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)
Another Lent has drawn to a close, another year's forty days of self-abnegation, self-denial, and self-emptying, during which, as in other years, I have barely shown up. Usually I tell myself that I don't really need to give up anything for Lent, but, rather, to commit to a more devout and rigorous prayer practice, and then I've ended up doing neither. I started off this Lent, for instance, saying a modified version of the daily office, but that fell by the wayside somewhere. I also thought I should try to stop swearing (which, for what it's worth, I only do when I'm in a room by myself or inside of my own head -- well, mostly, anyway), but on the Thursday after Ash Wednesday, I found myself starting my morning by eating a brownie for breakfast and dropping the F-bomb. And so it went. Every day for forty days I did something somewhere on the scale from neurotic to egregious. And I generally only said the entire rosary when I woke up in the middle of the night, as I often do, because it's a surefire way for me to get back to sleep.
This year, as in years past, I sought to rationalize my lack of effort by telling myself that because I was dealing with some difficult things in my life on a daily basis (my mother's fatal illness, my son's autistic behavior), I didn't need to impose other penances on myself (in other years, it was other difficult things: recurrent miscarriages, moving away from New York, or what have you). Tonight I went to Stations of the Cross for the first time this whole year. I also went to confession for the first time since the week before Christmas. And my confession was as trite as it possibly could have been: that I had had a bad Lent, and that it was through my own lack of effort, as well as through shifting the blame for my sinfulness onto other people and situations. This was particularly embarrassing, since I feel sincerely penitent concerning my grave sins, and have no trouble owning them. It's the small sins -- my daily fecklessness, pettiness, selfishness, and cruelty -- that I would deny with my dying breath if I could.
Tonight Otepoti (who, quite wonderfully, is visiting me from her home in what she calls the ass-end of the world) and I had a discussion about sin. We were talking, specifically, about whether committing bad acts made one essentially bad, while, conversely, committing good acts made one essentially good. Otepoti wisely observed that we are all essentially bad -- which dovetailed nicely with a realization I had the other day that we are, also, all essentially disabled. Only God is good. Only God is sound, only God is whole. And it is only -- only -- through His mercy that we are saved from our own neuroses, pettinesses, and egregiousness.
What kind of man would choose alcohol over family, work, and even
his own health? What kind of man is willing to admit that, at the very
core of who he is, there is something profoundly distasteful and
unnatural? . . . . A person exactly like you and me—not with some passing, analogous resemblance, when squinted at through a pious lens—but exactly like you and me.
I'm on light posting this month because of an intense level of busyness, but I wanted to make sure to link to Simcha Fisher's column at the National Catholic Register today. It hits hard in exactly the right place.
This poem, translated from the Inuit, was the first poem I saw in New York City's wonderful Poetry in Motion project, which put poems in advertising spaces in the subways and buses.
In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody can explain this:
That’s the way it was.
My husband and I got married on the day that Pope John Paul II died, April 2, 2005, which was, that year, the vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday. I've always felt that the day was especially blessed because of the Pope's passing into eternal life. As you probably know, he will be beatified on this year's Divine Mercy Sunday, May 1, 2011.
Should you ever have doubts about the man's own mercy and personal holiness, read on.
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
Adoption networks, please share this story of a family whose adoption of a little Russian boy with Down Syndrome was denied by a Russian judge, who thought the boy was "not socially adaptable" and best suited to life in an institution. Readers, please pray that Kirill will be able to come home to live with his waiting family.
Last weekend I had a visit from A.B. -- my former mentor, the most important voice teacher I've ever had, and the generous donor of my autoharp -- because he happened to have business in a Northern Appalachian town not too far from here. We went to a hippie café that is often frequented by my family because of its surprisingly good draft beer selection and the cheerful tolerance of the staff toward little children. Although our pupil-teacher relationship ended badly in the mid-nineties (he ordered me out of his studio one day when I told him his instructions were confusing me, which was really only the culmination of many months of growing tension), after a few years passed we were friends again. In my doctoral program, I studied voice with his best friend, who was on the faculty, and A.B. was a frequent audience member at my New York-area performances, as well as a thoughtful and provocative critic.
At the hippie café, I showed him the repertoire for a concert I have coming up, and we talked about it. The concert's theme is childhood, and the music includes, among other things, pieces by Charles Ives and the three "Heimweh" settings of Johannes Brahms, one of which, A.B. opined, was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful songs ever written. A.B. is one of the most brilliant musicians I know, one of the rare souls who deeply understand the elusive language of music and are able to interpret it in subtle, powerful, and nuanced ways, and, when I have the opportunity to talk music with someone like that, I'm in my supreme happy place: the place where -- to quote Brahms himself, out of context and with inappropriate self-aggrandizement -- I start to feel as if "straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God." And this makes me wonder.
It makes me wonder, because my supreme happy place -- the nirvana achieved through strenuous periods of talking about music, performing music, researching music, studying music, reading about music, teaching music -- was all I ever wanted, from childhood onward. Once I discovered classical music, it was as if a series of doors opened one upon another, and kept opening in my mind, and as if something shifted into place in my being with a loud sort of thunk. I was about eleven at the time, and from that point, the everyday, experiential world became like a dream to me. Music was what I wanted, music was my real world, and everything else was the Matrix. I think the reason I was so happy in graduate school was that the time I got to spend in Musicland exceeded the time I spent in the Matrix, and everything that I did in the Matrix served what I was striving for in Musicland.
But we are all cast out of Paradise at some point; for some of us it happens sooner, for others later. I think a clear-eyed observer of my life would see an overly-sensitive and romantic girl, who, perhaps not atypically, found a form of escape from an unstable home situation and the anxieties of daily life, in a neurotic striving toward a Bacchic transcendence that can be gained only through an Apollonian rigor. Indeed, my self-imposed work ethic superseded that of practically any singer I've ever known, but the oblivion I found in practice and study was topped by the bliss I found in being able, after many years of hard work, to make music say what I wanted, and use it to express the deepest emotions of my soul.
And of course, my allegiance to this striving, this oblivion, and this bliss turned everything else around me to shit. I can only credit the mercy of God with the fact that I'm still standing, still able to have relationships, still able to function with some degree of effectiveness as an adult. But I'm rarely, these days, in my supreme happy place, the lost paradise that Brahms's "Heimweh" songs are all about. The most beautiful and most famous of these songs, the one that A.B. praised, is the first song in the video below. The great scholar of German LiederEric Sams has written that in this song, called "Heimwh I" or "O wüsst ich doch den Weg züruck," Brahms "is overcome by a personal feeling that goes far deeper than the regretful words, into real tragedy."
(The text is a poem by Klaus Groth, translated here by Leonard Lehrman:
Oh, if I only knew the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
Oh, why did I search for happiness
And leave my mother's hand?
Oh, how I long to be at rest,
Not to be awakened by anything,
To shut my weary eyes,
With love gently surrounding!
And nothing to search for, nothing to beware of,
Only dreams, sweet and mild;
Not to notice the changes of time,
To be once more a child!
Oh, do show me the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
In vain I search for happiness,
Around me naught but deserted beach and sand!)
I spend most of my time in Matrixland now, where I feel like a stranger who hasn't mastered the language, and I wonder if I ever will. And what Telly notes mournfully after this classic performance with Itzhak Perlman on Sesame Street -- that it will never happen again -- is true not just of all musical performance, but also, of course, of all human endeavor, and is the final response to Brahms in his fruitless quest to return to Kinderland.
I've been saying this litany to the Japanese martyrs, and wanted to invite readers to join me.
Our Lady of Akita, pray for us. St. Peter Baptist, martyr and patron of Japan, pray for us. St. Francis Xavier, patron of Japan, pray for us. St. Paul Miki, martyr, pray for us. St. Anthony Dainan, martyr, pray for us. St. Anthony Ishida, martyr, pray for us. St. Francis Nagasaki, martyr, pray for us. St. Francis of St. Bonaventure, martyr, pray for us. St. Gabriel Jusuke, martyr, pray for us. St. Gaius Francis, martyr, pray for us. St. James Kisai, martyr, pray for us. St. Joachim Sakachibara, martyr, pray for us. St. John Kokumbuku, martyr, pray for us. St. John Soan de Goto, martyr, pray for us. St. Leonard Kimura, martyr, pray for us. St. Leo Tanaka, martyr, pray for us. St. Louis Ibachi, martyr, pray for us. St. Louise of Omura, martyr, pray for us. St. Matthias of Meako, martyr, pray for us. St. Michael Kozaki, martyr, pray for us. St. Paul Aybara, martyr, pray for us. St. Peter Shukeshiko, martyr, pray for us. St. Romanus Aybara, martyr, pray for us. St. Thomas Danki, martyr, pray for us. St. Thomas Kozaki, martyr, pray for us. St. Vincent Kaun, martyr, pray for us. Holy Martyrs of Japan, pray for us.
God our Father, you guide everything in wisdom and love. Accept the prayers we offer for the nation of Japan; by the wisdom of their leaders and integrity of their citizens, may their suffering be lessened, may harmony and justice be restored and may there be lasting prosperity and peace. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Sally has a post up for Saint Joseph's Day that blew me away. It's always good to be reminded that broken vessels can, and do, carry and pour forth a surprising abundance of grace.
When I heard last month that Suze Rotolo (above, with one-time boyfriend Bob Dylan) had died, I thought of her autobiography, A Freewheelin' Time, which I read a year or two ago. In it, she writes about the difficult and painful years of her affair with Dylan, and, almost in passing, about having an illegal abortion in the early 1960s, which nailed the coffin on their already-foundering relationship. While Rotolo writes about sinking into a depression afterward (a state of mind which she does not directly attribute to the experience), she asserts in the book that she considers abortion a right.
I will read and love just about any memoir of Bohemian New York in the 1950s and 1960s written by a woman (though, having already read several in this rather narrow and self-limiting genre, I have to admit that they all start to run together after a while in a monotonous wash of sex and narcissism). Rotolo's death sent me to the library in search of another Bohemian New York memoir that I'd read several years before, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, by the beat poet Diane Di Prima, because I recalled that Di Prima had had an abortion around the same time, but had written about the experience in a much different way. As I recalled, her description of the abortion and the circumstances surrounding it was not only detailed, but also tormented, even raw, a cri-de-coeur against abortion itself emanating from an unexpected quarter.
Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) at the Cedar Tavern, Greenwich Village, early 1960s
Di Prima, a refugee from a repressive Brooklyn Italian girlhood, was living on the Lower East Side, and was already the single mother of one daughter when she became pregnant by the poet LeRoi Jones. Jones, who was married, insisted upon an abortion. As Di Prima tells it,
I was torn apart. Though intellectually I had always held firmly there was nothing wrong with abortion, as woman I felt myself so much the channel of new life, the door into the world; as budding Hindu or Buddhist, I saw all life as so sacred; as the artist I was I felt so deeply that whatever happens has its reasons . . . that there was no way my having an abortion made sense. And too, as lover, everything in me screamed that I wanted this baby, wanted something of this man to keep, to love and live with [in spite of the fact that] I had already given up the notion that we would ever "be together," [as] it was bitterly clear to me that that was not what Roi wanted. . . . [Yet] for me it was all the more reason to want this child.
Di Prima writes wrenchingly about upholding the "code" of the illicit lover, which dovetailed quite neatly with the code of femaleness she'd learned growing up:
The reason not to have the baby was simple: Roi didn't want it. . . . Since Roi didn't want the child, I felt that if I loved him, it was incumbent upon me to have an abortion . . . To show the extent of my love by doing what I felt in fact was wrong. To commit what for me was tantamount to a crime, simply because the man I loved willed it so. And I would take the blame, the consequences, the blood on my hands. And not say anything about it.
It was, after all, the code I had learned, the code of the Italian woman: to do what he wanted and take the consequences.
Later, after traveling by bus alone to western Pennsylvania for the procedure and then back to New York, Di Prima writes about the
Pain in my heart far worse than the cramps. I was writing, persistently writing to the child I had killed. . . . I filled page after page . . . Some kind of ritual goodbye:
"Dear fish, I hope you swim In some other river . . . "
This heartbreaking passage stands in stark contrast to the self-justifying ethos of individually determined morality that permeates most of Di Prima's long and interesting (if, like me, you like this sort of thing) memoir. It stands in contrast, too, to Di Prima's own earlier description of abortion as "simply women's business. Something you didn't talk about, didn't 'lay on' anyone else, especially not the men. One of the unsung, unspoken ways women risked their lives [for the men they loved]." For Di Prima calls her abortion a "crime," asserts that she killed her child --not exactly what one would expect from one of the ur-mothers of Bohemia, the most visible woman on New York's avant-garde scene in the 1950s and early 1960s, someone who writes quite freely, and with a hint of self-congratulation, about performing all kinds of other transgressive behaviors.
Though Di Prima stops short of calling every abortion a crime -- oh, that women would begin to realize that what sucks for one of us truly sucks for all of us! -- it's a short walk to that conclusion, and her honesty is a far cry from Suze Rotolo's sanitized, oblique account, which strives to uphold the supremacy of "choice." Bohemians and would-be Bohemians, listen up.
It is March and black dust falls out of the books Soon I will be gone The tall spirit who lodged here has Left already On the avenues the colorless thread lies under Old prices
When you look back there is always the past Even when it has vanished But when you look forward With your dirty knuckles and the wingless Bird on your shoulder What can you write
The bitterness is still rising in the old mines The fist is coming out of the egg The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses
At a certain height The tails of the kites for a moment are Covered with footsteps
Whatever I have to do has not yet begun
-- W.S. Merwin
Above: Landscape with Bare Trees and Coastline, 1862, by John LaFarge.
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