The Two B's

My two-year-old woke up at five in the morning today and couldn't get back to sleep, so I brought him into the living room to play. I turned on the radio and heard the unmistakable sound of a Brahms cello sonata, the opus 38, no. 1, in E minor, which, as often happens when I hear Brahms by chance, almost brought me to my knees. I've loved Brahms since childhood, and remember having conversations about him with my nearest-in-age brother, G., when we were teenagers; I had not studied music theory at that point and didn't know the principles of harmony and voice-leading, but I tried to tell G. that I loved Brahms because his music was "vertical" rather than "horizontal." What I was referring to, though I didn't know how to say so, was Brahms's reliance on harmonic progression rather than melodic line to advance the emotional meaning of his pieces. Although he could write beautiful melodies, some of his most interesting pieces are devoid of the soaring, lyrical lines which are characteristic of his somewhat earlier Romantic contemporaries. Brahms's melodic motives tend instead to be obscured by his use of delayed harmonic resolution, often in the form of sixth chords, which impart a sense of both resignation and unfulfillable longing to his music. When I hear his music, I feel as if I'm being led one step to the side of my everyday life, into a slightly parallel reality of deep contemplation. It is a somewhat jarring sensation these days, when I have so many things to do in the moment; gone are the days when I could listen and contemplate at leisure. I suppose this is one of the great luxuries of driving a car, which I don't do - the ability to carve time out of the quotidian to listen and contemplate, to go into the denser, moister life that's at the heart of the brittle, outer one. (I try to sing some Brahms Lieder every time I have the chance to perform a solo recital, but that's not very often, and because my professional life as a singer was largely focused on Italian repertoire, there is not much demand for my work as a Brahmsian.)

For another wonderful musical moment, go to one of my favorite blogs, The Western Confucian, where American-expat-in-South-Korea Joshua Snyder has a video up of Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan's "Love is Just a Four-Letter Word," with Earl Scruggs helping out on the banjo. I love Baez's chaste, lyrical singing style, which always seems so anachronistic for both her times and her persona.

Vocal Vocations

I got the following email from one of the lay Benedictines for whom I gave a concert earlier this month; they had been praying for my pregnancy.

The news is sad indeed. And there is a lot of sadness, there is no getting around that. We have been praying for you and I informed the inner circle. . . .

And there is more to pray about, if you think back to our conversation in the garden. I am thinking about the total direction of your life, as you prayerfully weather each event and especially weather the direction of these somewhat grisly priests who, orthodox as they may be, seem unhelpful, at least as taken without the required grain of salt.

Concretely my prayer is that you will more and more be able to discern through the sad and the happy events how the Spirit is calling you to a lay vocation where your unique gifts, your motherhood and your song, are used to bless this broken world.

Love in Christ.

This is really something to think about. Right now I'm just stymied. I hope my vocation doesn't end up looking too much like the picture above.

Solidarity Forever

Rod Dreher has a post up about cohousing, which is evidently a new idea to him (it's not to me; I had a vaguely revolutionary boyfriend once who was interested in trying it, and had even gone to visit a cohousing community upstate to see if it might be for him; he was disappointed, though, that this particularly community was centered around caring for its elderly members, as his unstated, but real, hope was to recreate the free-love atmosphere of 1967).

Rod Dreher's post was timely for me. I miscarried over the weekend, and, since I knew this would happen and that I would need help with things like housework and childcare, I made a few phone calls on Friday while out with a friend and our children to try to arrange this with family members. My friend asked if I couldn't call my parish to find someone who could bring over a meal or two. The notion surprised me; I would never even have considered it, because that sort of thing doesn't happen in my community. I wonder it this is an indication that American Catholicism has diverged irrevocably from its roots in immigrant communitarianism, and it calls into mind all kinds of questions about the uncomfortable relationship between Catholic solidarity and American individualism (the latter of which, incidentally, Joan Didion blamed for the fiasco of the 1960s youth rebellion). Perhaps some of you are lucky enough to live in parishes or other faith communities where the members approach one another in the spirit of Christian charity. I wonder what that might be like. As it is, my experience as a Catholic has had little of the sense of loving community about it, which is something for which having an online community is a kind of antidote.

Angel of Mercy

When I went for my ultrasound last week, I asked my good friend J. to come with me. J. had been my NFP instructor before my marriage, is a biologist, and was newly pregnant with her third child. I was very grateful for her support when I learned that I would have another miscarriage. The next day, in an awful coincidence, she miscarried too. She sent the following email message to her friends:

Dear Friends,
Many of you know that we were expecting our third child.
The baby was only 27 days old (from conception) when our good Papa called him Home.
We named the baby Angel.
We are looking forward to being reunited with our Angel in Heaven.
Peace and Love to you all.

She closed with a quote from St. Faustina's Diary:

Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible,
look kindly upon us and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might
not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to
Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.

Bad News

My pregnancy is not viable. I'm supposed to be eight weeks now, but an ultrasound today showed nothing more than my five weeks' ultrasound did. I'm not shocked; I was very fearful about this pregnancy: right away it seemed that the numbers were not going up they way they should have been; but I am sad. I was so hoping to welcome a new little one in January.

At the same time, I am deeply convinced that God is merciful all the time. I know in my bones that His will is mercy, and I can say that flatly, even if I will never, on earth, be able to understand the reason for this loss, or the others (and I don't think the reason is "chastisement"). "My grace is sufficient for you," as St. Paul quoted Him: "For my power is made perfect in weakness." I can only pray for this action in my own life.

Thank you to all who have been praying for me!

All Mercy, All the Time

Although the semester is over, I found myself back at the music department today to meet with a student from my writing class over a disputed grade (I gave her a B plus; she asked me to change it to an A minus; I agreed because of her perfect attendance and hard work in the course). The university is in a poor but historical area, and after my meeting I decided to walk to a nearby church and sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament, something I have been wanting to do more of late. When I found the church closed, I nearly cried. I walked along, intending to go to a different subway station than usual, and suddenly I came upon one of the friaries run by the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (pictured above). I knew it was one of theirs when I saw the collection of beat-up old vans out front covered with pro-life bumper sisters. I know the Friars (commonly called the CFRs) through their connection with the Sisters of Life, their sister community; the Sisters have an apostolate to post-abortive women, and I participated in their retreats a few years ago, becoming very close to some of the nuns, and later sang in benefit concerts for them. I took my courage into my hands and went up and rang the buzzer; I figured I needed prayer, and I had happened upon the right place; in fact, I had been praying for the CFRs themselves just the night before.

A tall, lanky English brother answered the door. I told him who I was, and asked the brothers to pray for me. I told him about my pregnancy, my long-ago abortion, the two pregnancy losses that my former confessor had totted up against it, and my desire for God's mercy. He stood with me in the hot sun and prayed with me right there, but not before saying, quietly and with a firm joy: "God IS mercy."

Bringing It All Back Home

In response to my recent post on Joan Didion's essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Maclin Horton directed me to his conversion story, which was published in the National Catholic Register in 1981. In it, Maclin relates with eloquence and humility his own journey from the counterculture to the Catholic Church.

About the phenomenon of spring 1967, he says:

. . . it really seemed, for a month or two that spring, like a new world. The flowers were brighter, the new leaves greener, because a darkness had lifted. There were other people in the world who felt as I did. We were finding each other, and soon we would change the world or perhaps build another, where the strange haunting joy that seemed to hover near us would come to rest and be ours.


Soon, however, the utopian promise of the movement degenerated into hedonism and nihilism. Maclin says that at the time he followed "a hodgepodge of more or less pantheistic, vaguely Eastern religious beliefs," but observes that

[t]here is no essential distinction beween the One of Eastern contemplation and the Abyss of Western nightmare; the differece is that the Eastern mind attemps to respond to nothingness with a smile, while the Westerner wants to scream.


Of his gradual journey to Catholicism, he writes:

there was the puzzle of confrtonting smething which seemed wiser than anything around it and yet marred by strange superstitions such as transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope. And again there was the slow realization that things which appeared to be deformities were absolutely essential to the structure of the whole, and that things which appeared to be irrational were in fact the foundations of rationality, without which reason itself would wither and die.

Perceptively and provocatively, Maclin notes of his gneration:

It is a strange twist . . . which has made the term "conservative" applicable mainly to the partisans of industrial capitalism. Many of us -- the wandering religious fanatics, the agrarians and communitarians, the artists -- were part of a movement so conservative that there was no longer even a name for what we sought . . . We wanted a world in which fundamental realities -- spirit, earth, light, death -- would be visible in all their simplicity . . . . So we marched off to war and fought for the wrong side . . . But our army scattered in the night . . . Now I find myself at the gate of an old fortress, one of those we had attacked and which we had thought to be a place of darkness -- it had looked so grim in battle -- and I find it alive with light and music . . . . It proves to be the castle of the King . . . . sometimes I wonder why all the ex-hippies in the world aren't flocking to his service. . . . There is simply nowhere else to go.

Please read this wonderful essay. I wish that Maclin would turn it into a book, as he had originally planned to do; I want to read more.

"Oh! Shrive Me, Father"

I'm just back from giving a concert at a very unsual place, a land trust operated by a lay Benedictine organization. Their concert hall is in a building called Saint Cecilia, which also houses a tiny chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. The program was one that I have done often, a selection of Victorian salon music with one of the foremost performers on the English concertina. One of our pieces is the Londonderry Air, sung not with the familiar text ("Danny Boy," by Fred Weatherley), but with the earliest known lyrics, published as "The Confession of Devorgilla" in 1814.

Devorgilla was a twelfth-century Irish princess, the wife of Tiernan O'Rourke, prince of Breffni. At the age of forty-four she eloped with a rival chieftain, Dermot MacMurrough, and a war ensued between the two factions. Dermot invited Henry II of England, known as Strongbow, to come to his defense, thus paving the way for the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. In the end, Devorgilla returned to her husband, and spent the rest of her life in good works, one of which was the establishment of the abbey at Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, pictured above. James Joyce is referring to Devorgilla in Chapter 2 of Ulysses when Deasy remarks to Stephen Dedalus: "A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni" (he mixes up the identities of the two men, however).

The song pictures the penitent Devorgilla in the confessional, seeking shriving -- absolution -- from the priest:

'Oh! shrive me, father - haste, haste, and shrive me,
'Ere sets yon dread and flaring sun;
'Its beams of peace, - nay, of sense, deprive me,
'Since yet the holy work's undone.'
The sage, the wand'rer's anguish balming,
Soothed her heart to rest once more;
And pardon's promise torture calming,
The Pilgrim told her sorrows o'er.

The charms that caus'd in life's young morning,
The woes the sad one had deplor'd,
Were now, alas! no more adorning,
The lips that pardon sweet implor'd:-
But oh! those eyes, so mildly beaming,
Once seen, not Saints could e'er forget! -
And soon the Father's tears were streaming,
When Devorgilla's gaze he met!

Gone, gone, was all the pride of beauty,
That scorn'd and broke the bridal vow,
And gave to passion all the duty
So bold a heart would e'er allow;
Yet all so humbly, all so mildly,
The weeping fair her fault confess'd,
Tho' youth had viewed her wand'ring wildly,
That age could ne'er deny her rest.

The tale of woe full sadly ended,
The word of peace the Father said,
While balmy tear-drops fast descended,
And droop'd the suppliant sinner's head.
The rose in gloom long drear and mourning,
Not welcomes more the sun's mild ray,
Than Breffni's Princess hail'd returning
The gleam of rest that shriving-day.

Two of the lay Benedictines told me separately after the concert that they believed my performance of the piece showed too much fixation on my own penitence. "God loves you," one of them said simply, an amazing thing to be told after a performance, and a good thing to hear.

St. Dorothy

Kyle Cupp has a provocative post up, suggesting an approach to dialogue on life issues that controverts the culture-war paradigm. It got me thinking about Dorothy Day, whose cause for sainthood is being promoted by the Archdiocese of New York (they have a stylish website up to publicize it, too). I can't help but wonder if Dorothy Day's acclamation as a saint would ruffle feathers among American Catholics, who are already rather starkly aligned along the lines of conservative and liberal, orthodox and dissenting. These designations, however, are misleading; like most aspects of American Catholicism, they bear the taint of what Pope Leo XIII referred to as the heresy of Americanism. Most orthodox or conservative Catholics identify their spiritual beliefs with conservative political beliefs, while, conversely, liberal Catholics align themselves with liberal American politics. So conservative Catholics are pro-life, but many of them are harshly opposed to any governmental solution to ameliorating the lives of poor women who choose life, and they tend to be for the Iraq War and for capital punishment. Liberal Catholics, on the other hand, believe that abortion is a right, while condemning the execution of criminals and the prosecution of the war. Perhaps Servant of God Dorothy Day is just who we need to guide us out of this impasse.

Dorothy Day was a true political radical and a true religious orthodox, someone who sought to defend and protect the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. She endured the suffering of divorce and abortion, and underwent a dramatic conversion from communism to Catholicism. While her approach to aiding the weakest was transformed in light of her conversion, her dedication to justice and peace was unwavering throughout her life. It seems to me that her life and work are a true reflection of Catholic belief.

As far as the pro-life cause being a conservative one, this essay, published in The Progressive in 1980, was one of the earliest to make the powerful case that the protection of the unborn is rightly under the purview of the political Left. Read Mary Meehan's concise and cogent arguments in support of a leftist pro-life movement: "It is out of character," she notes, "for the Left to neglect the weak and helpless . . . . abortion is an escape from an obligation that is owed to another."

Some of my readers know that I grew up in an off-the-charts progressive family. I have never been able to understand why pro-lifers stereotypically oppose any measures, such as increased welfare and food-stamp benefits, subsidized childcare, and a guaranteed wage subsidy (supported, incidentally, by that great liberal Richard Nixon), that would assist the women who are most vulnerable to abortion but who courageously choose life. Should women and children be left to live in poverty? Should women already abandoned by the fathers of their children be further abandoned by our society? Is that Christian? Is it American? Dorothy Day, pray for us.

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer"

In reponse to the recent posts on this blog about the sexual revolution, Retired Waif suggested that I read Joan Didion's iconic essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (I had never read Didion, although the eponymous book and several others by her were in my childhood home; I found I didn't like her style, but I suppose that's mainly because it's been so widely imitated). The essay is every bit as chilling as the poem from which Didion took her title. Didion has gone to Haight-Ashbury in the spring of 1967 to cover the desultory youth movement there, which is mostly a loose coalition of drug-addled teenagers who have descended upon San Francisco in a vague attempt to shuck off the repressive strictures of home and school. Drugs are the fulcrum about which this coalition pivots, and there are famous scenes of a five-year-old on acid (she is a pupil in "High Kindergarten") and a three-year-old who starts a fire in a commune while trying to light an incense stick. Didion's preamble sounds eerily like our own times:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.

(There, however, the similarity to our times ends, for "in the cold late spring of 1967 . . . the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose.")

In a sort of reversal of the trajectory of, say, The Great Gatsby, in which the protagonists leave the innocent, golden West and become corrupted in the East, Didion's California is a hollow paradise, a place that lures the young with promises of redemption and fulfillment, of a return to innocence, of an exegesis of transcendental mysteries and a spiritual completeness, but delivers instead a total breakdown of morals and a drug-hazed anomie which barely cloaks the everpresent threat of violence. In light of this, it is jarring to note the fondness with which many baby boomers regard this time and place, which Didion describes as "the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum." She has harsh words for a society that, in the period after World War II, has atomized into self-sufficient nuclear families; it is not just in the inchoate youth rebellion in San Francisco that things have broken down, she suggests, but even in straight, mainstream American culture:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves . . . Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot . . . They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts.

I believe the anomie lived out by the generation of '67 is still very much with us; only now it's no longer on the fringes, but has sunk into the very marrow of our society.

Mercy Without Measure

I just tried to upload an .mp3 file from my recent recital to this blog, but evidently this platform doesn't accept them. The piece is the haunting "Troparion of Kassiani," an unaccompanied soprano-soprano-alto trio by the young British composer Ivan Moody, a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. He takes for his text the words of a hymn (or troparion) by Kassiani (pictured above), a ninth-century Byzantine nun, composer, and hymnographer who is acclaimed as a saint in the Eastern Church. This troparion, about the woman who washed Christ's feet with her tears, is chanted on the Wednesday of Holy Week in the Orthodox Church. The text, in translation, is:

The woman who had fallen into many sins, perceiving Thy divinity, oh Lord, fulfilled the part of a myrrh-bearer, and with lamentation she brought sweet-smelling oil of myrrh to Thee before Thy burial.

“Woe is me,” she said, “for night surrounds me, dark and moonless, and stings my lustful passion with the love of sin. Accept the fountains of my tears, oh Thou who drawest down from the clouds the waters of the sea. Incline to the groanings of my heart, oh Thou who in Thine ineffable self-emptying bowed down the heavens. I shall kiss Thy most pure feet and wipe them again with the hairs of my head, those feet whose sound Eve heard at dusk in Paradise, and hid herself for fear. Who can search out the multitude of my sins and the abyss of Thy judgements, o Saviour of my soul? Despise me not, Thine handmaiden, for thou hast mercy without measure.”

I thought of this today as I went to one of the dozens of Quest Labs around town, where I have a standing order to have blood drawn every two weeks for the duration of my pregnancy. Since September 11 I have been uneasy on the subway, but the presence in my car of two young nuns in long traditional habits was calming. The nuns got out at my stop, and I saw them again a few minutes later, walking ahead of me. To my surprise, they entered the same genteel building that I was headed for. As I followed a few paces behind, I was amazed to see them go into Quest Labs. When I got to the door, the nuns and I were the only patients there. I asked them to pray for me and the baby, and they said they'd pray to St. Gerard Majella for me (I already consider him a friend). As they were leaving, one of the nuns embraced me. I asked her her name, and she said, "Mercy."

Echoes of the Jazz Age (a guest post by Really Rosie)

[My friend Really Rosie and I have been discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on women's lives, which has been the subject of the last few posts here. She reminded me that there was an earlier sexual revolution, whose effects were, arguably, equally deleterious. I asked her to write a guest post on this subject, which follows. - Pentimento]

There is a contemporary epidemic of regret among women over their sexual pasts. These are tales that women share only with other women, and I have been on the receiving end of many confidences. I once had a friend, E., whom I would describe as sexually predatory (I didn’t know it at the time, but she was sleeping with the boy she knew I liked), who told me one night when she was high that when she was sixteen her boyfriend pressured her into having sex for the first time in the back of his pickup truck. The condom broke, and she ended up having an abortion. Or G., who once told me ruefully that “pull and pray” doesn’t work, as a preamble to another tale of abortion. She subsequently married for three years, then divorced the man who impregnated her. And then there’s my friend B., whose philosophy of sex is that you have to sleep with a lot of men before you can really know for sure who to marry (she’s married, a mother, and a convert to Catholicism, incidentally), who told me recently that she lost her virginity at seventeen on top of a pile of dirty wet towels in the basement of a hairdresser’s shop, and so regretted it that she couldn’t look at herself afterwards for three days.

As a culture, we tend to think of the sexual revolution as starting in the late 1960s, aided by the musical anthems of the day and made possible by the birth control pill and, later, by the Roe v. Wade decision. After all, what came before was the buttoned-up pastel Eisenhower era, with its “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” and smiling housewives, and its stricter moral code. What has receded much farther away in our collective memories was the FIRST sexual revolution, the flapper era of the 1920s, a backlash against the repressed Victorian age that came before.

In 1916, when Margaret Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn with the stated aim of providing for women "unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children," there was, in the wake of World War I and the 1918 influenza epidemic (much as there was during the Vietnam era), a “do it now!” attitude, since you never knew when death might strike. The birth of advertising fed into the sexual frenzy, as did the heady strains of jazz music. The writings of Freud, as well as other popular authors of the day, like Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, exploited this new ethos of sexual freedom and experimentation. Dorothy Parker even went so far as to discuss abortion in her short story “Mr. Durant,” although she didn’t dare name it (“Ruby knew, through some indistinct friends of hers, ‘a woman.’ It would be twenty-five dollars”).

Like those women who lived through the 1960s and its aftermath, the sexual revolution of the 1920s resonated powerfully in the lives of those who exemplified it. Lillian Hellman not only famously aborted the child she conceived with Dashiell Hammett (she wrote about it in her memoir, An Unfinished Woman), but reportedly went on to have six more abortions. Dorothy Parker and Zelda Fitzgerald also had abortions (it is perhaps unrelated, but Parker sank into a depression and attempted suicide soon after, and Fitzgerald spent the last 18 years of her life in a sanatorium; she died in a fire at Highland Mental Hospital at the age of 48). [Another proponent - and, as she would later acknowledge, victim - of the Jazz Age sexual revolution was Dorothy Day, pictured above. She too had an abortion, which she always regretted, and later gave birth to a daughter, Tamar, out of wedlock. Her relationship with Tamar's father ended when Day began to feel drawn to the Catholic Church, and had Tamar baptized. - Pentimento]

The first sexual revolution informed the second one, and it is the second one that continues to shape the lives of women today. I had the misfortune recently to miscarry my second child, and my midwife sent me to an abortion clinic to obtain a pill that would bring on the bleeding that my body refused to start naturally. I waited five hours in the packed clinic; I sat on the floor because every chair was filled. The misery of the women around me was palpable, the attitudes of the clinic workers condescending.

Unwanted pregnancy (as well as sexually transmitted disease) may be the most salient results of regretted sex, but sometimes regret leaves no outward mark. While it is often argued that women deserve freedom and pleasure in their relationships, I wish it didn’t come at so high a price. In the meantime, we tell our stories.

The Way I've Always Heard it Should Be

More from Girls Like Us:

In 1973, shortly after their wedding (the first between two rock stars), James Taylor and Carly Simon gave an interview to to Rolling Stone, in which James said of Carly that "[she's] a piece of ass . . . if she looks at another man, I'll kill her," and Carly said that she was "addicted to James."

In 1972, after waiting in vain one night for her current lover, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell attempted suicide by taking pills, "[cutting] herself up," and throwing herself against a wall. She then repaired to a residential treatment institution (she would write the nervous "Car on a Hill" about the night she waited for Browne, and the sedated-sounding "Trouble Child" about her psychiatric treatment, both of which appeared on her great 1973 album Court and Spark).

Carole King's 1972 album, Rhymes & Reasons, includes a song,"Feeling Sad Tonight," that sums up the post-1960s emotional landscape that her generation of women -- and all subsequent ones, I would add -- have had to face: the experience of "always feeling half right and half safe." (Carole, the mother of four children from her first two marriages, would soon find herself married to an abusive, drug-addicted ex-con, who on more than one occasion "took his fist to his wife's mouth").

Freewheelin'

A thread that runs throughout the book Girls Like Us (see post below) is that of pregnancy -- furtive, feared, unwanted. (I had the chance to cut through a large swath of the book today, because I have just found out that I am pregnant again myself, and I had to spend the morning in hospital to have some spotting investigated; there is no conclusive diagnosis yet, but if you are inclined that way, I could really use your prayers for the baby and myself right now). The fear of pregnancy is a constant shadow falling across the liberated lives of the "girls" profiled, along with their cohort. The repertoire of the so-called Child Ballads introduced by the female folksingers of the late 50s and earlly 60s (named for the musicologist who collected them, Francis James Child) is, to an astonishing degree, made up of songs about babies born in secret who are dispatched by their mothers (think "Mary Hamilton," sung by Joan Baez, pictured with her sisters on the left in the famous poster above). This was a theme that dovetailed with the lives of the young singers themselves, who, though "liberated," lived in fear of becoming pregnant; a strong social stigma, and certainly a career-ending one, was still attached to out-of-wedlock birth at that time.

Joni's relinquishing of her child seems to have colored her entire life to follow, and she constructed elaborate justifications to explain her act, later telling an interviewer who blindsided her with a question about her daughter (in what seems like stunned incoherence): "People are too possessive about their children, too egocentric with their children, anyway. I reproduced myself . . . but at the time I was penniless. There was no way I could take -- she would have been -- I was not the right person to raise this child . . . I couldn't keep her. It was impossible under the circumstance. I had no money when she was born, none . . . none of the music could have come out . . . I would have been waitressing or something . . . fate did not design this to occur." She also blamed her first husband, Chuck Mitchell, for her signing of the surrender papers; evidently, he did not offer to take care of Joni and her daughter with the conviction that Joni needed in order to bring her child home from foster care.

Then in today's New York Times comes this article, about a new memoir by Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's erstwhile girlfriend, who appeared with him on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Suze also became pregnant during their time together, and Dylan encouraged her to get an abortion, which was not then legal. This, the article notes drily, "strained their relationship."

I wonder why these sad experiences are not looked at collectively, forty years later, for the irreparable losses that they were. I wonder why these women are not universally sympathized with, and why their men's auras are not tarnished by the callousness they displayed. I wonder why the loss of children is tacitly accepted among many in my own cohort as a modern complication in the lives of modern women, which have become sadder and sadder, I believe. Some of the comments on the last post suggested that abortion, the increase in which is undeniably a logical outcome of the sexual revolution, was somehow not a life-changing tragedy. Why can't we see it for what it is -- in fact, a culture-changing tragedy?

I continue to admire the artists I'm reading about in Girls Like Us, but I find myself aching for the choices they felt they had to make.