an artist; insulting my family of origin; and -- the <i>tour de force</i> -- reminding me (in case I might have forgotten) that long before he knew me I had committed an "unspeakable crime" against my unborn child. He finished, in a sort of dénouement, by mentioning that I was "bad for" his spiritual well-being, and so he wanted nothing more to do with me.<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, I don't intentionally read this journalist's work anymore, though sometimes I will click on a link to an article a friend has posted and find something written by him at the end of it. While I spent months crying about his email at the time, by now I have other things to cry about. I was thinking about him the other day, though, and I wondered how I had had the presence of mind to turn down his marriage proposal, especially since I had always been prone to impulsivity, and was at the time a divorced woman in my mid-thirties facing statistically-declining odds of ever getting married again. The truth, however, was that, although the journalist was brilliant, witty, and charming, he had a certain quality that truly scared me. I couldn't describe at the time what it was, but after reading his email, I understood it a bit better. There is something corrupt and cruel -- something unmanly -- about deliberately attacking the weak, and I think that most women are instinctively repelled by it.<br />
<br />
I should note here that I am by no means the sole target of this journalist's vituperation. He, along with others of his cohort, in his professional work routinely disparages various people and groups with whom he disagrees, including liberals, immigrants, and Catholics who don't practice their faith the way he thinks they should. And I should note, too, that while most women may be repelled by attacks on the weak, not all are. Many women, in fact, are drawn to bullies -- to men who bolster their sense of self by making a show of strength against individuals or groups who are not their equals, against those who are lesser than they in strength, wits, and power. But, though it would be easy to do so, I can't in good conscience condemn these men, nor the women who love them, because we are all grievously wounded in our capacity to love.<br />
<br />
And surely it's what we all want most: to be loved not in spite of our woundedness and our egregious faults, but, somehow, <i>because of</i> them. Everyone wants to feel as though there is someone who sees him as he is, and who loves him anyway. Even the journalist -- who makes a show of deprecating those who have none of his intellect or understanding, including those Catholics who were not fortunate, as he was, to receive a sound teaching of the faith -- would occasionally reveal to me, in private conversation, his innermost fears and doubts. The vulnerability we show to one another can be endearing, certainly; but, as demonstrated by the journalist's gratuitous and deliberately hurtful reference to my long-ago abortion, it can also be used against us by those in whom we've put our trust.<br />
<br />
I would like to be able to call a man who deliberately hurts a woman a sadist or a misogynist, but perhaps that's unfair. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Nietzsche, when you gaze into the abyss, it gazes into you. When we make it our life's work, even our identity, to upbraid and revile, how do we keep ourselves from becoming something worthy of revilement?<br />
<br />
I suppose that women who are attracted to bullies see their vulnerability and want to protect it, to heal it. Some women no doubt nobly and self-sacrificially live out Longfellow's aphorism: "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." I know that this is true -- that both the journalist and the targets of his writerly contempt have suffered enough misery that we are constrained to love them without exception. Nonetheless, in the absence of severe neurosis, it seems to me that it is not unrealistic for women to expect men to protect them, rather than the other way around, and for men to want to protect women, rather than to harm them.<br />
<br />
I pray that we may all learn to forgive one another for the wrongs we so blithely and carelessly commit against each other, and, also, that we may truly learn what it is to love. God knows I pray this for myself every day.Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-65921632203751339442014-06-03T17:43:00.000-04:002014-06-03T17:45:26.309-04:00C'est Son Métier<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Template>Normal</o:Template>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>90</o:Words>
<o:Characters>513</o:Characters>
<o:Company>Risorgimento Project</o:Company>
<o:Lines>4</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>630</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>11.773</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:DoNotShowRevisions/>
<w:DoNotPrintRevisions/>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin/>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>With lilies and with laurel they go . . .<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>. . . . Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-- From "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent
Millay<span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There was a man I loved desperately when I was quite young.
R. was witty, well-read, and almost impossibly good-looking. He was also
louche, something of a hedonist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He spent a great deal of money on clothes and a lot of time in nightclubs, and he regarded himself as being on the cutting edge of cultural
expression. I was a teenager from an unhappy
home, and he became the first in a series of men about whom I believed that if I attached myself to them, I could escape and, in some essential way, save my life.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Predictably, this relationship didn’t work
out. I became suicidally depressed in the wake of its breakup, but recovered, and some years later R. and I were friends. We didn’t see each other that often, but back in New York, in one of the lovely ways that New York can seem like a small town, we
would often run into each other unexpectedly on the street. R. was a freelance journalist and didn't have a nine-to-five, and if I had the day off from
whatever my bread gig was at the time – waitressing, or secretarial temping, or
working as a cosmetics girl at Bloomingdales (my brother happened into the store one day and said of me and my colleagues, "You look like a bunch of Nazi nurses") – we would walk around the city and drink coffee and have conversations that were
shimmering, transcendent, incantatory. I still have dreams sometimes about those walks.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As happens, however, our lives went in different directions, and I had
not seen R. for many years when I heard the shocking news last year that he had died -- in
his forties, and by his own hand. He had achieved some success, and had even written a best-seller nonfiction book, but some controversy had arisen around it, and I assume, though I can’t
know for certain, that the minor scandal that ensued had contributed to
the deep depression which apparently led to his suicide. R. was childless, but he left his widow behind.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
His death, which I learned about around the time my mother also died, was crazy and unacceptable to me. As a young man, R. had been remarkably handsome, as well as generous, funny, and adventurous; but somehow he had become<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> one of those tragic ones, those few <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/123/23.html">who, as A.E. Housman wrote,</a> would "carry their looks [and] their truth to the grave." </span>He was not a Catholic; I don’t know
what, if anything, he had come to believe, though, on one of the occasions I ran into
him on the street, he had recently returned from a trip to Nepal, and on that occasion he urged me to read
Andrew Harvey’s book <i>A Journey in Ladakh</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
a luminous travel memoir about the author’s encounter with Tibetan Buddhism. And during much of the time I had known R., he was something of an obvious sinner.
I couldn’t help wondering if, with this checkered history, and lacking both
baptism and any formal sort of repentance, it was sensible or even seemly to pray
for his soul. But because</span> I profess to believe in the forgiveness of sins, I knew I must pray for him, and do so with great abandon, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
One hears occasionally from Traditionalist types the maxim “extra ecclesia nulla salus” – there is no salvation outside of the (Roman Catholic) Church. This is the teaching of the Church, but what does it really mean? The <i>Catechism of the Catholic Church</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> asks:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i>846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i>Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i>Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i>847 This affirmation is </i><b>no<i>t</i></b><i> aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i>Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation </i>[emphasis added]. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
It seems to me that the main problem with defining “extra ecclesia” is knowing each unbaptized man’s “fault,” which is, of course, impossible. There are all kinds of mysterious baptisms, including that of desire, about which we know little or nothing. "Betwixt the stirrup and the ground/Mercy I asked, mercy I found": there is forgiveness of which we know nothing. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
In fact, God is a fountain of mercy. God is love. God did not create His children in order to damn them. If He did, He would not be God. As Heinrich Heine, the great poet of German Romanticism and a convert from Judaism, said on his deathbed, “Of course God will forgive me; <i>c’est son métier</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
When we profess to believe in the forgiveness of sins, we are simply acknowledging, with Heine, that forgiving sins is God’s <i>métier</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, His business. With this statement, we categorically accept that God can forgive </span><i>all</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> sins, including the ones (always, it seems, committed by others) that we may not entirely want him to forgive. What we talk about when we talk about forgiveness is actually the possibility of redemption for our enemies, of the complete falling away of what made them our enemies in the first place, of what made them hurt us and of what made us hate them -- nothing less than the belief that </span><i>anyone</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> can become good in the Platonic sense; that </span><i>anyone </i><span style="font-style: normal;">can become holy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Therefore, I'm constrained to believe in the possibility of R.’s radical spiritual transformation, and of his total moral regeneration. In the end, what we profess when we say that we believe in the forgiveness of sins, is that we believe that God loves everyone else, including those annoying ones in apparent darkness, equally as well as He loves those of us to whom he has given the great and wholly-unmerited gift of faith.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
R.'s last book was published after his death. It's a nonfiction work about a morally-suspect character who became a quiet humanitarian, a narrative which parallels the trajectory of R.'s own too-brief life. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-1509125443079051862014-05-31T16:19:00.003-04:002014-06-01T07:32:22.415-04:00Mother vs. Happiness<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Where does it start, our downhill slide -- a slide into serious sin for the most damaged; for the rest. at best, into lukewarmth and mediocrity?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I suppose it begins with our desire to be happy, which is quickly corrupted by our belief that we <i>deserve </i>to be happy. I've known few people who don't secretly harbor this belief, including the very best of men. Our self-regard, our <i>amour-propre,</i> is so deep and intractable that even those of us who strive for holiness find it hard to escape the notion that this holiness, once attained, will curry favor with God and loosen up all kinds of neat stuff for us. It's hard to escape the thinking that if f I, say, pray and work for a sincere conversion, or go to daily Mass, or give lots of money to the poor, or pray for the people that I hate, then God, noticing with approval, will send me a really nice guy, or put in a word with my boss about a raise, or at least make my life just a little less painful and difficult. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This belief is reinforced by a popular narrative in Catholic writing, which features the protagonist's turning or returning to God, after which everything falls neatly into place. This narrative is (no doubt unintentionally) deceptive, because it implies cause and effect, actions and consequences. It doesn't acknowledge the untold numbers of people who turn or return to God -- who turn or return to Him daily, in fact -- and who strive to orient their lives and wills completely in the direction of His own, but who nevertheless suffer, who continue to suffer, and whose sufferings persist and even get worse. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We all want the shiny stuff, and to shore up our uncertain futures with the goods which, in a logical and just world, might be purchased by our holiness. But I doubt it really works that way, and am more inclined to believe that, at best, we have our brief moments of triumph and delight, before we're kicked right back down to the curb again, which is, essentially, where we belong: for, as Hamlet said, "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And why should it be otherwise? I used to know a sedevacantist mother of many children, whom I once overheard telling one of them about <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+11%3A12-25">Jesus cursing the fig tree.</a> She finished by explaining that the Lord would condemn those who squandered their gifts, adding (smugly, as it seemed to me), "So I had ten fruits." Nevertheless, I think we should probably ponder, and should perhaps shudder, before we assume that anything we've done is actually good, <a href="http://biblehub.com/luke/17-10.htm">since we're no more than unprofitable servants doing our duty.</a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">When I was a child and later a teen, I would often propose certain activities or situations to my mother, explaining that doing or having something, or becoming something, or going somewhere in particular, would make me happy. I bitterly resented her standard response, which was the sobering "You're not here to be happy. You're here to make the world a better place." But I know now that she was right. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we're actually here.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem "God's Grandeur":</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The world is charged with the grandeur of God.</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Crushed.</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I believe that, when Hopkins says that the world is "charged" with God's grandeur, he means two things: that God's grandeur is immanent in all things, that the created world is imbued and shot through with it; but, also, that it is the duty of creatures to bear, to maintain, and to reveal that grandeur: that revealing it is, in fact, our charge. It is our duty, as unprofitable servants, as my mother would say, to make the world a better place.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A friend of mine who follows an eastern religion told me his guru compared enlightenment to one's mother being home all the time. I loved that analogy, but it made me wonder whether enlightenment is or is not synonymous with happiness. Is having mother home happiness? Is mother happiness? One would think so; but as the German Romantic poet Klaus Groth put it in his poem "Heimweh II" -- Heimweh meaning, essentially, grief over the lost home, which is not just a house, but is a whole universe: </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück,</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Den lieben Weg zum Kinderland!</i></span><br />
<i>O warum sucht' ich nach dem Glück</i><br />
<i>Und liess der Mutter Hand?</i><br />
<br />
In translation:<br />
<br />
Oh, if I only knew the way back,<br />
the dear way back to childhood's land!<br />
Oh why did I seek happiness<br />
and let go of my mother's hand?<br />
<br />
That image of letting go of mother's hand to seek happiness is so wrenchingly poignant, and it seems not only to suggest that happiness is <i>not</i> a worthy goal, but also to assert that happiness is <i>not</i> mother. Mother is something else, something different -- something more than happiness. In fact, in my own mother's formula, mother, while not happiness, makes the world a better place.<br />
<br />
I don't believe that being a mother makes one happy, nor should it. I don't even believe that mother, or children, or anyone else deserves to be happy. But the ethos of having mother -- of having mother home all the time -- is better, somehow, than happiness, is beyond happiness, and I suppose it's what heaven must be like.<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/jD0MkNIjEtw" width="420"></iframe>Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-64430589547601999392014-05-26T20:19:00.000-04:002014-05-26T20:26:35.658-04:00In Memory of the Dead<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A. E. Housman wrote his poem cycle <i>A Shropshire Lad</i> in 1896, so this excerpt is not really about World War I; but I can't hear <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Butterworth">George Butterworth's</a> bittersweet setting of it without thinking of it as prophetic of the composer's own death in the Battle of the Somme, and the deaths of so many others in the flower of their youth. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">And there with the rest are the lads that will neve</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">r be old.<br /><br />There's chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart,<br />And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,<br />And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,<br />And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.<br /><br />I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell<br />The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;<br />And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell<br />And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.<br /><br />But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;<br />And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told<br />They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,<br />The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.</span></span></span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/b4kPNyQc5Ro" width="420"></iframe></span></span></span>Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-90296781585678981562014-04-12T18:37:00.001-04:002014-04-12T18:50:50.650-04:00Lent: The Underground River<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLE23eZ_sEnuw1KcB0NRtgegkkUvYvjdUI6I4g_UDeLtYt8V9bK25t9v1x_YYfFugl8FULpqiHqfVMFlkxX7cWrNgwmni5UL8fdTi-dX_aYBgRh6WnNLleS6V9gzifXKO-YAnR_2u_ol0Y/s1600/bonnard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLE23eZ_sEnuw1KcB0NRtgegkkUvYvjdUI6I4g_UDeLtYt8V9bK25t9v1x_YYfFugl8FULpqiHqfVMFlkxX7cWrNgwmni5UL8fdTi-dX_aYBgRh6WnNLleS6V9gzifXKO-YAnR_2u_ol0Y/s1600/bonnard.jpg" height="400" width="315" /></a></div>
<br />
Lent has been bleak. I suppose that's how it should be: we're supposed to acquaint ourselves well with ashes -- with the taste of ashes, with becoming ashes. I've never been good at keeping up my prescribed penitential practices, especially where food is concerned; I've always felt as if giving up this or that food was just too simple, too elementary, a mere beginner's step in the spiritual life, and that, since I don't have problems or obsessions or issues with food or drink, I'll just move on to the more advanced exercises, all of which shows, of course, exactly how warped I am by pride.<br />
<br />
So this year I've been rigorous about, among other things, not eating between meals, and it's been surprisingly hard. There's something so consoling about elevenses, or that late-afternoon bite of something -- so much so, in fact, that I've come to understand, this Lent, that turning to food has always been a way I've kept myself from crashing emotionally. This Lent, I've crashed.<br />
<br />
I spend a good deal of time each day thinking about food, about certain tastes and textures, about how a bite of lemon pound-cake with a cup of black coffee at four o'clock, or a glass of flinty, ice-cold white wine an hour or so later, or even some peanut butter smeared on a saltine at midday, would make me <i>feel. </i>And I imagine that these things would make me feel resplendent, transformed, and would make life seem bright and gay, full of whispered possibilities. And then I shake myself awake and remind myself that this is <i>food</i> we're talking about -- ballast against hunger, disease, and death for most people in the world, and for most people far from delicious, much less redolent of fantasies and hopes -- and that building castles out of pound-cake is a distinctly First-World concern.<br />
<br />
And then I think about the other things that I love, that I rely upon, that without which I would feel as if my life were truly a pile of shit. The main one is music. Slipping <a href="http://www.crookedjades.com/">the Crooked Jades</a> or one of Beethoven's late string quartets into my car CD player opens up worlds upon worlds for me as I drive through the bleak post-industrial landscape of my town; the music lends a warmth, a sort of hazy sheen to the phenomenal world, making what is often merely indifferent and sometimes hostile seem benevolent, making what's unendurable seem like a bad dream from which one will soon awake. But perhaps the world is not really so beautiful after all, and so I turn off the CD and navigate around the winter-cratered streets in silence.<br />
<br />
And then I mourn, because, in these moments, it strikes me that everything I love is gone, or is going, and that everything good is disappearing from the world. The record of our earthly sojourn is one of loss. The annals of recorded sound, the smooth pages of poetry, are cries from beyond the grave, where we, too, are going, who knows when? "The curtain descends, everything ends/Too soon, too soon."<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/jULhrwOmGOY" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
Sometimes I so envy our Pentecostal brothers and sisters. They have ecstasy, they have fellowship. We have rubrics, and wandering in the dark, and spiritual dryness. They go from door to door in the ghetto and ask people what they need -- do they need a window fixed, a bag of groceries, maybe someone to pray with them? And then they do those things for and give those things to those complete strangers, those others, those neighbors. My mother used to do this with her church. As for us Catholics, we shun each other at Mass and then have arguments in each others' comboxes.<br />
<br />
As I was waking up this morning, I mentioned to God that I'd given up everything I loved for him. My old life, research, singing, travel, pretty clothes, intense friendships, fun, my beloved city, the feeling of being an expert, even an authority, at something. Having only two children means that I also have had to give up the happiness of babies after only a short time, and to move swiftly on to the difficulties of everything else, especially since both my children have medical needs. And adopting means always being aware of a former but unbridgeable pain and loss and wounding, and means praying, as I stumble around in the dark, that I might be able to assuage it, and realizing how impossible that is and how inadequate I am. However, since we don't generally have any of the ecstatic things, the waves of warmth and happiness, the mystical auditions, I got no response to any of this from God.<br />
<br />
Lent always seems as if it goes on forever. It seems as if it will go on even after Easter is over. I've always thought that at some point, later on, in the future, everything will be settled and peaceful and good -- that one day the world which is hinted at in the music I so love will become apparent. But perhaps that will never happen, and we are all just headed down, into, as a character in a book I read put it, the underground river, from which there is no return and no going back.<br />
<br />
One of Debussy's earliest songs is "Beau soir," with a text by Paul Bourget, which says, in translation:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>When streams turn pink in the setting sun</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>And a slight shudder passes through the wheat fields,</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>A plea for happiness seems to rise out of all things</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>And mount up towards the troubled heart,</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br />
A plea to savor the charm of life</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>While one is young and the evening is fair:</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>For we are going away, like this wave is going away,</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The wave to the sea, we to the grave.</i></span><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ihFpOoZ6Mkk" width="420"></iframe><br />
I would like to have been able to add something to the annals of beauty, the record of loss, in my brief time here. I don't know if I will, but we must keep doing the work that's assigned to us each day.<br />
<br />
Above: Pierre Bonnard, <i>The Breakfast Room,</i> 1930.Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5554498168264477884.post-32582678170282342872014-03-09T12:37:00.002-04:002014-03-09T21:51:54.696-04:00Lenten Grocery Penances for Bourgeois Outcasts<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">At the evening Mass on Ash Wednesday I sat in the pew realizing that, for all my pushing away the truth of the matter, I am a failure. The proof could not have been starker -- here I was, sitting in my coat in an unheated church in the ghetto of a once-thriving, now-crumbling Rust Belt town, far away from all the things that, to my mind, had long defined not only my own life, but even life itself -- the things that had nurtured my belief that I was special, out of the ordinary, made for something important.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
My older son was with me, half asleep in the pew. I shook him awake to get in line for ashes, and when it was his turn, the priest -- a gruff, stern, socially-awkward west African man with a heavy accent and a hortatory preaching style, who is known to have conflicts with some of his brother priests in the diocese and who has been mostly benignly ignored by our parishioners -- murmured to my son, as he daubed the ashes onto his brow, "Remember that you are dust, my brother. And to dust you shall return." I was struck by this entreaty; after all, Father didn't call me "my sister" -- and I mentioned to my son that Father's words to him were special. And I believe that they were, because Father loves my autistic son, and I heard his words as not only an exhortation, but also a greeting cast out across the chasm of loneliness, from one outcast to another. I recalled Father hearing my confession a couple of years ago, when I was still wallowing in my own sense of exile and loneliness (well, I still am), and I mentioned it to him; he said, "Oh, my sister. I <i>understand.</i>" In loneliness, I became his sister. As outcasts, we were next of kin.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Of course, I've mentioned my feelings of isolation in my new hometown too many times to count. They stem from the obvious: I'm far away from home; my friends and family are at a significant remove. I can go through a day hardly seeing another adult except through the glass of my windshield; driving, while making my life incalculably better, has increased my sense of isolation, and also, I fear, my complacency. When I was still walking everywhere, I was forced to confront the poverty of my fellow walkers in the city; now I am safe from them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Not that this place hasn't also forced me to confront my child-of-the-utopian-seventies notions about poverty, too. I have reached out to a couple of poor mothers here, and found their lives and their children's lives to be hobbled by the kind of disastrous decision-making that right-wing pundits like to rail about. But I have made disastrous decisions too. I think I know something about the fear and despair that drives people to cling to even the most harmful and toxic attachments, and I have seen that the lives of the poor are shot through with a loneliness much worse than my own.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
I see now how we hold ourselves back, apart, and away from people who are not like us, and how I have done this, too. My singing was the thing that I imagined could keep me safe from the misery of broken human promises and relationships, and of stumbling and falling attempts at human love. I had something I could use to put up a wall of protection between me and the lives of utter loss and failure that are common to the poor women I have known: a key, a tool, an instrument, a wedge.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
To counter this still-prevalent attitude in myself, I'm doing <a href="http://pentiment.blogspot.com/2013/03/easter-grocery-shopping-and.html">grocery penance </a>for Lent again this year. I'm going shopping at Aldi's instead of Wegman's, for starters, and putting the price-point difference in our <a href="http://www.lovewithoutboundaries.com/programs/healing-homes/lenten-campaign/">Lenten sacrifice Jar to buy formula for medically-fragile Chinese orphans.</a> This means that I have to forego the smug sense of self-satisfaction that Wegman's lulls me into, the sense of being with other people like myself: clean, bourgeois, well-educated, able to pick out the freshest and most beautiful groceries in a warmly-lit, expansive space. Instead, I must stand out in the cold waiting, along with the gray-faced night-shift workers, the toothless, tubercularly-coughing women, and the lank-haired young mothers of children in dirty coats who ought to be in school, for Aldi's to open its doors and let us in to its boxy cheerlessness, to fill our rented carts with foods in knocked-off packaging (the Benton's graham cracker box looks so much like the Honey-Maid one, but just isn't), with brand names, like Cattlemen's Ranch and Happy Farms, both vaguely euphemistic and reminiscent of Chinese communism. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
And it also means that I have to strive to stop exalting myself, my knowledge, my gifts, and trying to use them to pry open the world to give me the things that I want, and to try instead to accept and desire being forgotten.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," one of the songs he wrote to texts by the Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, Mahler succeeded in creating a sense of stilled timelessness, of dying to self and to the world. The text says, in translation:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i>I am lost to the world</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">with which I used to waste so much time,</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It has heard nothing from me for so long</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">that it may very well believe that I am dead!</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It is of no consequence to me</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">whether it thinks me dead;</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I cannot deny it,</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">for I really am dead to the world.</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I am dead to the world's tumult</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And I rest in a quiet realm.</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I live alone in my heaven,</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">in my love and in my song.</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;">May it be so, eventually, for all of us.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/11mfvRIKgUA" width="420"></iframe><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
Pentimentohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17161146891505294679noreply@blogger.com20