Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
Where did the voice come from? I hunted through the rooms
For that small boy, that high, that head-voice,
The clatter as his heels caught on the door,
A shadow just caught moving through the door
Something like a school-satchel. My wife
Didn't seem afraid, even when it called for food.
She smiled and turned her book and said:
"I couldn't go and love the empty air."
We went to bed. Our dreams seemed full
Of boys in one or another guise, the paper-boy
Skidding along in grubby jeans, a music-lesson
She went out in the early afternoon to fetch a child from.
I pulled up from a pillow damp with heat
And saw her kissing hers, her legs were folded
Far away from mine. A pillow! It seemed
She couldn't love the empty air.
Perhaps, we thought, a child had come to grief
In some room in the old house we kept,
And listened if the noises came from some special room,
And then we'd take the boards up and discover
A pile of dusty bones like charcoal twigs and give
The tiny-sounding ghost a proper resting-place
So that it need not wander in the empty air.
No blood-stained attic harboured the floating sounds,
We found they came in rooms that we'd warmed with our life.
We traced the voice and found where it mostly came
From just underneath both our skins, and not only
In the night-time either, but at the height of noon
And when we sat at meals alone. Plainly, this is how we found
That love pines loudly to go out to where
It need not spend itself on fancy and the empty air.
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.
[UPDATE 7/31/11: It has come to my attention that this post has angered some men who identify as Traditionalist, or who may be sympathetic to Traditionalism. Readers who are new here should know that in this post, and on this blog in general, I speak solely of my own experience. I mean no harm to anyone, Trad or otherwise, and my intention with this post was certainly not to sow further division among Catholic men and women, but to acknowledge that we are all deeply wounded, and to pray for the healing of all, both as individuals and as members of the Mystical Body.]
When, after a lackadaisical childhood catechesis, years spent doing my own thing, and a dramatic conversion experience, I came back to the Catholic Church in 2002, I found that there was a New York City subculture I had never known existed: the subculture of young orthodox and Traditionalist Catholics. Many of this subculture’s adherents were actively looking for a mate, and I dated a few of them, which was an experience unlike anything I was familiar with from my own long romantic struggles.
Many of the men in this subculture were what I can only call essentially wounded in their masculinity. It was as if their self-identification as men had been haphazardly constructed out of subersive images of masculinity refracted to them from the culture; as if, finding certain norms of masculinity repellent (not without reason, it must be said), and not having had male role models to demonstrate for them any ontological qualities of manhood, these young men had skirted around the edges of male behavior, and had finished by taking affect for essence. Their own masculinity seemed to have been forged in opposition and negation, cobbled together out of strong, oppositional attitudes to what repelled them culturally, rather than out of any positive attitudes, such as the wish to take on essential male roles -- engaging, for instance, in meaningful ways in the existential struggle to fight real enemies, and providing for and protecting the vulnerable, including women and children. In addition, some of these men seemed to have self-consciously adopted certain styles, tastes, hobbies, and mannerisms associated with other times and places than twenty-first-century New York, identifying themselves more with, say, Europe before World War I, or fin-de-siècle Paris, or the New York of the Gilded Age. One man from this set whom I dated asked me seriously once whether I considered myself American (he didn’t, in spite of the fact that, like me, he was).
I do not mean to suggest that these men were homosexual. As far as their actual sexual problems and proclivities went, I did not get close enough to any of them to be able to speak with any authority. However, I began to believe that the one I got closest to had a problem with pornography based on one or two little hints he let drop, and also on the fact that, after we’d decided to be “just friends” and I got engaged to someone else, he emailed me some disturbing soft-porn images of an Eastern European dominatrix whom, he said, I resembled. This man was employed in a field related to Catholic apologetics, and I'm not saying that to be a successful, or even a sincere, apologist, one must be free of dark sexual neuroses and addictions. Only God knows what is in the hearts of any of us, including, as we have seen lately in the case of the disgraced Fr. Corapi, in the heart of the priest who is saying Mass, and in the hearts of those who appear to be the most holy. Only God knows what snares they must outrun each and every day of their lives in order to escape falling into the hells that are peculiarly painful and horrible and familiar just to them. But I am saying that the combination of qualities that I saw in this man -- a shrinking from true, essential masculinity, a way of being a man that in fact seemed gerry-built upon opposition to cultural standards of masculinity, a self-professed orthodox Catholicism veering towards Traditionalism, and some deep-seated sexual problems -- struck me as disturbingly emblematic of a certain kind of orthodox Catholic man.
In other parts of what someone has called "Catholic Blogistan," the “sola skirtura” debate rages on. This debate couldn’t be more preposterous, or a less compelling use of mental energy, to me personally, but my background is different from that of most of the people who frequent these particular Catholic areas of the interwebs. For some of the skirts-only enthusiasts, it's ostensibly a question of femininity. For others, it's a question of women in pants committing some kind of sin against God and man by allowing the outline of their lower body to be seen, rather than inferred. While these arguments are not interesting to me, however, the evidently torrid atmosphere from which they arise is. I can't help but thinking that men who get hot and bothered about whether women wear pants are coming from a place that I can only call sexually troubled, and it reminds me of the sexual woundedness I encountered in the men of the orthodox Catholic subculture into which I ventured after my reversion.
I do not mean to suggest that I am not sexually wounded myself. I am. And, as I mentioned earlier, neither am I suggesting that sexually-wounded men cannot be effective apologists. They can. It is when they write or speak out of a poorly-hidden crisis in their own masculinity, which I believe is a reflection of a cultural crisis of essential masculinity, that I get worried for women. Some orthodox Catholic men, on the one hand, appear to be trying to regain an impossible Edenic ideal of manhood and fatherhood that they may never have seen or experienced in their own lives. Others, though perhaps unconsciously, appear to do everything possible to avoid the self-sacrifice called for in marriage and fatherhood by attempting to disassociate themselves from any accepted cultural norms of masculinity, and, in so doing, fail to present themselves to eligible women as viable potential husbands and fathers.
The same man who sent me the dominatrix pictures before my marriage confided in me his great fear -- a phobia, really -- of one day having a child with Down syndrome. His revulsion for children with Down syndrome was so unusual that I wondered if it was, like his apparent attraction to S&M pornography, another part of his wounded masculinity, as if being unable to love the obviously disabled were somehow connected to preferring exaggerated images of unbalanced sexual power to the vulnerability (and, one could say, the shame) of a sexual relationship between normal, fallen, imperfect, broken husbands and wives. (It has occurred to me that, as much as I may or may not resemble an Eastern European dominatrix, he would have been terribly disappointed and unhappy being married to me. And if we had been married, and had happened to have disabled children, as I do with the man whom I did marry, I doubt he would have stuck around too long).
I have no answers to the problems of wounded masculinity and femininity in the Church. We are all essentially broken, after all. Nonetheless, when one of us is wounded in this fundamental way, and acts out of his woundedness, and does damage to others as a result of it, the entire Mystical Body of Christ suffers. I hope and pray that priests and laypeople may work together to heal the wounded -- i.e., our brothers and sisters and ourselves -- which I think would go a long way towards healing relationships between Catholic men and women.
This is the day 156 years ago that Walt Whitman self-published his first edition of Leaves of Grass. It began with a preface that would be left out of future editions, which read in part:
The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven
and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes
… but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than [their] beauty and
dignity [. . . ] … they expect him to
indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women
perceive the beauty well enough … [. . . ] The
passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of
gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the
manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light
and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception
of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people [. . . ]
The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract
addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but
is the life of these and much else and is in the soul [. . . ] This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the
stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the
people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or
number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the
young and with the mothers of families . . .
This song has been on my mind. It seems to me such an essentially American song: simple, strophic, tuneful, and mournful, sharing its themes -- of a trip taken far from home, of loneliness, of a kind of exile imposed in equal measures by the exigencies of circumstance, and by those arising from personal shame and pride -- with other great American songs (like "Poor Wayfaring Stranger," for instance, or Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"). It's supposed to have been written by Hedy West, a singer on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late 1950s-early 1960s, who based it on songs sung by her Appalachian grandmother, and wrote it from the point of view of a railroader.
My friend Rodak has recently made me a Peter, Paul, and Mary convert (which didn't take much), and here is their almost-heartbreaking version of the song:
Here is Joan Baez's winningly ingenuous version.
And perhaps my favorite, by the Australian group The Seekers, which sounds slick in comparison to the simplicity of the others, but whose beauty can't be denied.
Warning: if you dislike reading about poop, venture no further.
My son, whom his preschool teachers call "brilliant," scores in the mentally-retarded range on IQ tests because of his near-total non-compliance. He can memorize a book or a song after a first hearing, but our daily violin practice sessions are fraught by my continual redirection of his efforts, and by my own efforts to quell my frustration at his insistence on "playing it my way." I picture myself jumping to my feet and shouting, "This is MUSIC, dammit! This is only the single most important thing in the created world!" but I manage to restrain myself, because he's five years old. (I was going to write, "because he's five years old and has special needs," but his ability to comprehend the importance of music is not one of them.)
Yesterday we were having one of our frequent bathroom struggles, in which he refuses to poop, swears he doesn't have to, flings himself to the floor and lashes out, screams and cries, has to be physically transported to the toilet, and then sits meekly and finishes his business. The process is generally quite demoralizing to me. Yesterday, after having plunked him down on the toilet, I went into the other room to catch up on some ironing, and thought maybe I could snatch a few minutes to practice before he needed me to help him wipe. The motion of the body in ironing, it seemed to me, would pose no obstacle, and might perhaps even by an aid, to working on certain vocal technical issues. Singing, after all, is a physiological process that involves the fluid motion of the entire body, usually enacted in subtle movements which audiences do not see.
As I stood ironing and singing, however, my focus was interrupted by other concerns. I thought of a poem I'd read in college by Tess Gallagher:
I Stop Writing the Poem
to fold the clothes. No matter who lives or who dies, I'm still a woman. I'll always have plenty to do. I bring the arms of his shirt together. Nothing can stop our tenderness. I'll get back to the poem. I'll get back to being a woman. But for now there's a shirt, a giant shirt in my hands, and somewhere a small girl standing next to her mother watching to see how it's done.
And, for some reason, a totally unrelated piece by Schubert came rushing into my head, a piece I've never sung because it's for tenor or high soprano, the little chamber scena "Auf dem Strom" (On the River). (I do not have time to write my own translation, so I am copying someone else's of the poem by Ludwig Rellstab.)
Take the last parting kiss, and the wavy greeting that I'm still sending ashore before you turn your feet and leave! Already the waves of the stream are pulling briskly at my boat, yet my tear-dimmed gaze keeps being tugged back by longing!
And so the waves bear me forward with unsympathetic speed. Ah, the fields have already disappeared where I once discovered her! Blissful days, you are eternally past! Hopelessly my lament echoes around my fair homeland, where I found her love.
See how the shore dashes past; yet how drawn I am to cross: I'm pulled by unnameable bonds to land there by that little hut and to linger there beneath the foliage; but the waves of the river hurry me onward without rest, leading me out to the sea!
Ah, before that dark wasteland far from every smiling coast, where no island can be seen - oh how I'm gripped with trembling horror! Gently bringing tears of grief, songs from the shore can no longer reach me; only a storm, blowing coldly from there, can cross the grey, heaving sea!
If my longing eyes, surveying the shore, can no longer glimpse it, then I will gaze upward to the stars into that sacred distance! Ah, beneath their placid light I once called her mine; there perhaps, o comforting future! there perhaps I shall meet her gaze.
I recalled how, in the 1990s, my teacher A.B. had had a famous coloratura soprano in his studio. She lived in California and flew to New York for her lessons, and my knees would invariably turn to jelly and I would inevitably choke up when, having the lesson time after mine, she would open the studio door while I was working. One day, A.B. remarked to me that she was performing "Auf dem Strom" in a famous summer music festival. "Oh, I love that piece!" I gushed. He laughed me off, explaining that it was dreck.
Oh no, it was not dreck. How could A.B. and his prominent pupil gang up on "Auf dem Strom" like that -- on the gently-resigned opening melody in the french horn, drifting down, as it were, from a distant rise on the other side of the river as the speaker's small boat is already picking up speed in the current and bearing him away; on those lovely, arching vocal phrases, so full of longing and loss, but also of hope? No, the piece was beautiful, was true, even. It was, quite possibly, even healing.
Yesterday, as I stood there ironing and waiting for my son to finish in the bathroom, I realized that I hadn't heard it or thought of it in years, but the delicate phrase, repeated in the coda, "Ach, bei ihren milden Scheine/Nannt' ich sie zuerst die Meine" (Ah, beneath [the stars'] placid light, I once called her mine) flooded into the ear of my memory, and I thought that perhaps I too, one day, might be able to greet music once again as an old friend, might even be able to take hold of her as a balm for the healing of myself and others.
The main reason that I was hired to do the translation I mentioned in the post just below this one was that the author of the original piece, who is not a musician but a scholar in another field, wanted someone who could translate from the Italian and who was also familiar with the terminology of free jazz. I was his girl because, notwithstanding my training as a classcial musician, I am familiar with that terminology. One of my brothers is a successful jazz player, in the sense that he's only ever made his living from gigging (although, in recent years, he's supplemented it with teaching). Another brother started as a jazz player, later moving into music composition and criticism. My two brothers schooled me early in the idioms of jazz, and as a teenager I wanted to make my career in it, too. It was a boyfriend back then -- also, incidentally, a jazz player -- who suggested that, since I had a "real voice," I should continue my classical work and see where it took me.
Working on this demanding translating job has brought faded bits of my apprenticeship as a singer floating up like scraps of paper stirred up into miniature vortices by the wind on street corner. I thought of life with M., who, although he was a conceptual artist, always maintained that his greatest influences were not from other artists but werein fact from free jazz players. The essay I translated dealt with the metapsychological bases for improvisation, and quoted several of the players M. (and my brothers) had admired, including Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill, and Steve Lacy. As I worked late into the night to meet the publisher's deadline, I thought about my old life, which, though not perhaps influenced by free jazz to the extent that M.'s and my brothers' were, was yet marked by improvisation in just every one of its emanations.
Before I met M., I was rolling with a crowd of free-living theater and performance artists. I had decided that the jazzer boyfriend who pushed me toward the classical style was hopelessly dull, and I eventually ditched both him and his advice. I had become convinced that classical singing had no real meaning or place in contemporary life, and that I was called to do something more meaningful. Toward this end, I planned vaguely to make theater pieces based on a fixed vocabulary of words and gestures, which would be determined by an aleatory system. I actually started to make a deck of cards -- heavy paper on which I pasted various pictures culled from old Sotheby's auction catalogues, dried leaves, photos of friends, and images cut from zines -- that I was going to invest with a vocabulary of words, sounds, gestures, and meanings and use to create my pieces. I never actually got around to doing this; instead, I met M. He came to see me in a performance art piece at a downtown gallery, and thought it was silly. "Why don't you just sing?" he wondered. So, because he wanted it, I did.
I observed the way he worked at his own art. He worked at a bread gig during the day, making just enough money to live on, and then painted far into the night. He drank whiskey and listened to Steve Lacy and the Art Ensemble of Chicago while doing so. He read art theory and experimental novels. If I ever got sick (which I did rather frequently in those days, since I was poor and badly nourished) and couldn't sing for a few days, the whole world would become black for me; but M. advised me to work on my craft in other ways instead: to translate my pieces, for instance, and to do harmonic analyses. Cheered by this advice, I did, and I also created my own regimen of discipline that went far beyond these suggestions; I began to think about diction, and to ponder not only the sounds of the sung languages, but even the meanings of the sounds themselves. I read my scores as if they were novels, and began to understand music on a new level as I teased out the answers to the questions of why the composer set each word the way he did. I barricaded myself in the Lincoln Center Library's Rogers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound on Saturdays, where I would listen to every recording I could find of the pieces I was working on, the older the better. After I went back to school, I read seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century treatises on vocal technique and pedagogy. In short, I immersed myself in my art and learned everything I possibly could about it.
All of this changed me. I was no longer an experimental hanger-on from the Lower East Side. I was a serious artist. As I became a good singer, and, later, as I began to get work in my field, I started to think about the greater implications of my craft. What had been an individual discipline -- in some ways, a discipline that saved me from myself, and kept me from completely falling apart when life was at its worst -- became a key to something greater than the individual and her unique hardships. What I wanted more than anything was to reveal the beauty of the created world and of the human spirit in the music I sang, and to do so in a way that would bring audiences with me to a profound experience of our shared humanity. The further I went in my profession, the more consistently this shared experience was an outcome of my performances.
As I neglected my home and family last week to finish the translating job, I began to wonder how I found myself there, sitting at my desk in Northern Appalachia with three different Italian dictionaries open around me, striving to turn Italian academic writing, which even at its very best is almost never good, into readable English. What had happened to my world of beauty, I wondered, and why had God put me here, in a place whose ethos I still don't understand, and where beauty and connection have so often been replaced by loneliness and strife? I googled a few of my old art-world friends; they seem for the most part to be doing quite well and working steadily, though none will ever be famous. I wondered at that, since I feel that I am making myself more and more obscure and unknown in every way. I'm sure this is something necessary for my salvation as a semi-reformed diva bitch, but nonetheless, if God has given me the means and the tools to reveal beauty to those who are hungry for it -- who need it -- and if the pursuit of that revealing nourishes my soul as well, then why must I be so far from the former life, in which that pursuit made up the greatest part of my hours and my thoughts? Beauty is so elusive here; other values, in this place, crowd it out. Nonetheless, I believe it can be found, dug out, mined from any ground, and that in the place where I now live it is thirsted for more desperately, so I plod on desultorily, and try to put myself in its way.
In a thousand years I'll never be able to find this reference, but I swear up and down that the excellent New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast drew a cartoon titled thusly once long ago. I saw it in a book, and it made me laugh every time I thought of it for years afterward, and the text even became a running joke which my old friend Bob and I used to repeat to each other at opportune moments. That text follows here, as closely as I can remember it, panel by panel; just picture the matching illustrations:
Peter Pan -- what is?
Is pan with personality what flies around.
Is likened by children.
And then another panel that I no longer remember.
All of this is to say that I'm on blogging lockdown for a few days because of an extremely demoralizing translation from the Italian that I'm working on for a forthcoming scholarly anthology. I've already missed several deadlines, so must buckle down. Oh, and I've learned a lesson that I will pass on to you here: if you ever do any freelance work of any kind whatsoever, even if the work you're doing is, for, say, the friend of a friend, draw up a contract and have it signed by both parties.
As any classical musician in America can tell you, the Glee-like social ostracism of band, orchestra, and choir geeks doesn't end in high school, unless you go to conservatory right after graduating. This was not the case for me; while I received my M.M. at a conservatory, and my doctorate in the music department of a large university, I attended a liberal-arts college, where I was a socially-ostracized-music-geek undergraduate voice major. To complicate things further, I had a work-study job in the music library, with a shift on Friday nights, which limited my extra-musical weekend socializing, and to make matters even worse, the music building, which was open all night, drew me like a scrap of iron ore straight to the motherlode. Turn down the chance to practice at two in the morning? Not this girl. And, having a key to the music library, I could also sneak in and study scores and listen to obscure recordings all night long, which is what I did, and which, moreover, is how I first discovered such gems as Harry Partch's Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Transcriptions:
and a large chunk of John Cage's recorded oeuvre, among many other treasures.
One year, my piano professor wanted me to audition for the music department's annual concerto competition -- on the piano. I knew I would never be able to practice enough to get to the technical level required, and that it would be folly to compete against real pianists when I was not one. Professor R. was a real pianist with a solid performing and teaching career who commuted to my college from New York, where she also served on the faculty of a major conservatory, so I was surprised by and a little mistrustful of her enthusiasm for my playing. She explained to me that I had innate musicality, a gift, she said, which can't be taught, and she wanted to bring my piano technique up to the level of my natural musical proficiency. I was flattered, but I turned her down. I was a singer, and it was hard enough bringing my technique up to snuff as a singer, let alone spreading it thin between two equally-demanding instruments.
I was nevertheless delighted and honored when Professor R. asked me to be her page-turner for a performance of the rarely-heard Brahms Piano Quartet Op. 60, no. 1 in C Minor. Chamber music is my great love, and I knew I would learn invaluable lessons about ensemble music-making by observing her and her colleagues at close range in their rehearsals, and I did. I also came to know and love the gorgeous third-movement Andante, with its heart-stopping cello solo, truly one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written:
There was a beautiful young man at my college, with long, flowing hair, about whom I began to concoct elaborate romantic fantasies to the soundtrack of the Brahms Op. 60 no. 1 Third Movement Andante. I never expected him to cast a glance my way. Why would he? The other girls at my school were beautiful and rich, and I was ethnic-looking, and from a family that my best friend described as "middle-class poor." And to top it off, I was a music geek down to my very bones. Besides, he had a long-time girlfriend.
One night I saw him eating dinner in one of the campus's smaller dining rooms. On the table across from him lay a white rose. "Would you like to have dinner with me?" he asked, as I walked past with my tray. "I'm having dinner with a rose." I couldn't believe it. In a swoon, I sat down. I have no idea what we said, but I remember that he was sensitive, poetic -- and he had that hair.
In the middle of our dinner, his girlfriend walked in, saw us, wordlessly plucked the white rose off our table, threw it with dramatic flourish into the nearest garbage can, and marched out. So much for Brahms.
Brahms, you old Master! You weaver of dreams, you
liar! You encourage my “hopeless romanticism” and you know it! Life is
not as colourful as you would have us believe! Of course you know that
I know, and I can hear you laughing.
You dear Master, you! You—and the worthless dreams
you sell me! No, keep them coming. Weave on and on. Go from here to the
depths, then further into the depths, then rise up again—portray that
impossibly rich, romantic world as you always do. If only life were
really as romantic.
. . . . If only life were so rich.
If only life were so rich.
Last weekend I participated in a house concert here in my new town, to which, it seems, the toniest local classical musicians were invited to perform. While most of the singers sang transcriptions of opera arias, I sang Brahms's incomparable art song "Unbewegte laue Luft" (my translation here), which has been called a "Tristan und Isolde of the Lied." When I had finished, a sort of sigh rose up from the audience. A very old woman told me, afterward, that she had cried, and the head of the voice faculty at the local public university (who knows
me and my work, but can't offer me even an adjunct position because of a
statewide hiring freeze) said afterward, "I'm so glad you sang that.
People need to hear it."
Oh, yes, I agree. People need to hear Brahms; they need that stirring, rushing, choking, devastating beauty, that beauty that makes their veins throb with teeming life. Or maybe they don't. It made an old lady cry, after all. Perhaps the writer of the short-lived "Nihilism, Optimism" blog had it right after all, and Brahms -- or better, all music, all beauty, of which Brahms is only the exemplar -- is a deceiver, making us believe that life is so much richer, more poignant, more unifying, more exquisite, more imbued with meaning and deep feeling than it really is.
It seems to me sometimes that, as we grow up and grow older, we become more and more diminished by life. It as if life strolled up to us with a surgeon's scissors every now and then to cut off a different little piece of us. But we must go on, and so we go on wounded; and, if we're lucky, our wounds will remain open and tender, so that we can learn how to truly love other people. Nonetheless, it is very hard for me sometimes to wake up and realize that my life is not at all the same as the music I spent most of my life studying, that it bears little resemblance to the mystical world of beauty hinted at, even whisperingly promised, by Brahms.
I heard this lovely poem on The Writer's Almanac the other day (the poet, April Lindner, also writes in another of my favorite genres, YA novels).
****************************
Turn the knob. The burner ticks
then exhales flame in a swift up burst,
its dim roar like the surf. Your kitchen burns white,
lamplight on enamel, warm with the promise
of bread and soup. Outside the night rains ink.
To a stranger bracing his umbrella,
think how your lit window must seem
both warm and cold, a kiss withheld,
lights strung above a distant patio.
Think how your bare arm, glimpsed
as you chop celery or grate a carrot
glows like one link in a necklace.
How the clink of silverware on porcelain
carries to the street. As you unfold your napkin,
book spread beside your plate, consider
the ticking of rain against pavement,
the stoplight red and steady as a flame.
There is arguably no time more beautiful in New York City than right now. At the cusp of summer the air is still fresh, with still another two or three weeks before it hardens into a solid wall of brass-smelling heat that assaults you (the pedestrian and subway rider) the whole day long. The little patches of green you encounter, especially in the outer boroughs -- the grass at the curb and the modest little gardens that front the low brick two-families that are a staple of Bronx architecture -- seem so much lovelier than they would in the suburbs or the country, because they give solace and respite to souls conditioned to asphalt and concrete. This time of year is more than usually evocative for me of other times passed in the city in which I lived most of my life, especially times passed in the largely-untrodden and -unsung regions of Brooklyn and the Bronx.
We went back to New York this weekend to go to a wedding. The marriage was between two Portuguese-Americans, and the welcoming, relaxed warmth and ease of the bride and groom's families and wedding guests, as well as the fantastic music and food, gave both me and my non-Latin husband a sense of nostalgia for our old home town above and beyond that inspired by the beauty of the season. I found myself thinking of Walt Whitman's great poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:
I too lived -- Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk'd the streets of Manhattan Island . . .
Walking those streets, one feels as if one has a purpose, as if one is working as part of a unified organism oriented toward a goal larger than oneself -- a feeling I do not have living in semi-suburban semi-isolation in the small city where I live now, a city where no one walks the streets except at the end of the day, and then either in jogging suits with arms pumping, or with dogs in tow. There is nowhere really to walk to, after all, and no sense that you are walking along with others. On the rare occasions when I pass someone else in my solitary perambulations, the other pedestrian, more often than not, will turn and look away.
But there are reasons we are here aside from the obvious one of my husband's work, I am sure of it, though I'm not entirely sure yet what they are. Life has unfolded here in a way altogether different from the way it did for all those many years in New York, and, if it's lonelier, it's also been blessed by some incredible friendships with some fellow lady-bloggers and commenters. I attempted to write about the wonderful recent visit from New Zealand of Otepoti, who blogs at Reading for Believers, before my post was demolished when Blogger crashed earlier this month. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I had a delightful real-life visit from Mr. and Mrs. Darwin and their children as they drove through my patch of northern Appalachia on the way to see family in New York. And finally, while in town for the wedding last weekend, I met Mrs. C of Adoptio, which was, for me, one of those rare experiences when you can almost palpably feel the presence of the Holy Spirit fluttering around you.
Mrs. C is a lovely, graceful, accomplished woman, and also the rare sort of person who has a truly mature faith. Because of her deep understanding of our faith - an understanding born, in part, of suffering - and because of her great love for Jesus Christ and His Church, she also has a heart full of compassion. Believe me when I tell you that - as you may already know - these are rare gifts indeed, even (or perhaps especially) in orthodox Catholic circles. I feel as if her friendship itself is a very generous gift. And she is the one who introduced my husband and me to little Jude, who is in a Chinese orphanage awaiting adoption (another selfless gift on her part, and in which process we are currently waiting for fingerprint clearance from Homeland Security). I have asked Mrs. C to be his godmother.
She and her husband flew to Texas yesterday, where they are awaiting the birth of their daughter. Please pray with me that all will go well for them. She is going to be an incredible mother.
[Project Rachel founder Vicki] Thorn said that the abortion debate “is so emotionally charged, not
because it is a moral and philosophical debate, but because it is a
heart experience. I believe that everyone knows someone who has had an
abortion.
“We must always speak with gentleness and not condemnation, because
it is our charge, as laid out by Pope Benedict XVI, to bring the
wounded to the Church for healing.”
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