Artists in the Kitchen

Among other Sisyphean pursuits, I've spent the summer culling books from my chaotic "library." It's been an anxious and painful task, because it's forced me to confront my neurotic used-book-buying habits, and to recognize the ways I've attempted to create a kind of escapist utopia in my house by populating it with library discards. I discovered early on in our sojourn in northern Appalachia that there are fantastic library book sales here, and it's hard to pass one by when hardcovers are $.25 (I suppose this says something about the reading habits of northern Appalachia or of post-industrial America in general, but that's for another post). Those library discards -- some of them truly wonderful books -- have then gotten unpacked and placed in half-hearted, meandering subject order on various already-groaning shelves around the house, with the result that, when I search the shelves  for a book, I can't find it, and I panic. So my first step this summer was to cull the duplicates, of which there were more than I care to admit -- because, if I find something wonderful that I already have, I always purchase it, because it's wonderful, and no one else will want it, and I might lose the first one -- a thought process that has ended up, more than once, with me not being able to find either copy of the book, and then buying another on Amazon.

I grappled with most of this, and ended up donating 17 boxes of books to the library for their next book sale, which I am planning to not attend, or at least to drive by with my knuckles white from my death-grip on the steering wheel.

There is one category of my collection, however, that I will not be culling. It is my two shelves of vintage spiral-bound community fundraiser cookbooks.

It's hard for me to explain how I feel about these books, which were published from the 1950s to the 1980s, produced by such organizations as the Women's Service League of St. Paul's Episcopal Church of Burlington, Vermont; the Valley Calligraphy Guild of Harrisburg, Oregon; and the St. Joseph Altar Rosary Society of Endicott, New York. Looking through them gives me a sense of excitement and anticipation, as if I've discovered a secret passage back to a lost world -- not only a time, but even a place, of wisdom that I lack: a world where a budget-stretching, wholesome meal made from cans of soup, packets of Jell-O, and bouillon cubes would draw a family together in a near-mystical communion, giving all its members the strength and comfort they needed to face the confounding exigencies of the world beyond the kitchen table.

I love to read the names of the recipes in my spiral-bound cookbooks. There is Priest's Goulash; there are Lasagna Rollups. There is City Chicken; there is Grandma's Waistline. There are Orange Chiffon Pie and Cottage Cheese Cake. There are many, many casseroles. Some of them from the late 1950s and very early 1960s are hand-lettered in an artistic, leftward-slanting calligraphic hand that must have been popular at that time, since it is found across vastly distant regions. Some of the hand-lettered cookbooks also include little pen-and-ink drawings by the recipes' authors, generally the cooks' own idealized images of times that were long past even during their own lifetimes.

I also cook from these books, and it is a great pleasure for me. The best of them recipe-wise are, perhaps unsurprisingly, compilations in support of big-city cultural institutions: I have, for instance, a cookbook produced by the staff of the Library of Congress; another, called Artists in the Kitchen, by the Women's Council of the the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; and two published by the Junior Committee of the Cleveland Orchestra. One of my favorites, however, was created in 1973 by the staff and board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum (pictured above). It contains a short foreword:

It is a little-known and indisputable fact that museum people devote a great deal of thought and time to food, and the fare at the tables of colleagues is more often than not of the highest quality. We hope that you will enjoy this collection of recipes . . . the Museum's first venture into the culinary aspect of the arts.

And the recipes are redolent of a mythical New York City past. There are such 1970s-era staples as hot crab meat, Roquefort cheese ball, and tuna casserole, and there are still hints here and there of the rapidly-fading favorites of an earlier spiral-bound era, like green rice baked in a mold. There are also some bizarreries that, in my fantasies about what "museum people" must be like, I could not have imagined -- such as this one for spaghetti sauce:

But most of them are charming, interesting, and even touching -- like this one, whose name, use of Teflon, and offhand acknowledgment that it "will do for a light supper," combine to make me sigh with longing for an easier time -- a time in which an omelette with a bottle of white wine and a green salad would have made a lovely Sunday supper, and in which you would have eaten it with someone who loved beauty and simplicity, as you do.

But this one treads, for me, uncomfortably close to pathos. Mr. Hawkins was a bachelor, who nevertheless "[impressed] his guests with this spectacular dessert." I think about Ashton Hawkins. Was the notation of his bachelorhood a signifier of gayness? Or was he, perhaps, just lonely? I think I would have liked to have sat at his table and been impressed not only with his spectacular Calvados Soufflé, but also with the wit and mirth of his company and his colleagues'.

And it's not just the bachelor Ashton Hawkins. It's also Margot Feely, who submitted a recipe for "Desperation Shrimp," a lifesaver when dinner guests show up unexpectedly. It's Katushe and Danny Davison, who "have lived in London for the past several years and have found themselves in the enviable predicament of having their freezer bulging with pheasants," and who, to clear some space, invented the "excellent dish" of Pheasant Hash. It's Edward M. H. Warburg, who avers that his Veal Casserole with Peas, and his Curried Eggs, "are amongst my wife's favorite recipes."

Where is Mrs. Warburg now? Where is Ashton Hawkins and all of his colleagues? As Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his 1936 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.

I Hear the Bronx Singing

A student at my alma mater published this poem, a sort of homage and reply to Walt Whitman, in The New Yorker this week. It made me nostalgic.

Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing

I heard them and I still hear them
above the threatening shrieks of police sirens
above the honking horns of morning traffic,
above the home-crowd cheers of Yankee Stadium
above the school bells and laughter
lighting up the afternoon
above the clamoring trudge of the 1 train
and the 2 and 4, 5, 6, the B and the D
above the ice-cream trucks’ warm jingle
above the stampede of children
playing in the street,
above the rush of a popped fire hydrant
above the racket of eviction notices
above the whisper of moss and mold moving in
above the High Bridge and the 145th Street Bridge
above mothers calling those children
to come in for dinner, to come in
before it gets dark, to get your ass inside
above them calling a child who may never come home
above the creaking plunge of nightfall
and darkness settling in the deepest corners
above the Goodyear blimp circling the Stadium
above the seagulls circling the coastal trash
along the East River and in the Bronx
young men are singing and I hear them,
eastbound into eternity even
as morning destars the sky.

-- Ariel Francisco

A Poem for Advent

Who stands at the door in the storm and rain
On the threshold of being?
One who waits till you call him in
From the empty night.

Are you a stranger, out in the storm,
Or has my enemy found me out
On the edge of being?

I am no stranger who stands at the door
Nor enemy come in the secret night,
I am your child, in darkness and fear
On the verge of being.

Go back, my child, to the rain and the storm,
For in this house there is sorrow and pain
In the lonely night.

I will not go back for sorrow or pain,
For my true love weeps within
And waits for my coming.

Go back, my babe, to the vacant night
For in this house dwell sin and hate
On the verge of being.

I will not go back for hate or sin,
I will not go back for sorrow or pain,
For my true love mourns within
On the threshold of night.

-- Kathleen Raine

Poem: Psalm

I loved this poem when I read it this morning and didn't want to wait until Friday to post it.
*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *
I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn

on your holy day. The harbor is before me,
Governor's Island, the Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head
what Rabbi Nachman said about the world
being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
ask you to bless them and before you
close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

-- Harvey Shapiro, from A Momentary Glory, (c) Wesleyan Press, 2014.

Poetry Friday: Autobiographia Literaria

I heard Billy Collins read this poem on The Writer's Almanac while driving this morning, and reflected that it was practically perfect.

******************************************

When I was a child

I played by myself in a

corner of the schoolyard

all alone.

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds

flew away.

If anyone was looking

for me I hid behind a

tree and cried out "I am

an orphan."

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

-- Frank O'Hara, from The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. © Vintage Books

Poetry Friday: Next Year

Next year, she says, I think I will be four,
And will I still live here,
she asks, in this house, and with you?
A funny kid thing to say except
she's from the orphanage so it's not funny
entirely, not entire comedy I'd say.
Of course I tell her
you'll live here
with me forever, until you kick me out,
until you pry me from your side
with your stubborn teenage body,
with your young adult scorn,
with your middle aged disgust,
with whatever weapon you try against me.
And even then we will not be parted.
It took a miracle to part the waves.
It would take a greater miracle to drive me from you.

-- Liz Rosenberg, from The Lily Poems, ©Bright Hill Press, 2008

More Poetry Friday at Carol's Corner.

 

A Poem About Brahms

I was thrilled to read this poem today at The Writer's Almanac. Whether or not Brahms and Clara Schumann had a sexual relationship has been speculated about for many years -- it is undeniable that they loved each other profoundly -- but, although they burned most of their correspondence, the evidence is against it. Brahms biographer Jan Swafford has suggested that, after the death of Robert Schumann in an insane asylum in 1856, the younger composer had the opportunity to propose marriage to Clara, but instead left her disappointed. The two remained friends, and Clara, one of the greatest pianists of her age, premiered many of Brahms's works.

The Intermezzi mentioned by Lisel Mueller are opp. 117, 118, 119. Brahms called the three op. 117 pieces, which he wrote while Clara was in her final illness, "cradle-songs of my sorrows." Here is the great German pianist Wilhelm Kempff playing op. 117, no. 1, with beautiful directness and simplicity. The piece was inspired by the text of a Scottish poem, "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament," and Brahms inscribed in the score an excerpt from the poem in Herder's German translation. The English words are:

"Sleep soft, my child, now softly sleep;

My heart is woeful to see thee weep."

  

And here is the poem about Brahms.

Romantics

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry

"how far it went," their tender friendship.

They wonder just what it means

when he writes he thinks of her constantly,

his guardian angel, beloved friend.

The modern biographers ask

the rude, irrelevant question

of our age, as if the event

of two bodies meshing together

establishes the degree of love,

forgetting how softly Eros walked

in the nineteenth century, how a hand

held overlong or a gaze anchored

in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,

and nuances of address, not known

in our egalitarian language

could make the redolent air

tremble and shimmer with the heat

of possibility. Each time I hear

the Intermezzi, sad

and lavish in their tenderness,

I imagine the two of them

sitting in a garden

among late-blooming roses

and dark cascades of leaves,

letting the landscape speak for them,

leaving nothing to overhear.

-- Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. © Louisiana State University, 1995.

Poetry Friday: The courage that my mother had

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

More Poetry Friday at Check It Out.

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.

Great Things Have Happened

This is without a doubt one of the best poems I've ever read, by the late Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, who suffered a great deal of hardship in his life. The poem is about an experience he shared with his wife and her son, whom he adopted.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Great Things Have Happened

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

(From What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread. © Nineties Press, 1993.)

More Book News (Not My Own)

As some of you may know, our good friend Sally Thomas, in addition to being an essayist, blogger, and homeschooling advocate extraordinaire, is a poet. Her work has been published in the New Yorker and First Things, among other places, and she has just come out with a collection of her poems, Brief Light. Like everything she writes, it is excellent.

If you're not familiar with her poetry, Sally is a master of classical form, uses simple language to powerful effect, sees the world around her with an unflinching eye and writes about it with a beautifully restrained quality of compassion. If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that I'm a constant reader of poetry, and I do not exaggerate when I say that Sally is one of the best American poets writing. So go buy her book already.

Oh, and I see she's having a Giveaway-ish Event. You might even win a copy!

Poetry Friday: To Ninety

A city sparrow
touches down
on a bare branch

in the fork of a tree
through whose arms
the snow is sifting —

swipes his beak
against wood, this side
then that,

and flies away:
what sight
could be more common?

Yet I think
for such sights alone
I would live to ninety.

-- Robyn Sarah, from Questions About the Stars. © Brick Books, 1998.

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."

 


 

Poetry Friday: Zimmer in Grade School

In grade school I wondered
Why I had been born
To wrestle in the ashy puddles
With my square nose
Streaming mucus and blood,
My knuckles puffed from combat
And the old nun's ruler.
I feared everything: God,
Learning, and my schoolmates.
I could not count, spell, or read.
My report card proclaimed
These scarlet failures.
My parents wrung their loving hands.
My guardian angel wept constantly.

But I could never hide anything.
If I peed my pants in class
The puddle was always quickly evident,
My worst mistakes were at
The blackboard for Jesus and all
The saints to see.
        Even now,
When I hide behind elaborate mask,
It is always known that I am Zimmer,
The one who does the messy papers
And fractures all his crayons,
Who spits upon the radiators
And sits all day in shame
Outside the office of the principal.

-- Paul Zimmer

More Poetry Friday at Poetry for Children.

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.

Poetry Friday: Skyscrapers

The Flatiron Building,
first "scraper," squat,
like a snout.
Today it hardly scrapes the sky.

The Chrysler Building,
still the most beautiful,
most elegant. It points
its tiara toward heaven.

The Empire State Building,
majestic but haughty.
Imperious, indifferent,
scene of the most suicides.

The Twin Towers, doomed,
still speak to one another
but in whispers.
You hear them around nine A.M. 

-- Robert Phillips

(Above: Alfred Steichen, Flatiron Building, 1905)  

More Poetry Friday at Life is Better with Books.

Poetry Friday: The Lordly Hudson

"Driver, what stream it is?" I asked, well knowing

it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing.
"It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing," 
he said, "under the green-grown cliffs."

Be still, heart! no one needs your passionate 
suffrage to select this glory--
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs.

"Driver! has this a peer in Europe or the East?"
"No no!" He said. Home! Home!
Be quiet, heart! This is our lordly Hudson
and has no peer in Europe or the East,

this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! home! home! 

-- Paul Goodman

Above: Hudson River Looking South From West Point (Robert Walter Weir, c. 1865)  


More Poetry Friday at A Teaching Life.

Poetry Friday: Majority

Now you'd be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you'd be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife.

-- Dana Gioia, from Pity the Beautiful. © Graywolf Press, 2012. More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading.

Repost: Mother's Day

On Sunday evening, after the party ends
and family have gone, you’d love to say
how you can’t bear this gathering each May.
Your thoughtful husband usually sends
a rose bouquet, but changed his mind this year:
a special gift, it makes your finger shine
with emerald and ruby. “Too much wine,”
he banters as he wipes away your tear.
But you and I know, mother, what he can’t -
your April foolishness; how bit by bit
they snipped me out of you, took care of It;
how through the years I’ve been your confidante,
the reason for this night’s unraveling,
the garnet missing from the mother’s ring.


-- Catherine Chandler

Poetry Friday: A Cold Rain the Day Before Spring

 From heaven it falls on the gray pitted ice
that has been here since December.
In the gutter rivulets erode piles
of dirt and road salt into small countries
and the morning is so dark, in school

teachers turn on fluorescent lights
and everyone comes in smelling of damp wool.
From heaven it falls, just the opposite
of prayer, which I send up
at the traffic light: please

let me begin over again, one
more time over again, wipe the slate
clean, the same way after school
janitors, keys jangling from
belt loops, will use a wet rag and wipe

the school day off, so there is only
the residue, faint white on the smooth
surface. It's the same way
the infield looks before the game
begins, or the ice on a rink

between periods. All new again
for the moment and glistening.
Imagine each day you get to start
again and again. Again. How many
days does the janitor enter the room

of your soul, wipe it clean
go out into the hallway
and push his broom
down the long corridor, full
of doors to so many rooms.

-- Stuart Kestenbaum

More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading.