I am sharing the following chapter from The Book of Mev, which deals with the Catholic Worker, which is a thread in this week's class agenda..
The week Mev died, my brother-in-law Ken arranged to get me tickets to hear Bruce Springsteen, then on tour following the release of The Ghost of Tom Joad CD. I asked Jennifer, one of Mev’s students, to accompany me. They were good seats, and I cried much of the concert
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Later on, I had a musical diet to complement the visual wailing wall. In my apartment, there were certain songs I’d listen to, and they would inevitably make me agonize, but I didn’t care. It’s almost as if I wanted to hurt. And the effects of the music often exceeded that of the photographs that I had so often meditated upon. I must have listened to Mahler’s sixth symphony 50 times that year.
Only gradually did I let go of mourning as a full-time job and resume work on my dissertation on Elie Wiesel. I realized how weirdly lucky I was: I had the time and resources to be able to grieve, ache, commiserate; I didn’t have to return to a job two days after my spouse’s funeral. So I made good use of those early months, but at some point, I realized I need to get out of my own stuffy apartment.
I thought of Rebekah. A former Sister of Mercy, a Karen House community member, a nurse on the way to becoming a nurse practitioner, she had so often offered a steady hand to me, a gentle smile, a silent encouragement to hang in there, as she moved into our lives of affliction. She walked with us, had seen me raw, angry, broken and had cared for Mev with true mindfulness, from administering enemas to massaging her body so she wouldn’t get bed sores.
“I want to help Becky at Karen House” — That was my aspiration! It wasn’t so much to be of assistance to the women and children who took temporary relief and shelter there. It wasn’t to be so deliberate as Mev had once been, that of “tithing time.” I just wanted to tithe time with Becky, not the homeless. Becky accompanied me/us, so I wanted, in a small way, to accompany Becky back.
What this meant was that I joined her in one of Karen House’s basic practices: “taking house.” The running of this House of Hospitality is divided into three shifts: 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., 1 p.m. till 6 p.m., and 6 p.m. till closing at 10:30 p.m. Becky took the Saturday afternoon shift, so I started going to work with her every other Saturday. She kindly helped me lose some of my vast ignorance and inexperience: She instructed me in answering the phone (“Are there this many people without homes in St. Louis?”), getting guests their medicines (“What’s this drug for?”), giving out sandwiches to the men and women in the neighborhood who came by between 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. (“You don’t like bologna? You’re a Black Muslim? OK, peanut butter and jelly coming right up”), playing with the kids (“Sure, I’ll pick you up”), breaking up scuffles (“You bitches have got someone to look after you, what about me?” snarled one man, who resented what he deemed the lavish treatment of some of the female guests), accepting donations (“Gee, thanks for all these sweaters” to a huge drop-off in mid-May), making sure the guests do their chores (“Um, you think you’ll get to sweeping the floor today?”) and simply listening to tales of triumph and woe.
Oddly and accurately, Karen House grew on me. At one point much later, Virginia had to let go of her Friday evening shift, and I was asked by Celestia, resident wise woman of the community, if I would consider doing it. I said sure. At a little reunion of some of the Arco Angels, Jean Abbott said that the experience of being with Mev in those last months reminded her of when she was working in Central America. She referred to the intensity of working “in the mountains” where life was so under siege and, consequently, everything and everyone was so precious. When volunteers came back to the U.S., they missed that experience of intensity, of not taking things for granted. Spending time at Karen House was like being in the mountains or being on Arco during Mev’s last months: It’s not that it was always heavy with grief, but it was both delight and disorder: life on the edge.
Decreasingly as time went on, people asked me if I missed Mev. And I would, cornily, think of Springsteen’s song/echo of Steinbeck, when Tom tells his mother that she’ll see him when she sees people struggling for a new world. Over time, I invited my students from Webster University and St. Louis University – Elizabeth, Jason, Erin, and Jenifer – to come take house or tutor or hang out with the guests and community. A couple of them eventually joined the Karen House community and moved in.
At Karen House, I got to know women and children who had known the violence of poverty, the winter desolation of sleeping outside and the frightful agony of breast cancer. As we ate dinner or washed dishes or sat in the office together, they got to hear my stories of living with a wife who was slowly dying. So many middle-class, educated people presume there’s such a huge gulf between themselves and people who live on the street or in shelters. After being at Karen House, I was not able to countenance such a presumption. For it is indeed true: “We have all know the long loneliness and we know that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” It had all happened while Mev was lying there dying on Arco, and it was still going on at Karen House, and I imagine it is going on in hundreds of thousands of places at this very minute.
Courtney Barrett and Dan Horkheimer, Karen House Food Storage Room, 2003
I told Mark I would post this from our email exchange:
ReplyDeleteYou ask the question I am seeking to answer through this class :), i.e., why was The Brothers Karamazov the reading experience of a lifetime?
On a superficial level, I am always captivated by the Russian creatives, whether authors, composers, representational artists, dance, etc; as well as stories explicating the tensions among several brothers and their father (I am obsessed with The Godfather, for example, and am enjoying the new TV series Yellowstone)
On a deeper level, I guess embedded in that reading experience was an epiphany for me, that life's struggles/suffering and joys are one double helix which cannot be detached from each other. I had always lived my life as "work, then reward, work, then reward..." (or struggle, then joy) and that experience made me thing in terms of the work IS the reward. I am still grappling with this, BTW.
As a writer, Brothers K cemented in me the belief that truly great writing (i.e., art) tends to come (not always) through great suffering and personal tragedy, something that plagues me, frankly. I've always maintained that Shostakovich's 5th symphony would not have been nearly as great if he wasn't trying to survive Stalin's evil eye while not compromising his art. Brothers K would not have been as great if Dostoevsky hadn't faced death by firing squad. The torture that Brahms felt being in love with his best friend and benefactor's (Robert Schumann) wife, Clara, came out in his 1st piano concerto (my favorite of all of Brahms works).
The greatest art comes from getting what is deepest inside to the outside.
Why that novel of all the things I could have picked up? I was looking for a long novel for a long trip to Europe with my family, and I had begun to realize around that time that novels I didn't necessarily care for earlier in life needed a second chance. I had begun to reread some Faulkner at that time and realized that I had matured as a reader.
I do mark up the books I read, usually by underlining, sometimes with marginalia. I have only spent a few minutes skimming the edition I read (the Pevear/Volkhonsky translation) shortly after I saw the announcement for your class. If they are library books, I copy a few significant pages.
On reflection, there must have been a subliminal impact on The Moment Before. But consciously, I had not even considered writing a novel at the time. I had declared myself a short story writer only. TMB came about because so many of my writer group members and others really liked this Holly Chicago character featured in several of my stories. Generally, authors like Dostoevsky and my other faves have surely influenced my writing as that macro/meta style (bringing in everything life has but the kitchen sink) is what I almost universally tend towards, as opposed to the micro/poetic.
I will look for those references to K in Dear Layla. A good reason as any to savor it again.
I hope this helps. If you think this would contribute to the class, I can copy and paste it at the blog.
Thanks for posting, Mark. I felt inspired by your excerpt to write a little on some of the themes you touch on here. I hope it is okay that I post a comment here.
ReplyDeleteMidway into my year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) we had a silent retreat that lasted a couple of days. I was intrigued by the idea of spending entire days in contemplation and prayer. I'd worked plenty of dead end jobs - pizza man, machinist, construction worker - and had never gotten a single day off or a vacation day, so I thought a couple of days in silence would be a piece of cake. Hell, it would probably include cake (JVC does indeed treat its volunteers well, after all)!
I would contemplate different holy texts. Hadn't I read and fallen in love with holy texts? Gained their wisdom? Found a foothold against the long loneliness using them? My placement with JVC was difficult. No, it was not difficult. No, it was neither. I would set aside the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and exist in the gray.
I took with me a few books that were gifted to me, a pair of headphones and my phone. One of the books I took with me was a transcription of Oscar Romero's homilies. How it haunted me! I started to read it in the quiet of my room.
There I was, at the center of my everything, at the center of nothing, a very stupid man to have dared to stand on the tail of an ouroboros and assumed I would see its end, as if I had shed my own skin entirely!
I holed up in my room and read, and wept; in those that I was trying to accompany in my volunteer placement I saw more clearly my own family. A terrifying sight. Through my then-current clients I began to deepen my understanding my own family, their tales of survival and their scars. I had tried to distance myself from those I was trying to accompany at my placement for the sake of professionalism, or for the sake of protecting myself, or some bullshit like that.
There was a spiritual guide at the retreat, a woman much older than I whose name I don't remember anymore. I found myself sharing many painful things with this stranger, who listened quietly and seemed radiate a certain warmth and care.
When I approach the coda of my life I am sure that I will remember Romero's words, not only as I have read them and heard them second hand. I am sure that I will understand them from the hands of thousands of strangers whose songs are unsung, but unforgotten.
Perhaps I may perpetually leave the Garden of Eden with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, but at least I'll have plenty of people to talk to on the journey to the nearest coffeeshop. Gardens are full of love anyway, so why spend all one's time there where one is not needed?
ADDENDUM: If journeying to a coffeeshop in NYC, beware of dog poo.