Laurel Massé

All shall be well: Julian of Norwich

And in this vision, God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind's eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, 'What can this be?' And the answer came to me, 'It is all that is made.' I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, 'It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in this same way everything exists through the love of God.' In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God cares for it.  Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Julian was the first woman to publish a book in English (in what we now call "Middle English"). In it she tells of the visions she had in 1373. In it she describes Christ as a mother. In it she assures us that "sin is necessary, but all shall be well. All shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well."

Today the Episcopal Church celebrates dear Julian's feast day. Eat something wondrously good, with gratitude. She would like that. Remember that C.S. Lewis said her book was dangerous. I think she would like that, too. Stories about her suggest she had a cat. I like that.

There is more information about Julian here , and here is the podcast of a talk (the transcript's there, too) given by Rev. Mimi Dixon, Presbyterian pastor, about her experiences of Julian.

This extraordinary icon was written by Mihai Cucu. This, and his other exquisite icons, can be seen here.

It was Madeleine L'Engle who introduced me to the writings of Julian; for that, and for so much more, I am always grateful.

Have a beer with St. Brigid and God!

 Brid agus Muire dhuit!

Today is the feast day of St. Brigid of Kildare, to whom I have a special devotion. Patron saint of poets and brewers, of healers and midwives (and, along with Patrick and Columba, of Ireland itself), she was strong and gentle, prayerful and practical. St. Brigid worked miracles: my favorite is the healing of a blind Sister so that she could see the beauty of a sunset. To ease the thirst of lepers, she once turned a tub of bathwater into a tub of excellent beer. She was called Mary's Nurse, meaning that she helped Mary with the infant Jesus (a Time Lord!). Like so many of the great saints, she was as earthy and real as soil and water, and as wild as fire and air.

The following 10th century poem has been attributed to her:

I'd like to give a lake of beer to God.
I'd love the heavenly
Host to be tippling there
For all eternity.

I'd love the men of Heaven to live with me,
To dance and sing.
If they wanted, I'd put at their disposal
Vats of suffering.

White cups of love I'd give them
With a heart and a half;
Sweet pitchers of mercy I'd offer
To every man.

I'd make Heaven a cheerful spot
Because the happy heart is true.
I'd make the men contented for their own sake.
I'd like Jesus to love me too.

I'd like the people of heaven to gather
From all the parishes around.
I'd give a special welcome to the women,
The three Marys of great renown.

I'd sit with the men, the women and God
There by the lake of beer.
We'd be drinking good health forever
And every drop would be a prayer.

 

In my mind's ear, I can hear this woman laughing, and singing, her voice husky, her eyes shining. How could I keep from loving her?

For my solo album, Feather and Bone, I adapted traditional prayers collected by Alexander Carmichael in Scotland in the 1800s and composed Radiant Flame of Gold, a prayer to Brigid. Here is the track, with the sorely-missed Layne Redmond, and Tommy B on frame drums. I pray it in my times of trouble, and for others in theirs: Download 09 Radiant Flame of Gold

I am under the shielding of good Brigid each day,

I am under the shielding of good Brigid each night.

I am under the keeping of the nurse of Mary

Each early and late, every dawn, every light.

 

To learn more about St. Brigid, start here. To purchase Feather and Bone, send me a Facebook message here.

 

Still bustling the hedgerow

I just love this, love everything about it.

And it touches my personal history. Let me see... singing Zeppelin tunes in a band in high school in 1969, check. Met Robert Plant at a party in the mid-70s, and had a pleasant chat about singing harmony, affirmative. Loved Heart from the very first listen, and watched them blow The Eagles off the stage somewhere in California in 1980, yea and verily.

Finally, one must never underestimate the power of a great big stealth choir.

Enjoy!

 

Swordswoman

                       Rey Alabastro Photography

This is Samantha Catto-Mott, aka Samantha Swords, Champion of Longsword, Harcourt Park International Jousting Tournament, 2013.

If, like me, you looked at this picture and your heart leaped, hail sister! If you are thinking, "oh, playacting", or just wondering what this is all about, let me recommend the documentary Reclaiming the Blade, which is about retrieving the lost traditions of Western martial arts.

I offer my congratulations to Samantha, and a tip of the hat to fight choreographer Normand Beauregard, whose Swashbucking 101 class was a brightness in the gloomy sky of my time in New York city in the 80s. And a deep, deep reverence to legendary sword master Ralph Faulkner, with whom I had a few lessons in the late 1970s in Hollywood, without quite realizing how very lucky I was to do so. "Ah. Left-handed," he said. "That can be an advantage. Take this sword."

Still Jo's girl

So many years ago that this is almost a story that could start with "once upon a time", my family lived in a very big house, a legacy of the days of grand families and grand architects. The realtor called it a mansion. My family still calls it The Big House.

The first floor was indeed very grand. There was a parlor for company, and a library with built-in shelves. A dining room that overlooked a formal rose garden. A ballroom. The second floor had the good bedrooms, big as New York City studio apartments, with much nicer baths than I have ever had since.

My spirit's home, though, was up one more flight, in the small third floor servants' quarters. There, in a little monk's cell of a room with one window, I had a desk, a chair, a box of onion skin paper, my Sheaffer fountain pen, and a box of ink cartridges. And my companion, Jo March. I wanted to be just like Jo March, and to that end I scribbled page after page of - what? stories, probably, and perhaps some poems. I don't remember, and as my family moved a lot, nothing remains of all that ink except the memory of the texture of the paper, and the sound the pen nib made as I wrote line after line after blotted line. Oh, I wanted to be a writer.

Singing turned out to be easier, and my dear Lord is aware that I rather enjoy the spotlight. But this "words thing" never went away. I care about lyrics, I read aloud to people whenever I can, I do inspirational speaking, Shakespeare's King Lear leaves me sobbing on the floor, for Jo's spell has never worn off. And particularly at this time of year, the connection I feel to this fictitious character and to the extraordinary woman who created - or released - her is especially strong. It has long been my Christmas season practice to read Little Women again. Every year, somehow, it seems a better book.

My pretty little red leather-bound copy is currently in storage with the rest of my things, so I went to the local library. Their copy is for in-library use only - can you imagine? I'd have to wear shoes! But I found another treasure that I could take home: Marmee and Louisa by Eve LaPlante (2012). As far as I know LaPlante is the first author to explore the relationship between Lou and her mother, Abigail. Ever since her death in 1888, conventional wisdom has held that Louisa was her daddy's girl through and through, educated by him, inheritor of his gifts, beneficiary of his attention. That never set quite right with me. If the Alcott family was the model for the March family, why was the father absent for most of the book? Well, as it turns out, Bronson Alcott was also much absent in real life, and he never made a living. His mind on higher things, he seems to have been content to let his wife and daughters do all the work for the lowlier purposes of rent and food. Unlike his wife, Alcott did not particularly believe in the equality of women, and he came late to the abolitionist's cause. It was Abigail (Marmee) who encouraged her daughters to live full, good lives and to work to utilize their gifts, Marmee who wrote volumes of journals. And it was Marmee who worked until her health was ruined, as did Louisa, whose writing supported the family until she died at 56 (her royalties did so thereafter). The relationship between mother and daughter was deep, and necessary for both women. LaPlante's is a beautiful and calmly fierce book, well-researched and well-written, sad in many ways, but ultimately inspiring. Abigail was left out of history; Eve has fixed that.

You can buy the book through LaPlante's website, to which I have inserted a link above. Amazon has it, of course, but if you possibly can, please get it from an independent bookseller.

 

 

 

I sing because

...it is in my DNA. Both my parents had fine voices, and though as a teenager I was embarassed in church because they sang so loudly, theirs were the best voices in every choir they were in.

But the singer line runs primarily through my mom. Her father, Leonard Kranendonk, is the man standing on the right in this photo. From him, my mother and my uncle (on the left) inherited their voices; from my mother, my sister and I inherited ours.

Mom was a coloratura soprano of astonishing range. She now sings tenor with her choir. My Uncle Bob, a true musician-singer, has a rich smokey baritone voice, and my sister's is a contralto as sweetly dark as buckwheat honey. But we did not all become professional vocalists; only my grandfather, my uncle, and I followed that path.

My grandad was for many years the lead baritone of Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, an internationally-renowned glee club that started in the late 1930s. My uncle also sang with them for a time. You may not have heard of them, but there would be no Glee TV show without them (and possibly no Robert Shaw Chorale, since that's where Shaw got his start). Waring had a weekly radio and then television show, and they are considered, I learned last year, to have been the original Show Choir. English was my grandfather's second language (he emigrated from The Netherlands), but his own perfectionism and Waring's Tone Syllables, a diction technique, resulted in what you will hear on this opening track from his only solo album.

Leonard Kranendonk The Lord is My Light

My grandfather and I did not agree on the role of improvisation, but I think he was proud of me, and I feel him with me every time I sing in church. And because he sang sunrise Easter services on a mountaintop, and blessings at the Thanksgiving table, I reckoned I could, too. Singing anytime, anywhere, without accompaniment was normal.

It's autumn in upstate NY. As winds tug at the leaves of gold and flame, the trees simply let go, and drop them (you want lessons in attachment and non-attachment? Look to the deciduous trees). It's getting colder. Both my grandparents lived into the 21st century, and I lost them only 11 years ago, my grandmother Elsie (who sang alto) in October 2011, my grandfather the following spring. I feel them, and feel the pull of the old songs that are my my most valuable inheritance, and the voices that carried them. All these years later, I'm the one singing loudly in church. But really, whom then shall I fear, when I never sing alone?

 

Summer, sweet summerrrrrr...

Writer Henry James said the two most beausiful words in the English language are summer afternoon, and lovely they are, evocative, leaves rustling in a soft breeze.

But I am partial to James Joyce's riverrun, all vowels and voiced consonants. In fact, river is one of my favorite words to sing, along with forever. Why? Because, blithely ignoring conventional choral tradition, I think R's are beautiful in the mouth.

And why is that? Because I had the very good fortune to attend Fred Waring's Youth Choral Workshop one summer, when I was fourteen. There, I was taught how to pronounce words naturally and clearly, so that the audience could understand them. I've used what I learned there in every line I've ever sung.

I balk when choir directors tell their singers to drop the final r - in "father", for instance - because "it's an ugly sound" - insisting it's better to sing "fawthuh", because a musical tradition born in England in the 1600s should sound English. I'll do it, because the director is the director. But I don't mean it.

In fact, research suggests that the English we hear today on the BBC is quite different from that of the 17th century. I have heard Shakespearean verse spoken in a way that is closer to how it would have been spoken when new, and let me tell you, it is o'erbrimming with Rs. Big, rich, juicy Rs. Fat, piratical Rs. And they sound delicious, and quite like some of our American regional Rs.

This, and other differences between the English accents in the Renaissance and today's received pronunciation, reveal rhymes that have been lost. Loved and moved and proved used to rhyme. So, when Willie (I call him that because I love him sooooooo much that he makes me howl like a wolf) used some combination of love/move or love/prove as the final rhymes in Sonnets 25, 32, and (most famously) 116, he hadn't suddenly decided, "oh to heck with it, close enough!" They did rhyme. Then.

In Sonnet 61, he juxtaposes -where and near. In 66, gone and alone. So these words, too, may once have rhymed.

Why does this matter so much to me? Two reasons. FIrst, because there is no point to put on, for the sake of "tradition", the fake English accents I hear in some choirs, especially in the Episcopal Church, if the tradition isn't accurate. Second, rhyme scheme is part of how I remember a lyric (the overall story of the song being the other part. That will be another post). I am accutely aware of a missing rhyme where there should have been one. If, when I'm grabbing a Johnny Mercer lyric off the internet, the established rhyme pattern suddenly disappears for a line, for no reason, and then returns, something's wrong.

I wanted to post a YouTube clip that illustrates what I am talking about, but an evil cabal of choir directors is interfering with my internet connection today, and my eight-year-old laptop has jettisoned its Flash drive in its confused dotage. I therefore can't watch video clips any more, and am flying blind on this. But here are two links that should take you there...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt7OynPUIY8

and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s&feature=related

If they don't work, let me know. If they fail, go to YouTube and look for ... oh, try Shakespeare authentic pronunciation.

Mothering

It's Mother's Day here in the States. In every corner of my city, folks are taking their mothers to brunch, or presenting them with flowers, chocolates, world's-best-mom cards, jewellery - all in an effort to say thanks.

Or in an effort to avoid the ill-effects of forgetting, or - heaven forbid! - willfully ignoring Mother's Day.

Or some combination of all the above.

Great moms grow great kids, we are told. These great moms, living and deceased (for this is also a day of memory, and of missing  the first loved one), are already the topic of so many editorials, blogs, coffee mugs, and facebook comments that I want to take a moment to consider the other mother. The not-all-that-good mother. The bad mother. Because surely, somewhere, somebody had her.

And if great moms grow great kids, as the coffee mug says, what do bad moms grow?

Children who grow up with moms who beat them, physically and/or emotionally, whose moms couldn't be trusted, who forced their children to choose between mother and father - might be having a hard time with this particular holiday, and who can blame them? "I can never repay you for the gift of life," sing the cards. "Thanks, Mom." There is no flowery, verse-y card, though, for the gifts of the fist to the face and the assault on the soul.

We have a tendency to want to make things pretty, to look back fondly at a past that may never have actually happened. The happy Thanksgiving family dinner. The forefathers of our country agreeing on everything. Our foremothers happily consenting to be less than citizens. Many of us are taught, in childhood, that the Bible is a cohesive single text, and that everyone coming to America came for and received religious freedom - that kind of thing. But the truth is that life has always been complex, people have always endured great difficulties and confusions, and tried to do their best. And often failed, with consequences.

One of the best mothers I know is the thoughtful daughter of a bad mother, and I know she is not the only one out there. I want to celebrate the kids who had the not-so-good moms, but have carried on, teaching themselves how to trust, how to make friends, how to give and receive love. For these, the good mother is the one they have become to themselves. To all of you: you've done well. You are magnificent. Happy mother's day.

 

 

 

Steed and Mrs. Peel

We don't always know where our strongest influences and deepest dreams are sourced. Nor do we know what event might reveal the man - or woman - behind the curtain. I enjoyed, last night, the first good night's sleep since Mrs. Peel (feline) took up residence here, so I can say, with great assurance, that the arrival of a kitten, however small that kitten may be, can qualify as an Event. My memory gates are being pulled open by a little white-tipped paw.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I saw The Avengers when my family was living in Europe, in the 1960s. The first episodes were in black and white. I think the series went to color when it started showing in the States. Perhaps there was an infusion of dollars into the production budget. But the feel of the show was already firmly established. A little zany, a little camp, very chic, and much more wry and understated than anything else I remember watching. And much much more sexy. Mrs. Emma Peel (and my teacher in Paris, Mlle.Thériot), gave me the first clue about what a sensuous, sexy woman is.

Dame Diana Rigg, at 72, is a stunningly beautiful woman; when she joined the cast of The Avengers, she was 27, and simply gorgeous. Auburn hair, long legs, a lovely figure, a supple voice, and a light in her eyes. Wow. The boys I knew were thinking "that's what I want!", but the girls were thinking, "that's what I want to be", a big difference, as life would repeatedly reveal. She was lovely, very smart (a certified genius, as I recall), quite independent, and self-assured. This suggested that - perhaps - one could get away with being intelligent, and thinking well of oneself. Somewhere, someone would be delighted by exactly that. Confirmation of that radical idea? John Steed.

Steed was a government agent, a Bond but not as young, probably not as promiscuous, and not as gadgety. He was the professional to Peel's "talented amateur", and clearly adored and respected her. Played by Patrick Macnee, Steed was urbane, unflappable, witty, and deadly when necessary.  There was a tremendous mutual appreciation and sexual sizzle between the two characters, even though (or perhaps because) the nature of their relationship off-hours was never clearly spelled out to the viewer. There was also an obvious age difference: Macnee was 43 when the Steed-and-Emma episodes began.

To a certain extent, that kind of age difference is the Hollywood standard, even today. The parts seem to keep coming for aging male actors in a way that they do not for women. In fact, the parts for older women are so few that Meryl Streep can almost play them all and still have days off.

I don't know whether that thinking was in play when Mrs. Peel hit the small screen, and I didn't much care. The sparkling relationship entranced me. In it, I saw (subconsciously) that it takes a very confident man to give a smart woman the kind of acceptance that allows her to reveal how just how smart she really is. That kind of confidence has many roots; one of them is having lived a lot of life. So, perhaps from henceforth, the older and wiser man for me.

John Steed, preferably. But, you say, he is only a fictional character. Yeah, well, that there would be a problem, maybe. Or maybe not. Because to a certain extent, maybe we all are fictional characters. Really, how often do we look at someone and see them as they really are? Or as God sees them? Not very often, I think. We tend to see projections of what we want and need superimposed on the persons upon whom we're focused. When they turn out to be just themselves, and not our fantasy about them, disappointment ensues. Friendships shatter. Marriages fail. Who knew that Lassie would turn out to be a dog with shedding issues, and really big teeth?

I think it is safe to say that I still have not met my John Steed. If I have, I have not recognized him, perhaps because he is already partnered, or because he is only five years old so far in this lifetime. It's OK. I still have a fair amount of work and play to do in the living of this life, and I pray I will keep going, and going strong, until the day I die. At which time I hope that sweet five-year old, aged forty-five or so by then, will think, "Oh, how sad. She always reminded me of Emma Peel."