Music and Memory, Back to School Edition: Artificial Pearls

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.

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 kindly somehow. I thought about Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," 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 Emerson noting that

The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.

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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.

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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 burn to do it, because, as William Carlos Williams wrote (about poetry, though the same can be said about music):

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die every day
for lack
of what is found there.

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 The Magic Flute -- 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.

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.

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 Nutcracker on 78s, and he listened to it until the records, as he put it, literally dissolved. He later found a recording of La Bohème 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.

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 Grandfather Twilight, 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.

The Consolations of Appalachia

The literary critic George Lukács defined the novel as "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." I wonder sometimes whether, in my own small way, I am living in such a world. The winter has set in for good in my aging Rust Belt town, and the sky overhead, like the blighted landscape below, is every day an unrelentingly gray: an oppressive gray, a dull, gun-metal gray; not the kind of gray that's illuminated from behind by the sun, or the gray that seems redolent with mystery, or the gray that you know will blow away with the next strong breeze; or the gray that, even if it lingers, is mitigated by the hum and buzz of industry, endeavor, and human interaction. There were gray winters in New York, too, of course, but Petula Clark wasn't lying when she suggested that "When you're alone and life is making you lonely/You can always go downtown," because, there, you're liable to meet "someone who is just like you."


In spite of the fact that I've been here for five -- five! -- years already, I still feel that lack, that inability to meet who Anne of Green Gables would have called a kindred spirit -- that dearth, in fact, of someones who are just like me. Maybe they exist, but I would never know where to find them here. In New York, of course, you don't have to look far. You're bound, by the sheer volume of people, to meet many semblables. But I need to keep reminding myself that your friends don't have to be just like you.

Nonetheless, even though I've been here for five years already, my heart still leaps into my throat sometimes when I speak or hear the name of the city where I now live. How can it be that I live here? I think to myself. It sometimes seems like everything has conspired to humble me, even to chide me, for imagining that I could ever do important things. Will I die here? I wonder. Will the fire that burns in my heart be extinguished here, in total obscurity, in a forgotten backwater full of people who are sad, sick, and poor?  Will I never be able to bring forth anything beautiful?

And, my own loneliness and yearning notwithstanding, every day young single mothers from my old city and my old borough climb off the Greyhound bus here, their little children and a few shopping bags of belongings in tow. And some of them, I know for a fact, weep tears of relief when they arrive in this place about which I try very hard to remain neutral, grateful for the chance to leave behind the danger and despair of their lives in New York and to do right by their children. And with very good reason.

A few weeks ago I was actually back in New York for a semi-important gig. Remarkably, these still come my way once in a while, and I usually take them if the pay is reasonable and they don't disrupt my life or the lives of my family members too much, although they usually involve a lot of driving in the dark to get home as soon as possible afterwards. Doing school drop-off the morning after a concert on scanty sleep, my professionally-styled gig hair and traces of stage make-up are the only evidence that I've just come from a "real" place, doing what I think I "really" do, living for a day or two what I used to think of as my "real" life. And the fact is that my real life in that real place is no longer real. When I try to remember everything -- the years and years of memory accreted like layers of sediment, the smells and the sounds, the way the light looked -- it's almost as if a wall of smoke, of fog, stands between me and the person I was and the place in which I felt myself to be so deeply and intrinsically rooted.

I spend a lot of time in my car now, which is a very strange experience -- the sense of ploughing forcefully through a world that's hostile or at least indifferent, observing everything and yet removed, encased in the protective shell of my own atmosphere, is so different from the multi-sensory engagement, and the vulnerability, of being out on the street in a scrum of your fellow men. I have to say that it's cool to drive -- and even that I love my new used car, a Subaru Outback -- but I don't like the way that it's supplanted being in the greater world, and I find it hard to accept that this ethos of driving around is one of the defining aspects of middle-class American life.

One of the few random amazing things about this place though, is the libraries. There are four contiguous municipalities here that bleed into each other, but have their own separate governments, and each has its own library, and each of these libraries is a wonderful place, a haven, in a different way. I drive around to all of them, usually hitting two or more in a week. I love to go to the various children's rooms by myself, because I love to read children's books, and each library's children's room is bigger and better-stocked than my entire old branch library in the Bronx. And each library has discard tables that are veritable treasure troves, mainly for the kind of out-of-print children's books that I love. Some of the many books I've bought for a quarter have not been out-of-print, just inexplicably neglected and thrown away, like a new-looking copy of Maira Kalman's Fireboat, and a whole stack of books by Tana Hoban, which are among my favorites. My breath catches in my throat when I look at her photographs, so full of mystery, and suggestive of the strangeness and beauty hidden in the most mundane things (a picture from her book So Many Circles, So Many Squares, a library-discard-table glean, is above). Just the other day, for the combined price of forty cents, I picked up the following: Teacher Man by Frank McCourt; 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 1-12; a beautifully-illustrated children's biography of J.S. Bach from the 1960s; the January 2011 edition of the PMLA journal; and the "brief edition" (still four-hundred-plus pages) of the standard college music textbook Listen!

So, while haunting the public libraries here is one of my favorite things to do, it's an activity carried out in solitude (I shun the children's story hours, because they're way too noisy and frenetic for me, let alone for my children), and it reinforces my own solitude. But while I drive to the libraries, I often listen to Beethoven's Symphony no. 4 in B-flat major, whose first movement never fails to astonish me and fill me with delight, as it coalesces out of a tentative, fearful darkness and into triumphant joy. I wish I knew a way to bring that joy out of my car and onto these gray streets.

(If you play the clip below, do pay special attention to the ABSOLUTE GLORIOUS WONDER of Beethoven's writing for woodwinds, specifically for the solo woodwind quintet -- the way that he lifts it out of the structure of the symphony for a few measures, and allows each of the wind instruments' voices to come forward as they twine together in their finely-woven texture. I think that Beethoven, in all his large-scale works, gave the music of consolation to the woodwinds).

Tear-Water Tea

This may be the most perfect work of literature in the whole history of humanity (I've only recently discovered it).

Something Beautiful

This summer, against the background noise of complaints that "my friends don't have to do this," I've embarked on a learning-at-home program with my son who's going into first grade (I won't call it homeschooling, because we are not what you would call a homeschooling family). We are doing various unit studies of my own design, starting with a central text on a particular topic and then branching out to ancillary texts. My son then has to write a sentence and draw an illustration in his journal every day based on our reading.

We started out with the topic of making the world more beautiful, a subject dear to my heart. We read the wonderfully straightforward Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, with its evocative folk-art-like illustrations, as our main text, and then went on to others that supported the same notion: Mole Music by David McPhail, about a mole who takes up the violin with consequences further-reaching than he can imagine; the classic Frederick by Leo Lionni, about the worth of the work of the artist; and, finally, a book that was new to me, which I found by happy chance, Something Beautiful by Sharon Dennis Wyeth.

This book has become one of my favorites in any genre, and my son wants to hear it again and again. It is about a little girl, in a neighborhood that looks very much like my old Bronx, who is saddened by the dearth of beauty in the hardscrabble world around her. She goes on a quest to discover what is beautiful, what has value, and what gives happiness to the hearts of her friends and family, and in the end resolves to take concrete steps to bring beauty to a place that knows little of it. The book itself is a beautiful thing, with an admirably simple and restrained narrative and wonderfully realistic pictures by Chris Soentpiet, a veteran illustrator who was, incidentally, adopted from Korea and has also illustrated a sensitive book by Eve Bunting, Jin Woo, about an older sibling coming to terms with his family's adoption of Korean baby.

I read an article recently about the ways that the wave of gentrification which has turned most of the five boroughs into a playground for the wealthy has averted the Bronx. I only lived in the borough as an adult, but all my life, when riding the subway in the outer boroughs where the lines go above-ground, I pondered the many sections in my vast city where neighborhoods seemed to consist of one auto-body shop after another (many of them surely chop shops), aluminum-shuttered bodegas where the only fresh foods were onions and plantains, and twenty-four-hour laundromats. These were places where not a single green thing seemed to grow, and yet children ran through the streets and played in the spray from illegally-opened fire hydrants. What was it like for children, I used to wonder, to live in a place where they never saw anything beautiful?

Sharon Dennis Wyeth's book gives one answer. She does not condemn the inequality that compels some children to live amid poverty and ugliness. Rather, she suggests that the beautiful may be something that cannot be comprehended by the senses, something hidden, secret, and essential, and that it is something to whose revelation we all can -- and should -- contribute.

Quick Takes: Nostographers' Back-to-School Edition

1. For about two weeks after the first day of school, the route my son and I walk took us past a dead squirrel lying in the street, close to the curb.  It was near someone's driveway, and looked as though it had died in great agony.  "Look!" my son gasped, seeing it before I did that first day.  I tried to conceal my nauseated cringe, and we talked about it.  In fact, we had many opportunities to talk about it, because the squirrel remained, gradually deflating and decomposing, day after day.  In the morning, my son insisted on going up a different street, so as to save the fascinating dead-squirrel nature observations for the way home.  "Don't look up that street," he would caution me as we walked to school, but on the way home he would eagerly examine the squirrel's current state of decay.  I called the city sanitation department two or three times, but the squirrel remained.

Then one day last week, my son, inspired by the wonderful out-of-print Margaret Wise Brown book The Dead Bird, asked me to make a sign to commemorate the squirrel.  One one side, the sign was to read: "Here Lies A Squirrel That Is Dead," and on the other side: "Here Lies A Squirrel Which Is Dead." So I did, on a piece of cardboard with Sharpie marker, and on the way to school the next day we detoured past the dead squirrel and laid the sign in the street alongside it.

A day or two after that, the squirrel was gone, though, if you scan the gutter carefully, you can see a couple of bedraggled tufts of gray fur.  The sign remained for another week, and now it is gone too.

2. The school is about three-quarters of a mile from our house, and the walk takes us down a lovely divided street with stately homes.  Walking home alone one day, I noticed that, in back of one of these houses, a labyrinth had been painted on the driveway blacktop.  I remembered when I worked at a Wall Street law firm for my day job, and how a church down there -- was it Trinity Church? -- installed a similar labyrinth, white lines painted on black canvas stretched out in the church courtyard.  It was a very troubled time in my life, and I thought that walking the labyrinth during my lunch hour would somehow help.  I would walk that flat, painted maze in the church courtyard, car horns blaring outside on the street, without knowing what feelings or insights it was supposed to inspire, and, to my knowledge, it didn't inspire any.

3. I learned recently to my dismay that the accomplished, attractive college-age daughter of a musician colleague whom I greatly respect has developed a serious heroin habit. Instead of taking her daughter back to school, my friend pulled her out of a sordid crack-house and drove her to an out-of-state rehab, and the daughter is now living in an out-of-state halfway house.  My friend has no desire to go and see her.

This made me think about how my friend's music always seemed to come before everything else.  She spends many months of every year on the road, and this family crisis has not slowed her down.  If anything, I imagine that she is barricading herself ever more tightly into the predictable world of practice, rehearsal, and performance.  This is an impulse I fully understand, for, where the world is broken, music is sound and whole, and where I am utterly powerless and ineffectual in my own life and the lives of others, I have always been able to feel a sense of power and agency in my art -- the ability to perform on a relatively high level and, in so doing, to move hearts. And, where the people I knew disappointed me, Brahms and Mozart did not -- could not.

The world is broken, nonetheless, and music cannot fix it.  I wonder how often music becomes a substitute for what it stands for -- real love, true human connection.

Repost: The Work of Beauty

[Originally posted July 31, 2009]

Today is the birthday of two people who have been very dear to me. One, who lives far away now, I see only rarely; the other I will probably never see again. Both were accomplished artists who strove to dive deep and seek out what was untapped and overlooked in their disciplines, and one in particular rose to a relatively high level of recognition, but both, worn down by poor remuneration and family exigency, eventually attrited out of their fields.

As much as there is real resentment among the upstanding towards those who have spent themselves in riotous living, there is also, as I've learned since beginning this blog almost exactly two years ago, resentment of those who have shunned duty and spent their days seeking out the greenest green, the purest sound, the truest word -- especially when the fruits of their efforts, no matter how beautiful, do not produce much in the way of cold, hard cash. Commenters on this blog have suggested that financial reward is the surest gauge of artistic ability, when anyone who's spent any time at all among artists knows that money earned is generally a random and inaccurate measure of the quality of the work.

Lately I've been reminded of the poem "In the Desert" by Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

There seems to be an inordinate amount of self-perpetuating bitterness in our culture at present, and I've been disappointed to see many Catholic blogs serving it up. This blog, on the other hand, proposes that the work of seeking to uncover and propagate beauty is valuable work, even if it is not well-paid work, and even if it ends in total failure. Those who doubt this is a worthy proposition should read Michael D. O'Brien's compelling novel about the sufferings of a Native Canadian artist, A Cry of Stone. Or, if pressed for time, they could just read Frederick by Leo Lionni, in which the eponymous field mouse is chided by his community for appearing to daydream while they are gathering food for the winter. When winter comes, however, and the food supplies run low and everyone is feeling a bit . . . bitter, Frederick steps forth and tells them of the colors of the meadow (he had been "gathering" them while the others worked), describes the warmth of the sun so that it seems to the other mice that they can almost feel it, and recites a poem that helps them connect to a deeper sense of their shared field-mouse humanity.

This is the work of artists, whether known or unknown, whether successful by the measures of our materialistic society or not. It is sad to see those who should be seeking and advancing the beauty of God scorn the efforts of artists across disciplines to make His beauty more obvious and relevant to their fellows, when beauty itself is proof of His goodness.

Happiest of birthdays, M. and M. I wish you beauty.

Room

I'm still tethered to my desk editing a dense musicological tome, but I took a break this weekend to read a book I'd put on my holds list at the local library, Room, by Irish-born Canadian writer Emma Donoghue.  We were out of town at a wedding, and I sat on the lid of the toilet seat in the bathroom of our hotel room so as to be able to read it into the wee small hours without waking my family.  I found the novel so profoundly affecting that I am taking still more time from my deadline-dependent work to write about it here.

Room is the story of five-year-old Jack, who, as the narrative begins, has lived his entire life, along with his mother, in captivity in an eleven-by-eleven foot room.  When the two are unexpectedly thrust into the world, both must learn to redefine their relationship to it, and to each other, in ways that are, in a sense, even more painful and traumatizing than their captivity has been.  Donoghue draws freely upon children's "reversal" literature, most prominently Alice in Wonderland, to present the reader with the story of one of the great developmental dilemmas faced by all children -- how to understand, interpret, and navigate reality -- made exponentially more poignant for Jack by the sensory and social deprivation of his early years.

Jack's narrative voice is captivating, and his young mother is a giant of strength, love, and resourcefulness, who, in their imprisonment, has turned Jack's cruelly confined world into one of beauty and adventure.  The two are completely dependent upon each other, and the transition to a less-enmeshed relationship is one of the most difficult challenges Jack faces in "Outside."  For this reason, I think the book speaks especially to mothers, whose most important task is preparing and allowing our children to stand on their own and to emerge into a world not bounded or defined by us.  As the mother of a son approaching Jack's age -- a boy who, like Jack, has outstanding strengths, coupled with significant difficulties negotiating the sensory and social worlds -- I felt an even deeper kinship with the novel's narrator.

In addition to the compelling character of Jack, and the delicately-drawn relationship between him and his mother, Room fascinated me for its description of a child developing in confinement, a topic that has been an interest of mine since I saw Werner Herzog's film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser while an undergrad, and, later, sang the wonderful Brahms settings of poetry by Georg Friedrich Daumer, who had cared for Kaspar Hauser after the latter was found, as a young man, wandering the streets of Nuremberg after a life spent in captivity.

I loved this book so much that I am going to try to sneak in a second read before it's due back at the library.

Here is an interesting clip of Emma Donoghue explaining how she devised Jack's narrative voice.

Diagnosis Imitating Art

If we hadn't left New York, it might have taken much longer to notice that there was anything clinically atypical about my son.  I would most likely still be teaching part-time at the university, during which time my son's babysitter, who lived around the corner, would be looking after him in our home.  There was a private preschool in our old neighborhood, but it probably would have been too expensive for us; and our district school (New York has a complicated system of decentralized school districts, the result, in part, of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teacher strikes in 1968) did not have Pre-K.  It took experienced teachers in the preschool he began attending in our new city to alert me to the fact that he might not be developing typically.

My son was a late talker who spoke only about five words before he was two.  I enrolled him in a language study conducted by a doctoral candidate in speech-language pathology at my university, who ran a full battery of tests on him and concluded that "he's just one of those kids who's a late talker and we don't know why."  I did not sign him up for Early Intervention because he began talking exactly on his second birthday, and in three months was speaking in complex sentences with clauses and antecedents.  His potty-training experience was similar:  he started late, but mastered it almost immediately.

The speech-language pathologist ruled out autism for my son, because he made great eye contact and his cognition was clearly unimpaired.  However, I had noticed unusual things about him as a baby and toddler:  for instance, he never had the tight grasp on your finger that most infants have (my woo-woo homeopath and former friend claimed that he didn't need it, because he felt so at home in the world; whatever), and he didn't point at things until he was almost three, though he did indicate things in other ways.  He also avoided drawing and cutting activities like the plague, so I didn't push him in those.

We started the evaluation process in March of this year, and my son was given an IEP in June.  He's going to be attending an integrated Pre-K in the fall in which there are four teachers in the classroom, and half the students are typical and the other half disabled in various ways.  But he still doesn't have a diagnosis, just a collection of symptoms and behaviors; he will not get an official diagnosis until he sees a developmental pediatrician in October (the appointment was made in May, and we will have to travel over a hundred miles for it).  Nonetheless, reading between the lines in the evaluations, I anticipate a diagnosis of Asperger's or another high-functioning autism-spectrum disorder, which I confirmed with my son's occupational therapist.  In some ways, he is absolutely textbook for Asperger's, and, in addition to his delays and behavioral problems, he also has certain prodigious gifts, which is not unusual.  I am anticipating that after kindergarten I will be homeschooling him, because I fear that there is no school program we can afford that can teach to both his gifts and his delays.  Public schools are required to address disabilities and provide growth for students who demonstrate them, but not to provide enrichment if those same students also exhibit giftedness; private and parochial schools are not required to do anything for children with disabilities.

I really only started suspecting Asperger's last spring, however, when I picked up the book Tobin Learns to Make Friends, by the Northern-Ireland-born social worker Diane Murrell, from a library book display.  The book is about a little train (trains are a common obsession for kids on the spectrum) who exhibits classic signs of Asperger's, and has various scrapes learning the rules of making and maintaining friendsips with other trains.  I cried when I read it:  In the stories of Tobin's misadventures and difficulties with his peers, I might have been reading about my son.

And then, on Retired Waif's sporadic blog, I read about an unfortunate incident that sent shockwaves around the autism blogosphere earlier this year, when Smockity Frocks, one of those funny, witty, self-deprecating Christian-mom-of-many bloggers, wrote about her trials at the library one day when a little girl my son's age was behaving very, very badly and the child's caretaker did not respond in the way that Smockity thought she should have.  Smockity's truly cruel mockery of a child obviously on the spectrum made me cry again, because, once again, that stimming, perseverating little girl could easily have been my own child.  And even worse were the congratulations of most of her commenters, and Smockity's defensive response to the ones who suggested that the girl might have autism and that Smockity might have shown a bit more sensitivity (not to say charity) towards difference (after the ensuing pile-on, Smockity took down the post, but it can be read in cached form here).

Because of all of this, I'm in some ways very glad that we have moved away from New York, in spite of the fact that there is a much greater variety and amount of services available to children with disabilities there.  In New York, I would have been far more caught up in teaching and scholarship and my other historical concerns, and it might have taken me even longer to cotton on to the fact that my little boy has some special needs.  And I'm extremely grateful to Retired Waif for her friendship back when we were neighbors in the Bronx.  She's a gifted scholar and an excellent person all around, and l have learned a great deal from her approach to disability.

The Song of Francis

 I got this book out of the library, and it soon moved across to the list of books that I want to own.  My son loves it, and he makes up his own songs about blessing the Lord, based on the song that Saint Francis sings in the book.   I just saw that Amazon is offering it at a bargain price.  If you browse there, you can look inside the book (please note, I make no money from directing you there; I only mention it because I think some of my readers would also love this book).

Tomie DePaola has dedicated The Song of Francis to the nuns of the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, a wonderful place; I went on retreat there a few years ago, and recently performed in a concert series sponsored by a lay Benedictine foundation that is affiliated with the abbey.

Is Christian Time Travel Possible?

I've just finished Madeleine L'Engle's An Acceptable Time, the last novel in her Time series, which I picked up on the recommendations of Enbrethiliel and Lissla Lissar in the combox here.  I absolutely loved it.   At the same time, though I still haven't read his Landscape with Dragons, I'm starting to get an idea of why Michael D. O'Brien might have a bit of a beef with L'Engle.  The novel is about Meg Murry and Calvin O'Keefe's oldest daughter, Polly, who goes to stay with her grandparents, the celebrated Dr. and Dr. Murry, in rural Connecticut, in order to be homeschooled.  (Now, you'd think that's a premise that a self-styled guardian of traditional Catholic mores ought to love, but the homeschooling has been proposed as a solution to the fact that there are drugs and riotous living at her high school, and besides, like all the Murrys and their descendants, she's absolutely freaking brilliant, and so is poorly served by her district school; so there's no whiff of religious orthodoxy in the equation.)  Like many of the Murry-O'Keefes, Polly finds that she can time-travel, and she has some gripping adventures on the site of her grandparents' farm three thousand years ago.  She has a companion in her time travels, a retired Episcopalian bishop, who, though he unashamedly and frequently professes Christ, appears as a sort of Teilhard de Chardin figure. (Now, here's a bit of trivia for you:  I've actully been in the New York apartment in which Teilhard died in 1955.  It is in a building -- in the neighborhood where L'Engle herself lived, the neighborhood she writes about in The Young Unicorns -- that was once a Jesuit residence, and one of my professors from grad school lives there now. I wonder if L'Engle knew Teilhard or his confrères?)

Polly and Bishop Colubra find themselves in extreme danger three thousand years ago, and are unable to transfer themselves back to the present.  While Polly has more faith in science than in God, the Bishop invokes the mercy of Christ in ways both subtle and obvious -- intoning the Kyrie when he's been captured, for instance, and assuring Polly that Christ existed even a thousand years before His birth.  However, he also believes that the ancient druids possessed knowledge that has now been lost -- knowledge, for instance, of the techniques of time travel -- and I suppose that it is these statements that a critic like O'Brien would call heretical.

Now, I don't want to set up a straw man, because I haven't read O'Brien's polemic (though I do have it on order through interlibrary loan).  If anyone has read the book and can set me straight, please do so in the combox.  But it seems to me that, if you believe that we exist in both time and in eternity (which is what we believe, isn't it?), it is not heretical to believe in the possibility of time travel.  We already know that it is good and meet to pray for the dead as if they were still alive.  Nor is it heretical, is it, to suggest that ancient peoples and pre-Christian cultures possessed knowledge that has been lost to us?  Can't one believe in Jesus Christ as the Lord of and the fulfillment of human history and, at the same time, acknowledge that non-Christian lands and people had a great deal to offer?

I suppose the problem comes when we try to resurrect lost knowledge in its original context, rather than baptizing it in the light of the salvific proclamation.  Of course, we should not try to use any power to circumvent or second-guess the will of God, and part of the discipline of Christianity for some who have the special gifts of which Saint Paul speaks is the laying aside of those abilities in favor of accepting smallness, weakness, and utter dependence on God.  But, contra O'Brien, I don't believe we should be afraid to read any literary suggestions of special gifts existing in a non-Christian context, or about time travel, or about snakes or dragons who are good rather than evil.

The Young Unicorns

I woke up this morning with the incomparably delicious feeling that comes from having read a fantastic book the night before.  The book -- pace Enbrethiliel, in whose Madeleine L'Engle Novel Smackdown it fared rather poorly -- is The Young Unicorns, written in 1968, the third book in L'Engle's Austin Family chronicles.  While I wasn't crazy about the first in this series, Meet the Austins, which I also read recently -- it features a family whose cuteness seemed to me a benign, juvenile-fiction version of the preciousness of J.D. Salinger's much-maligned Glass family-- I was game to expand my knowledge of L'Engle beyond the Time quartet (and I can't but agree with Enbrethiliel that A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a towering accomplishment).  I couldn't find the second book in the Austin series, The Moon by Night, in the library, so I pulled a battered copy of The Young Unicorns off the shelf and took it home.  As soon as I had finished it, it took its place alongside The Brothers Karamazov and Clara as a book that I regretted finishing because I did not want it ever to end.

Now why would the perspicacious Enbrethiliel, with whom I concur on so many things, and I differ so much on the point of one YA novel?  I don't know.   To this reader, the book has everything.  The central argument is a version of the one that has been the downfall of many a good, intelligent, and pious man and woman since time immemorial:  the existence of real evil under the guise of goodness, beauty, and truth (in this case, the Anglican bishop of New York City).  The children in the novel are called upon, in their varying states of figurative and literal blindness, to choose good, but some are confounded by the glamour, as it were, of evil.  The theological problem of freedom -- the freedom to love and also to fall -- is posited against the tantalizing possibility of a return to a state of primordial goodness that is, however, compelled rather than freely chosen, and is, therefore, demonic.  And the climactic scene is truly disturbing and frightening.  And the book touches on race, class, exile, addiction, oedipal conflict, and disability.  And several of the characters are gifted musicians. And most of the action takes place in and around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, a New York neighborhood that I know as intimately as any.  While reading, I could trace each step of every one of the characters as they walked around the neighborhood as if I were walking with them, which gave me particular delight.  And is that a great cover, or what?  (The three Fab Four-looking fellows are members of a dangerous gang, the Alphabats, which is threatening to take over the city.)

Michael D. O'Brien, whose novels I also love, has been very down upon Madeleine L'Engle, which I do not love.  He calls her work "'Christian' neopaganism," and claims that the "foundation" of her work is "wrong."  I cannot bring myself to read his polemic on the evils of children's literature, so perhaps it's not fair of me to reject his argument, where it applies to her work, out of hand; and yet I do.  As with all of her novels that I've read, the message of this book is Christian on the deepest level, and, besides, it's a great read.

King John's Christmas

And this poem still makes me cry:

King John was not a good man –
He had his little ways.
And sometimes no one spoke to him
For days and days and days.
And men who came across him,
When walking in the town,
Gave him a supercilious stare,
Or passed with noses in the air –
And bad King John stood dumbly there,
Blushing beneath his crown.

King John was not a good man,
And no good friends had he.
He stayed in every afternoon…
But no one came to tea.
And, round about December,
The cards upon his shelf
Which wished him lots of Christmas cheer,
And fortune in the coming year,
Were never from his near and dear,
But only from himself.

King John was not a good man,
Yet had his hopes and fears.
They’d given him no present now
For years and years and years.
But every year at Christmas,
While minstrels stood about,
Collecting tribute from the young
For all the songs they might have sung,
He stole away upstairs and hung
A hopeful stocking out.

King John was not a good man,
He lived his live aloof;
Alone he thought a message out
While climbing up the roof.
He wrote it down and propped it
Against the chimney stack:
“TO ALL AND SUNDRY - NEAR AND FAR -
F. Christmas in particular.”
And signed it not “Johannes R.”
But very humbly, “Jack.”

“I want some crackers,
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don’t mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”

King John was not a good man –
He wrote this message out,
And gat him to this room again,
Descending by the spout.
And all that night he lay there,
A prey to hopes and fears.
“I think that’s him a-coming now!”
(Anxiety bedewed his brow.)
“He’ll bring one present, anyhow –
The first I had for years.”

“Forget about the crackers,
And forget the candy;
I’m sure a box of chocolates
Would never come in handy;
I don’t like oranges,
I don’t want nuts,
And I HAVE got a pocket-knife
That almost cuts.
But, oh! Father christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”

King John was not a good man,  
Next morning when the sun
Rose up to tell a waiting world
That Christmas had begun,
And people seized their stockings,
And opened them with glee,
And crackers, toys and games appeared,
And lips with sticky sweets were smeared,
King John said grimly: “As I feared,
Nothing again for me!”

“I did want crackers,
And I did want candy;
I know a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I do love oranges,
I did want nuts!
I haven’t got a pocket-knife —
Not one that cuts.
And, oh! if Father Christmas, had loved me at all,
He would have brought a big, red,
india-rubber ball!”

King John stood by the window,
And frowned to see below
The happy bands of boys and girls
All playing in the snow.
A while he stood there watching,
And envying them all …
When through the window big and red
There hurtled by his royal head,
And bounced and fell upon the bed,
An india-rubber ball!
And oh Father Christmas,
My blessings on you fall
For bringing him a big, red,
India-rubber ball! 

(From Now We Are Six)

The Work of Beauty

Today is the birthday of two people who have been very dear to me. One, who lives far away now, I see only rarely; the other I will probably never see again. Both were accomplished artists who strove to dive deep and seek out what was untapped and overlooked in their disciplines, and one in particular rose to a relatively high level of recognition, but both, worn down by poor remuneration and family exigency, eventually attrited out of their fields.

As much as there is real resentment among the upstanding towards those who have spent themselves in riotous living, there is also, as I've learned since beginning this blog almost exactly two years ago, resentment of those who have shunned duty and spent their days seeking out the greenest green, the purest sound, the truest word -- especially when the fruits of their efforts, no matter how beautiful, do not produce much in the way of cold, hard cash. Commenters on this blog have suggested that financial reward is the surest gauge of artistic ability, when anyone who's spent any time at all among artists knows that money earned is generally a random and inaccurate measure of the quality of the work.

Lately I've been reminded of the poem "In the Desert" by Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

There seems to be an inordinate amount of self-perpetuating bitterness in our culture at present, and I've been disappointed to see many Catholic blogs serving it up. This blog, on the other hand, proposes that the work of seeking to uncover and propagate beauty is valuable work, even if it is not well-paid work, and even if it ends in total failure. Those who doubt this is a worthy proposition should read Michael D. O'Brien's compelling novel about the sufferings of a Native Canadian artist, A Cry of Stone. Or, if pressed for time, they could just read Frederick by Leo Lionni, in which the eponymous field mouse is chided by his community for appearing to daydream while they are gathering food for the winter. When winter comes, however, and the food supplies run low and everyone is feeling a bit . . . bitter, Frederick steps forth and tells them of the colors of the meadow (he had been "gathering" them while the others worked), describes the warmth of the sun so that it seems to the other mice that they can almost feel it, and recites a poem that helps them connect to a deeper sense of their shared field-mouse humanity.

This is the work of artists, whether known or unknown, whether successful by the measures of our materialistic society or not. It is sad to see those who should be seeking and advancing the beauty of God scorn the efforts of artists across disciplines to make His beauty more obvious and relevant to their fellows, when beauty itself is proof of His goodness.

Happiest of birthdays, M. and M. I wish you beauty.

Swiftly Tilting

I have some writing assignments due soon, so I've been procrastinating as much as possible by reading lots of juvenile literature. I just finished A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third in Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series, which (like her other books) was, for me, like a long, cool, delicious drink of some marvelous beverage on the most wiltingly hot summer day. The book concerns time travel undertaken to save the planet from nuclear conflagration, which, contrary to the outcome you would expect if you'd read a lot of comic books or watched a lot of the original Star Trek, in this case actually works.

This blog and its comboxes have featured some previous discussions of time travel, and sometmes I think in fact that time travel is the main theme of my writing here -- the notion of a continual traveling back and forth between the past and the present, and the implications of such journeying. As Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This is a tricky conundrum for the convert: without the suffering and sin of the past, there would have been no conversion (as the "Exsultet" sung at the Easter Vigil says, "O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer"), but in embarking upon a new life we would like to travel as lightly as possible, leaving much of the past behind. I think perhaps the main themes of this blog are 1) the fact that such leaving-behind is not possible, and 2) my struggles to weave the past into my present and future in a way that will not degrade or undermine any of these three states -- states which, if you accept the proposition that time is non-linear, can sometimes seem arbitrarily defined. In Matthew 9:16, Christ noted the folly of patching an old garment with new, unshrunk cloth, and Saint Paul explained to the Corinthians that "whoever is in Christ is a new creation; the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come." So, in turning to Christ, we are made new; but, as I've often asked in this blog, what do we do with the past?

As the historian of conversion Karl F. Morrison has written (I've quoted him here before):

Conversion is often portrayed as a positive event, a turning toward. It also has a negative aspect, a turning away. The event of formal adhesion [to the new faith] may consist of this flight toward the future and from the past. But . . . . the old life overshadows the understanding of the new. The event may produce a transformation; but something resistant to change informs understanding it, and retention of the old may indeed have been a condition without which there could have been no change.

This came to my mind the other morning, when I turned on the radio and heard the opening strains of Ravel's String Quartet, which I've also written about here before. I wondered if I would be able to hear it without breaking down or resorting to the destructive dodge of replacing the present with the tantalizing memories of the past for which that evocative music was the soundtrack. While I never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd hear the quartet while clipping coupons at my kitchen table in Appalachia, I managed to get through it all right somehow.

Sorely Trying

Father came home feeling tired and weary. He had had a sorely trying day. When he opened the front door, he saw that . . . . [all] of the children were striking one another and speaking unpleasantly in loud, harsh voices . . . . "My goodness," said Father to Mother, "is this the sort of welcome I get after a sorely trying day?"

Thus begins my new favorite book, The Sorely Trying Day by Russell and Lillian Hoban (better-known for their Frances series), which was a felicitous find at the local library. In case you can't find it at yours, those sympathetic souls at the New York Review of Books Classics are going to bring out a new edition of the book, originally published in 1964, next year.

New Home

I write from my new city. The move was something of a disaster, with more going wrong even than usual with this sort of thing. To make a long story short, the moving company's estimate of time and labor turned out to be wildly off the mark, and it took five men almost three days to pack and move a two-bedroom apartment. Granted, I have a piano, but it's a small one; there were also those seven bookcases. But, to compound matters, it turned out that the estimator had also made a gigantic error in estimating the cost of all this, and because so much else had also gone wrong, the moving company decided to write off the difference. So all's well that ends well.

Our new home is a half-house, two stories plus a basement and garage, for exactly half the rent of our old two-bedroom apartment in the inaccessible outer boroughs of New York. But my new hometown is one of the depressed cities of the Northeast, so I imagine the low rent is a reflection of the low desirability of my new city as a place to live. It is beautiful here, however. The city is surrounded by mountains whose names no one appears to know.

Before we left, I stocked up on British sweets. My old neighborhood, with its large population of recent Irish immigrants, featured an impressive selection of English and Irish candy in just about every deli and corner store. Devotees say that there's no comparison between the English Cadbury bars and the American version, and I don't know when and where I'll be able to find things like the Cadbury Flake bar (above) again.

And we just acquired a washing machine and dryer. I am giddy with excitement as I await the delivery and installation. In New York I would wheel my grocery cart down to the corner laundromat every week and do six loads of laundry at one go, but that's not how it's done here, except by students and the very poor. So, while my fabulous college-teaching wardrobe hangs unused in my new walk-in closet, I am poised to become more like the mother in We Help Mommy and do the wash every day; there's even a clothesline here to hang it out on. Perhaps my son will even become as helpful as the two little ones in the book. Right now, he's mostly interested in the novelty of our flight of stairs, and throwing things down them.

Rainy Days

It rained for a couple of days last week, and we were stuck indoors. I had recently acquired a second-hand copy of the Eloise Wilkin/Golden Books classic We Help Mommy (above) at Really Rosie's recommendation, and I attempted a social experiment by reading it to my two-year-old repeatedly; he was game at first, and even declared that he wanted to help Mommy, but that help consisted mainly of emptying the waste baskets onto the floor. So I went to the wonderful Children's Vinyl Record Series website (about which I've blogged previously), and my son and I downloaded some of the old LPs that some marvelously generous soul has converted to .mp3s and posted for all to enjoy. Our picks included Everybody Sing! International Folk Songs, which made me nostalgic for my left-wing childhood (can anyone tell me whether children in right-wing households learn international folk songs too?) and A Child's Introduction to Gilbert and Sullivan, which was a big hit, as my two-year-old is already a fan of H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. The site has some real treasures, and is evidently part of a Christian initiative to reclaim and reform the arts, which is not a bad idea altogether.