Music and Memory, Part 35: Lorelei

One summer a long time ago, I was a waitress at a popular restaurant in the publishing district. Late at night, at the end of a busy and generally lucrative shift, I would take a cab home with my tips rolled up in my little black waiter's apron. I was living at that time in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is now impossibly expensive, but was then a sort of African-American bohemia. A legendary experimental jazz musician lived nearby, and I was over at his house fairly often, because his girlfriend was a friend of mine. Spike Lee lived around the corner, and I would pass him walking his dog on my strolls through the neighborhood.

My apartment was at the back of the third floor of a brownstone, and it was quiet, which was nice, because I stayed up late in those days after winding down from the intensity of a busy night shift, and consequently I slept late in the mornings. It was a beautiful thing to be able to sit up in bed in the mornings and look out of the window and see not a concrete-paved airshaft, but the lush vegetation of old-growth trees-of-heaven filling the small lot that was my backyard, though I had no access to it, and the backyard of the brownstone on the block behind me. The fern-like branches of the trees -- ailanthus altissima, the eponymous tree of the great novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn -- seemed to be piled up in the condensed space of the lot, frond upon feathery frond. They emitted a dark, dusty vegetable smell, the fragrance, to me, of a New York summer. I would get out of bed and make a quart or so of strong coffee in my little Italian stovetop espresso maker and drink it all, sitting at the table in my kitchen-slash-living-slash-all-purpose room. Then I would practice. It suited me to work at a night job, because I felt like I was giving the best energy of my day to my singing, and whatever was left over could be tossed casually into the hungry jaws of the chi-chi-restaurant-going public, which seemed to me, as Enid Bagnold wrote in another context in the wonderful book National Velvet, "like a million little fishes after bread."

I lived alone, and while the solitude felt rich and redolent, it was also devastatingly lonely. I was in love with M., and he had treated me cruelly. In my anxiety and sorrow I didn't have much of an appetite; besides the coffee -- Café Bustelo, which I made so thick that it could probably have been classified a foodstuff -- mangoes and Italian bread were the mainstays of my diet. One night, I recall, I sat alone at my table drinking Wild Turkey -- M.'s favorite libation -- while listening to Joni Mitchell, which, by the next morning, had caused me to swear off Wild Turkey forever, if not off M. or Joni Mitchell.

All during that summer and into the fall, a man sang in one of the apartments in one of the buildings on the block behind my own. Each day, across the thick, weedy verdure of the back lots, I heard this man's stentorian baritone boom out as he sang along to recordings. He would keep it up for at least an hour, and longer on Sundays -- sometimes the entire afternoon. I don't know what it was that he sang, or what he was listening to; the music and the words were indistinct, muffled by the distance across lots and absorbed by the dense urban vegetation. But it was something anthemic and simple -- likely a soul ballad, from what I could make out -- and he sang it over and over again. I can still hear his voice rising the interval of a major sixth, with a flourishing crescendo, at the chorus.

Rather than annoying me, I found the phenomenon of the invisible singing man and his incomprehensible, repeated song strangely comforting. It gave a rhythm to my day. Perhaps I was, for him, also an invisible singing presence, with my caffeinated late-morning vocalizing. I remember that during that time, I was working in particular on the song "Waldgespräch" by Schumann, about a man journeying through the woods, who is seduced and entrapped by the Lorelei; she tells him, in the last vocal statement: "You will never leave these woods again."

And perhaps I identified with the Lorelei, that siren of the Rhine who enchants men with her song. Believing that my own singing was a tool, likely the only one I had, I honed it in the hopes that it would precede me into the world and bring me back the things I wanted: security, peace, happiness, and love. But it didn't. And I was not the Lorelei. I was the hapless man in the legend, enchanted by myths of love and illusions of my own power. And everything that, at the time, I thought real and vital turned out not to be, though it took me many years to grope my way out of those woods -- even though they were not really woods at all, only Brooklyn back lots overgrown with weeds -- and see it.

Above: La Belle Dame Sans Merci, J.M. Waterhouse, 1893.

Easter, Grocery Shopping, and the Transformation of the Self

My sister phoned me yesterday to complain about my father, who had driven several hours to spend Easter with her and her family. He was being his usual surly self, his surliness tempered only by the sentimentality that often overtakes him in his cups. I noted that he hadn't changed much since my mother's death in December. "Unless you're committed to self-transformation," my sister replied, "you're not going to change much."

As I've mentioned here before, my sister (once a daily Mass-goer) is now a committed Buddhist, so, while I'm not sure what Easter means to her, I am aware that the notion of self-transformation is a powerful part of her religious practice.  But even for faithful Catholics, if there's ever a time to be "committed to self-transformation," Lent is it. And I don't know how other people manage it, but I seem to fail miserably at this attempted self-transformation each year.

This year, my Lenten penance was a diffuse attempt to rely on God more radically by striving to consume the copious stores of food in my pantry. I would allow myself to go grocery shopping only when they had run out. This meant curbing my usual practice of buying several of something on sale if the something is a thing I use regularly.  This way, I told myself, I would be identifying with the poor: buying only as much as I needed at one time, buying the cheapest things possible, and eschewing my usual penchant for shopping in the gourmet and organic sections of the supermarket. I worried that I had a tendency to hoard food, and I imagined flinging myself on the mercy of God and relying on him to provide for all our needs.

This didn't work out for several reasons. One was that I realized how time-consuming and costly it was to dash off to the store when I'd run out of an essential item like eggs, instead of buying an extra carton on my regular grocery-shopping trip even if the carton at home in my refrigerator still had four eggs left in it -- even if, in other words, my egg stock wasn't yet depleted. So I soon gave up identifying myself with the inconveniences, logistical difficulties, and annoyances that the poor put up with every day -- because I could.

I failed even in the small matter of coffee. As with most comestibles, when it comes to coffee I'm a fearful snob. My favorite coffee is Peet's Major Dickason's Blend, but, in some pre-Lenten paroxysm of penance, I had told myself that ten dollars was too much to pay for a bag of coffee beans, and I bought Eight O'Clock French Roast instead when it was on a buy-one-get-one sale. I made myself drink it during Lent, and it made me pretty sad -- so sad, in fact, that I cheated, and snuck in a bag of Starbucks toward the end of the forty days (I consoled myself that it was a bag of Starbucks Holiday Blend that I'd found as a deeply-discounted overrun at the local job lot). On Holy Saturday, with palpable relief, I threw out the remaining several-cups'-worth of Eight O'Clock coffee. So I failed to identify myself even with people who couldn't afford to drink expensive coffee, but who still needed, as I do, the buzz that coffee confers.

And then there was the other small matter of anger. I stayed mad at practically everyone I knew during the entire forty days. I found it very hard to let go of my everyday frustration with, and self-righteous indignation at, people who don't do the things I want them to do, or who don't do them in the ways I want them to be done. I cursed and swore many times a day, almost always in a room where I was momentarily alone, but even so. I wanted my family to be different. I wanted my three-year-old to stop acting like a three-year-old; I wanted my autistic son to stop being autistic; I wanted my husband to be less like a man and more like a woman in his emotional presentation and responsiveness. At the same time, I wanted everyone to like and admire me.

I see now that, instead of striving to be holier during Lent, I became obsessed with grocery price-points and whether or not I was getting the respect I felt was my due. And I see that this doesn't make me so different from my non-committed-to-self-transformation father, or from anyone in the world who doesn't observe Lent, since I had substituted material things and material results for that which is real.

And what is that which is real? I long for transformation every week at Mass -- for a transformation that can be felt. I beg God, when I receive him in Holy Communion, to transform me, to make me different,  in a perceptible, lasting way. I want the miracle of transubstantiation to change me, too, utterly. I want to see my old self go up in a conflagration, a holocaust upon the altar.

More often than not, however, I leave Mass feeling the same way I felt when I came in:  angry, petty, frustrated, drab, lifeless, irreparably broken.

The Easter flowers were beautiful on the altar today, and the music, while not exactly good in any Platonic sort of way, was much better than usual. In a few weeks, the flowers will be gone, and the choir will be back to its usual quality. And I will be the same. Or will I?

Perhaps we are all constrained to believe that, through our longing for Him, and through His gift of self to us, God is transforming us in ways that, though they may be imperceptible to us, are truly radical. We may pray for the sensation of knowing, of feeling, this transformation, but this is just as materialistic as my Lenten grocery obsession. We need to believe without seeing, and also without feeling. As T.S. Eliot wrote in the "East Coker" section of Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

A blessed and joyous Easter to all.

Your Crooked Way

My children wake up during the five o'clock hour each morning, which means that I do too. I find waking up in the dark extremely demoralizing, though, and often am filled with dread first thing in the morning. In order to mitigate this sensation, I make a cup of strong coffee using this excellent device as soon as I get downstairs to the dark kitchen. The three of us then say a morning prayer, which always includes the petition that God will help us to make the world a more beautiful place that day, and we sing one verse of this, our morning song.

I've had a cold for the past few days, so the other morning, because I was losing my voice, I told my older son to lead the singing. "You can sing, Mommy," he encouraged me, "in your crooked way."

You can sing in your crooked way: I thought about this later, and the expression seemed apt. Hadn't I spent years, after all, singing in my crooked way? I remembered the period in my life when I thought that singing was all I had, my only pathway to salvation. As a young woman, growing up and going out on my own felt like launching a cobbled-together boat into dark and perilous waters, or flinging myself off a cliff into some dark void. The world struck me as unkind and unreliable, and love as fleeting and evanescent. If there was something I could do extremely well, I imagined, it could be my shield against the inevitable bitterness and heartbreak that love and the world would deal out. I could not trust love, nor my fellows, but I could wield my singing like a weapon to cut through the dangers they proffered. Other people might have more and better gifts than I had; other people might have the gift of love. But I could sing, and I loved to sing, and I developed a rigorous self-discipline that enabled me, over the course of years, to become a highly-skilled and effective practitioner of that art.

It's not uncommon even for singers at the highest levels to sing flat. I've heard it happen many more times than I can possibly count, including at the Met. Indeed, I've heard mediocre and even lousy performances there, as well as great performances marred by mistakes, bad notes, miscalculations, and musical train wrecks. It happens to everyone. I remember feeling particularly bad for Plácido Domingo one Saturday afternoon when he was singing the title role in the rarely-performed opera Sly, which ends with a tenor aria, and he flubbed the final sung note in the opera, leaving the audience not with the memory of a compelling performance but with that of a single lame high note. There's something touchingly human, though, about singing flat; it's as if the heart, the moment's emotions, the character's words, all cause one's voice -- or, to be technically correct about it, cause one's ability to accurately replicate pitch -- to fail, and doesn't that happen in everyday, non-singing life, too?

There was a period in my career when I was singing in the wrong fach.  I was a small-ish young woman, and my size, combined with my high energy, quick wit, and fast conversation, led some in the field to assume that I was the kind of soprano capable of high, fast, virtuosic singing. As it turned out, I could do the fast singing part, but I could never reliably sing the notes above high C, which is what the fach requires. A famous coach commented on my low speaking voice and the disparity between it and the high-sitting roles I was singing; an assistant conductor at the Met told me that if I even "went one fach lighter" I'd be "working everywhere." I tried to be lighter, higher, faster, perkier. Finally, though, when things were falling apart in my everyday, non-singing life, I began to remember the advice of people who'd known me and my singing for a long time, including members of my own (musical) family, who had always suggested that my voice would darken and deepen. I had wanted to be something else, someone else, but I was not, in fact, that person; and how can the voice be compartmentalized, treated as its own entity separate from the singer's own body and interior suchness?

I listened to my lesson tapes and watched my coaching videos and realized that, when I deviated from pitch, I was not singing flat; I was singing sharp -- above the pitch, even in repertoire that was, really, too high for me -- and I came to see that particular dysfunction as a metaphor for forcing myself into a box (fach, after all, means box) that was not the right size for me. Singing sharp, too, seemed very much in keeping with the use of singing as a weapon -- a sword is sharp, after all; a knife is sharp; so is  a switchblade. I switched to the lyric mezzo-soprano repertoire, a switch I've written about in more detail here, and everything settled into place technically; it felt comfortable, like finally finding clothes that fit after you've been wearing someone else's for the longest time.

I sang in my crooked way for years, and my aims, as an artist, were crooked too, in the sense that everything was predicated upon my singing. It was my heroin, the drug I immersed myself in when I was devastated, frightened, falling apart; it was my consolation when girls around me had husbands and families -- had love; I didn't need those things, or so I thought, since I could sing. It came before everything else in my life; I did not know how to have a life that did not heliotrope like a vine around the trellis of musical discipline and accomplishment. In fact, it was my life.

Even in the time since my own life has settled into patterns more closely resembling other, more usual ways of living, I haven't quite known where to fit singing into those alignments. I still sang, taught, researched, and performed after becoming a mother, but without the same . . . graspingness. I still believe that the ability to sing is a gift which, I now realize, God would have me cultivate (like all His gifts) in the interest of bringing beauty and consolation to others. I'm still trying to understand how to do that.

But I don't know if, in this life, I can ever leave my crooked way behind. I'm reminded of Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening," in which the narrator, on a walk through London, overhears a lover declaiming the usual platitudes. Suddenly the declaration of love is cut short by "all the clocks in the city," who argue that

In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day. . .

and exhort the lover and his listener to

. . . stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

I know now that my singing isn't the only thing I have; the only thing I have is my crooked heart. And because it's all I have, it's all I can give to this world; my crooked heart is the only means through which I will ever be able to live out my daily prayer to make the world more beautiful.  I pray that God will bring beauty and consolation out of my own crookedness.

Suffer Like Coffee

Beautiful post from a sister who has been there. May we all learn to suffer like coffee.

The Red Flower

When I was a child, my next-door neighbors had a poster on the wall, a stark image that showed a swathe of black earth silhouetted against a white sky. A single fiery-red flower pushed up out of the black soil. I told the mother of this family that I thought the poster was beautiful, but she, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish refugees, told me that she found it disturbing herself. To her, the lone red flower seemed to be blooming out of troubled soil, in earth that had perhaps been ravaged by war and watered with blood.

If you go to school in New York State, you learn New York State history in third grade, and this was a subject that I particularly loved. It confirmed my suspicion that the ground beneath my feet was not inert, but was, rather, alive, fertilized by the hopes and prayers of hearts that had not long since ceased beating. It also brought home the truth that the soil of the city had itself been watered with blood. I lived across the street from the very spot where Peter Minuit bought Manhattan island from the Lenape Indians; later, I lived on Fort Washington Avenue, which had been a Revolutionary War fort, as had Fort Tryon Park up the street and Fort Lee across the Hudson River in New Jersey. The blood of soldiers watered that ground; the lordly Hudson once bristled with warships. The infamous Draft Riots of 1863 added the blood of lynched black New Yorkers to the soil around what is now Grand Central Station. In school we learned, too, about the digging of the Erie Canal, which opened the American West and joined it to New York and to the rest of the world, and about the Underground Railroad, which branched out through upstate New York to places like Elmira, Ithaca, and Rochester, where Frederick Douglass published his newspaper, The North Star. We learned about the great waves of immigration, about peoples exiled and displaced, fleeing from danger and persecution. And we learned about the men who had died digging the subways, building the bridges, and connecting the reservoirs of upstate Delaware and Sullivan Counties to the municipal water lines of New York City. While New York cannot, without some hyperbole, be called a war-torn land, there’s no denying that all kinds of blood flows figuratively through its history.

I started thinking about the the red flower growing in barren soil at Sunday Mass when the Gospel about Christ going into the desert was read. I felt sharply my painful absence from that place, watered with blood, that is my temporal Not-Exile, and I imagined what the Israelites might have felt, wandering around and around in an unfamiliar wasteland, on the way to something promised but as yet unknown and unrevealed. Compared with my beautiful land of Not-Exile, the place where I now live is a kind of epistemological desert, too.  When I moved from Manhattan to the Bronx, an old friend of mine observed that he didn’t know that anyone ever moved there willingly, except to be buried; when I told him, later, I was moving here, he was stumped for a reply. 

And it must be admitted that it’s a strange feeling to go from a place where, among other advantages, things function smoothly on a massive scale – a place where things work – to a place that is a relative desert. Not only is my new town dogged by social dysfunction -- a dearth of jobs, an aging population, and a disappearing middle-class -- it also has few consolations to offer in the way of culture, comfort, or aesthetic niceties, and I suppose this is no paradox. The commercial functionality of life in New York is so well–oiled that, if you’re sick in bed and can’t drag yourself to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled, they will deliver; if you’re hungry or thirsty at 3 AM and facing a bare refrigerator, you can go down the corner to an all-night diner or a Korean deli/salad bar and eat your fill. This kind of high-functioning service economy assumes, of course, that you have cash (or credit) in pocket to pay for it. There’s no sense of “come, all you who have no money, and eat your fill”; even the neo-back-to-the-landers who have marched on the borough of Brooklyn, establishing indie slaughterhouses and artisanal pickle-fermenting joints there, put out product that only people with a certain amount of disposable income can afford to buy. A service economy designed for those who can afford it is one of the reasons there’s been an underground exodus of the urban poor from New York to towns like mine in northern Appalachia, where the assumption is, correctly, that here you can get more for less. 

Fortunately, I can drive now; I don’t need the drugstore to deliver. But it took me a long time after we moved here to shake the sinking feeling that would come over me in the middle of the day, when I was either stuck at home with my preschooler or hitting a wall in one of the wide-ranging editing or translating projects I’ve worked on in the past year, and I would realize that I couldn’t just get up and stroll out for a cup of coffee.  To be able to do that is just, for want of a better word, nice. It’s something that makes an appreciable difference in the flow of one’s quotidian life, something that truly adds, to use an overused phrase, to the quality of that life. For one thing, it brings you into contact with other people, which doesn't often happen here, nor, I suspect, in a lot of other semi-suburban communities.

In New York, everything has already been done for you. Someone else opened the twenty-four hour drugstore; someone else, either a neo-back-to-the-lander Brooklynite or Starbucks, roasted that coffee and put it in a cup for you, provided a soft chair for you to sit and drink it in, and even set out a few well-worn kids’ books to keep your little ones amused while you snatch some private time in a public place. And this snatching of private time in public is, itself, a really special thing, which I didn’t realize until I moved to a place where people stay in their houses and shop in suburban shopping malls. The shared and public aspects of urban life help to forge and bond a community.

Yes, in New York, to quote Elizabeth Bishop, “somebody loves us all.” In my new home town, no one loves nobody. Though not, as far as I know, by blood, my own little place here has been well-watered with my tears.  Here, I understand nothing; I don't speak the language; I don't know which way to go. I feel as if I'm in a place without maps. The days are long and bleak. Nonetheless, as difficult, frustrating, and ego-bashing as my own small exile is, I believe quite strongly that it is necessary; as lonely and opaque as this place is to me, I believe that God wants me to be here, and I pray that I will be able to bring forth some sort of blossom out of this rocky earth. In fact, I believe that's what I have to do. Perhaps removing me from my home and chipping away at my loves and attachments is actually a demonstration, somehow, of God's mercy.

Quick Takes: It's Lent!

1. I felt like titling this post: "Wake Up, Mother------, It's Lent!" but thought the better of it. Nonetheless, that's what I tell myself in the morning when my feet hit the floor.

2. I've used this picture before, but feel compelled to use it again. I am trying to consciously set Lent apart in my mind from ordinary time, but I have historically been bad at making any kind of distinction between Lent and the rest of the year. It all feels like Lent to me -- the daily sense of a kind of messy, uphill slog in semi-darkness in a barren landscape to a destination that's unknown and not expected to be much fun when I get there. I often feel, in my quotidian life and work, as if I'm hauling heavy stones up a steep hill, only to get them there and watch them tumble over the cliff into a bottomless void. Lent feels no different. I suppose it's up to me to make it different by punctuating my days with regular periods of prayer and by giving up small pleasures, something I usually resent doing. I hope and pray for a better disposition this year.

3. Lent is also a yearly time of personal mourning for me. Two dear friends of mine died in the middle of Lent in 2006 and 2007. During Lent 2007, I also had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, landing me in the hospital and necessitating emergency surgery, during which one of my ovaries was removed (it took several days to be correctly diagnosed, so, in my usual state of oblivion, I went on about my life, walking all over town, teaching my classes at the large public university where I was completing my doctorate, and filing a claim against a former landlord in Bronx County Court, while ignoring the pain that dogged my every step). Sometimes I feel quite lost without one of these friends in particular. He died right before the ectopic rupture, which happened one night at home, and, as I was lying there on the floor sweating and vomiting, I prayed to him to ask God to save my baby, but evidently it was not to be.

4. We are supposed to wait in "joyful expectation" for the coming of our Savior, another thing I'm lousy at.  I wonder how to do it. Is my usual habit of grimly expecting something not-so-nice just a habit? Can it be changed? Can I change my temperament and demeanor without becoming a complete, phony sap?  This year, we are waiting for Jude, and I will be happy when he's finally here. Nevertheless, I don't know if it's because of my general demeanor, or if it's an opinion formed from my own observations and experiences, but I don't buy into that happy-ever-after scenario about this or about anything. The adoption magazines -- like all parenting magazines, actually -- are full of stories of the wait over, the family and the individual completed, the loneliness soothed, the joy of union. I'm not sure I ever believed that was the expected outcome of any relationship. I like to think of myself as a realist, as someone who sees through what is false in our culture, but perhaps I'm just a cynic who has more in common with my southern Italian forebears than I like to think. Nonetheless, I wonder what happens after the airport.

5. I've decided to give up drinking this Lent. I've never done this before. My drinking, such as it is, is restricted to a glass of wine every night with dinner, but I love that glass of wine, and have come not only to expect it but also to see it as a reward for getting through the day. It wasn't a hard choice, though. I was hit with a stomach virus last week and couldn't even drink water, so my nightly habit fell rather naturally by the wayside. Now that I can eat and drink again, I weighed wine and coffee in the balance, and decided that, much as I love that glass of wine, I need coffee more.

6. When I was little, I never thought I'd grow up to drive a car. Not only was it not really necessary where I lived, but also I really hated cars. I hated their smell, both inside and out. As a child, I used to fantasize about ploughing over all the roads in the world and planting grass and trees there, leaving a small path for people to walk, returning the ugliness of industrialism and urban life to the peacefulness of a sort of William Morris-esque pastoral utopia.  But then I grew up to feel as if I needed the city as much as I now feel like I need that glass of wine or cup of coffee every day. And now I am, reluctantly, driving. I still feel unmoored, too light, when I'm behind the wheel. I filled up my gas tank yesterday for the first time, and managed to get gas all over my shoes and inside my pocketbook (being a city girl, I never leave my purse in the car, even when I'm filling it up with gas). I am going to try to incorporate the fact that I drive a car now into some sort of intentional Lenten practice.

7. A good and fruitful Lent to all.

Other Madeleines

Sometimes it takes time for the reality of one's circumstances to fully hit one.  When we first moved here, I assumed that my life would sort of go on the same way it always had, just in a much smaller place.  I imagined, for instance, without really considering it, that I would have no problem walking into a deli and getting a coffee and a prune danish.  But then, after a while, I realized that there were no delis here.  Is it the same everywhere outside of major urban areas?

So I made my coffee at home, and I even made prune danish a few times, a laborious process, but worth it.

Still, it's hard to describe the jolt you feel when you realize that you can no longer do the ordinary things you once did.  In New York, most people can legitimately claim membership in a handful of communities, into and out of which they slip with relative ease. These might include one's friends from church or work, say, or the other mothers, like oneself, generally shunned at the playground (in my neighborhood, these included the German woman married to a Jamaican man, whose toddler daughter was completely bald from alopecia; the Irish-born woman who'd lived there for years and had many friends, but who was rejected when she adopted an attachment-parenting philosophy; and, perhaps most problematic of all in my majority-Irish neighborhood, the black Englishwoman).  For me, they also included my classical musician and singer colleagues; the brilliant young university-student mother with autism who lived downstairs and was my son's first babysitter (and, for her own reasons, a fellow outsider in our neighborhood); my professors and colleagues in my doctoral program; and the community of solid friendships I was able to construct with a few other women, including Really Rosie. Here, I can't even seem to make friends with anyone at church, and the post-kindergarten pickup line is not shaping up very promisingly; the other mothers seem to know one another already, and I'm prepared to be shunned when it's discovered that I'm the mother of the only child with autism in this otherwise mainstream class.

I found myself with time on my hands this morning, and I decided to go to the local Catholic hospital, to which I can walk, and do Adoration in their chapel.  One of my main incentives was, admittedly, that the hospital cafeteria carries these fantastic chocolate-filled croissants that are reminiscent of the ones sold at many a New York deli, with one of which I anticipated rewarding myself afterwards.  In the chapel I met an elderly nun I know who's originally from New Jersey, and I poured out to her my tale of crushing loneliness.  But as we talked, it dawned on me, as it does every so often, that God has uprooted me from everything I once knew and loved in His mercy. For everyone who wishes to ascend must descend. 

In my former life, after many years of struggle and hard work, I had achieved a certain level of accomplishment and a certain small amount of recognition.  And when I entered my doctoral program and began teaching college, things seemed, for the first time, completely right; I felt as if I had finally found what I was meant to do.  When I met my husband, got married in the Church, and had a beautiful baby boy nine months and three days after our wedding, I felt even more confirmed in the rightness of it all.

And then, multiple pregnancy losses.  And then, we moved here.  And then no more teaching, or friends, or community. And secondary infertility. And my mother's terminal illness. And my son's autism diagnosis. All these conditions, for now, are ongoing, as is my sense, to quote Saint John of the Cross, of the pervasiveness of "nothing, nothing, nothing."

And now this community has been devastated by flooding resulting from the recent hurricanes. I suspect that, because of the disaster, more people will leave this area, which has already lost half its population in the past twenty years.

Being stripped so bare of everything that I thought made me who I was, being so left to my own meager devices, makes me realize how much I relied on the good opinion of others in my former life, and how much I defined myself by my accomplishments. Here, it seems there is nothing but my daily struggles, mostly of the most mundane kind, but in many ways more challenging than the daily struggles of my former life, which were more easily solved, and whose resolution was so much more readily rewarded (good coffee and pastry, after all, can be had on nearly every street corner back in New York).  I feel so diminished here, and I feel as if God is pushing me to my knees every day.  Though this is painful and is not what I would have sought, it can't be bad.

My new town used to be a manufacturing hub.  That's all gone now, of course, leaving an emptied-out shell of a city.  In the midst of this, for some reason I can't fully comprehend, there is a small, independent coffee roaster here that makes the best coffee I've ever had in my life outside of Italy.  After the days of flooding, feeling rather helpless, I went downtown just to have a coffee there. They had been closed for several days because of ordinances against water use, and were just reopening.  As I was paying for my coffee, my eye fell on a glass cookie jar at the counter, which, to my amazement, was stocked with regina biscuits, a very particular, local, and therefore rarely found Italian cookie -- sesame-covered, delicate and not too sweet, my favorite biscuit of all, far outstripping your margheritas or your anisette cookies -- that I had not seen since I was quite young in Brooklyn, when I used to eat them by the dozen out of a brown paper bag from the local bakery.  I asked the proprietor where these cookies had come from.  From Brooklyn, she told me.  She didn't know the name of the bakery; a friend had brought them. I bought some; they were the same as they always had been.

I sat there with my coffee and my reginas and I wasn't sure whether I should play my usual game of conjuring lost worlds by way of strange-yet-familiar objects, mediating the ghosts of the invisible past with the tangible, the material, the present, as Proust did so famously in the opening pages of Remembrance of Things Past. In the end, though, I decided not to, because I am trying to actively turn my memory over to God, as suggested by the Ignatian "Suscipe" prayer.  I see, indeed, that there is nothing to fall back on but God.  I'm not saying I like this state of affairs, but that's the way it is.

Coffee Break with God

(My title is shamelessly mooched from a book I've never read, and has pretty much nothing to do with this post.)

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, because I know from long experience that they tend to be swept out with the eggshells and coffee grounds sometime around the end of the first week of January, and I like to save myself the embarrassment that my own broken resolutions cause me.  Sometimes I toy with various resolutions, however, trying them on and then, more often than not, rejecting them.  Here are a few that I'm idly considering this year:

1.  No longer swearing like a truck-driver, if only inside the echo-chamber of my own head.  I almost never swear in front of my son (not in English, anyway, though I have to admit to having said some really gutter things in Italian at times, when I've stepped on a Lego, say, or given myself a paper cut), and I've been very relieved that he's never yet, to my knowledge, said a curse-word (at least not in English).  And yet, we now know that swearing is much more effective at relieving pain and frustration than consciously resorting to blithe euphemisms; the real words just seem to work, and are so much more satisfying emotionally, perhaps because of their taboo status.  I often take myself into another room alone so I can swear out loud in English, but mostly those four-letter bombs are just dropping in the quiet of my mind as I face the frustrations of the average day.  And yet, for all the silence of my cursing, it still doesn't seem . . . seemly to even think those words.  So perhaps I'll silently substitute some corny-sounding euphemisms in my inner monologue in 2011.  Or perhaps not.

2.  Giving up coffee. I consider undertaking this heroic feat every so often, and even went so far as to make it my Lenten sacrifice a couple of years ago, an intention which lasted one solid day.  The truth is, I sometimes go for whole weeks without drinking coffee, but I have no wish to put it away from me forever.  Not only do I love the taste -- it's one of my favorite flavors, the darker and bitterer the better (no sugar, and lightened with half-and-half or cream; if only milk is available, I will forgo the coffee altogether) -- but I also love the idea of coffee.  There is something so companionable about it.  Two mothers having coffee together while their children play are engaging in a kind of conspiracy of community, it seems to me.  Tea, though I drink it, seems insubstantial and a bit fey in comparison, and herbal tea is something I dislike and generally avoid unless there's a medicinal reason for taking it.  (It's crossed my mind once or twice that if I gave up coffee, perhaps I would be able to conceive again; I've heard the anecdotal notion that coffee suppresses fertility.  But the truth is that I was drinking coffee all the other times I conceived; I believe God intends for us to add children to our family through adoption; and the possibility seems strong that conception wouldn't occur, and then I would have . . . given up coffee.  Is this a foolish, fetishistic, fatalistic line of reasoning?  Perhaps.  Maybe I will give up coffee after all, though it will be with great reluctance.)
  
3.  Being more patient. My son, who's quite advanced in some ways, is quite delayed in others.  He doesn't draw (though he is very specific in directing his parents and teachers to draw according to his designs), partially because of his fine-motor delays, and partially because he's intensely perfectionistic, and melts down completely when he attempts to draw something that doesn't come out as he'd envisioned.  Today I was helping him draw a tugboat puffing smoke.  He was trying to draw circles for the smoke, but, as he said, his circles had tails.  He flung himself down in tears, and didn't want to continue.  This brought me to tears too, because I felt that he had to.  The ability to practice a skill until it virtually becomes ingrained into the sinews of the heart, and the ability to love that relentless practice, are probably the most important capacities I've cultivated in my life.  But how can I teach a volatile, neurologically-puzzling preschool boy to love practice, to love discipline?  I was stymied.  With him, I realize that I will have to take many deep breaths and work very slowly on the same basic skills over and over again, when I want him to dance, to leap, to fly, as the ethos of intense practice has allowed me to do.  He is the sort of child who, I believe, will fly eventually; he is very bright, musical, and imaginative.  But I am so attached to the idea of self-discipline as the means to becoming skilled and independent, and to the notion of becoming skilled and independent as the means to intellectual and artistic freedom.  I suppose that, in 2011, I should resolve to learn how to slow down my own wild thinking and imagining.

Which, to sum up, is why I love this ad from the 1980s.  It suggests that, when you're hitting the wall in your ethos of relentless practicing, and especially if you're a musician whose work is starting to sound like sh--,  you need . . . coffee.  I guess the shadowy forces of the coffee-industrial complex figured, back in those pre-Starbucks days, that Americans just weren't drinking enough of it.

The Uses of Memory (re-post from April 10, 2009)

My recent trip to New York has moved me to re-post this entry from almost a year ago, since, having returned, I am struck all over again by the fact that

New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.

So far, after a year and a half in a very, very different place, however, I still feel as if I'm in exile, and it's become no easier. Ironically, I've found that one can become a new person in New York City simply by moving to a different neighborhood, far more easily than one can by taking on the trappings of a very different way of life in a small town.  And the snares of memory are tighter now than ever after a visit back.  I miss my friends; I miss the beautiful people of the city of New York.  And I miss the end of summer, when the bark of the plane trees in playgrounds from the Bronx to the Lower East Side becomes mottled, and the acrid stench of summer has started to give way to the clear skies and the faint smell of burning in the air that presage autumn.  And spring in New York, when people pour out of tenements to sit on their stoops and play radios, and children dance on the sidewalks out in front.  And the hum of quiet that descends over even the noisiest streets once or twice today, like a passage of angels.  And being able just to go down to the corner and have a drink or a cup of halfway-decent coffee.  And many, many other things.

So here's the re-post:
 
The Uses of Memory


Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will, all I have and possess; you have given it me; to you, Lord, I return it; all is yours, dispose of it entirely according to your will. Give me your love and grace, because that is enough for me.
-- Saint Ignatius of Loyola

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know certain things about me, its anonymous author: for instance, that I had a dramatic conversion several years ago, which led to gradual changes in my life and reasoning process from one way to its near-complete opposite; and that I consider myself a penitent. Having gone from espousing and living a self-absorbed, promiscuous, bohemian ethos that caused a great deal of harm to myself and others, to striving to espouse and live a Christian life, has been no easy transition. I struggle daily with the discipline and humility needed to shoulder the cross of my mundane responsibilities, and the past is always beckoning to me over that shoulder -- not so much the events of the past, which mostly ended in heartbreak and failure, but the sensations that accompanied and illustrated them.

I recall the way the light rallied bravely on a post-industrial street in early March in my old city; the taste of the coffee at a Puerto Rican lunch counter by the subway; the green glass bottles arranged on the window sill in a friend's apartment. The lime-green haze of the new leaves, like a diaphanous scarf caught in the black branches of the trees on Riverside Drive. The impossibly warm, nostalgic sound of my voice teacher's Bechstein. The buzzing haze of the city in summer, and the marvelously strange way that a hush would descend at certain moments over even the busiest street. The weeds that heliotroped and bloomed through chicken-wire fencing on a strip of auto-body repair shops in the Bronx. The playing cards I would often find on the street (I found a tarot card, "The Lovers," once). And the many, many goodbyes. While Rome is a city that is layered over with the history of Western civilization, New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.

Now I am elsewhere, with none of the sensations of my beloved city around me. And sometimes I mourn for the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, the beautiful fragments of a mostly unlovely life that shimmer even more in the refracted light of memory. And I wonder what God wants me to do with my memory. Must I ask Him to sever it from me? I suppose I would be happier and better-adjusted if I could forget the past. And these sense memories inevitably incur regret, because they suggest the past, which, since I cannot change it, leads to grief, and even depression. If God has forgotten my sins, must I remember them?

The quandary of conversion is that it must always be rooted in penitence. Can one be penitent and not mourn constantly? Saint Peter, according to legend, had furrows in his cheeks, gouged there by his incessant weeping for having denied Christ. And, according to Raïssa Maritain, the eyes of Blessed Ève Lavallière, a French actress and convert, were, after her conversion, always wet with tears of contrition for her past sins. Saint Ephrem the Syrian is said to have written:

The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again!

And yet, as Brother Roger of Taizé has noted:

It may be impossible to repent without feeling some regret. But the difference between the two is enormous. Repentance is a gift from God, a hidden activity of the Holy Spirit that draws a person to God. I do not need God to regret my mistakes; I can do that by myself. Regret keeps us focused on ourselves. When I repent, however, I turn towards God, forgetting myself and surrendering myself to him. Regret makes no amends for the wrong done, but God, when I come to him in repentance, "dispels my sins like the morning mist" (Isaiah 44:22).

What, then, is the place of memory in the penitential consciousness? Is it possible to mine the memory for beauty, and to use the beauty as a palliative for others? Is it the responsibility of those who are conscious of beauty to nurture it, wherever it is found, even in ugliness? Or must that beauty be left behind, even buried?

I recently had the opportunity to go back to New York to see the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (the image above, "Work Table," is the poster for the show). Retrospectives of Bonnard's work are rare -- the last one in New York was in 1998 -- and I enthusiastically recommend this show, which closes on April 19, to anyone who can go. It is wonderful. Bonnard is an artist who has always been important to me personally, and in fact, in his late paintings, there is an apparent attempt to come to terms with painful memory. He paints mundane domestic objects with luminous, even joyful, intensity, and yet the shadowy human figures who cling to the edges of his canvases hint at a tragic personal situation that caused great damage in his life and the lives of those around him in the mid-1920s, several years before he began producing this prodigious later corpus.

Were the dreadful events in Bonnard's life, then, somehow salutary for the rest of us? The beauty of his late paintings give the viewer great joy.

My fondest hope is that, out of the dreadful turmoil of my own past, some small healing for others might also be brought forth.

Happy Easter (and Passover) and many blessings to all my readers.

Six Quick Takes from a Winter of Discontent

1.  I have noticed that this is the sixtieth anniversary of Dunkin Donuts's existence.  This is by no means an occasion I think worth celebrating, since I find their coffee to be both bitter and weak, and, on the whole, virtually undrinkable.  But then, I find most coffee undrinkable these days.  I used to only be able to drink coffee brewed in my own Neapolitan coffee maker on my own stovetop, but now even that is undrinkable to me.  The coffee hath lost its savor, in spite of the fact that the idea of coffee is almost always somewhere in the nimbus around my conscious mind.  (Incidentally, as much as true coffee snobs claim to hate Starbucks, those who know cannot deny that Starbucks did New York City a great public service when they came to the city in the 1990s by uniformly lifting all New York coffee to a higher level.)

2.  I'm listening to the live broadcast of Ariadne auf Naxos from the Metropolitan Opera, and reminiscing about seeing the same production around the time that Starbucks first came to town.  It almost never happens, at least in my experience, that the tenor who sings the role of Theseus sings it well, but perhaps I'll be surprised today (or maybe not, since my son just said, "I want that song to be turned off," and I can't say that I blame him, because, although Richard Strauss may have been one of the greatest composers who ever lived, especially in the way he wrote for orchestra, I find his music creepy, unsettling, even, if amorality can be said to have a sound, amoral.  I do love Zerbinetta's aria, though).  When I went to the Met's Ariadne in the mid-1990s, the Theseus was so bad that, after his aria, my then-husband called out, "Go for it, brother!" from his seat next to mine in Family Circle, and I nearly died of exaggeratedly-virtuous embarrassment.

3.  I don't know if such mortifying prickings of memory and conscience are Lenten in origin or not, but I have just remembered that I borrowed money from a Columbia boy I dated during the summer I was twenty and never paid him back.  The circumstances under which I borrowed the money were unhappily clouded, as I recall, by my sense that, because he was rich and I was poor (and since we were sleeping together), the loan wouldn't, or shouldn't, be a problem for him.  Thank God for the internet, and for the fact that I have some concert gigs coming up.  As soon as I remembered his last name, I was able to find out where he now works, and as soon as I get paid I am going to send him a money order.  And thank God for conversion, too.

4.  Speaking of Kurt Weill, I also recently remembered one of the worst experiences of my life, which happened when I had a club date with an avant-garde outfit called the Imploding Head Orchestra.  Believe it or not, I sang this song, as well as the "Youkali Tango," and the man whom I loved desperately arrived, while I was singing, with the woman whom he loved desperately.  Because I was the sort of person who did things like that referenced in number 3, above, it wasn't all that much longer before we were married, but not before we'd sacrificed our unborn child on the altar of our desperation.

5.  At the library today, I saw a family of young women who I assumed, based on their style of dress, were Christian, perhaps even trad Catholic, homeschoolers.  If you were from New York, you might at first have thought that they were Orthodox Jews (just as, if you are from New York and you see an Amish man in these parts, you at first think he's an ultra-Orthodox Jewish patriarch, and your heart longs for home).  But if you put a family of Christian homeschooling girls next to a group of Orthodox Jewish girls, you'd notice at second glance that, although the Jewish girls also have skirts down to their feet and sleeves down to their wrists, they are ineffably more elegant and fashionable and, I might add, prettier than the Christian homeschoolers.

6.  I hope and pray that God will use my sense of exile from my city and all that I once knew, my remorse for my misdeeds, and my confusion for His glory and honor and for the help of someone else who, like me, is stumbling brokenly through the Lenten desert.

Sense and Sensibility

 

Though he hasn't been evaluated or diagnosed yet, my son's teacher at preschool recently suggested that he exhibits behaviors that may be consistent with a sensory processing disorder.  I wasn't alarmed by this, since he is a bit quirky, and since I know several children who have received this diagnosis and received treatment for it.  When I plunged into the waters of the primary source of all knowledge -- Google -- and found this checklist, however, I wondered if I didn't have it, too, especially in the area of hypersensitivity to sound.

As a child, I couldn't stand to watch t.v., a habit that's stuck with me, because I found the low-pitched buzz that the television made acutely disturbing.  As a parent, I physically cringe and do cartoon-like double-takes at every normal-household-decibel-level whine and shout, and even at the ringing of the telephone, until, by the end of some days, I am in the blackest of noise-induced moods.  When I met my husband, I was intensely drawn to him, among other reasons, for the beauty of his speaking voice, and rejected another suitor around the same time because (among other reasons) there was something about his voice that bothered me (based on his later denunciation of me, this seems not to have been a bad decision).  In spite of the fact that I'm a professional musician, I often find it difficult and unpleasant to listen to music, because it absorbs my attention so completely that I feel as if I become the slave of what I'm hearing, right down to my very cells.  And music of all kinds makes me weep (interestingly, my sister, the only one of us four siblings who did not become a professional musician, exhibited this same propensity as a baby).  And don't get me started on the sense of smell. 

My son has been telling me lately, "Mommy, we are twins," which I chalked up to your common house-and-garden Oedipal complex, but perhaps he's more right than he realizes.  My friend H., disability activist and author of the now-defunct blog Retired Waif (as well as one of the most brilliant and fascinating people I know), once guffawed loudly when I referred to myself as "neurotypical," and replied, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, "Oh right, Pentimento, you are the poster girl for neurotypicality."  I wonder now if I would have made entirely different choices in my life if I had been the kind of person who was not wholly unsettled by the hum of a television.

And, come to think of it, when M. gave me a copy of Remembrance of Things Past years ago, and told me that Proust had lived in a cork-lined room on coffee brewed with milk, I found myself nodding my head in total sympathy with the neurasthenic author; it sounded like a good kind of life to me. 

So Much for the "Chouchou de Paris"

From Richard Cross's wonderful article about the conversion of pianist and composer Hermann Cohen.  I love that one of the monkeys on his back as a novice was . . .  coffee (I'm down with the malicious wit part, too).

When Hermann presented himself at the Carmelite convent in Agen he brought a great deal of emotional baggage with him. Here was a young man who only a short while ago had been a dandy and dilettante. He had bad habits to overcome: a malicious wit, a tendency to backbite and gossip. He was addicted to gambling, he smoked, he took snuff, he loved coffee. What he faced was bare feet in the winter, rising in the middle of the night for prayer, total abstinence from meat, fasting throughout the year, sleeping on a board without a mattress, long periods of silence in a small cell, and no keyboard during his novitiate. So much for the "chouchou de Paris."

Hard Grace

I wonder sometimes if I'll ever get used to life as it really is, if I'll ever reconcile myself to the fact that it has little if anything in common with the dark, redolent landscapes suggested to me in my youth by the songs of Brahms and Schumann and the poetry they set. In my younger days, I imagined that I could recreate my life whole out of those ingredients, plus maybe a bowl of flowers, some macrobiotic groceries, red lipstick, and a thrift-store coat. Things seemed like so much more than what they were; I could practically feel the molecules moving along the surfaces of the created world, and I expected objects to live and breathe and tell me their stories. I also imagined that I was the translator of phenomena, that I needed to make the hidden stories of things known through my own artistic work. I thought that if things looked a certain way, smelled a certain way, and sounded a certain way in my daily experience, everything would be all right. In short, I believed that aesthetics trumped nature, nurture, neurosis, and the whole host of other uncontrollable variables that end up carving a life out of the seemingly endless run of days. Oh, and grace. I didn't know much about it, nor about mercy; but I did have the sense of an invisible thread of goodness that somehow tugged me safely through some shocking and desperate situations.

But grace is not always aesthetically satisfying. It's hard to distinguish sometimes between the gift of humility, which is like a long exhalation of relief, and the feeling of being kicked down howling into the dirt. Grace has led me further away from the beautiful perceptions that used to make up my days -- the vetiver perfume worn by a bohemian German woman who sat next to me at the ballet one day when I was fourteen, the swirl of cream spiraling down into a glass of black coffee, the delightful label on a can of imported tomato paste, so beautiful that I removed it and pinned it up on the wall -- and deeper into the repetitive, drone-like tasks that actually do make up the days of most adults.

I sometimes think that the adults in my life recognized certain proclivities in me as a child and trained me for them, with the result that I lived as an artist and lacked practicality almost entirely. I also behaved in ways that were hurtful to those around me. I think the adults felt themselves to have been thwarted by responsibility and circumstance from paying court to beauty as they had wished to, and so trained me to do it for them. But in the end, like most people, I eventually had to learn the hard lessons of adulthood; I just did so later than most, and with more resentment.

When everything whispered beauty to me, I lived in a kind of perfumed solitude, which has devolved now into ordinary everyday loneliness. And it's almost a year since we moved away from New York, and I still can't drive.

But Mark Strand wrote in his beautiful poem "The Continuous Life":

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

Above: The Table (1925) by Pierre Bonnard.

The Uses of Memory

Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will, all I have and possess; you have given it me; to you, Lord, I return it; all is yours, dispose of it entirely according to your will. Give me your love and grace, because that is enough for me.
-- Saint Ignatius of Loyola

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know certain things about me, its anonymous author: for instance, that I had a dramatic conversion several years ago, which led to gradual changes in my life and reasoning process from one way to its near-complete opposite; and that I consider myself a penitent. Having gone from espousing and living a self-absorbed, promiscuous, bohemian ethos that caused a great deal of harm to myself and others, to striving to espouse and live a Christian life, has been no easy transition. I struggle daily with the discipline and humility needed to shoulder the cross of my mundane responsibilities, and the past is always beckoning to me over that shoulder -- not so much the events of the past, which mostly ended in heartbreak and failure, but the sensations that accompanied and illustrated them.

I recall the way the light rallied bravely on a post-industrial street in early March in my old city; the taste of the coffee at a Puerto Rican lunch counter by the subway; the green glass bottles arranged on the window sill in a friend's apartment. The lime-green haze of the new leaves, like a diaphanous scarf caught in the black branches of the trees on Riverside Drive. The impossibly warm, nostalgic sound of my voice teacher's Bechstein. The buzzing haze of the city in summer, and the marvelously strange way that a hush would descend at certain moments over even the busiest street. The weeds that heliotroped and bloomed through chicken-wire fencing on a strip of auto-body repair shops in the Bronx. The playing cards I would often find on the street (I found a tarot card, "The Lovers," once). And the many, many goodbyes. While Rome is a city that is layered over with the history of Western civilization, New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.

Now I am elsewhere, with none of the sensations of my beloved city around me. And sometimes I mourn for the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, the beautiful fragments of a mostly unlovely life that shimmer even more in the refracted light of memory. And I wonder what God wants me to do with my memory. Must I ask Him to sever it from me? I suppose I would be happier and better-adjusted if I could forget the past. And these sense memories inevitably incur regret, because they suggest the past, which, since I cannot change it, leads to grief, and even depression. If God has forgotten my sins, must I remember them?

The quandary of conversion is that it must always be rooted in penitence. Can one be penitent and not mourn constantly? Saint Peter, according to legend, had furrows in his cheeks, gouged there by his incessant weeping for having denied Christ. And, according to Raïssa Maritain, the eyes of Blessed Ève Lavallière, a French actress and convert, were, after her conversion, always wet with tears of contrition for her past sins. Saint Ephrem the Syrian is said to have written:

The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again!

And yet, as Brother Roger of Taizé has noted:

It may be impossible to repent without feeling some regret. But the difference between the two is enormous. Repentance is a gift from God, a hidden activity of the Holy Spirit that draws a person to God. I do not need God to regret my mistakes; I can do that by myself. Regret keeps us focused on ourselves. When I repent, however, I turn towards God, forgetting myself and surrendering myself to him. Regret makes no amends for the wrong done, but God, when I come to him in repentance, "dispels my sins like the morning mist" (Isaiah 44:22).

What, then, is the place of memory in the penitential consciousness? Is it possible to mine the memory for beauty, and to use the beauty as a palliative for others? Is it the responsibility of those who are conscious of beauty to nurture it, wherever it is found, even in ugliness? Or must that beauty be left behind, even buried?

I recently had the opportunity to go back to New York to see the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (the image above, "Work Table," is the poster for the show). Retrospectives of Bonnard's work are rare -- the last one in New York was in 1998 -- and I enthusiastically recommend this show, which closes on April 19, to anyone who can go. It is wonderful. Bonnard is an artist who has always been important to me personally, and in fact, in his late paintings, there is an apparent attempt to come to terms with painful memory. He paints mundane domestic objects with luminous, even joyful, intensity, and yet the shadowy human figures who cling to the edges of his canvases hint at a tragic personal situation that caused great damage in his life and the lives of those around him in the mid-1920s, several years before he began producing this prodigious later corpus.

Were the dreadful events in Bonnard's life, then, somehow salutary for the rest of us? The beauty of his late paintings give the viewer great joy.

My fondest hope is that, out of the dreadful turmoil of my own past, some small healing for others might also be brought forth.

Happy Easter (and Passover) and many blessings to all my readers.

The Aroma of Longing

Recently in the combox, some of us have been discussing longing. When I asserted that longing is the post-Romantic condition, Mrs. T corrected me: it is the human condition.

We live on one side of an old two-family house from the 1930s, and when we moved in, I had perhaps irrationally high hopes that our other-side neighbors, a young-ish married couple with no children, would become great friends of mine. But it was not to be. Soon after we arrived, they complained about our noise: our son, whose third birthday was nearing, is a very rambunctious boy, and my husband and I would talk in our bedroom, which abutted theirs, apparently past our neighbors' bedtime. We have tried to be sensitive -- I don't consider us a loud family (except for when I practice, when my husband plays the piano or his accordion, when my son is screaming, when I am yelling ... hmmm) -- but sometimes we forget. My husband was vacuuming the living room the other night when the wife called and said she had just gone to bed and could we please stop; it was, um, 8:30.

So this great friendship was not to be. But I have a kind of olfactory voyeurism into my neighbors' lives. The house has two separate basements, one for each side, with built-in chutes on the first and second floors to throw dirty clothes down to the laundry room. Whenever I open one of the chutes, I can smell what my neighbors are cooking. It always smells so good that I feel disappointed by what I'm cooking on my own side of the house (which is usually also quite good) and seized with longing for what they're having for dinner. They make a lot of popcorn, which is not something we have over on this side. And this morning, as I was throwing last night's pajamas down to the basement, I caught the aroma of their coffee. It was wonderful - cinnamony, inviting, seemingly nothing at all like the coffee I was brewing back home. I imagined what life must be like on the other side of the house: bathed in warm colors, with attractive, artsy knick-knacks strewn about. But my own coffee was good too, and the husband of the couple is getting his doctorate in something called post-subculture studies, so maybe it's just as well we didn't become friends.

Too Late Now, Part 2

I haven't thought about my sojourn at 216 Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for years, but after writing about my move there, I've been besieged with memories of the place. My time there coincided with the temporary end of my relationship with M. (The relationship started up again the following year when I met him by chance in a part of town where I rarely ventured. I became pregnant soon after, and he urged me to have an abortion, which, perversely enough, led to our marriage a year later, a marriage which was perhaps -- though I loved him terribly -- doomed from the start.)

I spent the autumn of 1989 living at 216 Carlton in impoverished solitude, having lost my waitressing job at a chic restaurant in the publishing district, where most of the profits appeared at any rate to be going toward the wholesale purchase of cocaine. Somehow that fall I was able nonertheless to save up $90 to buy a beautiful black velvet Renaissance-style hat at a neighborhood shop (I passed it on a couple of years ago to Dawn Eden, on whom it looks extrememly fetching). Every morning I would get a chocolate croissant at the corner deli and drink a whole pot of coffee which I made in a large-ish Neapolitan macchinetta. This coffee was so strong that my friends called it "coffee gluten." One frigid day I decided to give it up, and, when I reached the point where I thought I was going blind, I walked for a couple of miles in the cold to clear my head, ending up somehow at a pizza shop in Brooklyn Heights, where I drank a double espresso and promptly felt much better.

One of the things I remember most clearly from that fall is the way the mimosa trees grew behind the building, making a sort of impassable jungle between my brownstone's back lot and the one across the way. When I sat in the window and gazed out across the back lots of my block, I got a delicious sense of the peace that one feels when one is all alone in a quiet place in the midst of an enormous city, the same sense that one gets from staying up all night with only the radio for company. When I think of that view now, I can still hear the bellowing tenor of a man who lived across the way and used to sing along with gospel recordings, the only interruption in the stillness of those mornings, but one that soon became woven into my solitary contemplation.

Those mornings, almost invariably, I would listen to Joni Mitchell's great album Court and Spark (above), and to the jazz programs on WKCR, one of the true treasures of New York City. One day about a week after I moved in, I woke up and switched on the radio and heard, to my shock, a piano ballad version of the elusive song that had been haunting me. The announcer identified the leader as James Williams, with the eminent Ray Brown and Elvin Jones, from the recording Magical Trio 2. I bought the CD and gave it to my brother to tape for me, since I didn't have a CD player; the cassette tape has surely disappeared in one of my many moves since then, and the recording is now out of print. Williams himself died tragically young in 2004.

These memories bring to mind Czeslaw Milosz's 1938 poem "Encounter":

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Lost in the Supermarket

While I generally find any kind of shopping an onerous chore, I happen to love grocery shopping, especially when I can do it alone. It is a secret pleasure for me to roam the aisles of a big, clean, well-lit store and look for bargains; it’s probably the closest thing to hunting that I will ever experience. I love to cook and bake, and I love the challenge of planning the week’s menu out of what I might find while stalking the sales. I try to find the freshest, best things for the lowest prices, and feel a sense of accomplishment, and even delight, if I can pull something off like happening upon a rack of Angus steaks on the day before expiration, when the manager is offering them for two bucks off, or finding Yuban coffee at two for four dollars (I would prefer to drink something more coffee-snobbish on a regular basis – my favorite coffees are Peets whole bean and the Route 66 Blend from Misha’s in Alexandria, VA – but Yuban is actually quite good for what it is, and I feel virtuous when I buy it because they include some fair-trade beans in the mix).

But if everything can be a catalyst for transcendence, then everything can also be a cause for heartbreak. Shopping alone gives you ample time to concentrate on the soundtrack being piped over the supermarket’s PA system. I’ve always wondered how these stores choose their playlists; I’ve heard music while shopping that I can only call astonishing, and a great deal of music that, as music does, evokes memories of the past, and those not always happy. Last night I had the whole store almost to myself, and I heard the Beatles song “You Won’t See Me” from Rubber Soul, one of my favorite albums of all time, which I received third-hand in childhood, and was flooded with cringe-inducing memories of my adolescence. Then, as I was checking out, an unidentifiable song by the Cocteau Twins came on, which evoked all kinds of painful mental images of my college days, when that band was all the rage among sensitive, artistic, goth-leaning girls because it featured the sort of wordless keening that seemed to express what we wished to call up out of our own souls, but could not in words.

As H.R. Haweis wrote in 1872, “When memory is concerned, music is no longer itself; it ceases to have any proper plane of feeling; it surrenders itself wholly, with all its rights, to memory, to be the patient, stern, and terrible exponent of that recording angel.”