Lenten Grocery Penances for Bourgeois Outcasts

At the evening Mass on Ash Wednesday I sat in the pew realizing that, for all my pushing away the truth of the matter, I am a failure. The proof could not have been starker -- here I was, sitting in my coat in an unheated church in the ghetto of a once-thriving, now-crumbling Rust Belt town, far away from all the things that, to my mind, had long defined not only my own life, but even life itself -- the things that had nurtured my belief that I was special, out of the ordinary, made for something important.

My older son was with me, half asleep in the pew. I shook him awake to get in line for ashes, and when it was his turn, the priest -- a gruff, stern, socially-awkward west African man with a heavy accent and a hortatory preaching style, who is known to have conflicts with some of his brother priests in the diocese and who has been mostly benignly ignored by our parishioners -- murmured to my son, as he daubed the ashes onto his brow, "Remember that you are dust, my brother. And to dust you shall return." I was struck by this entreaty; after all, Father didn't call me "my sister" -- and I mentioned to my son that Father's words to him were special. And I believe that they were, because Father loves my autistic son, and I heard his words as not only an exhortation, but also a greeting cast out across the chasm of loneliness, from one outcast to another. I recalled Father hearing my confession a couple of years ago, when I was still wallowing in my own sense of exile and loneliness (well, I still am), and I mentioned it to him; he said, "Oh, my sister. I understand." In loneliness, I became his sister. As outcasts, we were next of kin.

Of course, I've mentioned my feelings of isolation in my new hometown too many times to count. They stem from the obvious: I'm far away from home; my friends and family are at a significant remove. I can go through a day hardly seeing another adult except through the glass of my windshield; driving, while making my life incalculably better, has increased my sense of isolation, and also, I fear, my complacency. When I was still walking everywhere, I was forced to confront the poverty of my fellow walkers in the city; now I am safe from them.

Not that this place hasn't also forced me to confront my child-of-the-utopian-seventies notions about poverty, too. I have reached out to a couple of poor mothers here, and found their lives and their children's lives to be hobbled by the kind of disastrous decision-making that right-wing pundits like to rail about. But I have made disastrous decisions too. I think I know something about the fear and despair that drives people to cling to even the most harmful and toxic attachments, and I have seen that the lives of the poor are shot through with a loneliness much worse than my own.

I see now how we hold ourselves back, apart, and away from people who are not like us, and how I have done this, too. My singing was the thing that I imagined could keep me safe from the misery of broken human promises and relationships, and of stumbling and falling attempts at human love. I had something I could use to put up a wall of protection between me and the lives of utter loss and failure that are common to the poor women I have known: a key, a tool, an instrument, a wedge.

To counter this still-prevalent attitude in myself, I'm doing grocery penance for Lent again this year. I'm going shopping at Aldi's instead of Wegman's, for starters, and putting the price-point difference in our Lenten sacrifice Jar to buy formula for medically-fragile Chinese orphans. This means that I have to forego the smug sense of self-satisfaction that Wegman's lulls me into, the sense of being with other people like myself: clean, bourgeois, well-educated, able to pick out the freshest and most beautiful groceries in a warmly-lit, expansive space. Instead, I must stand out in the cold waiting, along with the gray-faced night-shift workers, the toothless, tubercularly-coughing women, and the lank-haired young mothers of children in dirty coats who ought to be in school, for Aldi's to open its doors and let us in to its boxy cheerlessness, to fill our rented carts with foods in knocked-off packaging (the Benton's graham cracker box looks so much like the Honey-Maid one, but just isn't), with brand names, like Cattlemen's Ranch and Happy Farms, both vaguely euphemistic and reminiscent of Chinese communism. 

And it also means that I have to strive to stop exalting myself, my knowledge, my gifts, and trying to use them to pry open the world to give me the things that I want, and to try instead to accept and desire being forgotten.

In "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," one of the songs he wrote to texts by the Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, Mahler succeeded in creating a sense of stilled timelessness, of dying to self and to the world. The text says, in translation:

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult
And I rest in a quiet realm.
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love and in my song.

May it be so, eventually, for all of us.

Music and Memory, Part 30: The Slovenly Wilderness

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Gustav Mahler going on a walking tour of the Austrian Alps with his protégé, the great conductor Bruno Walter. Walter, no doubt like most visitors to the Alps, was in ecstasy when he beheld the mountains' grandeur, and he waved his hands around excitedly. "Look, Gustav!" he cried, to which Mahler, walking on quickly with his head down, replied, "No need; I have composed them already."

As a child, I had all kinds of fantasies about what the unmediated, unadulterated natural world might be like, but my experience was mostly confined to yearly hikes at Bear Mountain, which my father, paraphrasing Marx, called a "Lumpenwilderness."  And anyway, it can seem Herculean at times to leave New York City and go into nature, or anywhere else for that matter. If you don't have a car, which is many if not most people, you have to rent one. For my set, that meant walking across the George Washington Bridge to the Rent-A-Wreck in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Then you had to actually drive out of the city, which could literally take hours, because, since you'd walked to New Jersey, you had to drive back across the bridge to get your stuff. And then there would be traffic and getting lost, which could not be avoided if your path took you through the Bronx at all. And then, if you weren't some sort of wilderness expert, what exactly were you supposed to do when you get there? You could luxuriate in the grass while trying to wipe the fear of Lyme ticks from your consciousness, or marvel at the unobstructed views of sky. But if you're like me, by dark you would be sweating in your bed because of the sonic emptiness, terrorized by the absence of the reassuring all-hours city din. As Woody Allen said, "I am two with nature."

It's much easier driving into nature from here, though. We're surrounded by state parks, all of them spectacular, the closest about twenty miles away (Bear Mountain was only a little further than that, but it could take two and a half hours to get there). This summer, trying to quell my fear of Lyme disease, I started to take my son with high-functioning autism into the woods on hikes. (Incidentally, though I fear ticks, I have no fear of mosquitos. I'm the carrier of a rare Mediterranean disease which, like sickle-cell anemia, is linked to malaria resistance, and mosquitos have no interest in me.) In the past few months, my son has had tremendous difficulty controlling his emotions. We've started him on medication -- and, pace the nostalgic authorities on boyhood who glibly insist that boys are being medicated for being boys, my son is being medicated to try to help him with his towering rages that keep building up over the course of a day, that cause him to scream bloodcurdlingly and prolongedly when something happens to go awry in the little ways in which things go awry every day, and that are making our family's attempts to live in peace extremely difficult. But when he's in the woods, he's better. I don't mean that he's not autistic, but that in the woods, his autism shines forth as a kind of intense and beautiful adaptation. He's calm; he writes poetry in his nature journal; he's a delightful companion. I haven't read Last Child in the Woods, but I'm starting to believe in the healing propensities of the natural world.

In the state park, my son tells me that he misses New York. He often says this, and he says he wants to move back. He was not yet three when we left, but he has an uncanny memory, and he's also been to visit many times. I think about a trip I took to coastal Maine with M. fifteen years ago, and how beautiful it was, and then, stuck in traffic on the Cross-Bronx Expressway after driving many hours, with the windows of the rental car rolled down in the heat and the tinny sound of a frenetic merengue played on a thousand radios pouring in along with the damp, sour smell of the hot summer pavement mixed with the odors of piss, stale beer, and the dank Harlem River far below us, how my heart leapt and thrilled to be home.

I mention instead to my son that in New York, it's hard to find a place as beautiful as the place where we are now. Places as beautiful as this are far away and hard to get to, and, besides that, there's so much traffic and noise there.

I remember staring in bewilderment when my my longtime recital accompanist declared that nature was more beautiful and more important than music. I'm still not sure I believe it. My kind of nature is the still life, the natura morta, as it's called in Italian -- the nature that is mixed, and even wrecked, by its contact with the human, or the nature that is furtive, appearing a little at a time to slowly and imperceptibly redeem the urban spaces that have ruined it, like the weeds that grow out of the sidewalk cracks or the iridescent pigeons -- all so different, all so lovely, though their detractors call them rats with wings -- that peck at the refuse carelessly strewn on the street. Perhaps, like Mahler, I believe that music is better than nature, that art enhances, ennobles, and supersedes nature. Indeed, Wallace Stevens wrote about this in his 1919 poem "The Anecdote of the Jar":

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Above: Corenlis de Heem, Still Life with Fruit, 17th century.