Beauty: Let it Kill You

Heather King has linked to a very good essay by English pianist James Rhodes, published a few months ago in the Guardian, about the sacrifices, existential and ethical as well as physical and material, that Rhodes has made in order to be a musician. Rhodes writes (quite accurately, as any working classical musician or singer can tell you):

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching) . . . And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of, that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary.

The "and yet" part is one of the great, secret pleasures, I think, of any classical musician's life. There is a quiet but profound elation at opening a fresh piece of music and settling in to work. A young musician, to paraphrase Stanislavsky, practices his art because he loves to hear himself in it; but as you advance in that art, you begin to fall in love with practice itself. You come to love the protecting walls of even of the most moldy practice rooms, the ones with the broken piano benches, the missing ceiling tiles, and the garbage cans stuffed with half-full cups of deli coffee; such places become your kingdom of solitude, your secret laboratory, the place where you shuck off the shell of the mundane world and become better than you are. And you also come to love the methods, the process of taking apart a piece: phrase by phrase, working those phrases backwards, forwards, in triplets, in dotted rhythm, in reverse dotted rhythm, using different vowel sounds, in different keys, etc. Maybe the dawn of this very particular kind of love is one of the reasons classical musicians appear to exhibit more autistic traits than the general population.    

Using Rhodes's essay as a starting point, Heather suggests that the necessary sacrifices an artist makes -- the eschewing, or the loss, of love, financial security, success, and emotional stability -- can be a unique imitation of Christ:

If you want to be an artist, you have to be willing to be totally ripped apart. Maybe that's why we don't have more Catholic writers (and painters, and poets, and composers, and musicians). Maybe we lack the willingness to be ripped apart...to let grace work its violence on us. To wait for a wedding that may or may not ever come, practicing, practicing, practicing. Preparing, hoping, praying, waiting. . . . There is nothing more Catholic than letting ourselves be killed by love. 

Indeed, though one often hears platitudinous reassurances from teachers and mentors that you don't HAVE to to be unhappy to be an artist, one sometimes suspects that these mentors are just trying to stave off the ruining of their students' lives. Who are these happy artists our teachers allege exist? And do we admire them? Edvard Munch said, "Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. . . .My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art." Conversely, Gustave Flaubert wrote:  "To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

Beethoven is known to have been a difficult and not very nice guy who was at times wildly unhappy, unhappy to the point of suicide when he realized that his hearing loss would eventually be profound deafness. He wrote in 1802, in a letter found after his death which has become known as the Heiligenstadt Testament:

Divine One thou lookest into my inmost soul, thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to do good live therein. . . . With joy I hasten towards death [but]  if it comes before I shall have had an opportunity to show all my artistic capacities it will still come too early for me despite my hard fate and I shall probably wish it had come later - but even then I am satisfied, will it not free me from my state of endless suffering? Come when thou will I shall meet thee bravely. - Farewell and do not wholly forget me when I am dead.

To echo Heather's point, the sacrifice that Beethoven made in his terrible unhappiness -- the decision to forestall his own longed-for death and to continue living a life of suffering until he had brought out of himself all the beauty that he wanted to give to humanity -- is Christ-like. 

I'm not sure that great art and happiness are compatible, and, for the selfish reason that I get to be wrenched open by the  profound understanding of the human spirit that is evident in his playing, I'm rather glad that James Rhodes does not live a bourgeois life of comfort and forced good cheer.

Vivian Marie Cupp

Kyle Cupp of Journeys in Alterity and Vox Nova lost his baby daughter yesterday, fifteen hours after her birth, due to the effects of anencephaly, which had been diagnosed in utero. Throughout their pregnancy, Kyle and his wife Genece were brave and loving witnesses to mercy and life. May God comfort them, and may Saint Vivian Marie pray for us.

The Binding of Isaac and the Problem of Happiness

In the first reading for Mass yesterday, God famously puts Abraham to the test (Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18). I sat in the pew for a long time after the end of Mass trying to puzzle this one out. Why would God, who abhors human sacrifice, compel Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac -- the child of destiny whose descendants God had promised would be more numerous than the stars of the sky?

We have come to think of Isaac as a young boy, but, according to ancient interpretation, he was in fact a grown man who, along with his father, dutifully obeyed the command of the Lord and allowed himself to be bound and led willingly to the holocaust. As Christians, we see the Abraham-Isaac dyad as a type, a prefiguring, of God's later sacrifice of His only son. We know God's later sacrifice too to be sui generis, unique in history, and yet it happens every day in bloodless form in the Masses that are said upon all the millions of altars throughout the world. Can we understand God's own sacrifice, happening both in time and in eternity, as therefore in some sense coming before Abraham's test, and also as co-existing in time with it?

It has seemed to me in observing the lives of some very holy people that God has sometimes asked them for what they love the most dearly. Again, I have to wonder why. The testimonies of priests and religious whom I know suggests that they are happy; that is, that only after giving up the fulfillments, both real and tenuous, of the wordly life have they been able to find happiness. Does this mean that, after giving up what God wants of us, we will be happy? I've never been convinced that living happily in this life is part of God's divine plan for His people. But if we are not happy, how can we serve Him? As the Psalmist asks, "Can the dust praise you?" How could Abraham fulfill his destiny if God took from him the only thing that had meaning and value for him -- that is, the only thing after God? And it is not any generic taking-away; God told Abraham to slay his son with his own hand.

The Binding of Isaac is a radical, shocking text, and I'm not entirely sure what it means. One thing that strikes me about it, though, is Abraham's attentive listening to the voice of God. When God and "the Lord's messenger" call to him, he answers, "Here I am!" with alacrity. Maimonides suggested that Abraham heard God's command to slaughter Isaac in a prophetic vision -- in this case, an auditory vision -- which suggests that we need to listen for the voice of God in a particular way. But how will we know when we hear it?