This will mostly be a reading thing. Which will, undoubtedly, veer into Opinions.
Listening: Well, we’ll start with some listening, anyway. But it will be this kind of listening: me listening to my youngest’s piano lesson last night – listening because the teacher is back at grad school after his spring break, and so from now until May, we’re back on video lessons. I usually don’t listen in, but this time, I wanted to because there was a competition last Saturday, and my son didn’t do as well as he had hoped. I wanted to hear the debriefing and what the plan was for going forward through the next few weeks, which involve a number of recital/competition type events.
After the conversation exploring what the heck happened last Saturday, the teacher ended up giving him three practice strategies: revisiting the metronome, recording himself and listening carefully with a score, and then dividing his pieces into chunks, writing the measure numbers of those chunks on pieces of paper, putting the pieces of paper in cups – one for each of the three pieces, and then randomly pulling out papers from the cups and practicing, on the spot, the measures indicated.
The goal is a deep and firm hold on the music that’s not going to be disturbed by the vagaries of any particular piano or what someone says to you right before you go onstage or the
temperature of the room or how your sleeves feel. Not that any of those were issues – I think he did identify the issue – but you get the idea.
My son doesn’t want to pursue this as a career or even at the college level. With that in mind, it’s hard to establish why we’re going this particular route in playing right now. I do think that playing in competitions forces a certain level of concentration and work that playing casually might not. He wants to be able to play certain pieces – the more advanced Beethoven Sonatas, for example – and he knows that this is getting him to that point. He also knows that this type of performance emphasis is, indeed, helping him with his jazz work and will probably help him as he inches forward in pipe organ.
It’s interesting. I’m just glad it’s all about something that I don’t mind being a part of. I mean, if we’re talking soccer or dance….oy.
(Why do I say that? Partly because I enjoy listening to music and have at least some rudimentary ability in the area myself. But also because this level of public performance with piano, at least, doesn’t eat up entire days and weekends as do sports and even dance. I have never experienced the level of hell with piano recitals that I did for the couple of years my daughter did dance. Piano recitals take an hour. The little kids play for about 30 seconds each, then they’re done, the next one toddles on stage, and by the time you get to the older kids, you’ve actually got something interesting to occupy you with their Beethoven or Gershwin or Debussy – and you don’t have to pretend that you’ve got nothing better to do for an entire afternoon of your life than watch groups of overly-made up toddlers wander aimlessly around a stage.)
Reading:
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve just read the novel Dayspring by Harry Sylvester. Originally published in 1945, Ignatius reissued it recently with an introduction by Philip Jenkins. From that introduction:
Sylvester’s profound admiration for southwestern religious culture goes far to explaining the novel’s poor reception among critics, who could not believe they were seriously expected to admire the ridiculous savagery of the Penitentes. In the New York Times, literary oracle Orville Prescott reacted coldly to what he described as “only a religious tract spiced with plenty of sex”, while to his eyes, the Penitentes were “not masochistic; only barbarously fanatic”. No reviewer found time to admire Sylvester’s superb descriptions of mystical experience or the visionary encounters that transform the puzzled Bain, trampling all his previous experience and expectations.
Nor could the critics understand how the absolute religious vision of the Penitentes–their medieval obsession with sin and salvation–might have the slightest relevance to Bain’s own Anglo community, which was so firmly rooted in the secular modern world. Initially, Bain himself is a dispassionate observer of the Hispanic world, and only gradually does he come to see through their eyes. When he does, though, he is appalled by the ways and customs of his own people, especially among the sexually liberated progressive colony centered on the horrendous Marsha Senton. (The colony is a barely disguised version of Taos, and Marsha is just as clearly meant to be Mabel Dodge Luhan.) Bain comes to realize that his own Anglo people are at least as deeply imbued in sin as the “primitive” Hispanics, at least as pagan and bloodthirsty, although they lack any awareness of the need to change. Who are the real barbarians, he asks? Who are the true fanatics? Adding a powerful contemporary theme to the novel, his wife’s plans for a second abortion serve to focus Bain’s growing awareness of sin and personal responsibility.
I wasn’t deeply taken with this novel. I wouldn’t agree with any assessment that calls it “great,” as Jenkins does. It’s certainly worth reading, for the historical insight it offers, I think. But it didn’t offer me food for the thought the way that much of Mauriac or Greene do.
I’ve said before that one of the reasons I enjoy reading fiction is the insight it gives me, not only into human nature, but into the past and into other cultures and ways of life. You can read a history book about mid-century Catholic practices, for example, but just as, if not more valuable, are novels with Catholic characters doing Catholic things. Of course, it’s fiction you’re reading, but the narratives still give a sense of how things were – and even if it’s idealized, it’s helpful – for understanding what past believers saw as “ideal” is illuminating, too.
I can’t help but compare this to A Burnt-Out Case – written twenty years later, but also about a non-believer amongst a cast of characters that includes odd people with hidden agendas as well as believers trying to muddle through and do the right thing, including priests. Greene’s psychological insight is so much deeper than Sylvester’s – it’s clear, reading them so closely together, why Greene is a great writer and Sylvester isn’t.
The idea is that Bain, the protagonist, is an anthropologist studying the ways of the peoples of New Mexico – the native peoples, I suppose, although the emphasis is on those of Mexican origin – he calls them “Spaniards.” He’s been there for some months, poking around. He interacts with those whom he’s observing as well as the Anglos, mostly bohemian types, doctors and lawyers. He’s married, his wife is back in California – she’s an academic of some sort as well, and during the course of the novel after a visit to Bain, she becomes pregnant. She’s been pregnant before, and had an abortion, something that’s an important plot point , of course, but, I want to say, is not presented as a big deal, practically speaking. There’s no sneaking around or fear of speaking about it or obtaining it – it’s “an operation.”
So Bain is an agnostic, maybe even an atheist, but moved by various intuitions, decides to be baptized – the excuse given is that it will give him access to the main subject of his research, the penitentes – the group of men who engage in extreme penitential practices, culminating during Holy Week.
So we have a couple of levels of storytelling here. First is the level of documenting, which is interesting: Sylvester’s portrayal of the Anglos, in particular – cultural appropriators and arrivistes, decadent to a point, unbelievers and scornful of religious faith.
He wondered again why he came here: they were not part of his work, nor of his life; they and their talk wearied him; he had been to this place before, often: in Greenwich Village, when he was studying at Columbia; in Provincetown; in Woodstock — wherever bohemians justified their sicknesses and their sins by talk of art. (62)
Of more interest is his description of the penitentes, which is extremely sympathetic and expressive of a good understanding of Catholic theology. The penitentes, as he describes them, are not exhibitionists or masochists – they truly believe that their sins are at a level for which this kind of painful penance – flagellation, hauling crosses and carts with wheels that don’t turn – is appropriate.
We are a violent people, with many passions. It is the reason for the penances of the Brotherhood. We do not feel that the ordinary penances imposed by the priest in the confessional are enough. (145)
In fact, as Bain gets more involved in the group, he’s asked several times, as a test, if he thinks he will experience pleasure because of the pain – it’s clear that this group is fully aware of the potential for abuse and perversion, and is committed to weeding anything like that out from the beginning.
The second level, then, is Bain’s own spiritual journey. In this way, Dayspring is a bit like narratives in which playing Jesus or Judas in a passion play has an impact on a character or community: The Greek Passion by Kazantzakis, for example. But of course, here, we have more than playing a part at work. Bain has submitted himself to baptism, so the deeper question is the working of grace – exposing himself to this for the sake of his research, will both baptism and the penitential rites of the Brotherhood have an impact on him?
Well, spoiler alert – they do, although I won’t tell you how. There were moments which Sylvester described worked better than others. For example – a scene during a procession – one of the best in the novel – in which the dissolute bohemians have come to watch and Bain, unknown to them because, of course, he’s hooded, is participating. He can see them, they can’t see him. He sees that they are watching him and the others with total incomprehension – but he also sees them, at the same time, as they are, for who they are. It’s a rather effective dramatization of Paul – the Cross looks like foolishness to the world, but is really the one true thing through which we gain wisdom – real wisdom.
But no, as a whole, I didn’t love it. I appreciated what Sylvester was trying to do, and found the historical angle intriguing – not much changes, does it? – but I finally couldn’t buy the personal transformation that was supposed to be at the core. There was just a little bit too much Deus ex machina, especially at the end.