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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

From: http://lyricstranslate.com

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

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

The Road to Mandalay

My father used to sing this song when I was little; it's the famous setting of the equally famous Kipling poem, written by American composer Oley Speaks in 1907.  We were singing it today just for fun, and I decided (inevitably) to look for some versions on Youtube.  The first one I listened to was the one I expected to be the perfect performance, sung by matinée-idol baritone Lawrence Tibbett, a paragon of baritonal virility; and it is great, but his fake Cockney accent just gets silly after awhile:


And then I found this.


Could anything be hipper?  I love the "exotic" arrangement, and the fact that Sinatra changed "Burma girl" to "Burma broad," and, of course, Sinatra himself.

Starfish

A terrific poem today on the Writer's Almanac.

(It's also a New York poem.  The poet, Eleanor Lerman, is from Far Rockaway by way of the Bronx, so the channel to which she refers is most likely Broad Channel. in Queens, or the East Rockaway Channel in Nassau County, Long Island.)

Starfish
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to

the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

("Starfish" by Eleanor Lerman, from Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds. © Sarabande Books, 2005.)

One of the Gayest at Montmartre

Eugénia Fenoglio was born in 1866 in Toulon, France.  Her father, an alcoholic tailor, battered his wife, who often fled with the children to seek shelter with relatives.   The day came that her mother left her abusive husband for good, but not long after, he sought the family at their new residence and killed his wife and then himself in front of their daughter.

As a child, Eugénia had loved theatrics, and had written, directed, acted in, and even designed the sets for plays she staged with her friends.  Not long after her parents' murder-suicide, she made her way to the capitol, where, encouraged by a lover, she tried her luck on the stage and met with phenomenal success there.  She took the name Ève Lavallière, after a mistress of Louis XIV who, incidentally, had become a penitent and had died a Carmelite nun.

According to CatholicIreland.net:

"The sudden death of one of the leading actresses of the theatre became the opportunity for Ève and she did not disappoint. Her voice was exceptional and she was able to use it to convey every sort of emotion - from silence to violence, from authority to disgust.

"Listening to Ève conveyed the audience into the very heart of the tragedy or comedy . . . she was playing. Even the great contemporary actress, Sarah Bernhardt, told her, 'What you do is innate: you create - you do not copy the characters. You give birth to them from within yourself. It is very beautiful.'"

La Lavallière became the most popular and successful actress-singer of the Belle Époque.  She was fabulously wealthy and a critical success.  At the same time, her personal life grew more and more chaotic and disorderly.  Before achieving fame onstage, Ève had supported herself as a Parisian courtesan; after, she was the mistress at one time or another of an assortment of prominent men, and bore a child out of wedlock -- a daughter, who would cause her mother great despair as an adult by living openly in a lesbian relationship.

During the First World War, on holiday in a small village while preparing for a tour of the United States with the Théatre des Variétés, Lavallière experienced a dramatic conversion after meeting a local priest and mentioning to him lightly that she had sold her soul to the devil in order to maintain her youth.  The priest, at first outraged, lent her a book about St. Mary Magdalene, which she read in a state of gradual awakening to the reality of her life of sin, and in a spirit of deepening penitence.  She cancelled her participation in the American tour and retreated to the countryside with her dresser from the theater, Leona, who accompanied her conversion with every step.  Lavallière applied for entrance as a Carmelite postulant, but was denied on account of her poor health (and perhaps too because her fame both as an actress and as a libertine had penetrated even into the cloister of the Carmel).  Instead she became a Franciscan tertiary, and after an attempt at missionary work in Tunisia, spent the rest of her life in solitary prayer and penance.

Some years after Lavallière's abrupt renunciation of the stage, a French reporter managed to track her down.  The New York Times published a story about this encounter in 1921:  "Once talk of Paris, Actress is Recluse," proclaimed the headline. "One of the Gayest in Montmartre . . . Lives Apart from the World Except for Village Poor."  The article, which can be downloaded here, mentions that the reporter asked Lavallière's maid if the former actress "ever [thought] or [talked] about the past." 

"Never," was the maid's answer.  "When she gets letters from her old friends she sometimes smiles, for she has no bitterness about the past, but she doesn't think about it.  She thinks only of the present and the future." 

I first learned of Ève Lavallière five years ago, while doing my dissertation research on music and penitence.  Raïssa Maritain had written of her friend that, after her conversion, Lavallière's eyes were always wet with the tears of contrition.  I remember reading at the time that Pope John Paul II had beatified her, but have not been able to confirm this on the web.  Nonetheless, I have decided to start a home-made novena to her in advance of the anniversary of her death, July 10.  I am closing each day with a prayer written by Lavallière herself: 

Oh my beloved Master, by Thy hands nailed to the Cross, I beseech Thee to wipe away all of the sins committed by my criminal hands.  My sweet Jesus, by the painful fatigue endured by Thy blessed feet, by the divine wounds They suffered when They were pierced, wipe away the filth left by my guilty feet.  Finally, Oh my Master, Oh my Creator, Oh my Savior, by the dignity and innocence of Thy life, by the holiness and purity which characterized it, wash away all of the stains of my impure life.  May that abominable life exist no more in me, may the ardor of Thy love hold me entirely, for Thou art, Oh my King, the sole refuge of my soul; grant that I may be unceasingly consumed with the ardor of Thy charity.  Give me, my Redeemer, above all, Holy Humility. 

For more on Lavallière, go here. 

Late Ripeness

A poem by Czeslaw Milosz, in honor of what would have been his ninety-ninth birthday yesterday.
********************************************

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

A Dying Tomcat

My birthday was the other day, and I have a tradition of pulling a book off the shelf and reading a poem at random on my birthday morning, not for any necromantical purpose, but simply to make a small space for beauty and expansiveness before the diurnal responsibilities come to trample them down.  This is the poem I read: 

For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished his Former Hissing and Predatory Nature

I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns

to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I’m not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel

how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail

did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch

that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw

is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,

let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.
*****************************************************
It's by Mary Karr.  I thought it was wonderful.

The Mary Ellen Carter

On the way home from Mass today, my son asked over and over to hear the song "about that ship that crashes."  This is the song that he meant.  We found the CD, and sat in the driveway singing it.



I like the Bertolt Brecht quote that Liam Clancy uses as a preamble to this performance:  "With a man's dying breath, he should be prepared to make a fresh start."  It reminded me, in fact, of what Christ said in today's Gospel reading:  "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."  This is something I needed particularly to hear.

Twenty Years After

Twenty years ago, right around this time, I became pregnant with my first, lost child.

My whole world was M. then; all I wanted was for him to love me; I suppose that I believed somehow that the pregnancy would force his hand, would compel his love.  What I did not know was that the sacrifice of our child -- and his regret, and the way that we were now inexricably linked to each other because of that grim martyrdom -- was the thing that would finally inspire his love.

By then, however, it was too late.  I still loved him, but I had become bitter and cynical.  I married him because I felt -- we both felt, I'm sure -- that this was the one way to set right what we had made so wrong (though I can't really know for sure what he felt, because, after the abortion, we never spoke of it).  So I married M.  And I threw myself into my singing.  I have never met anyone who worked as hard as I did to become a good artist, who studied his craft from as many aspects, who strove to become an authority on the history and practice of his discipline the way I did.  (And I now know that, later on, when I taught college, I was much too demanding of my students; since this kind of striving, I believed, was the only thing that could save me, it was surely the only thing that could save them, all of whom were from humble backgrounds, all of whom were searching for the divine spark of beauty in their own hardscrabble lives, too).

I loved what I was doing as a singer -- all I ever wanted was to create something beautiful that would move people -- but, more importantly, it gave order to my life, it kept me from flying off into oblivion;  in short, it kept me from hitting bottom.  I trusted nothing and no one; I believed that all I had to hold onto in my life was my singing; I truly believed that singing would create a new, alternate reality for me, a realm in which the emptiness was filled, and in which I not only had power and agency, but also in which I became essentially good by virtue of the qualities I had developed as a musician.

I suppose it is no coincidence that I walked away from my opera career at the same time that I jettisoned my first marriage.  Too much had been predicated upon my first poor, lost child.

In the ensuing years, I have sometimes sought, sometimes resisted, the contraction of my life into a shape and a form more constrained than the expansive life I once imagined for myself, and which I have pursued at great cost.  I am both an accustomed and a reluctant penitent; as much as penitence has become a habitual stance -- to the bemusement of those who know me -- I would so much rather have all the nice, easy, kind, fun, pretty things in life instead.

My only prayer, as always, is that God will use the rest of my life for something good; that He will bring beauty and healing for others out of the abyss of my crimes and my despair.  Once, when I was very ill, I had a feverish hallucination of the Blessed Virgin standing at the foot of my bed; she showed me scenes from my life, little lozenge-shaped dioramas in her hands in which I relived all my misdeeds.  Then, as I lay there and watched, she turned each of the lozenges around, and they became roses, which she scattered from her hands.  Readers and friends, please pray for me too.

Friday Poetry: I Will Go Into the Ghetto

This beautiful poem, by Charles Reznikoff, is one of the works of art dearest to me in the whole world.  It has such profound personal resonance that I feel as if it could be the story of my own life, or, at least, the story of my sentimental and artistic educations.  Enjoy.

I will go into the ghetto:  the sunlight
for only an hour or two at noon
on the pavement here is enough for me;
the smell of the fields in this street
for only a day or two in spring
is enough for me.
This peace is enough for me;
let the heathen rage.

They will take away
our cakes and delicacies;
the cheerful greetings, the hours of pleasant speech, the smiles,
and give us back
the sight of our eyes and our silent thoughts;
they will take away our groans and sighs
and give us -- merely breath.
Breathe deeply:
how good and sweet the air is.

Deceptions and Enormities

I just finished reading a short story by the poet (and prolific writer in many genres) Donald Hall, "From Willow Temple," which you can read in its entirety here.  The story, about a young farm girl whose inadvertent witnessing of her mother's adultery resets the trajectory of her own life, is restrained and affecting, notable as much for what Hall leaves unsaid as for his stance of quiet, distant compassion for his characters.  He has his protagonist muse:  "Surely I was changed forever . . . . I knew that by universal conspiracy we agreed to deny the wickedness of every human being.  We needed, every hour, to understand:  The fabric of routine covered unseen deceptions and enormities.  We also needed to remember that the cloth must show no rips or tears, and this covering was as real as anything." 

Then I read the Facebook status update of a man from my old parish who runs a crisis pregnancy center in the South Bronx, helping desperate young women seeking abortions to choose life instead, and supporting them in every way possible in that choice.  On his Facebook, he often posts anecdotes from the day-to-day work of the interns who tend to the young mothers.  One young woman, he wrote, came to the office seeking an abortion because of her dire economic situtation and her desire to finish school.  A friend of his -- incidentally, a self-described conservative Catholic homeschooling mother -- commented, "If you want to finish school, don't have sex!"

Then I picked up the copy of Marian Helper that had come in the mail, the little journal published by the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, the order in Stockbridge, Massachusetts whose apostolate is the spread of the Divine Mercy devotion.  I read an excerpt from a memoir written by Fr. Donald Calloway, a priest in the order, who had been a runaway, a drug addict, and a criminal before his conversion.  The story included a photograph of Fr. Calloway addresing a crowd, and quoted from his address:  "Don't think I'm holy, because I'm not.  The honeymoon is over.  I go through trying times, tough times, and I am tempted like you don't know.  Big time.  So pray for me . . . I need it.  I'm a hunted man.  Satan hates my guts.  And I am still a man in the conversion process [in need of] more mercy, more mercy, more mercy.  That's what I need, what we all need."

At first, I misread "hunted" as "haunted," and I began to wonder if all of us are divided into two groups, the haunted and the scared -- those who have committed "deceptions and enormities," and those whose fear of the consequences has prevented them from doing so.  Of course, this is wretchedly simplistic.  Still, reading the barely-disguised contempt of the homeschooling mother on Facebook for the poor young girls in my old borough reminded me once again that those who were lucky enough to receive sound moral instruction in their early lives should not attribute their good fortune to their own merits, and that from those to whom much has been given, much is expected.

Whether haunted or scared, however, we are all hunted; surely we can unite in our recognition of this, our human condition.  Some of us, like Fr. Calloway, are "tempted . . . big time"; others are probably tempted to far less spectacular sins, like the common house-and-garden pride and scorn that is so very hard to weed out of our hearts, and which seem to me emblematic of the state of being scared -- for surely it's fear that leads us, more sinful than the publican and less virtuous than the Pharisee, to commend ourselves for having avoided spectacular sin and for having achieved much.  This brittle self-commendation surely masks the quite justified fear that our nice lives, our accomplishments, our sense of ourselves as good people doing good things, could be swept away from one moment to the next by the simplest, most unwitting mistakes made in a moment of carelessness.  Which is why, in addition to being hunted men, we all need more mercy, more mercy, more mercy; and the more we're given, the more we are required to show to those poor souls we're inclined to scorn.

Life in a Northern (Appalachian) Town

I went to what I think would count as a society wedding the other day.  As the unlikely wife of an accidentally prominent man, I have to go to these things sometimes, and I always dread them.  First of all, I just know that I'm going to disappoint; the local society ladies are probably expecting a Sex-and-the-City, glamorous type of New York woman, and I turn out to have no jewelry to speak of and grad-student hair.  And then I always seem to say the wrong thing.  I started talking to a Very Important Person about concertinas at one of these events, for instance, prompted by the shape of a box he was carrying, and watched his face take on that look that you get when you're trapped with someone who at first appears to be normal, but whom you slowly start to realize is preoccupied with abnormal obsessions.

My husband was unsure if we should even attend at all, because it was the third marriage of a lapsed-Catholic son of a prominent Catholic father.  Politics prevailed over theology, however, as my husband works with the father, and besides, we were only invited to the reception; and so we went.  The groom, who was fifty, was a gorgeous, tanned creature with perfectly-gelled hair, who looked ten years younger; the bride was a rangy, slightly-loopy-but-sexy blonde about half his age, just a couple of years older, in fact, than his children.  When I said the wrong thing, which didn't take long, it was to her (though she started it, by suggesting -- rather wildly, it seemed to me --  that I possessed the entrepreneurial skills to start a small business of the kind that is desperately yearned for around here, in the hopes of sparking some sort of resurrection in this fallen-on-hard-times post-industrial town):  I asked her what her plans were once she got settled into her new, married life.  It became immediately clear to me that I'd been rude, though I hadn't meant it rudely at all.  I saw the bride an attractive, energetic young woman at the cusp of her adult life, and I felt I was taking a kindly interest in her.  Though I said none of these things, my conversational gambit, I hoped, implied the questions:  would she start having children right away?  (I doubted the couple, who had lived together before their marriage, were NFP practitioners.)  Would she take a class, pursue an interest, a career?  I was disheartened when she seemed flustered and upset by my question; fortunately, she got caught up in another conversation before we were both forced to walk our own back to some other, safer topic.

One of the groom's sons presided over a table right next to ours, which seemed to be populated by theater geeks; his wavy, Botticelli-esque hair hung down below his shoulders, and he wore a fedora, reminding me pleasantly of the Devo song "Through Being Cool":

If you live in a small town
Your might meet a dozen or two
Young alien types who step out
And dare to declare:
We're through being cool



I spent a long time talking to the groom's elderly mother, who was not at all hesitant to express her concerns about the union:  "He keeps getting married," she sighed.

The food was dreadful, but the band was really fantastic, and even included a horn section.  We danced to one song, and then we went home.

Waiting Confoundedly

It's been hard for me to make new friends in my new home town.  One of the reasons is that I'm relatively isolated by my lack of license-able driving skills.  It takes extra effort to go anywhere, and it usually involves strollers and bus schedules, and the sort of planning that no one I know really does here; they just throw their kids and stuff in the car and take off, while I mostly just stay at home.  But it's not just that, and it's not just that the people I meet here come from such different backgrounds from mine.  Another reason, I think, is that it's hard to find other mothers here who share my essentially pessimistic philosophy of life.  (It's not at all hard to find such mothers in New York, since it's really not hard to find anything at all you're looking for there.)

Now, those readers who know me personally will tell you that I'm actually not quite so much of a downer as you might think in real life.  I laugh all the time, and I truly enjoy things (I also cry every day; there's just so much to cry about.  It's hard to say how much of this is neurosis, how much is justifiable compunction, and how much is culture and genetics; it seems to me sometimes, having been like this since childhood, that I must be the logical heir of a tragic Mediterranean worldview).  Nonetheless, I have to keep reminding myself that I no longer live in New York City.  I live in America now, the land of positivism.  I feel that I cannot talk about the things that preoccupy me with the other mothers I know where I live now, lest I intrude upon their deeply-held conviction -- one that seems to be a bedrock of our culture -- that everything is, or will be, all right, and that, if you are an essentially good person, you deserve to be happy.  While I believe that everything will be all right in the eschatological sense, the rest of this point of view utterly confounds me.  Does this mean that I suffer from depression?  Or just that I need to go back to New York more often, or perhaps back to my ancestral village in the mountains of Campania?

We are still in the throes of adoption paperwork, and it's taking longer than we expected, because Catholic Charities, our agency, is woefully understaffed and -funded.  It occurred to me recently that most Americans (and also most New Yorkers) in our position do IVF, and, indeed, IVF seems like a typically American-positivist response to an intractable problem.  I'm quite sure, however, that even if I had not had a dramatic reconversion to the Catholic faith, IVF is not something I would have ever undertaken.  It's not just the ethical problems that give me the creeps about it, but also the philosophy of positivism on which it's based -- the philosophy of everything-will-be-all-right-and-I-deserve-to-be-happy -- that I reject all the way down to my bones.  IVF strikes me as a salient example of the American tendency to marshal all the resources at one's disposal to try to force a desired outcome, and, even if I weren't a Catholic revert, I would think (and in fact know from bitter experience) that to base one's actions on this shaky philosophy can only lead to bad ends.

Nonetheless, the world of adoption is equally confounding to me.  I recently read a parent testimony in an adoption book about a couple who rejected a Chinese adoption placement because the little girl they had initially accepted had become seriously, perhaps fatally, ill.  "We chose to accept a new referral," wrote the adoptive mother, which seemed to me a rather cagey way to put it.  After adopting a different girl -- "the daughter I am sure was always meant to be ours" -- this mother was relieved to find that another couple had chosen to adopt the first, sick little girl as a special-needs placement.  And yet the mother made a point that this sick little girl, the girl she and her husband had decided not to adopt, "will always be ther first daughter of our hearts."

I found this attitude absolutely confounding, and vaguely troubling.  The adoptive mother's rejection of the sick child cannot be compared to terminating a pregnancy with a poor prenatal prognosis, the major difference being that the child rejected on account of illness survived and was adopted by someone else.  But what if she hadn't been? 

I am hardly in a position to judge this mother or anyone else, or to speculate about the nature of the girl's undisclosed illness.  Perhaps the first adoptive couple did not have the means to care for a child who might be very ill for the rest of her life, or who might not live very long.  But the rejected placement did make me wonder how the parents would have reacted if it had been found that their biological child was gravely ill.  Call me a Mediterranean fatalist, but it's not part of my worldview that anyone deserves to be happy.  I do believe, though, that we are called to love and to serve, and in some cases that means loving and serving children who are less than perfect, and who God gives us as a gift, one that will transform us and conform us, in His service, more closely to His will.

UPDATE:  Karen Edmisten writes (in a recent blog post about parenthood) that, "when a gift is given, it is worth the sacrifice it takes to accept it."  That sentiment articulates my feelings about the rejected adoption placement better than I did; but, again, it's hard to know all the variables in that situation.

"To be a true artist," part 2

Michael Greenberg's Salinger essay, linked to in the post immediately below, reminds me of the poem "To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing," by W.B. Yeats, whose 145th birthday was yesterday:

NOW all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

"To be a true artist, the performer must give up being on stage"

One of the fringe benefits of rehearsing at my old university is the out-of-date magazines that someone has been leaving for years on a marble counter just outside of the elevators (on a floor that Music shares with the French, Classics, and Theater departments).  I've gleaned many a few-weeks-old New Yorker and Chronicle of Higher Education there, and on this recent trip, picked up some New York Reviews of Books, in one of which I found this excellent short essay on J.D. Salinger.