In the spring before she left home to spend the last few months with her mother, Wieck began, despite the “deafness,” to teach her some little pieces by ear. She learned the music without difficulty; it was speech—words—she could not hear. Soon after she returned from Plauen to live with her father, formal piano lessons with two other girls of her age commenced. At this time she began to speak full sentences, but the “deafness” did not totally disappear until she was eight.
These passages from Nancy B. Reich’s Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman allegorize the deaf-muteness that art requires of its practitioners. Regrettably, many artists exaggerate the need for self-absorption without understanding what is here expressed: that the silence and meditation of artistic “self-absorption” require an unsexy innocence—and that this self-absorption is a developmental, rather than permanent, state. I love the idea that the young Clara Schumann (nee Wieck) is silent and seems not to understand for years and years, only to finally speak in her true voice: musical articulation. It’s a nice thing to remember in spring, when it seems like even the earth is prone to talking too much—and saying just the right thing every time. Even if it is everyone else’s time to speak, trees included, it does not mean you shouldn’t be—mustn’t be—(beautifully, perfectly) silent.
—Uzoamaka Maduka
Time was when time had time enough
and the sea washed me daily in its delicate brine.
There is no terror when you swim in the buff
or speed up the boat and hang out a line.
Time was when I could hiccup and hold my breath
and not in that instant meet Mr. Death.
Originally I was going to write my staff pick about the Frieze Art Fair, which took place two weekends ago on Randall’s Island. In truth I can’t write well about Frieze; I can only list the experience, and I’m no Joan Didion, so it doesn’t do the event justice. All I can think about is acquiring and packing more boxes of books. About my move back to Detroit on May 29th and how I rounded out my teen years and came into adulthood in New York City. As crazy as that was, this move will be my real test of adulthood—returning home to pay off a hefty load of personal debt, helping to take care of both my grandmother who has been struggling with dementia and my mother who is going through her own health crisis. Right now it is hard for me to focus on anything else because I am a slave to my New York memories.
Moving is cause for reflection. I have been looking back to when I first acknowledged my instinct to come to New York, and so I think of Anne Sexton. Not known as a New York writer, Sexton in my Holden Caulfield years was what Plath seems to be for many other teen girls. Sexton made me believe in my dark instincts and gave me confidence to push and explore them. Among the books currently lying around to be packed is a first edition of Sexton’s “The Death Notebooks,” given to me by an ex in his pre-war apartment on East 3rd Street on the infamous Hell’s Angels block. Leafing through the book I am pulled back again to a different time before I received this particular edition, before I left Michigan for New York in 2007. It’s the summer before my departure, and butterflies seemed to be following me everywhere. “Do you think it’s a sign I’m going to die soon?” I said to my mother about the bizarre occurrence, while giving examples of the absurdity and their symbolism in Ancient Greece, in stories like Psyche’s. My mother shut down my crude butterfly-grim-reaper joke by replying that obviously death in symbolism doesn’t have to mean “the end,” that most often it means change or metamorphosis (an evident choice metaphor, the butterfly and change). But I know the death Sexton most often writes about in her “Notebooks,” especially the poem “For Mr. Death Who Stands With His Door Open,” is actual death itself. It is hard for me not to project or to reread that poem in terms of what’s going on in my life right now. To read death in my boxed up apartment as the big, almost scarier word “change”: the death of an era or shift into the unknown.
—Lisa John Rogers
Happiness—a small-scale, endearing, harmonious happiness—surely dwelt here beneath the low-powered lamps in the tiny rooms of these houses. A small-scale happiness and a modest harmony: let a man cry out, let him rage, let him howl with grief with all the power of which he was capable, what more than these could he ever hope to gain in this life?
Fumiko Enchi’s “The Waiting Years” walks so softly over themes of disappointment and despair that only on completion does one realize how much ground Enchi has covered, and what a loud wail she has sent up, in spite of her unhurried pacing and simple language. We first meet “The Waiting Years” protagonist Tomo in Tokyo, where her preposterously insensitive husband has sent her to find him a live-in concubine. Enchi slowly takes us through the following years, which find Tomo’s disappointment and isolation increasing in lockstep with superior, intelligent care for her household and her family; the greater her despair, the more acute and swift the necessary manipulations of her complicated and selfish family. There is a parallel care and intelligence in Enchi’s writing: everyone, including villains and even a kitten (present in only one chapter), receives an artful and empathetic characterization, some of them short and funny and some of them leisurely and devastating. Enchi’s writing has some of the same amniotic fluidity as Tolstoy’s, an almost bodily, floating immersion into the effortless habitat of the story, making the end of the book a shocking change of atmosphere and temperature.
—Alma Vescovi
At Mack’s funeral, many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell):
“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other friends also reported visitations.
Earlier this month, Vanity Fair ran a 5500-word, online-only article on Dr. John Edward Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, who, some 20 years ago, became one of the most infamous academics in America when, after years of studying the stories of “experiencers”—i.e. alien abductees—came to conclusion that they were, in fact, telling the truth. To be clear—not that abductees thought they were telling the truth, but that they had, in an unknown space/time dimension, experienced something real. Moreover, due to certain details and commonalities in the reports of his subjects, Dr. Mack came to believe that the abductions were part of an alien/human hybrid-breeding program.
The question asked by the article’s title—“Have Humans Been Abducted by Extraterrestials?”—isn’t the one that stays with reader. Aliens–are-they-or-aren’t-they turns out to be a sideshow to the human drama: What would it be like to have a frightening experience, then be shamed and ridiculed for it, instead of believed?
—Alyssa Loh