Backtracking again

I started this post a couple days ago – before my sister more eloquently described our day. I wouldn’t bother to post it, but I know at least one person in my audience will read it, and I don’t have time to rewrite it in a letter to him. Other issues around the household have absorbed my attention of late; because of their unresolved, tawdry, and emotionally exhausting nature, I don’t have much to say. All I will say is that tonight was the last chance to go to confession at our parish before the Triduum, and I showed up, after committing about 100 sins getting all the kids in the car, at the wrong time. In the next two days before we are going out of town for an Easter celebration and spring break trip to Texas, I might try to hunt down a church with sacraments for last minute penitents, but I’m also hoping that God will accept some of these trials as sufficient penance.



***

Thanks to our most loving mother, my sister and I were able to take a day trip to New Orleans sans enfants. We sat in on a couple of the Tennesee Williams literary festival talks, held in the Counting House at the beautiful Historic New Orleans Collection, a room that was painted wedgewood blue with near white trim. On the wall behind the lectern was an enormous portrait of three sisters in white Scarlet O’Hara dresses. I had a hard time keeping my eyes off them.

 

from www.hnoc.org

The wall to my left was also adorned with portraits from two centuries ago: a scowling older gentleman, the lady of the house, several young people, including a young girl who must have been the house maid. One dashing young man could have been a stand-in for Mr. Willoughby, with his dark tousled hair and flirtatious smile. Were these people actually related, or had the historical society collected some portraits and arranged them to indicate familial connections?

We also had time to spend wandering the streets of the French Quarter for a couple of hours. Browsed in a couple of shops pretending we might actually buy something. Stopped in for a sandwich at one little corner bistro but were overwhelmed by the patchouli, so we passed out again through the side door. Peeked around the Ursuline Convent, now a museum, and studied its intricate model of New Orleans, its reproductions of old Bibles, and its display of actual Episcopal jewels, which suggest that a great strength of humility is needed by the man who wears them to withstand the intoxication of power. The convent church was repainted in unfortunate pastels. The empty tabernacle indicated that it isn’t currently in use; unfortunately, it wasn’t repainted to represent the period during which the convent was flourishing. I noticed in the festival program that one of the presenters scheduled later in the weekend had written two books about the Ursulines, who settled in New Orleans nearly 3 centuries ago, and who must have represented order and peace in contrast with the bacchanalian pursuits indulged in a few blocks away. The partially tended garden, peopled by contemporary statues of southern spiritual leaders, scented with orange blossoms, and sprouting a few random herbs, suggested the peacefulness of the cloister that must once have thrived here. The visit to the convent was at least as instructive as the festival.

After visiting New Orleans on three separate occasions, the feeling of having arrived in a foreign land has faded a little. I feel like I can orient myself around the French Quarter: That way to the Mississippi River, the opposite way to the city park, which we only drove through, west to the Garden District, east back home. There is still much of the city to discover; I know we’ll be making a trip to do the Audubon zoo and insectarium at some point, and I’m daydreaming about a weekend trip with my husband after his return: we’ll check into one of the quaint little European style hotels a couple blocks up and over away from the shopping and bars. Then we’ll stroll at a romantic pace along the city streets for awhile before dining at one of the little bistros. The next day we’ll visit some churches and look for the oldest tombs at some cemeteries, before spending the rest of the afternoon at the art museum and picnicking in the city park. Maybe whoever is watching the kids could meet us there, so that we all could enjoy the little storybook theme park there.

I’m happy my mom and sister felt the instant enchantment of New Orleans on their first visit. You always want the people you love to love what you love. Like this picture.

Youth Serum

There is nothing for shaving 20 years off your age like sharing a bed with your sister. I finally had someone to put my ice cold feet on. Last night my visiting sister and I lay in my bed and whispered and giggled like we used to when we were afraid our mother would rap on the wall and tell us to quiet down. And maybe in the back of my mind, the little girl me was half afraid her half-awake mother, hair tousled into horns by sleep, was going to appear at the doorway and demand what in the world we were thinking. But we kept talking anyway until we became incoherent.



My sister and I look like two different sides of the family. If we were going to the Oscars, I would wear one of those simple, sleek column gowns like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d wear something with a little décolleté and feminine curves like Kate Winslet. But we often think alike: while flipping through one of her fashion magazines while we were talking with my mom, who came along to visit too, I paused at an ad that showed two bronzed beauties in expensive clothes at the beach with their arms draped over each other, one looking directly at the camera, the other staring off into the horizon. “Look, it’s you and me!” I said.



She laughed. Apparently on the drive down here, my mom was looking at the same magazine and held up that ad with a disgusted, “Look at this.” And my sister said, “It looks like me and Emily.” Of course, the magazine is trying to suggest the eroticism that my mom picked up on, not sisterly love, although the two models do look alike. And if my sister and I hung around the beach like that, I’m sure we would get some stares because we don’t look alike. But we have often lamented that the sisters in Jane Austen’s day were allowed to be much more affectionate without suspicion.



Not that suspicion has deterred my sister from harassing me with irritating shoulder squeezes. She does not mind attracting attention. But then she has always been the beauty and I the brains in our sisterly partnership. (Not that she’s not brilliant, too, of course.) As teenagers, she read fashion magazines, and I read our grandfather’s scholarly magazines. Two nights ago we stayed up late detailing some of our differences: she’s afraid of getting old and ugly; I’m afraid of getting old and senile. And our mother, who is the most youthful mother of 30somethings I know, assured us we were both wonderful. But, motherly affirmations aside, we shared our struggles with coming to terms with being nearly middle-aged and having such a long way to go in our spiritual lives, although we are happy to point out each other’s root sins.



This visit is going to be a short one. We are off to New Orleans today, with two carloads of children in tow, so we are going to eat beignets and window shop in the French Quarter, peek into churches and then play at the park. Meanwhile, my sister and I are plotting our return to the fabled city on Thursday, if we can figure out the logistics of leaving our mother with the 11 cousins, so that we can sit in on the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and learn the failproof method of writing a novel in six months.  If we had planned ahead at all, she should have used one of her free vouchers to fly down here just for that.

Visiting New Orleans

I’d like to say we did something Monday to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. And in a way, perhaps we did: we visited New Orleans for the first time, site of a once flourishing slave trade, but also of prosperous free people of color - gens de couleur libres they said in Louisiana. We actually didn’t visit any relevant sites, but we did see the baptistery where slave and free were all baptized since the mid 1700’s at the old Basilica of St. Louis. I wonder if babies baptized in such an old font have a special connection to the communion of saints?

We went as a day trip, a short drive under 2 hours, but we felt like we were stepping onto another continent as we drove down the streets of the French Quarter before pulling into a cramped parking garage that seemed identical to one where we parked in Spain two years ago. A stark contrast to the drive through the desert of urban blight on the eastern outskirts of the city. Remnants of Katrina’s destruction still linger.


I suppose everyone who has been to the city has been transported in a similar way. The narrow streets, the tiles on the walls, the wrought iron balconies and columns on the buildings all make you feel you’ve crossed the Atlantic. We peeked into an old hotel that had once been a convent, the doorman telling us to check out the ballroom. The kids tramped up the curving staircase in their jeans and tennis shoes, but surely weren’t we all in our finest under the crystal chandeliers? Peeking out the shuttered balcony, we could see across the street evidence that this wasn’t all maintained as a tourist destination. Someone actually lived in those garrets…not Sara Crewe, but someone with raggedy curtains and a window air conditioner. Had to be hot, even malarial, in the summer.

Gearing up for Mardi Gras

After consuming beignets and café au lait, we spent the morning walking up and down the streets. Watched the fortune tellers set up in front of the basilica, peeked in shops, hunted out the little building that now houses Faulkner House Books, which about hundred years ago, once housed William Faulkner and a friend while Faulkner wrote his first book, Soldiers’ Pay. It’s a narrow little building, and you can only enter the front room and part of a hallway, which are now lined floor to ceiling with book cases. The hallway houses faded first editions of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren. Look but don’t touch. Even though the space was tiny, hours could easily have been whiled away browsing.

Faulkner House Books

            With the fortune tellers in front of St. Louis

Same thing with the many antique stores. We stopped to stare in one that had elephant leg stools, and noticed a beautiful wooden pieta, paint flecking off, on a pedestal surrounded by other statuary. I went inside to peek at the tag to see how old and how much: 1550s, $95,000.

I wonder who will buy that. A church? A collector? Someone who just wants something pretty in their house? What cost beauty?

Too often I’m too cheap to buy pretty things. A house with 6 kids is not a place for 500 year old statues, even if I had a spare hundred thousand. But I wonder if I lived somewhere like the French Quarter, a place that begged for décor, if I’d spend more time and money trying to make my home as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside. Interior decorating is not one of my talents, but every once in a while I see something that would look nice in our house. I’m not one to buy something that we don’t need, except books - and ice cream – but I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be more generous with beauty. I’m grateful when someone else was, in these churches and parks and buildings of New Orleans.

Basilica of St. Louis

Ambiguity about Ondaatje

Sigh. I just finished Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Spent Saturday recovering from the flu while reading in bed. Didn’t want the dream to end. Beautiful, beautiful, but sad, sad. There’s a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t like this book after the movie, also beautiful, but bitter, left a bad taste in my mouth. In the movie, WWII nurse Hana runs off with Indian bomb defuser Kip on a motorcycle after shooting the burn victim, the apparently English patient, a man whom she loved, full of morphine, so that he’ll die. The book ends differently – should I tell? – after the dropping of the atomic bomb destroys Kip’s belief in what he is doing and breaks up the coterie in the abandoned villa.

Aside from the act of euthanasia at the end of the movie, I wouldn’t recommend the movie because it’s nearly soft-core porn. Yet here I am unable to take my nose out of this book with naked people kissing on the cover because it is so beautifully written. I felt like I had to hide it from my preteens. Can I excuse my love of this book by citing the difference between reading something and seeing it? A visual image imprints itself differently on the brain - it stays with you longer than one you read and affects your emotions more strongly. Based on this, I let my kids read The Lord of the Rings before letting them see it. Similarly, I felt more moved after seeing the devastation here after Katrina – or in Haiti- than after reading about it. So I read about the intimacies described in this book without feeling as voyeuristic as when watching the movie, but the circumspect, poetic way Ondaatje writes also differentiates the book from the openness of the camera.


Is there something redemptive in the meeting of the four damaged persons at the Villa San Girolamo that comes across in the book but not in the film? I like to think the redemption has to do with Mr. Cairns comments in the comments section below about recovering the body. But it seems what these victims of the war are suffering is the opposite of Gnosticism. They have to recover a sense of the body’s connection to the soul, not because the soul is more perfect, but because they’ve lost their souls. Whether they are seeking the identity of the patient, their own identities after being dismembered, or an ability to reconnect with human beings after turning themselves into statues to survive the devastation of the war, it appears they need to connect physically, not just with their minds, but with their hands and bodies, in order to heal: “Here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defense but to look for the truth in others.”

Could you say that, even though the story weaves around tales of love and death, adultery and betrayal, the characters treat each other with a certain chastity – Caravaggio never fully reaches out to Hana, Hana barely touches the patient, Kip never really gives himself to Hana, but preserves a distance, never really looking into her eyes? I can’t make up my mind whether the book has a resolution or not. And the beauty of the place stands in such stark contrast to the horrors of the war and the doomed love affairs.

Yesterday we went to New Orleans and visited the World War II museum, and again came face to face with the horrors of war. How did the men who survived Normandy, or the War in the Pacific, come home and rebuild their lives after such devastation? It was a hard museum to visit, especially when you knew that downstairs was an old man, a volunteer helping fill out membership applications, who had lived these stories and now watched people meandering through the exhibits, looking at photos without knowing that dead soldier in the picture.