Tanning While Rome Burns

My family and I recently went on a beach vacation at a spot we’ve been going for several years, having started this yearly sojourn when we still lived in New York.  In fact, it’s not a particularly arduous place to get to from New York, but from where we live now the trip seems counterintuitive at best. It’s full of Italians from the Bronx, so it’s an easy place to slip back into, even for my non-Italian-American husband, who has nevertheless lived among Italian-Americans for a good part of his life. I suppose we keep going back because not only the place, but also its ethos, are so familiar to us, but we can’t help viewing it, now, from something of a critical distance. Or maybe I should say, in my case, from something of a heightened critical distance, because I’ve never been a great one for the beach, and I’m starting to realize that I’m not a great one either for that elusive pursuit of that intangible essence that people know as having fun.

The truth is, I go to the beach, and I see the crowds evidently enjoying themselves as they tan or read or drink or body-surf, and it unsettles me.  I always want to leave before everyone else, because I hate the feeling of having stayed too long, and having to leave as the sun is setting, and you’re hungry and a little dazed from the sunshine and covered with sand, and you have to schlep your chairs, umbrella, and cooler back to where you’re staying. Anyone, I’m sure, would want to collapse under these circumstances, but I also want to cry.  There’s something so brittle about it – all the forced merriment in the bright sun, the making the most of the last days of summer – and it makes me sad. I had the same feeling recently at one of the big events I’m occasionally constrained to attend with my husband for his work.  Having to wear a cocktail dress and attempt something sophisticated with my still-graduate-student-looking hair, to drink and dine with prominent citizens of my new town, and to dance to the same band that plays the same music at every single one of these events (and I actually happen to think this band is very good) sent me halfway toward despair and rushing to the confessional the next day. I told the priest, who knows me, and who had, incidentally, also been in attendance the previous night, that I felt as though I'd been watching everyone dancing before a yawning chasm into which Death was pushing them unawares, and was this normal, or did he think that maybe I needed some antidepressants?

He didn’t address this last question directly, but I sometimes wonder if my relationship with God is just not meant to be one of those joyful ones that I’ve heard about all my life.  I truly believe that not everyone is meant to know that kind of joy in a place that is, after all, known officially in some quarters as “this vale of tears,” and so sometimes I wonder why everyone is trying so hard; after all, the "ego" in "et in Arcadia ego" is commonly understood to be death. But some people are surely meant to struggle more, to swim more arduously upstream, than others, and I am either one of them or else am hopelessly neurotic.  Nonetheless, I pray St. Ignatius’s Suscipe each morning upon waking, because I can’t help but feel that I am so steeped in my difficult past that its color has seeped into my very bones and tinted them the darkest of blues.

Here is a mélodie by Debussy, “Chevaux de bois,” number 4 of his song-cycle Ariettes Oubliées, a setting of a poem by Paul Verlaine about a fairground carousel which in some ways echoes my feelings about the beach and summer vacation in general.

Turn, turn, good little wooden horses,

turn a hundred times, turn a thousand times,

turn often and turn always,

turn, turn to the sound of the oboes.

The child in red and his mother in white,

the boy in black and the girl in pink,

One in pursuit, and the other striking a pose,

each of them pays his Sunday penny.

Turn, turn, horses of their hearts,

while all around your turning

the sly pickpocket is watching --

turn to the sound of the victorious cornet.

It is astonishing the way it intoxicates you

to keep turning around in this stupid circle,

empty stomach, aching head,

feeling sick and yet having loads of fun.

Turn, wooden horses, with no need

of spurs

to command you to gallop;

turn, turn, without any hope of hay.

And hurry, horses of their souls--

Already night is falling, calling to supper

the troops of jolly drinkers, made hungry by their thirst.

Turn, turn! The velvet sky slowly begins

to clothe itself in golden stars.

The church bell tolls sadly.

Turn to the happy sound of the drums.

(Above: Detail from Guyhot Marchant’s Danse Macabre des Femmes, 1491.)

Quick Takes: Heimweh Edition

1. It's that time of year again, August, the cruelest month, mother of nostalgia.  New Yorkers and former New Yorkers, do you love August there as much as I once did?  Yes, it's hotter than hell (though the hotter-than-hellness has intruded ever earlier into New York summers over the past few years).  But the  sultry August air is redolent with mystery as it shimmers over the  asphalt, and cicadas sing even in the scanty grass that grows up between sidewalk squares, even in the parts of the outer boroughs most characterized by chain link fencing, used car lots, and metal recycling plants.  Every patch of green is like a reminder of lost paradise, reminding me of Tennessee Williams's poem "Heavenly Grass":

My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass.
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Then my feet come down to walk on earth,
And my mother cried when she give me birth.
Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.

2.  Today I walked past an upstairs window in my house, and caught a glimpse of the brick wall of the house next door.  For a split second I actually thought I was back in my New York apartment, where the brick wall of the building across the air shaft was my constant view.

3.  I thought about New York again when a contractor came to put in a new front door.  He is my across-the-street neighbor's father-in-law.  The guy who paints your apartment in New York is always your super's father-in-law (sometimes his brother-in-law; sometimes both).  These in-laws rarely speak much English; nor did the father-in-law who came today.  The difference was that this father-in-law was Greek, and the New York fathers-in-law are usually Serbian or Dominican.

4. On Sunday I was so overcome with loneliness that I stood at my kitchen sink in Northern Appalachia and bawled like a child.  It's been nearly three years, and I still feel like I'm floating, untethered, in space.  But I tell myself how much better it is for children to be here, and it is, especially for children, like my son, with special needs.  Though I've considered homeschooling him, I know he needs to be with other children, and, though I'm an experienced teacher (albeit of older students), I'm not an occupational, speech, or physical therapist.  He is getting a panoply of services through our local school in the fall, including a one-on-one aide in his mainstream kindergarten classroom.  He wouldn't get that in New York.  No one gets one-on-one aides anymore.  Parents with means generally send their special-needs children to private school, and then sue the city for tuition reimbursement.  The city usually settles, because even private-school tuition in New York City is less expensive than a one-on-one classroom aide.

Today was a beautiful day, and we spread a picnic blanket and had our lunch in the backyard.  Though my son generally prattles on constantly, a rare peace settled over us as we turned our faces to the sun and listened to the breeze rustling the maples and copper beeches.  I let myself relax for about five minutes, which is something I would never do in New York.  I thought where we would be at that time on that day if we had remained there: probably at a playground, which would require me to be on the continual qui-vive.  I have heard that, when your children are of school age, you can make friends with other mothers at pick-up time.  I wonder if that will happen for me.

5. Heimweh, as you will know if you're an aficionado of German romantic poetry and music (or if you read this blog regularly), is often translated as "homesickness," a spiritual yearning for the home to which the sufferer can no longer return.  Nevertheless, the term, which originated in seventeenth-century Switzerland, was coined to describe the actual physical illness, sometimes resulting in death, experienced by Swiss regiments when they were stationed far from the Alps. "To ward off [this debilitating] nostalgia, Swiss soldiers were forbidden to play, sing, or even whistle Alpine tunes," because Alpine melodies "haunted the hearer with 'an image of the past which is at once definite and unattainable.'"

Perhaps Heimweh is, itself, a kind of disability.

6. Baritone William Sharp and pianist Stephen Blier sing and play Paul Bowles's haunting setting of Williams's "Heavenly Grass":

  
Above:  Community garden in East Harlem. 

"Beautiful city, we must part," part 2: The Groans of August

It's time for my yearly post on the month that obsesses my imagination.

This is the first time I've spent my favorite month outside of New York City in many years, and August in Appalachia, at least in my corner of it, has nothing at all in common with August in New York City. Back home in the city, the alert observer could perceive the shift in the position of sunlight and the not-unpleasant burning smell in the air that marked the change from high summer to summer's end, and all the uncertainty and the promise of newness that this strange, shifting time -- the real start of the New Year in New York -- brought with it. Here, there's no sense of change apparent, at least to my senses, which were developed and trained under a different set of circumstances: except for the mist rising from the mountains in the early morning, high summer continues.

I'm still walking around in heartbroken longing for my old city and for many parts of the life I once lived there, but it occurs to me more and more that walking around in heartbroken longing has been a constant in my life at least since adolescence. And the truth is that August, far from being a month worthy of commemoration, has traditionally been for me a month of awful loss and absurd failure. This brings me back to my old dilemma: does God want us to be happy? Or does he perhaps ask those of us who are inclined to grief to suffer it for Him, offering that suffering up for others in the expectant hope that He, in the strange efficacy of His economy of mercy, will use it for their healing and their joy? I know, in spite of all the self-esteem propaganda and New Age relativism I absorbed that told me I was essentially a good person, that I am not in fact a person who deserves joy, and the individuals for whom I most often consciously choose to offer my grief are probably not either. But I think some people need joy in order to live and heal, and I pray that God will give it to them, because He loves them so much.

As anyone who's read this blog for a time knows, I'm a pretty egregious sinner who's made some irrevocably bad decisions that have had dire consequences on the lives of others, as well as on my own. Every day upon waking, the prayer comes to my mind that God might use me for good. But how might He do this? Can the leopard change its spots? I am still that person, that egregious sinner, that, for want of a better word, raging diva. But somehow, since the moment of metanoia that changed my heart in 2002, I'm also a different person. I want to trust that God will find a way to use the raging diva that He saw fit to reform for the purpose of demonstrating His unfathomable mercy to other egregious-sinner chicks like myself. Hopefully He'll make His ways somewhat clearer to me as I walk around, hearbroken with longing in August in Appalachia.

Above: "Dining Room Overlooking the Garden" by Pierre Bonnard, an image that has always looked like August to me.

Something About Time

In spite of the fact that it's a month that commemorates some awful times in my life, I love August. (The month of March has traditionally also been a bad one for me, but I have none of the same affection for it.) August is, to my mind, the most beautiful time of the year in New York City. This sounds completely unreasonable, because it's usually the hottest time, the time when the dirtiness of everything stands out in stark relief in the sweltering haze, and the time when the city is overtaken by European tourists; for me, personally, it's also often been a time of loneliness and bereavement. And yet it's also beautiful: I love the way that the hot breeze is punctuated with the fragrance of whatever green things strive mightily to grow in the city, and the swell of cicadas that rises up from every patch of grass, and the solitude and quiet that can be found in the most unexpected places, even on the busiest streets, at certain times of the day.

In August of 1989 I moved into the first apartment in which I lived completely alone. It was in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, which is now quite chic, but then was not (though I used to see Spike Lee around from time to time; he was very short). I was reeling from a devastating breakup, and in my confusion had forgotten to have the electricity turned on in the new place, so my first night there was shaping up to be a dark one, alleviated only by the seven-day bodega candles I'd bought at the corner deli and placed around my tiny bedroom.

I was working as a waitress in a restaurant in the publishing district where a jazz pianist, an elderly black man who must have been on the scene for decades, played on Monday nights. One slow night a few days before my move (August is the slowest month for the restaurant business in New York), he played a tremendously beautiful song that I'd never heard before. I couldn't stop him to ask what it was, because a jazz pianist, as the only musician, has to keep up a steady flow of music, segueing smoothly from one song to the next. At the end of the night I saw him start to leave, and I abandoned my tables and ran out the door after him. "What's the name of that song you played?" I asked, humming a little of it.

"I don't know," he mused. "Something about time."

On that very dark first night in my new apartment, I plugged in my tiny black and white countertop television, and, by some kind of electrical providence, it came on. And, amazingly, it came on to a woman singing the song I had just heard played a day or two earlier at the restaurant. It was the Fred Astaire movie "Royal Wedding," and the song was "Too Late Now," sung by Jane Powell, who plays Astaire's sister, in a scene with Peter Lawford. I was astonished, and I knew that there was a God who loved me and who had a sense both of humor and of proportion. He had allowed only one source of electricity in my apartment to remain active, not one that would give me full light, but one that would play me that beautiful song. (I was to live in darkness for many more years, a darkness partially illuminated, indeed, by the beauty of song.)

The song, by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, is sung by Jane Powell in the scene from the movie in the video link above.

Mourning into Joy, part 2: Tisha b'Av

Yesterday was the anniversary of my abortion. I mentioned this to Really Rosie, and she pointed out that this year it was also the Jewish fast of Tisha b'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, and also other tragedies that have befallen the Jews, from the failure of Bar Kokhba's second-century revolt against the Roman empire to the Holocaust. On this day, a day of great mourning, the Book of Lamentations is read, and, in Sephardic temples, the Book of Job.

According to Orthodox Jewish belief, however, when the Messiah comes, this day of mourning will be transformed into one of great joy. God asserts in Jeremiah 31:13: "I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow." This is my prayer for all men and women who've suffered the tragedy of abortion.

Old New York: August

I have always loved this time of year in New York City. There are rare, uncanny patches of silence in the day, holes in the constant noise through which you can almost hear angels passing. I love the smell too, the sort of pungent, slightly overripe green smell of the late-summer flowers of New York permeating the air: trees-of-paradise and mimosa, gutter trees that will grow anywhere. Their fragrance, a little too sweet, is a prelude to the burning smell of a New York autumn.

I remember the first summer here I lived all alone here.  The subway cars were hotter than a sauna, and covered with graffiti. I lived that summer in Flatbush, which was almost entirely Jamaican. Young men would offer to walk me home from the subway in order to protect me. I remember getting off at the wrong stop in Manhattan one morning and walking for a bit before finding myself in what seemed like the bustling port of Hong Kong; I had walked south and east, and was in the deepest Chinatown. Later, I would go back and wander around, buying rice face powder and packets of the gold-printed square paper used for Chinese New Year to write letters on. I wonder if Chinatown is still like that; it’s a long time since I’ve been there; twenty years ago it was almost a foreign land. Do you still see rows of seamstresses at their sewing machines in sweatshop windows as the D train crosses the Manhattan Bridge? New York is a different city now, and much has been lost: the sense of a patchwork of many small neighborhoods, the relative ease with which you could get by with no money, the bittersweetness that hung in the air at this time of year.