Franny, Zooey, Being, and Nakedness

Before my sister became a committed Buddhist, she was an actress.  In fact, not unlike the eponymous heroine in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, she was an exceptionally gifted actress, who nonetheless, like Franny, felt a searing spiritual lack at the heart of her life and craft.  In Salinger's novel, Franny is dissuaded by the ministrations of her wised-up brother from "wandering off into some goddam desert with a burning cross in her hands"; Zooey convinces her that she need not integrate her heartbeat with hesychasm in order to live an authentic life, but will better serve God and her fellow man, in whom she is to see Christ Himself, by returning to college and her artistic discipline.  My sister, on the other hand, in her own painful search for authenticity, alighted on an austere Tibetan Buddhist practice, abandoned her profession because, she claimed, she had only entered it to "get attention," and began moving all over the country with the man she would marry and working in various jobs to support him while he "took time off" to meditate.  She now teaches meditation to beginning practitioners in her Buddhist sect (in this sect, one has to shell out a lot of money to receive the higher, apparently secret teachings that enable one to work as a meditation instructor), and has gained some attention for her articles on using the everyday frustrations of parenting as tools toward enlightenment.

Back when my sister was a struggling actress, there was a period during which she, along with many other actors I knew working Off-Off-Broadway, got a string of parts in plays that featured a guy getting totally naked.  Apparently there was some sort of trend in early-millenial theater theory that a guy getting naked onsage was a good way to further a play's dramatic action or to salvage a foundering plot.  I went to a number of diverse plays by various playwrights in which a guy got naked, and would sit in the darkened house in a strange state of conflicting emotions that included both admiration for the naked actors' courage and heartfelt, head-hanging empathy for all those who had to share the stage with them.

To one of these cringeworthy naked-guy spectacles I once brought a boyfriend of recent vintage, and after the show we went out to eat at a nearby diner with my sister and a childhood friend.  My sister, our friend W., and I were giddy in the rush that follows any performance, even an embarrassing one.  We all ordered grilled-cheese sandwiches.  When it came time for Stoner-Carpenter Guy to order, however, he handed the menu back to the waitress with an air of noble renunciation, and said loftily, "Nothing for me."  Knowing he was a vegetarian, I helpfully suggested dishes like quiche or salad that would not be cooked, as our grilled-cheese sandwiches would, on a grill tainted with runoff from bacon cheeseburgers.  But as Stoner-Carpenter's demurrals became more insistent and began to take on an air of condescension, it occurred to me that he regarded us grilled-cheese eaters as persons to be pitied.  We thought nothing of the ethical contamination of our foodstuffs; indeed, we were happily munching away on cheese -- made with rennet, the lining of a cow's stomach -- pressed between packaged slices of non-whole-grain bread, all cooked together in animal fat.  While Stoner-Carpenter sipped his water, I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and cried.  It seemed to me that Stoner-Carpenter saw through me to the deep, dark truth within:  I was morally deformed, a lesser human, a fraud.  I had lost his love through my unethical eating, and this loss, as well as the fiasco the night was turning into, was clearly my own fault.  Our relationship would go on like this for two more years.

I thought of these things today, while buying coffee at a gas station during a road trip with my husband.  The gas station-convenience store milieu suddenly called up from my memory another road trip, taken with Stoner-Carpenter Guy one winter long ago, during which, when we got out at a truck stop somewhere in Pennsylvania, he ordered soup to go and requested, to the bemusement of the cashier, that it be packaged in a soda cup rather than in a styrofoam bowl (styrofoam being, of course, lethally toxic).  And then, from these memories on to the essential questions:  How do we live?  How do we hew to, and honor, the truth?  How are we to be authentic?

The practice of hesychasm, though it suggests a gradual winnowing away of everything in the seeker that is false and not conformed to Christ, turned out not to be the appropriate path for Salinger's Franny; as to my sister, I have my doubts that an esoteric spiritual practice rooted in a foreign culture can possibly lead to the capital-T truth (and, of course, as a Catholic I believe Buddhism is, if not a false path, at least an incomplete one).  As for Stoner-Carpenter Guy, not long after the grilled-cheese incident I came upon him, for all his public show of eating only bread at a dinner party I was giving, surreptitiously wolfing down bowls of bouillabaisse in a corner of the kitchen.  But it's a tricky thing to make food your god, and especially so if you believe that eating confers moral status upon the eater, or, conversely, strips it from him (and that illicit drug-taking has no similar effect upon the user).

I remain filled with a kind of awed respect for all those actors who gamely got completely naked in those Off-Off-Broadway shows years ago.  If only it were as easy for the rest of us to humble ourselves right down to nothingness like that, to strip off all that is non-essential, and to open ourselves completely, in the terrifying vulnerability of our pitiful nakedness, to God.

Music and Morals, Part 6: Augustine of Hippo

Today is the birthday of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church, who was born in 354 in what is now Algeria. Augustine's conversion from Manicheanism to Christianity was accomplished through the sense of hearing; as he wept in a garden in Milan, unable through the action of his will to free himself from his slavery to sexual sin, he heard the voice of a child repeating, "Pick up and read, pick up and read [tolle legge]." He picked up a Bible that was at hand, opened it, and read Saint Paul's instruction to the Romans:

Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in lusts (Romans 13:13-14)

and his conversion was complete.

Augustine, who had written the treatise De Musica before his conversion, struggled mightily afterward to define an appropriate Christian response to the sensual pleasures that music confers. In Book 10 of Confessions, he writes with palpable anxiety of the urge to

[have] the melody of all the sweet songs with which David's Psalter is commonly sung . . . banished not only from my own ears, but from the Church's as well.

He was ultimately able to reconcile his love of music with the hatred of the memory of sin that it evoked by rationalizing that it was not the singing that moved him, but rather the content of what was sung. Indeed, he frequently refers to his own conversion using the language of music, and, specifically, of singing. In Book 9 of Confessions, for instance, he writes of the desire to praise God for granting him the gift of faith by singing a song (invoking Psalm 26) from the very depths of his being:

[Converts wish] to sing from the marrow of our bones, "My heart has said to you, I have sought your face, your face [O Lord] I will require.

And in his Commentary on Psalm 32, Augustine glosses that Psalm's famous opening verse:

The old song belongs to our old selves, the new song is proper to persons made new . . . Brothers, sing well.

The liturgical music performed at his baptism seem to have entered as deepy into Augustine's physical body as into his soul, inpiring the cleansing tears that reflect the ritual water of baptism itself. Augustine describes it in Book 9:

I wept at your hymns and canticles, moved deeply by the sweetly-sounding voices of your church. The voices flooded into my ears, trut seeped into my heart, and . . . tears streamed down, and to me it seemed they were good.

In 1838, Franz Liszt wrote to his friend Joseph-Louis d'Ortigue about Raphael's painting of Saint Cecilia in ecstasy surrounded by SS. Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene (top; the second image is Botticelli's rendering of Augustine), which he had seen on a trip to Bologna. The painting impressed him deeply, and he interpreted it as an allegory of the artist's ability to perceive and propagate the divine truths revealed through the sort of heightened sense of hearing that had brought about Augustine's conversion itself. Liszt considered Cecilia, "that virgin, ecstatically transported above reality," to be the exemplar of the artist, who translates divine sounds in such a way that they can be understood by the masses, and he saw the three saints who flank her as representing varying degrees of comprehension of music. As he described Raphael's rendering of Augustine (second from right):

His face is serious and grieved . . . . Having waged a constant war against his senses, he is still fearful of the fleshly snares hidden in the appearance of a celestial vision . . . as one who had been seduced and transported far from God's way by the lure of paganism, he is asking himself . . . whether these harmonies that seeem to descend from heaven are not actually deceptive voices -- a contrivance of the devil, whose power he knows only too well.

May Saint Augustine intercede for us, that we may be given true hearing and be able to discern between the two.

Music and Morals, Part 5: Wannabe [A Guest Post by Really Rosie]

I made it through the wilderness
Somehow I made it through
Didn’t know how lost I was
Until I found you.
I was beat
Incomplete
I’d been had
I was sad and blue
But you made me feel
Yeah, you made me feel
Shiny and new.

When I mention to people that I was a Madonna wannabe (as in “I wanna be like Madonna!”), it makes them laugh. It’s not something you’d expect if you knew me. But somewhere between the time I was a little girl in pink smocked dresses and the time I was a straight-A high-schooler, there was Jamy, and there was Madonna.

We were eleven years old. Jamy was from the outskirts of the city, and I was a suburban girl. She was an only child and a latchkey kid, and the kind of girl who you knew would probably soon be into boys and drugs, but for the time being talked about prank calls and shoplifting and knew what clothes and music were cool. She used to make up elaborate fantasy games at recess, and sometimes I was lucky enough to be allowed to join in.

I adored Jamy, but I never felt secure in her esteem. I thought she was my best friend in the world, but each day when I came to school, she would name a different classmate who was her best friend. I would have done anything for her attention, which she gave to me sparingly and grudgingly. She made fun of me constantly: “Here I am, I’m Rosie, with my sandals and my dresses and my long hair, skipping down the street.” Or once she told me that she knew that whatever she said or did to me, I would still be her friend and follow her around. I would call her every night after dinner, and we would talk for a long time. My mother tried to convince me to skip a night and see if Jamy would call me, but I was sure that she wouldn’t, and that therefore the only way I could talk to her was if I did the calling.

Jamy knew what we should be “into,” and what she was into in 1985 was Madonna. It started with Jamy singing “Material Girl” and “Like a Virgin” and teaching them to me, and it evolved into full-on hero worship. Soon I was buying record albums with my tooth-fairy money and playing them on my Fisher-Price record player. I was memorizing lyrics and buying fan magazines, cutting out every picture of Madonna I could find, and collaging my bedroom walls. Jamy would sleep over, and we’d play records and dance, tie up our hair with tights and wear ripped clothes and proclaim ourselves “sleazy.”

The music was -- well, I didn’t exactly get it. I had to ask my mother what a virgin was, and I wasn’t quite sure I understood what “material” meant, even after it was explained to me. There was something that scared me a little about the song “Burning Up,” but I liked the opening notes of “Borderline,” and the exuberance of “Lucky Star.” I knew my parents disapproved of the lyrics, the sex, and the pseudo-Catholicism, which onl made me want to love the music more. I enjoyed the looks of shocked disbelief I got when my parents heard me sing a lyric like, “Unlike the others I’d do anything/I’m not the same, I have no shame/I’m on fire!”

I’m not sure when or how things went awry. I started getting into trouble at school. I was frequently made to sit in a chair in the hallway outside the classroom. I double and triple-pierced my ears with safety pins multiple times. I wore eyeliner, rubber bracelets, and fingerless gloves. I started shaving my legs. Once or twice I went to school wearing only a thigh-length black t-shirt and underpants. I started getting into fistfights. I kicked another girl in the head once after I’d already pushed her down. I was angry and hurt and I stopped letting people touch me. Once I half-heartedly tried to strangle myself in the back room at school with the long plastic bead necklace I was wearing. I got suspended and nearly flunked out of sixth grade.

Maybe it was because of Jamy’s fair-weather friendship, or maybe the music that I played constantly but barely understood; but, whatever the reasons, I started hating myself. I used to lie on my bed and gaze up at the life-size poster of Madonna and take everything in, the "Boy Toy" belt, the messy bed-head, the crucifixes, the gloves, the half-closed eyes and half-open mouth. I would wonder who she was, what she was thinking, what she could teach me. And I would wonder who I was. Would Madonna save me from myself if I was her number-one fan? In the rare photos of me taken at that time, I look angry and lost.

When I was twelve, my parents decided at take me and my three younger brothers to Israel in anticipation of my bat mitzvah. I didn’t want to go. Why should I go to a far-away country that had nothing to do with me, to celebrate a milestone that I wasn’t even sure I cared about?

We stayed in Israel for a full month, touring around the country and visiting relatives. My father had hired Laura, a young American ex-pat, to drive us around in a van and serve as our tour guide. And somehow -- starting on the first day we arrived in Israel, and Laura led us through a little Havdalah service, the closing prayers at the end of the Jewish Sabbath, in front of the Western Wall -- I felt something inside me change. There was something familiar to me in the stones of Jerusalem, the green and blue of the Galilee, and the dust of Masada. There was something lyrical in the spoken Hebrew that I’d always found to be so obtuse on the page. Something sweet to be tasted in the persimmons and even the lemons from the tree in my cousins’ backyard. I had always believed in God, but Israel was a whole country of holiness. I opened myself to the experience, and was amazed at what I saw and felt.

And as I am as influenced by people as I am by countries, or music, or literature, I watched Laura. I saw her wait three hours between eating meat and eating dairy and resolved to do the same. She heard me singing in the back of the van and told me I had a nice voice; it made me want to sing more. And I found myself singing not Madonna, but the prayers from the children’s Shabbat service: “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel!” Laura told me I was pretty; it made me examine myself in the mirror.

When I came back from the trip, I couldn’t wait to finally call Jamy and tell her all about it. I dialed the phone, breathless with excitement, and Jamy answered. Before I could even begin, she said, in her usual scathing tone, “I’d personally never go to that country. So dangerous, with all those Arabs. . .” And I never heard the end of her thought, because I hung up on her. Two or three days later, for the first time ever, Jamy called me. And I told my mother to tell her I wasn’t home.

Perhaps it was right after I had hung up on Jamy, or perhaps it was a day or two later, but I soon realized that I could no longer listen to Madonna. She wasn’t who I wanted to emulate, she wasn’t the direction I wanted my life to take. Where in her music was the music of the Jerusalem souk, the cool salty thickness of the Dead Sea, the green of the olive trees? I had seen and felt beauty, and it wasn’t Madonna. I went into my bedroom and tore down every single picture. For years afterwards, I would have to resist the urge to run when I heard a Madonna song on the radio.

I listened to the song “Like a Virgin” today. It’s bubble-gum pop at its worst: synthesizer, drum machine, untrained vocals. Madonna sounds like she’s singing in a tunnel and using only part of her voice; you want to tell her to try to breathe and use the whole instrument. She sighs; she moans a little. The words fail to titillate or shock me anymore; perhaps they were always this devoid of the forbidden mystery of sex, but I just didn’t know it at eleven.

I suppose we are constantly asking ourselves who we want to be. For a while, it looked like I really could have become a juvenile delinquent. Instead, I threw myself wholeheartedly into Judaism for a time. It still colors my life, my actions, my decisions, the way I see the world. I have been and I am an actor, a wife, a mother. Who I want to be is always evolving. One thing I know for sure, though, especially when I revisit her music: I don’t want to be like Madonna.

Music and Morals, Part 4

I just got back from a mini-road trip to another city where my husband had a job interview. On the way back, the muffler fell off our car -- luckily, near an exit on the interstate -- and we found a muffler shop where the kind young auto-body fellow fixed it free of charge. My son and I waited in the front of the shop, where the radio, predictably, was tuned to a classic rock station. The Who's 1975 song "Squeeze Box," which I hadn't heard in years, came on, and I found myself listening carefully and liking it in spite of myself. It's a well-crafted and well-played song, with some nice touches, like the entrance of the banjo in the third chorus, and Roger Daltrey's funny and skillful imitation of a woman's voice in a verse repetition, while all but the rhythm instruments drop out. I almost sang along, and then I felt abashed, because I really shouldn't like this song; it is, after all, completely and pointlessly obscene.

This got me thinking about rock music in general. It's not exactly news that both the music and the lyrics of a great deal of rock exploit human longing, especially sexual longing. Does this mean that someone who is trying to carry out the injunction to chastity according to one's state in life is bound to abjure rock? Does rock provide an open door to sexual temptation? This raises further questions: does rock lend itself particularly well to other kinds of exploitation, for instance, the manipulation of human loneliness and vulnerability by the advertising industry to sell products? Is there a rock-industrial complex?

One of my favorite albums of all time is Liz Phair's 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, which Phair claimed was a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones's Exile on Main Street. The album is raw and brilliant, and I don't think anything she's done since comes close to it in quality. But I gave my copy away, along with a lot of other things, when I got married; I don't think I would listen to it now.

I remember having a discussion once with my late friend and mentor John Allitt about the Beatles. I was chagrined to hear him place much of the responsibility for the disintegration of British society in the 1960s at their feet. John had seen many of his students at the Central College of Art in London go over the edge on drugs, and he believed that the Beatles's music and espoused philosophies had spurred these students onward to destruction. Could he really mean it? The Beatles, arguably as important to Western music as Brahms, and as well-loved by me? Could he possibly be right? Then again, how is a Beatles-loving Christian supposed to take John Lennon's utopian, anti-Christian sentiments in "Imagine"? If you love this music, are you supposed to view it through a lens of ironic distance or cultural superiority?

St. Augustine of Hippo, who had loved music prior to his conversion, struggled mightily afterward with what might constitute a Christian response to the sensual pleasre that music evokes. He went so far as to describe in his Confessions his urge to have "the whole melody of sweet music which is used to David’s Psalter, banished from my ears, and the Church’s too." He was able to quell his conscience on this matter by focusing on the texts rather than the melodies.

Fellow interpreters on the blogosphere (to use Kyle Cupp's felicitous phrase), what do you think?

Music and Morals: Bach

Around the time that my first marriage was ending, I started working with yet another new voice coach. (Not exactly voice teachers, coaches are generally pianists who have a great deal of familiarity with and, at best, love for and insight into the classical vocal repertoire; their job is to help singers learn how to put it across in stylistically appropriate ways. Voice teachers mostly stick to technique.)

In addition to being a monster pianist, this coach possessed several unique characteristics. He hated opera, but coached it to pay the bills; his real love was art song. It was mine too. I had long dreamed of having a career as a recitalist, but my teachers had told me that it wasn't possible for an American singer to do so. So I had jumped onto the opera treadmill in the hope of having a great career that would one day permit me to do the music I really wanted to do -- the sort of career that the very fortunate (and deserving) Dawn Upshaw has had.

When my first marriage ended, however, I found that I no longer had the heart for opera. I just couldn't go on another audition. I was five minutes late for one of the last auditions I ever took, with a famous genre-specialist conductor who lived overseas, but whose tours to the cultural centers of the United States and recordings of rarely-performed operas were wildly popular among music enthusiasts. When his people squeezed me in despite my throwing off the scheduled list of singers by five minutes, the famous man talked on his cell phone during my entire aria. My manager was appalled by the disrespect I had implied by being late, and I wondered myself if there weren't something Freudian about it, but my voice teacher simply rolled her eyes when I told her what had happened. "He's lucky you weren't five hours late," she said. "This is New York."

In the meantime, as my opera career and my life were unraveling, I began to feel a strong rapport with my new, opera-hating coach. I even asked him to play my last few opera auditions as my accompanist, because, in spite of the fact that he hated the repertoire, he could play the hell out of it. In private, we worked together on music that we both loved -- songs by Brahms, Schumann, Messiaen -- and talked idly of doing recital tours.

Another thing that was unique about this coach was that he was straight. In fact, he was married, and I had at one time heard vague rumors that he had been abusive to his wife, who sang at the Metropolitan Opera. They seemed to be happy enough now, though she was often away on singing jobs.

The weekend after my first husband moved out, the coach called me up. His wife was out of town, and he wanted to pay me a visit. I was distraught that morning, and, if I recall correctly, drinking in bed. I thought, why not? But then somehow I got hold of myself and called him back to ask him not to come. I don't know how it happened that I was seized by a sudden attack of virtue -- I'd hardly been a paragon of it lately -- but I was extremely relieved. I never saw him again.

Something that the coach said to me during our work together stands out in my memory. Music, he said, was about the moral virtues. To illustrate this point, he told me that he woke up at 5 AM every day to play Bach's two-part keyboard inventions -- perhaps the purest, most cerebral, and, in a sense, the loneliest and most chaste music that the Western art music tradition has ever produced. (To listen to Glenn Gould playing Invention no. 2 in C minor, go here.)