Music and Memory
Yesterday I attended a concert sponsored by the Shelter Island Friends of Music. The performers were playing their original compositions. One performer, as described in the program, Clarice Jensen, has a number of albums out but the one to which I was drawn was called “The Experience of Repetition as Death” and was described as a requiem for a dying mother. As this young woman is about my older son’s age, and that was the age when I lost my own mother, I had a flashback to how music encircled me as my own mother was dying. I did not have the creative ability to give voice to that experience aurally as Jensen did, but I did find solace in music. A parallel experience, perhaps?
I wrote an essay about that power after my mother had died and it was published by the East Hampton Star, the paper local to where my father now lived, alone. I do not think I am violating any copyright by sharing that here. But it seems to intersect so beautifully with the work of Jensen.
Music and Memory—from many years ago…
It is one of those perfect May days. The sunlight articulates the late spring Long Island landscape into pristine color and form. A gutsy breeze whips the newly greened trees into echoes of the clouds that ponderously pass through an intense blue sky.
All is light airy beauty around me but my heart is leaded darkness as I drop off my excited children and husband at the carnival, an annual Memorial Day Weekend event sponsored by the University Hospital. Half envious, half relieved I watch them all tumble out of the van and they bounce with excitement towards rides, games, cotton candy.
As I pull out of the parking lot and turn right towards the Hospital I turn on the radio. I have joined some symphony; its tonality is unfamiliar to me and as a former music major I am slightly annoyed that I cannot precisely place it historically. My suspicions: twentieth century. Gradually my senses, my thoughts, my very breathing is pulled into this music of infinite sadness. A soprano is singing some carefully measured cadences in a language that I can recognize as Slavic but for which I have no bearings. Yet the fact that I cannot understand or even guess at the words' meanings seems not to matter. My intellectual state of annoyance concerning a location in music history fades. The music reverberates throughout my body and appears to diffuse into the sunlit landscape of billowing new green trees. We understand one another, this music and I.
I make the left turn into the hospital parking lot. The gate is up since it is a Saturday; I do not need my husband's parking pass. I find a slot and pull in. Although I turn off the engine I leave the radio on, transfixed as I am by that luminous beauty-- my sadness sounded out in measured time. I gaze at the imposing charcoal gray Hospital Towers and I count up twelve floors. Twelve floors-- to where my mother lies, lies dying.
My thoughts, so recently a tumbled mass of past childhood images take on a melodic shape; the cantus firmus of deep string continuo enfleshes time itself. I see images of a young mother, smiling at me as she hangs sheets on a clothes line stretched out across a tenement roof six floors above familiar neighborhood terrain. My brother and I (he is six and I am eight) play hide-and-go-seek on the warm tarmac roof around mysterious brick and tar shapes. We can see the East River glinting blue in the golden sunlight; tugboats utter mournful comments, their puffs of sooty smoke transform into marshmallow clouds. My eye follows the rococo lines of the Queensboro Bridge into a foreign land and suddenly I am giddy with the height. So I run to find my mother who once upon a time was a ballet dancer with a life of her own which she gave up as I and then my brother came along. (This I know now, of course, not back then.) Black hair flowing she is struggling with a white sheet snapping in the wind. Soon it is time to descend to our apartment and, perhaps, go to the park down at the corner at Sutton Place. There I can climb onto the cement wall and hold onto the curved wrought iron railings and gaze into the coursing River down below while my mother sits on the benches and reads, still keeping a watchful eye on my younger brother as he gleefully flings the heavy wet sand around the small sand pit in the middle of this park. In this world I am loved and cherished and all things have a function, a purpose, a meaning, a place.
Now here I sit-- staring into a sky that mimics that past day. All the edges are sharp and clear; the hospital looms up and hides the sun which relentlessly streams around it. Present and past swirl around one another, intermingling images in a cruel sort of way.
The music crescendos and I feel my heart beating in time. My being has synchronized with a musical utterance that translates felt sorrow into aural presence. I wonder if Plato was wrong-- is reality in essence temporal... not eternal? There is a rich density to being that only time seems able to express. Who is my mother? The woman lying upstairs, feeble, unable to walk, her brown eyes cloudy and unable to see, is but a fragment of my mother. What do the words mean that the soprano so effortlessly spins out? My mind flits through questions as wave after wave of music rolls over me, bathing me in the musical equivalent of unshed tears. So-- where is my mother? Upstairs in a hospital bed or dancing upon the tenement roof? Who is this person who is my mother? To listen to this music is to recognize the utter privacy of another human being to whom one is most close and at the same moment most distant of all. I hear it; I feel it. I cannot comprehend it. What is this music? Who is my mother? The questions have merged and become one.
It is time to go and visit. Regretfully I turn off the radio but first I note the time and the station. Lived experience becomes a conscious cognitive event. Then I go and see my mother. A slice of time has been carefully noted and I now treasure it in my heart. She seems glad that I have come and I try to gently brush her long gray hair and coil it upon her head. Yet even the gentlest touch hurts.
Later that day after returning home I am driven to call the radio station. The man who answers looks up my request and informs me that the piece that had been playing was Symphony # 3 by Henryk Gorecki. The name means nothing to me but I am relentlessly pulled into a suburban record store (tape and CD store now, I suppose) the following day and am surprised to find a rack full of copies. Upon arriving home I open the CD almost reverently, hoping to find some sort of answer to a question not yet wholly formed.
I discover that Symphony # 3 is subtitled "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" and was written in 1976 to commemorate the Holocaust The soprano sings in Polish. Fascinated I read the English translation of the movement that had captivated me:
Where has he gone
My dearest son?
Perhaps during the uprising
The cruel enemy killed him.
Ah, you bad people
In the name of God, the most Holy,
Tell, me, why did you kill
My son?
Never again
Will I have his support
Even if I cry
My old eyes out.
Were my bitter tears
to create another River Oder
They would not restore to life
My son
He lies in his grave
and I know not where
Though I keep asking people
Everywhere
Perhaps the poor child
Lies in a rough ditch
and instead he could have been
lying in his warm bed
Oh, sing for him
God's little song-birds
Since his mother
Cannot find him
And you, God's little flowers
May you blossom all around
So that my son
May sleep happily[1]
So here it is--a mother laments a son lost to her and probably dead. A daughter laments her mother unknown to her and now seemingly opaque forever. These mysteries of incomprehensible sadness-- they are what binds up together as human. Whether it is Auschwitz then or Syria now or even a hospital parking lot in suburban Long Island our hearts beat in time to this infinite sadness and infinite beauty. Herein lies the anguished puzzlement of consciousness. We cling to the ephemeral yet eternal treasuring of time in our music and in our memory. It is all we have and yet it is everything, rich, wondrous and devastating to the human heart.
[1]a folk song in the dialect of the Opole region translated by Krystyna Carter, copyright 1992 Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.