From Maenad to Christian

The young journalist Tara Isabella Burton, both a polymath a fine writer, has a compelling conversion story on Catapult that is very much worth reading. She details her quest for the power to pull back the curtain of ordinariness covering the world, in order to glimpse what she believed to be the enchantment lurking beneath the surfaces of things. In fact, Burton's quest reminds me a great deal of my own younger life (though my own questing entailed fewer trips to Europe and a lot more subway rides to botánicas in the outer boroughs). My main complaint about her longish essay is that it spends itself in romping through such rites of magic as are preferred by flowing-haired moneyed college girls and skimps on the punchline, which is her conversion to Christianity, leaving it essentially unexplained.

Nevertheless, her article contains some pointed insights about the desire for meaning in modern life, spun from the perspective of a certain kind of twee aestheticism, with the surprise that all of Burton's searching ends in Christ.

I sacrificed all of myself. I emptied myself out. I hit bottom, in a thousand different ways, and got what I wanted, in a thousand more, and then, somewhere in the middle of my seeking a vague and generic sense of Poetry, I found a specific one.

One rooted not in a vague sense that magic was real and that the world could at any time be an enchanted one, but in a concrete sense that at one particular place, at one particular time, the laws of nature had been suspended.

I don't mean to be hard on Burton. As I said, she could be me with more money. I too spent years trying to pierce through the dull veil of ordinary time in order to live in a vague world of endless beauty, and used similar tactics. I wanted to be special, to live in a special way, and to surround myself with special people. I wanted to drift through the mean streets where I lived unscathed, a kind of wraith from a Cocteau Twins song. I too dyed my hair this or that color, read Tarot, and abused alcohol and other people. I too made terrible mistakes and sacrificed everything good that I had, though I didn't know at the time that it was good. I too had a conversion, and for me, the conversion is ongoing, as I hope it is for Burton.

I imagine Burton's readership is more interested in the details of her novelistic life in Trieste, with its Passion, Heartbreak, and Blood, than it might be in the daily humiliations I imagine are required for a mind like hers to make common cause with the demands of our faith, not to mention with the unwashed and unlettered hordes of other believers. Indeed, one of the most painful and salutary things about my own ongoing conversion has been embracing the everyday humiliations of my un-special day-to-day life, the life in which I work harder than I ever have at anything for seemingly minuscule gain, and in which the haunting, shadowy beauties of my past pagan life recede ever more into the distance.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the old things in New York City: a lamp I used to have, my old kitchen table with the sun streaming through the window's metal safety guards, a closed theater marquee on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, countless walks through Central Park undertaken just in order to get across town, a collection of blue glass bottles in my voice teacher's apartment -- random scraps of memories of the ordinary things of everyday life, which, when I lived it, I strove to see as pieces of a pattern, a riddle to solve, the road map to a more magical realm -- a life beyond life, though temporal, where everything was radiant and where I would be able to see things as they really were.

As Burton notes, however:

Fridays mean that Christ died and Christ is risen and that Christ will come again. So does rose quartz. So does a full moon.

In other words, the meaning of the natural world, and of all phenomena, and also of the dullness and pain of our everyday lives, is that Christ has redeemed and is redeeming all the scraps of ordinary existence from the clumsy and ineffectual grasping of people like me. Things are what they are, but what is real, and what is hidden, all point to him and to his ongoing restoration of all nature and all humanity. And minds like mine, which long to ascend to the stars, must content ourselves with gazing upon the one whom Burton calls "this unprepossessing carpenter," and about whom Isaiah says: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." In this mortification of clinging to beauty without beauty lies salvation for people like me, and perhaps like Burton.

Mother of the Muses

I had the strange and somewhat disconcerting experience recently of reading a memoir about people I know. It was written by a woman who was, at one time, romantically involved with a close friend of mine. Both of them are writers, and her memoir details a time in her life after college when she, a young woman from a privileged background, took a poorly-paid entry-level job at the literary agency that represented J.D. Salinger, and simultaneously moved into a tenement apartment in Brooklyn with my friend (in a building that really should have been condemned; I was there many times). At the end of this time period, according to the memoir, she underwent an awakening that was both literary and spiritual in nature and jettisoned the apartment, the job, and the boyfriend.

The memoir may sound -- and perhaps is -- a trifle slight and self-serving. It's a coming-of-age story very particular to its time and place -- New York City in the 1990s -- but it's written with an appealing clarity and simplicity, and the author gets so many things right, including the changing seasons in the city; my friend (whom she paints in an unflattering, if fairly accurate, light); and, ultimately, the reality of suffering. One of her job duties at the literary agency was answering the voluminous fan mail sent to Salinger with an off-putting standard form letter. After reading some of these letters, however -- many of them from fellow World War II veterans -- and after belatedly reading Salinger's slim oeuvre, she comes to a deeper understanding of the human condition. She notes that Bessie Glass, the mother of Franny and Zooey, of Boo Boo, Buddy, and Seymour (as well as of Walt, lost in the war, and his twin brother Waker, a cloistered Carthusian monk), "is in mourning [for her two dead children]. As is the entire Glass family. A family in mourning, never to recover. A world in mourning, never to recover." The book is worth reading just to get to that moment, which comes near the end.

I didn't know the author that well back in the day, and I don't know whether her heart had always been open to the truth of suffering, or whether that realization was entirely catalyzed by her reading of Salinger. The author's ex-boyfriend has, in private correspondence, cast her compassion somewhat into question, but I suppose it's not really that important. What is important is the truth that art can effectively reveal certain aspects of humanity, including the inescapable fact of its suffering, and can also provide, if not the remedy for that suffering, then at least some assuagement.

This calls into question the purpose of the memoir as a genre. What is it for, really, and who among us has lived in such a way that merits such public retelling? The Salinger memoir appealed to me because I knew what the author meant. She describes with great care the weather, what she wore, and what she ordered at the deli, all of which are things that I like to know about; attention to such details in my own life is something that has always had great, almost talismanic significance for me. And even if she's not telling the truth about everything -- because who, in a memoir, is? -- she is nothing but truthful about the fact that, beneath the surface of things and phenomena, trouble is roiling, suffering exists, and even the best-intentioned of us cause one another unspeakable pain. If the Salinger memoir has merit, it's primarily because it sends out a slim shaft of light into the brokenness of things: the light of shared pain, of recognized suffering. We possess art, as Nietzsche said, lest we perish of the truth, and is not the purpose of art to alleviate suffering? Goethe wrote:

Now, Muses, enough!
You strive in vain to show
how anguish and joy
change places in the loving heart.
You cannot heal the wounds
that love inflicts;
but comfort comes,
kindly ones, only from you.



And Memory, Mnemosyne, is the mother of the muses.

Perhaps all art is an evocation of Memory, Mother of the Muses; as writers and as readers we summon her so that, as good mothers do, she might comfort 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.

Music and Memory, Part 28: Don't Look Back

About four years ago, my husband was offered his current job. He said at the time that if I didn't want to leave New York, he'd turn it down, but I told him I thought he should take it. The job represented real career advancement, came with a substantial pay raise, and was located in an area blessed with natural beauty and in which one could live on much less than in New York. In addition, he was extremely frustrated with the job he had then, and I was just coming off my third miscarriage in a row and might have been secretly yearning a little for what they call in A.A. " the geographical cure."

I thought of these things this morning as I drove from Mass through our decrepit downtown (the downtown which, every time I pass through it, I tell myself could be great, cool, and charming, when in fact it's pockmarked with abandoned storefronts, its roads continually under construction). Where would we be now, I wondered, if I had decided four years ago that I simply couldn't leave New York? If you're from there, you know that this type of person actually exists; there are members of my own family who have predicated their professional and family lives upon the axiom that they must never, ever move away from New York (and I have other friends and family members who once held to this position, but allowed it to relax over time when they found that they just couldn't get a job in their fields).

I feel especially nostalgic at this time of year, generally a beautiful time in New York, when the light has softened over even the most ramshackle auto-body shops in the Bronx, and the late-summer cicadas sing from every weed growing up from a sidewalk crack. I travel back in my mind, seeking after certain sense memories, trying to recall fragrances and sights: the smell of strong coffee wafting through the open doors of Puerto Rican lunch counters, the faint tang of smoke in the salty city air, the refraction of the mellow light through the trees, the plums and figs piled up under the awnings outside the Korean fruit-sellers'. But I know that there is no good reason to do this. If I strive, as I say the Suscipe prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola, to surrender my memory and my will to the direction of Christ, then I know that I will at some point have to stop chasing the lovely ghosts of memory.

In his song "She Belongs to Me," Bob Dylan describes a woman who has "everything she needs":

She's an artist, she don't look back

I would like to be like this woman, who also "never stumbles;/She's got no place to fall," a line that, for some reason, makes me think of Richard Wilbur's poem "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," especially the breathtaking last line about the heaviest nuns "keeping their difficult balance." 

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

     Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

I am striving against memory to keep my difficult balance in the world in which I now find myself. As my cousin said once, "Don't look back. You're not going that way."

 


 

Yesterday is Not Today

I haven't been posting much here, in part because I don't have as much free time for musing, let alone writing, with a new two-year-old around, and in part because the demands of quotidian life have been more pressing lately than this blog. I've noticed something similar with the other blogs I still manage to read, which number far fewer than they used to for the same reasons.

There are also other vaguer and more existential reasons I've been blogging less. One is something that gradually occurred to me on one of my now-daily drives through the place that I live. I don't enjoy driving much yet; in fact, I keep myself up some nights thinking about the places that I have to get to the next day and planning routes to them that will not involve having to make a lot of left-hand turns. I've also found, curiously, that though I'm inclined to profanity in my non-driving life, I've been uncharacteristically restrained in the car: I find myself uttering "Please get off my tail already" under my breath rather often, and, if someone cuts me off, which is frequent, I might let loose with a mild epithet like "Oh, man!" I think that swearing is usually inspired by a kind of self-righteous indignation, and I just don't have the confidence as a driver to assume that I'm right in any driving situation.

But anyway, it dawned on me as I was driving my kids somewhere how much driving changes a former New Yorker's life. I don't mean the obvious facts of greatly-increased mobility and independence, but the fact that, in a car, you become a sort of secret agent. In New York, your agency is out there on the street.  In New York, I was accustomed to being looked at -- not because I'm particularly stunning, but because everyone there is looked at. There's much more of a sense, there, that one's life is lived openly in the public square. In New York, after all, to get to where you're going you have to ride on a subway or bus with many other people, and then walk down a crowded street with many other people. There are many daily functions, including eating and making phone calls, that you're constrained to do in public each day (in my opinion, clipping one's nails, applying full-face makeup, and shaving do not fall into that category, though I've seen people do all of these and worse on the subway). if you're an extrovert, you thrive on this sense of shared purpose, even if it's shared only by virtue of circumstance or necessity, and if you're an introvert, you develop a coping strategy, a game face. I suppose I was a little of both, but I never went to the bodega without lipstick on, I dated a couple of men I met on the subway, and I went to and from my bread gig in high heels, no matter how painful they were by the end of the day (though I stopped wearing high heels after 9/11, just in case I ever had to run away from someplace really fast; one of my friends who lived in my building did, in fact, have to limp eight miles home in stilettos on that day, since the subways and buses had shut down).

This is a different place, though, and in a car, no one sees you. For a former New Yorker, it conveys a tree-falling-in-the-forest sort of feeling. It doesn't matter how my hair looks, and it matters even less what I am thinking about. Most people are just trying to pass me illegally, which is fine with me. I put on the classical-music FM radio station and play guess-the-composer, a game I've always enjoyed, and I have the sense that I'm creating my own little pod which keeps at bay the pervasive sense of lassitude and purposelessness that I see in the jobless men and the women in their pajamas and the boarded-up buildings that I drive past each day. Since my car has no air-conditioning, I sometimes wonder what effect the music that escapes through my open windows might have upon the denizens of my new city. What does it do to you to hear unfamiliar Schumann or Beethoven on a relentless summer day? Do the thrilling strains of the Seventh Symphony act as some kind of cooling agent, or some sort of rising agent, on the system? Can they change the heart?

Sometimes I sing along. Sometimes I turn off the radio and do vocal warm-ups. It doesn't matter what I do. And that is the crux of the matter.

A few years ago, on the eve of the Feast of the Ascension, I had a dream that Christ ascended into heaven on the cross. We know that's not what happened, of course, but I think the message in the dream was that we ascend by descending, as it were -- that is, by accepting humility. Indeed, the more I drive around my depressed little town in my hot little car with three hubcaps missing blaring classical music, the more I get the sense that, as John the Baptist said, I must decrease. And for someone who's used to being looked at that can be a little hard.

I noticed that my last post, the poem "Skyscrapers," went up on the five-year anniversary of my very first post. This blog started as an online diary, and, in writing it, I have written candidly about some of my sins and obscurely about others. I have tried to excavate my own memory in the hope of transmuting it into something beautiful, of spinning refuse into gold. Sometimes I still think that might be possible, but more and more I'm beginning to feel that I have to stop living in the past. God will transform bitter, devastating memory according to His own purposes if I let go of it and give it over to Him; it's not up to me. As Saint Ignatius's "Suscipe" prayer says:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O lord, I return it. All is Thine, dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and thy grace, for this is sufficient for me.

Perhaps I need to stop mining the ore of memory in order to be able to go forward into a new kind of smallness and quietness, a kind of fruitful unimportance. So much of my memory is the memory of sin, and, as someone who knows a lot about these things once told me, you don't need to tell people about your sins, because your sins are lies. In fact, as this person said further, your sins are shit, and you don't go around showing people your shit.

Since a great deal of this blog's content has been an exploration of my past sins, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be keeping up with it. I also have a big writing project coming up that's going to take up most of Jude's naptimes for the foreseeable future. For now, though, I will continue to check in here when I'm feeling inspired.

I will close now with a poem by Paul Bowles, which in many ways evokes the way I feel right now (Bowles, a composer as well as a poet and novelist, wrote a fine art-song setting of his own poem, but I couldn't find a decent performance on Youtube).

Once a Lady Was Here 

Once a lady was here.
A lady sat in this garden,
And she thought of love.
The sun shone the same,
The breeze bent the grasses slowly
As it's doing now.
So nothing has changed.
Her garden still looks the same,
But it's a diff'rent year.
Soon the evening comes down,
And paths where she used to wander
Whiten in the moonlight,
And silence is here.
No sound of her footsteps passing
Through the garden gate.
No, nothing has changed.
Her garden still looks the same,
But yesterday is not today.

Music and Memory, Part 26: Heroin

About fifteen years ago I began the transition from pursuing a standard career as an opera singer to pursuing a recital career based mostly on the fruits my own research, a transition that would become final when I left my opera management the day before September 11, 2001. This change was precipitated by my meeting F., a wonderful Italian collaborative pianist and musicologist, on Saint Patrick's Day, 1996. Before long, we were researching and performing together, and he was my exclusive recital partner until he took a teaching job in Europe in 2005.

One day we were on our way to a gig in one of the mid-Atlantic states. We had walked from our late lamented neighborhood across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to rent a used car, had driven back to get our stuff, and now were on our way. On that drive, my colleague F. said two things that astonished me. The first was in response to my putting a Joni Mitchell CD in the car's player: he ejected it, saying, "Life is too short for bad music," and replaced it with a live recording that he had pirated himself at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy (I continue to disagree with his assessment of bad music in this case). The second happened a little further down the road, as he told me about the sunsets, mountains, and animals he'd seen while on a concert tour in Brazil. "Really, Pentimento," he asserted, "all of that is far more beautiful and important than music."

I was speechless. How could that be? Music was my elixir; no, my medicine. Thinking more about it, I wondered if it might not, more specifically, be a sort of chemo drug, a life-saving medicine that carried the risk of certain potent side effects. Nothing was more important to me. It came before, preempted, and supplanted what should have been my most important relationships. My early life had been so tenuously established, my adult life so undisciplined; music was the only constant, and sometimes I felt it was a thing even more essential to my existence than a chemo drug would be: it was oxygen itself, the most basic ingredient for my survival from one day to the next. I clung to it like a vine that heliotropes its maundering way around a trellis to get to a patch of sun. Or maybe music was my heroin, the jab that could deliver a few hours of beauty and a sense of agency into an otherwise bleak life.

Performing -- even rehearsing -- with F. has been one of the high points of my life. Our musicalities complemented one another in a way I'd never experienced before. We had plenty of conflicts in our working relationship, but working with him was one of the essential steps in my maturation as a singer and musician. We performed together just once after he moved abroad, when my first son was one year old and I was pregnant again, though I didn't yet know it. Having a baby meant that I could no longer practice obsessively, as I'd always done before, and, as we rehearsed before the gig -- the only time we had -- F. stopped and said, "How is it that you're finally singing the way you always should have sung?" I suppose it had to do with lowered expectations, with not predicating a hundred other things upon my success in that one particular performance, and with having my single-minded focus distracted and dissipated by the needs of another person.

Now F. is far, far away, and so am I. And I wonder if there is some way to convert the heroin of my former life as a singer into some kind of methadone, to ease off my addiction to that intense inner world with a duller, less devastating version of it. It's been said that pop music anchors the listener to the place and time that he heard it -- that particular summer, that one party, that boy or girl -- and that, as such, it's a mnemonically static form, whereas classical music is redolent with all kinds of associative possibilities. I'm not sure I buy that; hearing any of dozens of classical pieces evokes for me the time and place when that piece entered my life, directed my thoughts, dominated the world of my senses. It's very difficult for me, for instance, to hear Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 without seeing a hundred moments from the years of my childhood to the years of my doctoral study; sometimes I cry when I think that Beethoven has to be dead, but I wonder if I'm not really crying for the past in general.

But the past is receding like a world seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and I must remind myself every minute to be here now, in post-industrial America, in crumbling northern Appalachia, a wife and mother, in the land where my own mother is dying and where my family members are wandering desultorily or struggling desolately, and where I seem to have lost the power and agency I once had when I was a young singer who lived for and through music.

(Above: Dame Maggie Teyte sings "Oft in the Stilly Night," which is not a folk song, as the announcer states, but rather one of the Irish Ballads of Thomas Moore, set to music by John Sullivan in the early years of the nineteenth century).

Unknown Lives

I wake up without an alarm at about 5:45 each morning, and, in the few moments that I lie awake in the dark before swinging my feet to the floor, I ask God to abundantly bless every person I see that day, every person whose voice I hear, every person I hear about, and every person I think of, and especially those whom I do not think of, who make up by far the largest group in my general supplication -- all those forgotten or unknown not just by me, but by even those in their physical midst.

Perhaps we are all such forgotten and unknown ones. Each person is a profound mystery, containing worlds upon worlds that no one else will ever enter.

Recently a trove of photographs was found, most of them images of people now forgotten and unknown, taken by Vivian Maier, above, a nanny in Chicago. Maier died in obscurity herself, and never told anyone about her luminous art. The photographs are stunning and beautiful, the kind of thing I could look at for hours.

Read more here.

As Caryll Houselander wrote in The Passion of the Infant Christ:

There is no outward sign of the miracle that is taking place. Office workers are bending over their desks, mothers working in their kitchens, patients lying quietly in hospital wards, nurses carrying out the exacting routine of their work of mercy, craftsmen at their benches, factory workers riveted to their machines, prisoners in their cells, children in their schools. . . . Everywhere an unceasing rhythm of toil, monotonous in its repetition, goes on.

To those inside the pattern of love that it is weaving, it seems monotonous in its repetition; it seems to achieve very little. 

In the almshouses and the workhouses, old people, who are out of the world's work altogether at last, sit quietly with folded hands. It seems to them that their lives add up to very little too.

Nowhere is there any visible sign of glory. But, because in every town and village and hamlet of the world there are those who have surrendered their lives, who have made their offering daily, from the small grains of the common life, a miracle of Love is happening all the time, everywhere. The Holy Spirit is descending upon the world.

Upon the world that seems so cruel, mercy falls like summer rain. . . . The heart of humanity that seems so hard is sifted, irrigated, warmed; the water of life floods it.

Music and Memory, Part 25: Every Gig Counts

On the last day of classes at the end of the fall semester a few years ago, at the large urban university where I taught a writing class for music majors, I picked up several dozen doughnuts and a couple of gallons of coffee at Dunkin Donuts before getting on the subway to go teach.  I had a lot of jazz players in my class that term, and, when they fell upon the treats like a horde of locusts as soon as I'd set them out, I reminded them half-jokingly that it was probably more than they usually made on a gig. The truth is that it's harder to make a living as a jazz musician in New York than it is even as a classical musician.  As in the classical world, there's a glut of players and a dearth of jobs, but the prevalence of brunch spots and tony cocktail parties depresses wages for jazz players to a degree that few opera singers ever experience, owing to the virtual non-existence of comparable gigs in the opera field. So opera singers have desk jobs, and legendary jazz players take home two hundred bucks on a club date, while their lesser-known colleagues compete with Manhattan School of Music students for the $25-or-so-per-man that a brunch gig pays.

Still, in the classical world, you could always tell which of your colleagues was going to be an unusually good, and possibly even a successful, artist by the way she comported herself when even on the crappiest of gigs. The soprano singing a concert of opera arias in the church basement with a pickup orchestra of her friends from conservatory conducted by her boyfriend, who nonetheless wore her most beautiful diva gown, got her hair done, held her head high, and smiled dazzlingly at the audience at her entrances and exits, was the one who was going places. She treated herself, her motley audience, and the very essence of the singing profession, insofar as it was visible in that church-basement gig, with the respect commanded by the Western classical music tradition as one of the most beautiful possible reflections of God's divine nature and His desire that His creatures should live life more abundantly.

Even if it weren't for their gig at the Carlyle Hotel and Joe Nocera's rave in the New York Times, this couple is going places. Nocera's essay is certainly unusual for an op-ed piece, the sort of thing that is generally attributable to a slow news day, a personal connection to the subjects, or some combination thereof. Still, good on them. I don't know them or their playing, but they must be excellent. And their work history is very much like that of thousands of other musicians in New York, with the exception of their eventual, hard-won success.

"If I would help the weak, I must be fed . . ."

Fellow-former-New-Yorker Fallen Sparrow's moving reminiscences of his life in the days following September 11, 2001.

The Healing of Memory

It is worth noting that Dante places the full healing of memory at the top of Purgatory, long after earthly death and the long process of atonement for one's sins. Setting aside dementia, injury, or some other illness that affects one's mental faculties, it is in man's nature to remember, to carry with him through his life memories of events both good and bad. Why would that be? How does one reconcile God's love with the burden of painful memories?
 
God doesn't erase our memories because they help to constitute us as individuals, and His creatures whom He loves. Rather than blot out our memories of injuries, heartbreaks, and sins we've endured and committed, God forgives us our offenses and preserves the memory so that we might recall the love He has for us.

Fallen Sparrow is back, and I'm so glad.

Rupture

As we wait and wait to adopt little Jude (our application is currently under review by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and I got a letter from them yesterday which said that our social worker at Catholic Charites had forgotten to sign our home study, and could I please send another, signed copy), I have been thinking a lot about what it might be like for him to leave behind everything that he's ever known to join our family.  I have been considering the grief this rupture will engender in him, and how he won't be able to explain that grief to us in words.  And I think about all the other children who he will leave behind; do they grieve, too, for their companions of the orphanage?  And do the orphanage workers who care for the little ones grieve to see them go?

I think about the unimaginable Middle Passage, and the millions of Africans who perished on the journey to new, unsought-for lives as slaves in the Americas, lives that were foisted on them by force.  Does the sense of that sundering, that rupture, live on in subsequent generations?  Is there a shadowy cultural memory of a trauma shared by millions that resonates in the blood and the bones, that cannot be shaken or denied?

In a small and very different way, the break with the past, the rupture from all that is known and loved (even if to love it was a compromised kind of love), is an ethos familiar to me from long experience.  Does Jude love his friends, his caretakers, his orphanage?  They are family and homeland to him.  Will he have a better life in America with a family who will love him (and perhaps, in some small, particular way, with a mother who knows a little about rupture and grief), with people who can give him opportunities to form secure attachments and to learn how to trust?  Objectively speaking, yes, of course.  As for me, I have a better life now than I had when I was bereft, lonely, and overwhelmed by sin, but this doesn't mean that I don't sometimes grieve the provisional home, family, and friends I have left behind -- a leave-taking that is inseparable from my conversion.

My father often notes that life is loss, and, well, it is.  Real love is inextricably bound up with the painful losses and diminishments of every day.  I hope, in spite of all that little Jude will lose in joining our family, that, like me (and even if, like me, he is unable to forget), he will gain much more.

Music and Memory, Part 23: Auf dem Strom

Warning: if you dislike reading about poop, venture no further.

My son, whom his preschool teachers call "brilliant," scores in the mentally-retarded range on IQ tests because of his near-total non-compliance.  He can memorize a book or a song after a first hearing, but our daily violin practice sessions are fraught by my continual redirection of his efforts, and by my own efforts to quell my frustration at his insistence on "playing it my way."  I picture myself jumping to my feet and shouting, "This is MUSIC, dammit! This is only the single most important thing in the created world!" but I manage to restrain myself, because he's five years old.  (I was going to write, "because he's five years old and has special needs," but his ability to comprehend the importance of music is not one of them.)

Yesterday we were having one of our frequent bathroom struggles, in which he refuses to poop, swears he doesn't have to, flings himself to the floor and lashes out, screams and cries, has to be physically transported to the toilet, and then sits meekly and finishes his business.  The process is generally quite demoralizing to me. Yesterday, after having plunked him down on the toilet, I went into the other room to catch up on some ironing, and thought maybe I could snatch a few minutes to practice before he needed me to help him wipe.  The motion of the body in ironing, it seemed to me, would pose no obstacle, and might perhaps even by an aid, to working on certain vocal technical issues.  Singing, after all, is a physiological process that involves the fluid motion of the entire body, usually enacted in subtle movements which audiences do not see.

As I stood ironing and singing, however, my focus was interrupted by other concerns. I thought of a poem I'd read in college by Tess Gallagher:

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

And, for some reason, a totally unrelated piece by Schubert came rushing into my head, a piece I've never sung because it's for tenor or high soprano, the little chamber scena "Auf dem Strom" (On the River).  (I do not have time to write my own translation, so I am copying someone else's of the poem by Ludwig Rellstab.)

 Take the last parting kiss,
 and the wavy greeting
 that I'm still sending ashore
 before you turn your feet and leave!
 Already the waves of the stream
 are pulling briskly at my boat,
 yet my tear-dimmed gaze
 keeps being tugged back by longing!

 And so the waves bear me forward
 with unsympathetic speed.
 Ah, the fields have already disappeared
 where I once discovered her!
 Blissful days, you are eternally past!
 Hopelessly my lament echoes
 around my fair homeland,
 where I found her love.

 See how the shore dashes past;
 yet how drawn I am to cross:
 I'm pulled by unnameable bonds
 to land there by that little hut
 and to linger there beneath the foliage;
 but the waves of the river
 hurry me onward without rest,
 leading me out to the sea!

 Ah, before that dark wasteland
 far from every smiling coast,
 where no island can be seen -
 oh how I'm gripped with trembling horror!
 Gently bringing tears of grief,
 songs from the shore can no longer reach me;
 only a storm, blowing coldly from there,
 can cross the grey, heaving sea!

 If my longing eyes, surveying the shore,
 can no longer glimpse it,
 then I will gaze upward to the stars
 into that sacred distance!
 Ah, beneath their placid light
 I once called her mine;
 there perhaps, o comforting future!
 there perhaps I shall meet her gaze.

I recalled how, in the 1990s, my teacher A.B. had had a famous coloratura soprano in his studio.  She lived in California and flew to New York for her lessons, and my knees would invariably turn to jelly and I would inevitably choke up when, having the lesson time after mine, she would open the studio door while I was working.  One day, A.B. remarked to me that she was performing "Auf dem Strom" in a famous summer music festival.  "Oh, I love that piece!" I gushed.  He laughed me off, explaining that it was dreck.

Oh no, it was not dreck.  How could A.B. and his prominent pupil gang up on "Auf dem Strom" like that -- on the gently-resigned opening melody in the french horn, drifting down, as it were, from a distant rise on the other side of the river as the speaker's small boat is already picking up speed in the current and bearing him away; on those lovely, arching vocal phrases, so full of longing and loss, but also of hope?  No, the piece was beautiful, was true, even. It was, quite possibly, even healing.

Yesterday, as I stood there ironing and waiting for my son to finish in the bathroom, I realized that I hadn't heard it or thought of it in years, but the delicate phrase, repeated in the coda, "Ach, bei ihren milden Scheine/Nannt' ich sie zuerst die Meine" (Ah, beneath [the stars'] placid light, I once called her mine) flooded into the ear of my memory, and I thought that perhaps  I too, one day, might be able to greet music once again as an old friend, might even be able to take hold of her as a balm for the healing of myself and others.

Music and Memory, Part 20: The Matrix

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 Lieder Eric 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.

Music and Memory, Part 19: Reparations

For most of my life, my behavior was so selfish, willful, amoral, and defensive that, in recent years, my fervent wish has been not only that the people I've known along the way would have peaceful and happy lives, but also that they might forget me completely.  So it was with some trepidation, and a great deal of embarrassment, that I sent a check to the workplace of A., the Columbia boy I'd borrowed money from years ago.  Although it was during Lent of last year that I remembered this unhappy incident, it took me until the end of the year to make reparations, because, although I went out on gigs with some frequency in 2010, after travel and childcare expenses were figured into my fee, I generally returned home each time with something like fifty dollars.  In December, however, two large-ish fees came in that did not need to be offset by as many expenses as usual, so I took myself to the post office, praying that paying off this old, until-recently-forgotten debt would not open up some unpleasant can of worms.

A letter from A. came in the mail yesterday, and I opened it grimly.  To my astonishment, he was not only happy to hear from me, but also, unbeknownst to me, he'd been at a concert I gave last month in Boston, where he now lives.

He wrote: 

. . . I don't want to be a creep, which is the main reason I didn't approach you at your concert.  That and -- well -- certainly the memory in my mind is not the actual person you are . . . . it was at a recent bored moment at work [that I undertook a "Pentimento" internet search and] saw that you were giving a concert soon, and in fact it was in my own backyard. . . . And the performance [brought] tears to my eyes.  [Your] voice was soothing to the soul, and especially exciting given that I knew you back when you were first going down this path . . . .

Most striking [were your] expressions after the songs.  The bashful turn to the pianist, the being exposed, the being vulnerable and showing it.  I could see why you have specialized in [concerts given] in salon or intimate settings.  You share yourself with your audience.  You are there with them, not above them . . . You share their vulnerabilities. . . To see how that path you started -- to see the beautiful place it has progressed to -- that also brought tears.

The letter brought me to tears too.  I thought of how the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had told his friend, my old voice teacher Barbara Conrad, that she must never give up singing, because she could never know when it might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience.  I doubt that my singing carried that import for A., but perhaps some healing did come out of it, some reparation for the past.  If only A. knew how bitter the road was that led me to the point of being able, now, to be vulnerable onstage, and to share in the vulnerabilities of the audience.  For so many years, I sang defensively, acquisitively, planning what I could get from it.  Life -- everything -- has changed so much since then.  Once, when I mentioned to my husband that my singing had changed, he suggested that one can't compartmentalize one's life; when one's heart changes, everything must change along with it.  As the poet Jane Hirshfield writes:

let one animal/eat from your hand and the whole herd comes.

Hirshfield's poem, "Letting What Enters Enter," concludes with the line

she forgave me nothing that I love.

But after reading A.'s letter, I believe that God, in His mercy, somehow forgives us everything that we love.

The Book of Tears and Remembering

It's a Saturday, and I'm surprised to find myself doing what I used to do on Saturdays for years back in New York City, before I was a mother, before I had fully accepted my reversion back to the Catholic faith (and even then for a long time after), before I moved to the Bronx, a move about which a friend of mine said, "I thought people went there willingly only to die." I am sitting at the enormous sixties-era oak desk that I got for fifty bucks at the apartment sale of a divorcing Argentine woman in my old neighborhood, editing text while I listen to Jonathan Schwartz's weekly radio program on WNYC, on which I know he will play at least one song that will make me want to take to my bed in a paroxysm of tears -- probably something sung by Audra McDonald or Nancy LaMott -- and sleep until my heart is healed, a moment which, of course, will never really come.  In those days, however, most of the text I was editing was my own, and I was often longing for love, love either past or ambiguously present, and working against the feeling of shikata ga nai, the sense that everything I was doing was just to fortify my own very small world against the encroachment of despair, so I had better keep working.  And then, as now, I was constantly nagged by the feeling that I had to get up from the desk and go over to my little piano and start practicing already, because I probably had a gig or a university recital requirement right around the corner.

Back then, when I would hit the wall and not be able to read another word, I would push up from my mammoth desk and flee the apartment, letting the steel door slam behind me.  I would go out the side entrance of my pre-war apartment building and walk to Fort Tryon Park.  Now, I slink out the back door of my house and walk through my silent neighborhood, often meeting no one on the street except a young man with Down syndrome, like me an inveterate walker no matter what the weather.  Days like this, I miss everything about New York.  I miss the colors and the smells.  I miss seeing people on the street, even if I didn't want to talk to them, even if I hoped and prayed, as I did on many a day, that I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.

I know there must be a reason for my coming here, besides accompanying my husband to the place where he got a job.  When he got the job offer, he told me that if I wanted to stay in New York, he would turn it down.  But even I, with my more-than-occasionally faulty grasp of the theory of mind, knew that I couldn't hold him back from what was a step up.  Even I had a shred of humility large and sincere enough to swallow hard and accept that we would be leaving everything we knew and many of the things we loved, but that it would be willful and cruel of me to put my foot down and keep it in the city I love.

That was two years ago.  It's been a hard, lonely two years.  There have been many struggles, and few bright spots.  Sometimes it feels as if things are just getting more and more difficult, and as if none of my prayers are being answered in the way I want, not even what seemed like the inocuous-enough one for a friend.  I feel like my life is contracting, getting smaller and narrower, rather than expanding, which is of course what everyone wants to happen in their lives.

It is so hard for my prima-donna self to accept this smallness, this forced humility.  My heart aches when I think of what might be happening in my old neighborhood.  The plane trees are turning yellow and dropping their leaves to the sidewalks.  My friend N., the opera singer who lives on the other side of the building, is writing some software code for a design client.  My great friend F., who was my recital accompanist before he moved to England, is swinging his book bag full of bottles of Italian wine from Astor Wines and Spirits as he trudges with his idiosyncratic gait up the hill from the subway to his apartment, which is around the corner from mine, and from which he can see a sliver of the river and the bridge out of one window.  My beloved downstairs neighbor, Mrs. M., an Austrian refugee from World War II who died last year a month before her ninety-ninth birthday, is walking back from the hair salon, looking natty in a tweed jacket.

But all of this is long ago.  My friends are dispersed, and some are dead.  And if I remember hard enough, I will see M. on the street outside, waving to me over his shoulder as I stand in the window of our apartment, on his way downtown to work a night shift in a building that was destroyed in 9/11.  And then I will remember the day he stopped waving.

And then where will I be? At my desk in Appalachia, my heart aching, asking God that, if He's going to allow me to remember all of this, to let it be for a reason that will be helpful to someone else, even if I never know it.  As Pablo Neruda wrote, "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido" -- love is so short, and forgetting is so long.  And now I really do have to go and practice.

Here's some music about tears and remembering on this lonely Saturday.

Prayer and Memory: A Turtle in the Hole

A long time ago, when I walked across the street one lunch hour from my day job to Saint Peter's Church in lower Manhattan and sought absolution for my abortion (the anniversary of which was, incidentally, yesterday), the kindly priest in the confessional said to me, among other things, that you never have to say a formal prayer in your life.  This crossed my mind as I thought about how I would respond to Tertium Quid's meme, which is an invitation to discuss your three favorite prayers.  I am not an obvious person for this meme, since my prayers are generally overly-emotional and guided by the pathos and desperation which are so commonplace to me that they could very well be dodges (which thought makes me recall with some longing my Buddhist sister's cool injunction to me to "Tame your mind"; if only things could be that easy).

In fact, I keep a sort of random, rolling devotional practice going throughout the year.  I strike up novenas at odd times to whichever saint has caught my fancy at the moment, which may or may not be related to the proximity of that saint's feast day.  I'm currently saying the profoundly powerful novena to Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (St. Edith Stein) suggested here.

But there are three prayers I say every day, or almost every day.  They are the prayer of Saint Francis, the prayer of Saint Ignatius Loyola, and the Divine Mercy chaplet.  The first two I say in the morning and also at night, if I remember, and the chaplet I try to say at three o'clock each day, though occasionally I will skip a day if I have an appointment that requires me to be with people outside of my family.  The days I do say it, it's usually on the fly.  Today, for instance, I said it while walking two miles in ninety-degree heat while pushing the stroller.

1. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
    where there is hatred, let me sow love;
    where there is injury, pardon:
    where there is doubt, faith ;
    where there is despair, hope
    where there is darkness, light
    where there is sadness, joy.

    O divine Master,
    grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
    to be understood, as to understand;
    to be loved, as to love;
    for it is in giving that we receive,
    it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
    and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

I'm sorry if I've just tune-virused that saccharine hymn "Make Me A Channel of Your Peace" into your ear for the rest of the day ("To be loved as to love with all my sou-ou-oul . . . "  Okay!  Sorry!).  It's not clear whether this prayer actually was written by Saint Francis, but it's long been attributed to him.  And the saccharine hymn, which I have sung as a cantor countless times -- in French as well as in English! --  has militated somewhat against a more contemplative delving into the words.  But I turned to the prayer in earnest after reading Mary Karr's conversion-and-recovery memoir Lit (which some of us are reading and discussing over here).  Karr describes memorizing the prayer while still essentially an atheist, after a year of white-knuckling her recovery from alcoholism, and repeating it with her young son at bedtime each night. 

Saint Francis is himself treated with a sort of saccharine pseudo-reverence in our age, and not only by Catholics, but it's meet to recall that he was a penitent, and the founder of an order of explicitly-named penitents.  What Mary Karr, in recovery from alcoholism, found salutary about his prayer is that it is about dying to self, which is perhaps the hardest thing for an alcoholic to do, as well as a crucial component in his recovery.  I say this prayer daily now because my inclination is to grab all of the good stuff for myself and run away, and, though I pray for the Holy Spirit to transform my selfishness, arrogance, and self-regard into humility and charity, I need a mnemonic to help me think and act differently in order to prepare myself for that hoped-for transformation.

But the prayer describes what, in my better moments, I really do want for my life:  to bring joy to those who are sad, light to those in darkness, through the tools I have at hand -- the disciplined practice of beauty.  The prayer of Saint Francis is even a kind of boddhisattva vow -- my sister would be proud -- asking that others are given peace, love, and happiness before the supplicant himself.

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

This prayer is from Saint Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises.  The particular hook for me is that the supplicant surrenders his memory to God.  Baudelaire wrote, "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans" -- I have more memories than if I had lived for a thousand years -- and I often feel this way myself.  Sometimes it seems that nostalgia is my drug of choice, and that, like all addictions, it creates a soft, padded place around me that cushions me from the jagged edges, the boredom, the loneliness, and the frustrations of everyday life.  Memory compels me, entrains me, and sometimes torments me, and I frequently ask myself, and God, what to do about it.  If something good can come out of these memories, I have bargained with the Almighty, then let me keep them; and, if nothing good can come of them, if their retention only causes me, and others, pain -- which I fear is often the case -- then please take them from me.

Memory, nonetheless, is the driving force of this blog, and I hope and pray that soemthing good will come from the storehouse of my memory, through this medium, for someone else.  The notion of giving one's memory to God and allowing Him to inform it, to infuse it, to direct it, brings with it the promise of release from memory's chains on the one hand, and service to the healing potential of memory on the other.  So I say these words each morning and night, even when to say them is essentially a lie.  Like the recovering addict, I keep "acting as if," as I wait for the transformation that can come only from the Holy Spirit.

3.  The Chaplet of Divine Mercy
On one of the coldest mornings I've ever lived through, in January of 2004, I took four subways to the ass-end of the Bronx to attend a "Day of Prayer and Healing"given by the Sisters of Life at the Convent of Our Lady of New York.  In the chapel, where we convened, was a huge image of the Divine Mercy, which I had never seen before, and I was wondering what the rays were doing emerging from that saccharine old image of Jesus from my grandmother's picture of the Sacred Heart.

I learned the Divine Mercy chaplet that day, and I made my confession to a wonderful CFR (Friars of the Franciscan Renewal) priest, Father Joseph Mary, who had been a restaurant chef and a major sinner before his own reversion to the Catholic faith.  He gave a talk in which he described how he had used to love rambling through the woods looking for snakes and turtles.  One day before his conversion, he told us penitent women, when he was pretty well in the grip of serious sin, he had the opportunity to go to a rural area for a holiday, and he went hiking through the fields.  He saw a hole in the ground of the kind that's used to drive a fence-post, and the goofy thought crossed his mind, "I wonder if there's a turtle in that hole?"  He looked down, and there was a turtle in that hole.  He scooped it out, and as he did so, an inner voice said to him, you are that turtle, and I AM lifting you out of your own hole.

I had a great time at confession, if that can seriously be said, because I so respected and felt such a fellow-feeling for Fr. Joseph Mary's sensibility.  For my penance, he gave me the Divine Mercy chaplet.  I had never said it before, and I said it at home that night. I thought it would take a long time, like the rosary, and was surprised when it was over so soon.

Am I supposed to say here that the prayer and my daily practice of it have changed my life?  They have, though not in ways that I can quantify.  But reminding yourself of the truth on a daily basis, even at times when lies surround you (and even at times when lies seem more comforting and appealing) has got to change you down to your very molecules.  The truth is that His mercy is God's greatest attribute, and, if my memory truly serves, may it serve to reveal to others, including to you, my readers, this truth.

I am tagging Melanie at The Wine-Dark Sea, Sally at Castle in the Sea, and Maclin at Light on Dark Water to continue this meme, should they wish to (hmmm, I see the recurrent water metaphor here -- must have to do with the ocean of mercy).

Music and Memory, Part 10: Oh People of My Land

My new town appears to be home to a high number of mentally unstable citizens, the result of the mandated deinstitutionalization of the residents of the area's large, now-defunct state hospital in the 1970s.  Since I still don't have my driver's license, I often come upon these citizens when I take the bus or walk around in the near-deserted downtown.  Today I felt my old and my new worlds colliding when an apparently-mentally-unstable woman on the bus asked me if I was a teacher, the question I was often asked on the bus, in cabs, on the subway, and on the street back in New York (I'm not sure why, but this bus rider added what my former fellow citizens in New York used to say:  "You just look like a teacher").  I told her that I used to teach music, and she segued into a monologue about her boyfriend's concert-level skill at playing Chopin, and then asked me if I knew every word in the dictionary; she claimed acquaintance with several people who did.

Then a Mexican man got on the bus, and my heart leapt.  I almost never see Mexicans here, a sign of the area's extreme joblessness.  Likewise, I want to dance on the rare occasions that I come across an Orthodox Jewish couple, or a pair of frum women with their children in the park; it's a reminder to me of home, of the world outside of this place, the world of color, of music, of warmth.

Speaking of color, music, and warmth, I got a catalogue in the mail the other day listing the scholarly books on music published by Ashgate, the English academic publisher.  One of their new releases is a book called Fado and The Place of Longing:  Loss, Memory, and the City.  According to the catalogue blurb: 

Fado, often described as 'urban folk music', emerged from the streets of Lisbon in the mid-nineteenth century and went on to become Portugal's 'national' music during the twentieth. It is known for its strong emphasis on loss, memory and nostalgia within its song texts, which often refer to absent people and places. One of the main lyrical themes of fado is the city itself.

Reading the book description, in addition to making me think that fado should be the official musical genre of this blog, brought to mind a memory of my old home.

For a long time back in New York, my across-the-hall neighbor was a single, middle-aged woman who shared my first name, and who was herself apparently mentally unstable.  She was an artist whose work was exhibited, but in her day-to-day life she seemed anxious to the point of being severely troubled and not entirely functional.  I was surprised one day to meet a beautiful young woman coming out of her apartment, who, as it turned out, was my neighbor's only daughter, D., come to live with her for a while.  D. seemed like someone I wanted to know:  she was sophisticated and smart, and was a former writer for the Village Voice whose music criticism I had read.  But one night, as I was coming home late, I saw her moving all of her stuff out of her mother's apartment.  They had had a huge fight, and D. was moving to Staten Island by taxicab to live with a man she'd recently met.  I assumed I'd never see her again, and I was chagrined.

But D. came back.  In fact, she came back more than once.  At one point, she moved to Italy to try to make it work with a different man, but returned with a diagnosis of breast cancer.  After treatment, the cancer went into remission, and D. was unsure where to go next.  She was trying to restart her life, and she had a book contract from a major publisher to write about cancer from the perspective of a woman like herself, a hip young New Yorker, who would refute all the bullshit New-Age cancer platitudes -- you caused your cancer with your own self-hatred, you can heal through visualization, but only if you want to badly enough, etc.  She came across the hall to tell me about it one day in the fall of 2002, when I had just come back to the Catholic faith and had just started graduate school.  And the reason she had knocked on my door that day was that she had heard the notes of this fado song leaking out through the doorjamb, a song she had first heard on a recent trip to Portugal.



The wonderful singer is the part-Mozambiquean, part-Portuguese Mariza, who even looks strikingly like the biracial D.  According to a fan-written translation, this is the meaning of the text, sic in its entirety:

Is both mine and yours this fado
destiny that tides us (together)
no matter how much it is denied
by the strings of a guitar
whenever one hears a lament
of a guitar singing
one is instantly lost
With a desire to weep
Oh people of my land
Now I've understand
This sadness which I carry on
Was from you that I received
and it would seem tenderness
If I let myself be soothed
my anguish would be greater
my singing (would be) less sadder
Oh people of my land

From: http://lyricstranslate.com

This time, or so it appeared, D. had come home for good.  She was broke.  But we never did hang out much; our schedules didn't mesh.  She went to a nearby café to write during the day, while I was traveling between the university and my office job; and she stayed on at the café at night when it became a bar, while I was too busy and tired to go out (and was also experimenting with not going to bars or drinking at all, in what I saw, perhaps misguidedly, as solidarity with my then-boyfriend, who was recently sober in A.A.).  Our paths continued to diverge, and, right around the time I moved out of my long-time and beloved home to get married in 2005, I was shocked to learn that D. had died at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, the cancer having returned and metastasized to her bones.  I wrote to her mother from my new home in the Bronx, but never heard back.

From what I understand, D.'s mother is somehow keeping on, God knows how.  But in writing this, I have realized that it's been a long time since I've remembered to pray for D. or for her mother.  Dear readers, if you have it in your heart to do so, please say a prayer for this them.

"Beautiful city, we must part," part 3: Old Man in a New Place

While I don't know if I'll ever get used to living away from New York, sometimes I'm convinced beyond a doubt that leaving was the only thing to do in order to go on living.  I'm exaggerating wildly, of course: we didn't leave because our lives were threatened, we left because my husband got a job in Appalachia.  And, while I often feel like a walking ghost here, and as if I've left my whole heart behind, I must confess that for many years my abiding fantasy was to decamp to a place where I knew no one and no one knew me.

All New Yorkers are familiar with the painful, uncanny way that the past stalks us there; if you're not running into your former loves on the street (and they always do seem so much happier now), then you are constrained to coexist with the constant evocation of former lives, former ways of being.  In New York, you can try to cast off your old self and pick up the trappings of the new, and you can succeed quite well up to a point; but then you have to pass by the building where thus-and-such happened, or the spring wind as you walk up one of those streets that are veritable wind-tunnels carries with the bits of garbage the whiff of the past in its wake, and you are brought to your knees.  Oh, that beautiful city, where you can find your heart's love and the dearest, most intimate friends imaginable, where you can breathe freely even if oppressed by poverty and care, where you can traverse whole nations on the subway and visit the Cloisters for a penny, where you can walk and walk for hours and find something beautiful even on the ugliest corners, where you can go to the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, where you can get a doctorate for spare change. . . 

After my conversion in 2002, I had to go on living in the city that had been the site of great sorrow, vice, and folly.  This wasn't as hard as it might have been if I had had to keep frequenting the precincts that had become associated in my mind with sorrow, vice, and folly; shortly after my conversion I began my doctoral studies, which took me on a new route through the city, and brought me new colleagues, friends, and pursuits.  Marriage and, soon after, motherhood effected this translation still more, and I saw that it was in some way possible to attempt a new life in the same place where the old life had run to ground.  But, even if possible, it is hard.  To live a new life, one must separate from one's old companions and one's old thoughts, and New York, the capitol of longing and loss -- is it just that for me?  it not such for every New Yorker? -- hits you upside the head with the old thoughts, the old yearnings, just by virtue of making it necessary for you to pass certain buildings or to wait for the bus at certain corners.

So perhaps it's safer for the convert to go far away, to start over completely.  But is it a dodge, an easy way out?  I imagine that countless souls must flee the wreckage of their lives in small towns to come to a place like New York, where they can start over, shrug off their failures, and become someone new.  I'm trying to do the same thing in reverse, and I have no idea how.

Above:  a picture I took from my brother's window on a recent trip back.

Washing the Elephant

I had to take a long-ish bus trip with my little son the other day -- we had been to visit my ailing mother -- and before we left I happened by her local library and bought a bunch of ten-cent past-dated magazines for the trip, including a couple of last month's New Yorkers.  Toward the very end of the trip, I found this poem, by Barbara Ras, in one of them.

Washing the Elephant
Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash
the elephant, begging the body to do it
with soap and water, a ladder, hands,
in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas
of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,
the cratered full moon’s light fuelling
the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize
your parents in Heaven,” instead of
“Being one with God will make your mother and father
pointless.” That was back when I was young enough
to love them absolutely though still fear for their place
in Heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full
of something resembling street water after rain.

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,
to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies
about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them
as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkerchief of coins
to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder,
Land of Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.
Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading
through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants
made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel
and down Thirty-fourth Street to the Garden.
So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking
after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined
for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken
pathos.

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,
the few real loves-of-your-life, and how much of the rest—
the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,
unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things
like popsicles unthinkingly.
And though dailiness may have no place
for the ones who have etched themselves in the laugh lines
and frown lines on the face that’s harder and harder
to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life
will appear in a dream, arriving
with the weight and certitude of an elephant,
and it’s always the heart that wants to go out and wash
the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories
that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.