Birthing of Altar Music

Mother Anne Martina, the woman who accepted me into the convent in 1958, appeared to me in a dream. "Why did you enter the convent?" she asked. It was a kindly question, simple curiosity on her part, as though now, in her afterlife, she still cannot quite figure it out. And neither can I. In the dream I responded to her question by experiencing a flashback of memory-dream images of myself as a child on Lake of the Woods in Minnesota, a little girl barely distinguishable from the lake, sky, wind, wheeling gulls or my grandmother's daisies. "I want to be a nun," came the voice of the dream, as though Holy Mother Earth and Holy Mother Church might be the same.

 

Writing begins in memory. Life plants seeds that throughout life whirl round in a person's spirit, bits and fragments from here and there in an individual history. Life then issues a command. "Remember."

 

Who can tell how the fragments of memory will coalesce? They whirl like galaxies in the mind, like cells in the womb. But there is a moment that verges on the divine when, if we are blessed, memory attaches itself to a fixed point in the soul and becomes a story.

 

I'd lived all my life with convent memories that whirled without coherency or a meaning that satisfied me. But it was music that provided the fixed point around which the story could be told. I tried to communicate this experience in a kind of tone poem that opens the novel.

 

Sound moved over the water of Black Sturgeon Lake. Gulls heard. Sound lifted under their wings as air, passed through their hearts and lungs, issued in a cry.  Sound moaned in the rocks.  Fallen needles of tamarack and fir blanketed the ground, and sound filled them, too.  Wind, bees, and the delicate feet of mice scattered the needles. A spider's web became a harp and it sang.

 

Wild, sound luged through a granite pass the Eagle River carved a thousand thousand years ago and surrounded the bones of deer licked clean by wolves.

 

Earth opened to sound like a lover. Sound entered every cell, vibrating, setting in motion the circle of the world.

 

Each person tells a different story because only the most elemental memories are facts. Most memory is perception followed immediately by emotion and interpretation. Facts do not always have the density or complexity to carry the energy of memory. We actually change the facts of a memory sometimes without being aware of having done so, simply because the effect of the experience was so powerful that we cannot believe the actual happening could have been simple. So another moment comes in the act of writing, and it is the moment of "form." Will I remember these experiences in the form of memoir, fiction, or poetry?

 

I tried several times to tell this story as memoir, but it kept flying off, like a chaotic and failed galaxy with no center of gravity. I felt like a woman who desires a child but is unable to conceive. I needed that grace, that connection, that gravity. Then I met Gwendolyn Moore.

 

Gwen is a retired concert pianist who has created a center for music and the arts in her home on Marrowstone Island in Washington. While I lived in Port Townsend, WA, I went regularly to her "Coffee Concerts" on Wednesday mornings. Filled with energy, her hair a white flurry, Gwen laughed and greeted all her friends. She spent about half an hour explaining the musical selections she would perform that day, demonstrating musical passages and the way in which the musical form rendered spirit into beautiful and artistic sound. On the first day I heard Gwen play she had chosen Mozart's "Rondo in A minor," and explained that the composition was grief or loss in musical form. She said that A minor is the key a composer often uses to express grief and that it is played entirely on the white keys, as if the musician hadn't the strength to lift his fingers to the black ones.

 

Women have told me that they knew the exact moment they became pregnant, as though they could actually feel the joining of cells and the descent of a new spirit into their womb. I left the Coffee Concert that morning feeling exactly that way. I ordered a CD of "Rondo in A minor," and then the Verlag Urtext with its very professional blue cover so that I could learn to play it on the piano. And I did learn the first page, the simple theme of grief that then goes round and round in ever more complex turns. I kept the CD playing softly in the background as I began to write, and it focused my spirit and provided the still point for the story of longing and loss that the novel, Altar Music, was to become.

 

The little girl who played in her grandmother's daisies so joyously that she could barely tell the difference between herself and the flowers-she is there, but transformed by the music into someone even more real than herself. And the nun that I became-she is also there, but as someone else. She became a pianist who could tell more through her music than through the simple facts of her life what the choices made for God might mean. From the seed of music spun the lives of characters I never met in real life, men and women who seemed conceived in my soul and birthed through words. And out of it all I experienced a kind of answer, nothing conclusive, nothing that will not be wondered over again and again for the rest of my life, but something that can satisfy for the moment. "Music cannot end. It spirals down to death. It turns. Returns. It circles on."