Opposite Sides of the Same Cultural Coin

Where hedonism was once a short walk around the block from profound conversion (see Augustine of Hippo, Oscar Wilde, and Ève Lavallière, among many others), it is now, according to Eve Tushnet, a culturally-sanctioned and expected segue to secular bourgeois complacency.

An excerpt:

A woman who has sex with multiple partners (maybe hooking up a lot if she’s at a more elite college), contracepting throughout and having at least one abortion, then cohabits, then marries in her early 30s if at all, might be a hedonist or a relativist. In my experience she’s much more likely to be trying to do everything right, finish her education and start climbing the economic ladder and make good rather than hasty choices in her men. Her mother usually supports or even pressures her in her decision to abort, and many of the decisions I’ve described are made not in the service of personal sexual liberation but as a means to preserve her relationships. A lot of the time it doesn’t work–the marriage or cohabitation she really hoped would be “the one” still breaks up–but she sees all the alternative choices as even riskier, and therefore irresponsible.

Read the rest of Eve's provocative and important piece. It may not square with what you've come to assume if you've been raised in a more traditional environment and have always striven towards a traditional adulthood achieved by means of a traditional morality, but in my experience, and in the experience of so many women I've known, she is absolutely right.

Real Men, Part 2: Fifteen Minutes of Slutty Fame

By now we all know more than we want to about the imbroglio that has cost Rush Limbaugh the advertising of several high-end sponsors, a pull-out which, in turn, prompted him to apologize for calling a Georgetown Law student who testified before Congress about contraception a "slut" and a "prostitute," making other nasty insinuations about her sex life, and suggesting that she and other women whose contraception is covered by their health insurance make sex videos and post them online so that, in a sort of never-too-old-for-the-frat-house quid pro quo, he can watch.

Some conservatives have dug for dirt on the student, Sandra Fluke, and found it. It seems she is an activist who sought to attend Georgetown Law solely as a test case, in order to try to force the administration of the Jesuit university to violate the teachings of the Catholic Church, amend its policies, and include contraception in its health insurance plan.

Do you disagree with what Sandra Fluke is fighting for? I do. 

And yet I was surprised this morning to see, on the Facebook wall of a well-known Catholic bioethicist, a status update that questioned whether a law student "bankrupting herself for contraceptives" might accurately be called a slut.  A friend of this bioethicist, whose profile picture features the words "Lent: Turn Away from Sin," cheered him on. Another commenter wrote: 

If you're so addicted to sexual stimulation that you need to have it often, and you're not in control of your sexual behavior, you are a slut. The only question left is why Rush feels so compelled to repeatedly apologize for speaking the truth. . . Repeatedly apologizing [is] protracting what should have been 15 minutes of slutty fame.

I have to admit to liking that line about fifteen minutes of slutty fame. However, because it was just the sort of bitchy little bon mot that I would have expected to issue from the mouth of one of my opera-queen semblables of yore, reading it next to the Facebook profile of someone who probably considers herself a Catholic conservative was, to say the least, jarring.

The greatest mockers of Sandra Fluke on this particular thread were women. And on another friend's wall, the greatest defenders of Rush were men. There is, of course, a good deal of overlap between these two camps. And it made me wonder.

Why would anyone defend a man who attacks a woman, least of all conservatives? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that conservatives generally advocated a return to pre-1960s cultural mores, during which time it was generally accepted that men protected women, even women with whom they disagreed and women who were of a lower moral status. Good men, real men, would never use a national platform to viciously attack and personally defame a woman -- in particular a stranger and a private citizen -- with whom they did not agree (especially men who live in sexual and pharmaceutical glass houses, but that's another story). And men who applaud these attacks seem to me lacking in some crucial component of manliness.

Why? Because men are supposed to protect women. Simply put, it is unmanly to to attack a woman. (Sadly, it's to be expected from other women, even, apparently, from conservative Catholic ones.)

These unfortunate discussions make it clear how much we are all suffering culturally in a society in which abortion is legal.  When a man takes a woman to have an abortion, encourages her to have an abortion, pressures her to have an abortion, or abandons her when she is pregnant -- all phenomena which it's safe to assume are exponentially more prevalent now than before the legalization of abortion -- he is avoiding his responsibility as a man to protect the weak. A society in which these phenomena are commonplace is a society in which it's acceptable for men to harm women, or to allow harm to come to them, in subtler ways as well. I contend that, in the era of legalized abortion, unmanly men -- men who shirk their duties vis-à-vis women, men who deride women, men who degrade women -- are so commonplace across racial, class, educational, and economic lines as to be banal. And, dare I say it, they now also exist across lines of faith. 

If conservative Catholic men are openly defending a famous man (and a man who, it must be said, has proven himself to be somewhat less than temperate, sexually and otherwise) for attacking a woman, there is something woefully wrong with the culture of conservatism, because it has clearly accepted the social mores and the sexual constructs of our post-abortion society.

When Mary Visited Elizabeth

The Sisters of Life have a cadre of laypeople, known as the Visitation Coworkers for Life, who assist them in carrying out their charism of helping women in crisis pregnancies.  The title of this program is, of course, a reference to the Visitation, when Mary, newly pregnant herself, traveled into the hill country of Judea to wait upon and serve her cousin Elizabeth, who was in the sixth month of a miraculous (and perhaps, because of her advanced age, dangerous-seeming) pregnancy. I am not officially a Visitation Coworker for Life, the program having started just around the time we were moving out of New York, and I'm not sure I would make a very good one. Nonetheless, I fell into that role unexpectedly last weekend, when A. and her two toddlers washed up on the shore of our decaying Rust Belt town and lacked for a place to stay. They had been supposed to come here at an earlier date, it seems, and the shelter in which A. had arranged to stay had given her spot away when she didn't show up. She found a temporary spot in an emergency shelter, but the little family ended up staying with us for two nights (and seemed ready to stay indefinitely) while we tried to figure out what had gone wrong at the emergency shelter and to work it out.  From the first hour, there was misunderstanding piled upon miscommunication between A. and the shelter staff, not to mention a clash of cultures: it cannot be denied that the social service workers in my new home town are shockingly generous and eager to help their charges, which is the complete opposite of the ethos among their counterparts in New York, and A. started off on the wrong foot by being surly and defensive with the emergency shelter director, who had elbowed another woman aside to take in A. and her children in. Things escalated from there to the point that the shelter director yelled at me and hung up the phone when I called.

A. was comfortable here in our warm house; her children loved my husband, and cried when he left the room. My son loved having the little ones to boss around, and cried, himself, while falling asleep because, as he said, "I don't have children yet." I bought supplies for A., and made her and her children special foods. We gave her the covers off our own bed, and put her family in what will be Jude's room.  She wanted my husband to bring her belongings here from the shelter, which would have been impossible even if we had wanted to; the Coworker for Life who drove A. here from New York had had a hard time fitting all of her stuff in a minivan, and we have a Honda Civic.  But I told A. that she had to play by the rules and work things out at the shelter, because her permanent placement and her chance at getting a Section 8 housing voucher -- the reason she came here -- would be jeopardized by her having another place to stay. She denied this, but I know otherwise.

The surprise in all of this was that A. is just weeks away from giving birth to her third child, a circumstance that no one, including the Sisters of Life, knew about (in fact, Sister M. was exasperated when I told her the news over the phone, because if she had known about A.'s pregnancy, she could have gotten A. into another shelter in New York, sparing her the myriad difficulties of moving to a strange city). A. mentioned vaguely that the father of the three children plans to move here eventually after getting his high-school equivalency diploma, but I'm doubtful this will happen. Her near-total passivity in the face of crisis bewildered me, as did her comfort in relying upon the kindness of complete strangers and her apparent trust that these strangers, and the social-service system, would take care of her and her children. I'm pretty sure her pregnancy is high-risk -- she said she had a uterine fibroid tumor -- and she doesn't have a crib or a stitch of clothing for the baby. But these are the kinds of things that kind strangers and the social-service system provide.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Helen Alvaré, legal scholar, sociologist, advisor to Pope Benedict's Pontifical Council to the Laity, and all-around cool chick from New Jersey. Because I told her about my ongoing concern about single motherhood in my community, she sent me some of her articles on this subject. I have been reading one, "Beyond the Sex-Ed Wars: Addressing Disadvantaged Single Mothers' Search for Community," with great interest. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find a free link to the article, but I'm guessing it can be obtained using Lexis-Nexis at a library.) Alvaré cuts to the heart of the rising rates of unwed motherhood, especially among disadvantaged women: poor young women, she says, not only seek status in their communities by taking on the role of single mother, but also find opportunities to serve, as Mary served Elizabeth -- to be, in Alvaré's, term, "a gift" to their children. The casual attitudes toward sex and relationship among these populations (Alvaré describes sex as a phenomenon that "just happens," and a child as the expected outcome of a steady dating relationship) are balanced by the great seriousness with which motherhood is viewed.  She writes:

I propose that this phenomenon is a function not only of a declining cultural antipathy for nonmarital sex, and not only of the trend to think of the sexual choices of single women from "public health" and "privacy" perspectives. It is also very likely a function of the tremendous value many single women attach not only to their baby, but also to the sense of accomplishment, even courage, that they derive from making the decision to give birth to their baby, in admittedly difficult situations, and from taking care of the baby, largely by their own strenuous efforts.  This decision can garner a certain amount of praise in their community: they have accepted the consequences of their choices, and have put the baby before material things. . . . the morality of nonmarital sexual intimacy is completely overshadowed by the narrative of freely accepted sacrifices made on behalf of the child.

Although it caused us stress and annoyance, there was no question in my mind or my husband's that we should take in A. and her family this weekend, and serve them in whatever way was required.  It's untangling the knot of seeming requirements that gives me pause. While it's impossible for me to lionize A. -- to me she seems shockingly passive, frustratingly unambitious, and almost frighteningly naïve for a girl from the New York ghetto -- and while I can only shake my head at her and her babyfather's eagerness to allow strangers and the state to care for their children -- I believe that I may need to shift my thinking about A.'s decision-making capability. For, while it would appear to me that she has made some really bad choices, to her and to her presumed community she has made powerfully positive ones, having been willing to sacrifice essentially everything she had to give life to her children.

Real Men

[UPDATE 7/31/11:  It has come to my attention that this post has angered some men who identify as Traditionalist, or who may be sympathetic to Traditionalism.  Readers who are new here should know that in this post, and on this blog in general, I speak solely of my own experience.  I mean no harm to anyone, Trad or otherwise, and my intention with this post was certainly not to sow further division among Catholic men and women, but to acknowledge that we are all deeply wounded, and to pray for the healing of all, both as individuals and as members of the Mystical Body.]

When, after a lackadaisical childhood catechesis, years spent doing my own thing, and a dramatic conversion experience, I came back to the Catholic Church in 2002, I found that there was a New York City subculture I had never known existed: the subculture of young orthodox and Traditionalist Catholics.  Many of this subculture’s adherents were actively looking for a mate, and I dated a few of them, which was an experience unlike anything I was familiar with from my own long romantic struggles. 

Many of the men in this subculture were what I can only call essentially wounded in their masculinity.  It was as if their self-identification as men had been haphazardly constructed out of subersive images of masculinity refracted to them from the culture; as if, finding certain norms of masculinity repellent (not without reason, it must be said), and not having had male role models to demonstrate for them any ontological qualities of manhood, these young men had skirted around the edges of male behavior, and had finished by taking affect for essence.  Their own masculinity seemed to have been forged in opposition and negation, cobbled together out of strong, oppositional attitudes to what repelled them culturally, rather than out of any positive attitudes, such as the wish to take on essential male roles -- engaging, for instance, in meaningful ways in the existential struggle to fight real enemies, and providing for and protecting the vulnerable, including women and children.  In addition, some of these men seemed to have self-consciously adopted certain styles, tastes, hobbies, and mannerisms associated with other times and places than twenty-first-century New York, identifying themselves more with, say, Europe before World War I, or fin-de-siècle Paris, or the New York of the Gilded Age.  One man from this set whom I dated asked me seriously once whether I considered myself American (he didn’t, in spite of the fact that, like me, he was).

I do not mean to suggest that these men were homosexual.  As far as their actual sexual problems and proclivities went, I did not get close enough to any of them to be able to speak with any authority.  However, I began to believe that the one I got closest to had a problem with pornography based on one or two little hints he let drop, and also on the fact that, after we’d decided to be “just friends” and I got engaged to someone else, he emailed me some disturbing soft-porn images of an Eastern European dominatrix whom, he said, I resembled.  This man was employed in a field related to Catholic apologetics, and I'm not saying that to be a successful, or even a sincere, apologist, one must be free of dark sexual neuroses and addictions.  Only God knows what is in the hearts of any of us, including, as we have seen lately in the case of the disgraced Fr. Corapi, in the heart of the priest who is saying Mass, and in the hearts of those who appear to be the most holy.  Only God knows what snares they must outrun each and every day of their lives in order to escape falling into the hells that are peculiarly painful and horrible and familiar just to them.  But I am saying that the combination of qualities that I saw in this man -- a shrinking from true, essential masculinity, a way of being a man that in fact seemed gerry-built upon opposition to cultural standards of masculinity, a self-professed orthodox Catholicism veering towards Traditionalism, and some deep-seated sexual problems -- struck me as disturbingly emblematic of a certain kind of orthodox Catholic man.

In other parts of  what someone has called "Catholic Blogistan,"  the “sola skirtura” debate rages on.  This debate couldn’t be more preposterous, or a less compelling use of mental energy, to me personally, but my background is different from that of most of the people who frequent these particular Catholic areas of the interwebs. For some of the skirts-only enthusiasts, it's ostensibly a question of femininity.  For others, it's a question of women in pants committing some kind of sin against God and man by allowing the outline of their lower body to be seen, rather than inferred.  While these arguments are not interesting to me, however, the evidently torrid atmosphere from which they arise is.  I can't help but thinking that men who get hot and bothered about whether women wear pants are coming from a place that I can only call sexually troubled, and it reminds me of the sexual woundedness I encountered in the men of the orthodox Catholic subculture into which I ventured after my reversion.

I do not mean to suggest that I am not sexually wounded myself.  I am.  And, as I mentioned earlier, neither am I suggesting that sexually-wounded men cannot be effective apologists.  They can.  It is when they write or speak out of a poorly-hidden crisis in their own masculinity, which I believe is a reflection of a cultural crisis of essential masculinity, that I get worried for women.  Some orthodox Catholic men, on the one hand, appear to be trying to regain an impossible Edenic ideal of manhood and fatherhood that they may never have seen or experienced in their own lives.  Others, though perhaps unconsciously, appear to do everything possible to avoid the self-sacrifice called for in marriage and fatherhood by attempting to disassociate themselves from any accepted cultural norms of masculinity, and, in so doing, fail to present themselves to eligible women as viable potential husbands and fathers.

The same man who sent me the dominatrix pictures before my marriage confided in me his great fear -- a phobia, really -- of one day having a child with Down syndrome.  His revulsion for children with Down syndrome was so unusual that I wondered if it was, like his apparent attraction to S&M pornography, another part of his wounded masculinity, as if being unable to love the obviously disabled were somehow connected to preferring exaggerated images of unbalanced sexual power to the vulnerability (and, one could say, the shame) of a sexual relationship between normal, fallen, imperfect, broken husbands and wives.  (It has occurred to me that, as much as I may or may not resemble an Eastern European dominatrix, he would have been terribly disappointed and unhappy being married to me.  And if we had been married, and had happened to have disabled children, as I do with the man whom I did marry, I doubt he would have stuck around too long).

I have no answers to the problems of wounded masculinity and femininity in the Church.  We are all essentially broken, after all.  Nonetheless, when one of us is wounded in this fundamental way, and acts out of his woundedness, and does damage to others as a result of it, the entire Mystical Body of Christ suffers.  I hope and pray that priests and laypeople may work together to heal the wounded -- i.e., our brothers and sisters and ourselves -- which I think would go a long way towards healing relationships between Catholic men and women.

The Pill and its Discontents

 “I’ve got 44-year-olds who show up in my office after trying two months and say, ‘I don’t understand, my gynecologist told me I was fine,’” says [Dr. Jamie] Grifo. “Now, he didn’t say, ‘You’re going to be fertile forever.’ But they didn’t hear that part . . . And for these women, if IVF doesn’t work, it’s very hard to recover. They have to grieve and mourn and make a life. These women, the 44-year-olds, are the ones that struggle the most, because they are so angry. And they’re angry at one person, but they won’t admit it. They’re angry at themselves.”

While waiting for the hour-plus-late New York-Boston train, I went to the newsstand and bought the latest issue of New York Magazine for its fascinating cover article, "Waking Up from the Pill."  Although most readers here won't come to the same conclusions as its author, Vanessa Grigoriadis, most will agree with her that the Pill has greatly exacerbated female infertility and led to a great deal of heartbreak among women who delay childbearing in the interest of career ambitions and sexual freedom.  Even to a pro-sex feminist like Grigoriadis, the Pill has emerged as a tool to control rather than empower women, with disturbing consequences.

(Cross-posted at Vox Nova)

Friendship, Maine, and Marriage

Since my conversion/reversion, I've stood in a rather awkward position vis-à-vis my gay friends (having been a female opera singer in New York, they are rather many). One dear friend and colleague of mine expressed his distress that I was marrying a man who believed that my friend's behavior was aberrant. "God made me this way," he explained. Several years ago, before I understood that such things were really sins, I attended an old friend's gay wedding in Toronto. I had no problem with it at the time, and didn't see why anyone else should. The two had been together for years, loved each other, owned a house together. Love is love, I told myself, and I was happy that someone appeared to have found it.

In the light of conversion, I see things differently now. I still feel uncomfortable with the Church's injunction of celibacy for homosexuals, but no more so than I do about the same injunction for single heterosexuals: not because I think it's an undue burden, but simply because I know how hard and painful it can be. I am also very sympathetic to the feelings of hurt and exclusion that every gay person I know has felt at some point. Their suffering is not helped by the fact that some among my own faithful Catholic cohort effectively shun them.

However, my Facebook news feed is all abuzz today with cries of woe and outrage over Maine's adoption yesterday of a ballot proposal that would overturn the new state law permitting gay marriage. One friend wrote simply, "Muck Faine [sic]," while another, a deeply religious man who sincerely loves Christ, quoted Psalm 69: "Those who hate me without reason/outnumber the hairs of my head;/many are my enemies without cause,/those who seek to destroy me./I am forced to restore/what I did not steal."

I wish I had a good argument to refute them. To say that marriage is between a man and a woman, which I think now is a no-brainer, appears to gay-marriage advocates to be an argument based on a lack of charity and an outmoded morality. To be honest, I don't quite understand why gays even want to marry, other than for symbolic reasons of equality. Most states guarantee hospital visitation and property transfer rights to gay partners, and some recognize civil unions. Some of my gay Christian friends point to David's intense friendship with Jonathan in Samuel 1:18-20 as an example of a homosexual union blessed by God. I am no scriptural authority, but, as a musicologist, I'm all too familiar with recently-popular posthumous ascriptions of homosexuality for which there's no real evidence to certain great composers and musicians. (As for the Schubert claim, all I can say is that the construct of male friendship was very, very different in early-nineteenth-century Vienna from what it is today. And as a colleague of mine once noted as we browsed in the classical music section of the late, lamented Tower Records at Lincoln Center, recording companies need some filler for those "Gay Classics" anthology CDs, since it would be too boring if they were all Tchaikovsky.)

As it stands, I will have to refrain from making comments on my friends' posts, because I fear I have no consolation to offer. But I wish I knew exactly how to be a good friend to them, which I feel at a loss to do right now.

Another Catholic Approach to Single Motherhood

"Restoring those who are broken from sexual sin and who desire to live life differently — a life focused on Christ — is a burden the church must share. What an awesome opportunity for a spiritually mature woman to come alongside a single mom as a mentor and friend.

A regular time together praying and studying God’s Word will help her mature in her walk with the Lord. Allowing her opportunity to observe life as you live it — meal preparation, family time, and providing wholesome conversation and wise counsel on a frequent basis — can provide teaching moments that will benefit her for a lifetime. Introducing her to a small group or class in the church where she and her baby are welcomed and plugged in will be vital to her restoration.

These are just a few examples of things the body of Christ can do. Staying connected with young couples or single moms who have chosen life should continue beyond the celebration of the child’s birth if we truly desire to fulfill the law of Christ in bearing one another’s burdens.

You will find it is not a burden after all, but a tremendous blessing as your family line extends to include these precious souls as part of your own."

From the 40 Days for Life blog.

Mercy and the Single Mother

Enbrethiliel at Sancta Sanctis has an interesting post up, analyzing current attitudes toward single motherhood among (mostly female) Catholic bloggers. With the caveat that "[as] for myself, I don't want a Catholic blogosphere that's too sweet," she quotes from a couple of blogs that make accusations, based purely on the authors' speculation, against single mothers, the main one being that single mothers make the considered, if not calculated, choice to be consigned to poverty and exhaustion because they want sex without consequences (ascribing uncanny, almost parthenogenetic, powers to single mothers, these bloggers essentially ignore the concomitant choices made by men). One of the bloggers Enbrethiliel quotes goes even further:

"In Feminist Fantasy Land we are supposed to look upon irresponsibility as something to be praised and we are supposed to boo and hiss at duty and responsible adult behavior. Therefore, marriage is to be looked upon as a waste of time and promiscuity is to be embraced.

The result? A massive, and still growing, class of impovershed [sic] single mothers that demand tax payer money [sic] to care for themselves and their children. All while many of them continue on in the same irrisponsible [sic] behavior that landed them in poverty in the first place.

And we are supposed to feel sorry for them and praise them as heroic martyrs. (???)

. . . . [S]ingle mothers are not special and they do not deserve special praise or special treatment above married mothers. " [Emphasis in original]

I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to unpack this diatribe, which after all speaks for itself. But I am saddened to see these sentiments emerging from Catholics who adhere proudly to their faith. Then again, maybe "adhering proudly" is the key to this disparagement, to this -- dare I say it -- scorn, and even hatred, for one's brethren. I believe that the Catholic faith contains, teaches, and advances the truth, but having received the gift of faith-- through no merits of my own -- gives me no cause to boast, and even less to disparage others, especially others who are in need of friendship and spiritual support.

Some readers of this blog know of my close friendship with a single mother living in poverty, who is a mother in spite of every effort of her ex-boyfriend's family to induce her to abort (and, pace Coffee Catholic, she is not supported by taxpayer money, though her pre-school-aged daughter, as an American citizen living in poverty, qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid). She did not make the choice to deprive her daughter of a father; her daughter's father made that choice. And her "irresponsible behavior," like that of so many other women, was motivated far less by "feminism" than it was by love and the desire for love. Was that love misguided? Most likely yes. But bloggers like Coffee Catholic and Leticia are luckier than they know if their own love and desire for love was never misguided, mishandled, mistreated, or cast before swine. Perhaps they had attentive parents of whose love they were assured, and therefore never knew the desperate loneliness and sense of unworthiness that encourages so many women to seek love and its substitutes elsewhere; if so, in that regard, they are also luckier than they know. But from those to whom much has been given, much is required.

The patristic apologist Tertullian famously described the early Christians by saying: "Look . . . how they love one another." That love was truly revolutionary in the pagan ancient world. Equally revolutionary, in a culture that regarded strength and ruthlessness as virtues and meekness as a sign of cringing subservience, was the idea of humility as a good for which to strive. I understand the attraction that some Catholics feel to the ethos of the Church Militant, but that does not cancel out the necessity, modeled by Christ Himself, for us to humble ourselves and to love one another in truth. If we are living in a neo-pagan era now, shouldn't we, as Christians, counter the culture by cultivating love for one another -- especially for those we're naturally inclined to scorn and hate?

There is a phenomenon among Catholics of a certain lack of enthusiasm for converts (or, as in my case, reverts), in spite of the fact that heaven rejoices over repentant sinners far more than over the righteous. I sometimes think that the righteous ones resent the fun that the more sinful converts and reverts had spending themselves in disorderly living, and think that we should pay for it temporally more than we seem to have already -- the workers coming at the eleventh hour and all that. To them, all I can say is that God is good, and one of the strange paradoxes of grace is that those who deserve it the least have the most right to His mercy. May God teach all of us, especially me, to be merciful.

(Above: Colin McCahon, Madonna and Child)

Turning Everything to the Purpose

As my readers know, I love Brahms. Like many of the great composers, however, it must be acknowledged that he was not much of a mensch. His well-known apology for not having offended each person present at a dinner-party was a bit of a self-effacing joke on his part; he was notorious for his barbed, even cruel, wit and his heedless egotism, and, according to a friend of his youth, Brahms was "sehr herbe in Wesen": very bitter in his essence. This bitterness was tempered later, when, as one of the only composers in history to be acclaimed and handsomely remunerated in his own lifetime, he was able and eager to show extraordinarily generosity to those in need.

It has often been speculated that Brahms's personal problems were the result of childhood trauma. Although his home life seems to have been happy, his family struggled in poverty, and the young Brahms was forced to quit school and bring in an income to help out. So, from the age of twelve, Johannes played piano in the dockside brothels of his native Hamburg, the Animierlokale ("stimulation pubs"), providing music for the dancing of the St. Pauli Girls and their sailor clients.

Brahms was a virtuoso pianist and musician, and he was able to play the waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas that his employers demanded from rote memory, while at the same time reading from a novel or a book of poetry that he had propped up on the music rack of the whorehouse piano. But, as his biographer Jan Swafford writes,

the effects of the Lokale on him were deep and indelible. For the rest of his life, with friends or in his cups, Brahms would recall those nights as dark and shameful . . . . He told one beloved that "he saw things and recieved impressions which left a deep shadow on his mind" . . . . Between dances the women would sit the prepubescent teenager on their laps and pour beer into him, and pull down his pants and hand him around to be played with, to general hilarity.

And Swafford continues, in an aside which drew mocking derision from Charles Rosen when he reviewed the Brahms biography in The New York Review of Books in 1998:

There may have been worse from the sailors. Johannes was as fair and pretty as a girl [see the sketch of him, at twenty, above].

As Swafford notes philosophically:

Everything that happens plays a part in an artist's life. What elevates one and not another to the level of genius is not only talent and ambition and luck, but a gift for turning everything to the purpose. Many first-rank creators have had traumas in their lives -- Beethoven's drunken father and his chronic illness and deafness, Robert Schumann's mental illness . . . With Brahms, it was first of all the lowlife of Hamburg. The [St. Pauli] Girls shaped him along with the training in music, the novels and poetry. The . . . squalor of his home and the Lokale . . . and . . . the idealistic intensity of his studies and his reading -- all that is one with the story of his music.

I've been thinking about Brahms lately in light of my friend Fallen Sparrow's recent brutally honest posts about his struggles with intimacy. Fallen and I had a discussion about his use of the word "monstrous" to describe some of the women he'd been involved with before he found sobriety. His violation as a teenager by an older woman is monstrous indeed, and I hope and pray that, as Brahms was able to do, Fallen will be able to temper the poison that was given him into medicine that he might use to heal the sick. There are people around him who need that medicine, and who need to receive it from him in particular.

Breast is Best?

There's a fascinating and disturbing interchange on Inside Catholic about breastfeeding at Mass. One commenter (#22) sees nursing a baby in public at all as part of a Satanic plot to destroy motherhood. This reminds me of a letter I read a while back in the New Oxford Review which asserted that sex is solely for the creation of babies, which, as I understand it, actually controverts Catholic doctrine; after all, sex is not proscribed for those past childbearing years, those who are already expecting a child, or those medically proven infertile.

For the record, I nursed my son on demand wherever that happened to be, including at Mass, and never thought much about it (he just weaned at 28 months, and I did try to avoid nursing him in public after he was about two, since nursing an older baby is something that is frowned upon most places in America). I never used a blanket. There are lots of discreet ways to do it without covering your baby's head, which always seemed to me like something a baby wouldn't really want to have done to him.

Hat tip: Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex.

Sex, Death, and Mozart

When I was studying for my master’s degree in music in the early 1990s, I took a seminar on the operas of Mozart with a brilliant professor (his other specialty was the Japanese shakuhachi flute, which he played at the level of a master, and for which mastery he’d even received a spiritual name from a Japanese sensei). The class was one of those once-in-a-lifetime learning experiences that make you fall more deeply in love with a subject you love passionately already. I remember particularly well the section on my favorite opera of all, Don Giovanni. Professor B. suggested that when Mozart uses a chromatic descending figure in this opera, it is to illustrate sex – specifically, the destructive force of untamed sexual energy, in an opera in which such a force threatens to loosen society itself from its underpinnings.

That chromatic downward figure occurs throughout the opera; one famous moment is in the duet that Don Giovanni sings with Zerlina, whom he is attempting to seduce on her wedding day, “La ci darem la mano” (the scene is shown above in a photo from Sacramento Opera's production). This duet, wonderful in its simplicity, using such a minimum of resources to show so much about the two characters who sing it, is well-known not only to opera lovers but also to readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Don Giovanni tells the peasant girl that he will take her to his castle, where they will give one another their hands, and where she will say “yes” to him (as Molly Bloom says yes at the close of Ulysses). Zerlina is about to go off with him when she is rescued by another of the Don’s conquests, Donna Elvira, who, in the Don Juan legend but not in the opera, is a nun whom he has seduced away from the convent. The descending chromatic line appears in the orchestra at the duet’s coda, when the two are singing, “Andiam, andiam, mio bene, a ristorar le pene d’un innocente amor” (Let us go, beloved, to assuage the pains of an innocent love). Its function is to tell us the truth: that the love Don Giovanni offers Zerlina is far from innocent (he later tries to rape her offstage during a party at his house).

The other night, I turned on the radio and heard the third, adagio movement of Mozart’s great Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major, K. 595, in a live performance by Imogen Cooper with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis on his 80th birthday. It took my breath away – not only the performance, which was full of both brilliance and insight, but also the music itself. I first heard this concerto on an LP that I begged my mother to buy at the supermarket when I was around nine (I don’t know why; I just saw it in a display of classical LPs for $.99 each, and I thought I would like it. It was published by Funk and Wagnall, and featured a nineteenth-century color engraving of Papageno, the birdcatcher from The Magic Flute, on its cover. She acquiesced, and I wore the grooves out listening to it). The elegiac adagio movement is heartbreakingly simple, its theme almost folklike; one can almost see one’s own life pass before one’s eyes when one hears it, in all the bittersweet folly that makes up any life. It also makes frequent use of a downward chromatic figure in the piano theme, later taken up by the orchestra. Hearing it made me think of the long-ago opera seminar. Surely in this autumnal concerto, Mozart was not thinking of sex, but of death; he wrote the concerto just a few months before his own death, when he was living in poverty, and was surely already gravely ill. Perhaps he really used descending chromaticism throughout his work when he wanted to indicate one of those moments of profound, unspeakable truth upon which everything else hinges.

More Bad Dreams

We went to Promisek for a few days of respite. I had a dream that my husband and I were dating, and that after a few years he decided to break up with me. In the dream I was forty-two (my age now), and I was struck with fear that I would never marry, and would now have to revert to a way I used to relate to men, having sex with them in the hope that one of them might fall in love with me and perhaps even consent to spending his life with me. In the dream, I made a mental note to buy condoms, which seemed like a necessary ancillary to my new (old) life. It was a horrible, resigned feeling, and I felt myself looking down the road to a life of loneliness. I fear that my dream is the actual experience of many women in their late thirties and early forties, and it makes me horribly sad to realize that women have internalized the practice of giving so much in order to get so little in return from men, who in the old days recognized their role of caring for women and children and protecting them. In spite of whatever advances we seem to have made, I will not budge from my conviction that women want to marry, want to take care of men and children, whether they admit to it or not. It seems to me that the sexual revolution has done great harm to the idea of healthy relationships between the sexes, each of which now is always sizing up and second-guessing the other (He: “What does she want from me? I hope she understands that a roll in the hay doesn’t guarantee anything”; She: “Maybe if I perform really well in bed, he’ll want to see me again, and I’ll be his girlfriend”) while trying to avert and evade their real responsibilities to one another. But, at the risk of sounding medieval, I am willing to bet that most men who haven’t been profoundly damaged emotionally actually want to take care of wives and children, and that most women, even those who espouse second-wave feminist non-essentialism, want to have husbands and children.