Lonesome Lies Before Us

by Don Lee

  “I could do it pretty cheap, the album,” Yadin said. “Ten thousand. Maybe seventy-five hundred.” He extracted a handwritten budget from his manila envelope: rough estimates for mixing, mastering, pressing CDs and vinyl, and miscellany like cardboard eco-wallets stenciled in one color.

  Hanrahan pushed his keyboard aside. “Why don’t you just do a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign?”

  “I’m not very good with computer stuff,” Yadin said. He could do searches and order items, but invariably needed the reference librarian’s help to do anything else online.

  “That’s no excuse. It’s not that hard. You could learn. Or get someone to do it for you.”

  “Maybe. If it comes to that,” Yadin said. “I’ll be honest. I’ve been out of the industry a long time. I don’t know what kind of a following I still have out there. It could be no one remembers me.”

  “You realize you don’t have to cost out separate masters for CD and vinyl?” Hanrahan said, scanning the budget sheet.

  Yadin saw the serendipity of having Hanrahan as his counselor today. “But the compression, the signal-to-noise ratios, the dynamic range—they’re all different,” Yadin said.

  “I know that,” Hanrahan said. “I mean most engineers these days will give you both for the same price. You tracking this yourself? You don’t have studio rental time on here.”

  “Home recording,” Yadin told him. He watched Hanrahan combing his fingers through his weird half goatee, stroking it forward, not inward. “So,” Yadin said to Hanrahan, “you’re a musician, too.” He knew not to ask professional or wannabe.

  “Give me a few days to look over your case,” Hanrahan said. “I still think a HELOC’s out of reach for you, and inadvisable, anyway, but maybe a refi’s viable somehow. I strongly doubt it, but if you could reduce your rate even just a little bit, you might be able to save some money in the long run—maybe enough to release your album someday.”

  He never made a formal announcement to anyone that he was quitting. He simply fell away from the music business. With the twin despairs of his finances and his Ménière’s, his hearing becoming so spotty that sometimes he couldn’t tune his guitar by ear anymore, it had seemed unimaginable to him that he would ever be able to make music again. When he was dismissed by his label, it seemed the decision to retire had been rendered for him. He knew that Jeanette was secretly relieved his career had ended. She was practical, and she had made it clear that she thought being a musician was impractical.

  If not for the happenstance of visiting the library three months ago, on the first Saturday of March, he likely would have never begun writing the songs for his new album. As he walked by the community room, he had heard Caroline reciting a stanza of a poem:

  My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

  All felled, felled, are all felled;

  Of a fresh and following folded rank

  Not spared, not one

  That dandled a sandalled

  Shadow that swam or sank

  On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

  Intrigued, Yadin took a seat in the back of the room, and he learned from the slides being projected onto a screen that Caroline was lecturing on a nineteenth century English poet named Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  “What’s notable to me,” she said, “is how the melancholic subject of the poem—the chopping down of a stand of beloved trees to make way for a development—is conveyed with language that’s so full of music and percussion and surprises, beginning with the collocation of ‘airy cages,’ juxtaposing freedom and entrapment, wildness and industrialization.”

  Caroline discussed Hopkins’s background, how he had converted to Catholicism and become a Jesuit priest, never publishing any of his poetry during his lifetime, so as not to violate the humility of his position. “He believed that all the temporal pursuits and indulgences of everyday life, especially ambition, should be left behind. He advocated asceticism, or a sort of poverty, in order to be more attentive to God’s voice and encounter Him more deeply. Only by reining in your selfish desires could you truly get in touch with your spirituality.”

  It turned out that Caroline, before getting her master’s in library science, had been pursuing a Ph.D. in Victorian literature at Boston College, and the lecture on Hopkins had been requested by a Catholic group, timed for the start of Lent. At the end of the session, Caroline offered the group a packet of Hopkins’s poems and writings to reflect upon; she suggested they might use them to embark on a quasi-Ignatian spiritual exercise, going out into nature in silent meditation and keeping a journal on what they experienced.

  “Are you Catholic?” Yadin asked Caroline after the lecture.

  “I’m not a practicing Catholic anymore, but I once was.”

  “You believe in God?”

  “I do,” Caroline said. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  He was pretty certain she was kidding. Wasn’t she? She could be prickly, and her sense of humor always threw him. “Does that cause a conflict with Franklin?” he asked.

  “Not as much as I’d like.”

  As far as Yadin could determine, Franklin was mostly a Buddhist (like many UUs, he was reluctant to profess a particular creed). He often referred to the teachings of Thích Nhâ′t Hạnh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist peace activist, though occasionally, too, to David Steindl-Rast, the Benedictine monk.

  Franklin’s sermons largely revolved around mindfulness, inclusion, and empathy—all pretty much in line with Unitarian Universalism’s Seven Principles. “UU is about deeds, not creeds,” he would say. “Faith doesn’t have to be synonymous with doctrinal belief. It’s simply about keeping a place of hope and meaning at the center of our lives.”

  All of this had reassured Yadin at first. Unitarian Universalism had allowed him to draw the benefits of fellowship, yet avoid what UUs called “The God Issue.” In the last year, though, he had become strangely fidgety. The services—and Unitarian Universalism as a whole—had begun to feel too amorphous, even somewhat empty to him. Franklin’s sermons sounded good on delivery but were, upon further reflection, often circular, repetitive, and touchy-feely.

  Even adherents acknowledged that UU’s lack of strong denominational beliefs was a problem. Its Seven Principles were sometimes referred to as the Seven Dwarfs or Seven Banalities, indoctrinating UUs to walk the fine line between confusion and indecision. There were other jokes: What’s the Holy Trinity for UUs? Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Why is it dangerous to piss off a UU in the South? He might burn a question mark on your front lawn. How does a UU begin a prayer? To Whom It May Concern. Why do UUs have trouble singing in the choir? They’re always reading ahead to see if they’ll agree with the next verse. What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a UU? Someone who knocks on your door, then says, “I don’t know why I’m here.”

  Yadin tried to talk to Jeanette about it. During each worship service, there was always a juncture where Franklin would say, “If you pray, please pray; if you meditate, please meditate,” and everyone would bow their heads and close their eyes.

  “What do you feel in those moments?” Yadin asked Jeanette.

  “What do you mean, what do I feel?”

  “Do you feel anything? As an atheist?”

  “I feel at peace. I feel gratitude for the people around me.”

  Supposedly forty-six percent of UU members considered themselves agnostics or atheists, and the UUA explicitly welcomed them. In addition to people of all faiths, they embraced those with no faith. Yet Yadin suspected that many members of their church were closet theists of some sort, privately beholden to a deity, sustained by the promise of an afterlife or rebirth. During the moments of prayer, he felt them radiating serenity; he imagined they were communing with a larger spirit or essence, and were being transported or touched or consoled by it. He wished he could join them.

  Yadin went to see Franklin.

 
“This is very common, what you’re feeling,” Franklin told him in his office. “You should think of it as an encouraging sign, actually. It’s all part of the process. You and you alone should choose what you want to believe. Brother David reminds us that I believe means I give my heart to this. What do you give your heart to, Yadin?”

  Franklin handed him a workbook for a program called “Building Your Own Theology.” It contained various exercises, and the culminating assignment was to write your own credo statement, a few hundred words declaring your personal convictions. It took Yadin days to pen. In the end, he stooped to clichés about treating others as he wished to be treated and making a difference in other people’s lives.

  He wanted something more definitive—a clearer direction or path to follow. He wouldn’t have minded creeds, rules, if they could furnish him with some reassurance and tranquillity. He wanted a religion with more structure, more vigor. He wanted, he realized, to believe in God.

  Hearing about Gerard Manley Hopkins—not just his poems, but about his life—stimulated something in Yadin. Two days after the lecture, he returned to the library and asked Caroline for a copy of the packet she had distributed to the Catholic group.

  “Don’t tell Franklin I’m giving you this,” she said.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “No. That’s the maddening thing. He wouldn’t mind at all. He’d applaud it. He’s polymorphously perverse—at least when it comes to religion.”

  “I’m going through something,” Yadin said. “I’m kind of having doubts about UU.”

  “A crisis of faith?”

  “I guess.”

  “You want answers to all those epistemological questions: Who am I, why am I here, what’s it all about, why do I feel so alone, is there any meaning to the things I’ve gone through.”

  Disquieted, Yadin said, “That’s exactly right.”

  “And UU isn’t cutting it for you, so now you’re looking for the transcendent, the numinous, the ecstatic. Would that do it for you?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Yadin said. “What’s numinous mean?”

  “Suggesting the presence of a divinity or strong spiritual quality.”

  “Oh. I thought it was more like luminous.”

  “Similar connotations. The UUA commissioned a self-study a few years ago,” Caroline said. “It concluded that in order for a religious organization to grow, it needs clearly defined boundaries. But you can’t put a boundary around a vacuum. That’s why UU keeps losing members. People drift away because they don’t see the point to it anymore.”

  “Do you?” he asked her.

  “I’m married to Franklin,” she said. “We have three children.”

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  “Isn’t it?” Caroline said.

  That night, Yadin tried to read the photocopied poems in the packet she had given to him, then went back to the library.

  “Could you explain some of these lines to me?” he asked Caroline.

  “Explicate, you mean,” she said.

  He faltered. “Okay.”

  “Don’t look so scared,” Caroline said. “Tell me what you want to know.”

  He pointed to the second line of “Pied Beauty” and asked, “What’s ‘couple-colour’?”

  “It just means the sky’s two colors—blue, ‘dappled’ with white clouds.”

  “What about ‘brinded’?”

  “Same as ‘brindle’—brown fur streaked with another color,” she said.

  He moved his fingertip to the third line. “How about ‘rose-moles all in stipple’?”

  “The reddish dots on a trout, as if they’ve been stippled or painted on. Are you going to make me do this with every line?”

  He pretty much did. She accommodated him for the rest of “Pied Beauty” and most of “God’s Grandeur,” then told Yadin that, for the other poems, he would have to fend for himself.

  “But I can’t even make heads or tails of what these poems are about,” he said.

  “There are only two subjects in lyric poetry: love and death. You figure it out.”

  She lent him a dictionary and a thick academic book on Hopkins’s poetry, most of which was indecipherable to him. He had never done well in school, and he was aware that, in general, he wasn’t very smart. Yet he began to understand that it wasn’t absolutely necessary for him to know what every word meant—they were so strange and funny, the words, combined so queerly—or even what was being discussed in each poem. It was only important for him to give in to the sound of the words, their rhythms and rhymes and proximities.

  “You again?” Caroline said.

  She was standing in the periodicals section. The library, as usual, was bustling. There were just fifty seats and twelve computers in three rooms, and kids often had to sit on the floor between stacks to read.

  “I want to do what you suggested to the Catholic group—the spiritual exercise,” Yadin said. “When does Lent begin?”

  “Tomorrow,” Caroline told him. “Ash Wednesday.”

  “How do I go about it? What’s the first step?”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything formal. Just take a walk. One step in front of the other.”

  “That’s it?”

  Caroline gathered a newspaper and put it on a shelf. “Saint Ignatius of Loyola originally designed his spiritual exercises for thirty-day retreats. Then it got spread out to cover the forty days of Lent. It’s serious work, and no one has the time or patience for anything like that anymore. I certainly don’t have the time or patience to guide you through it, nor is it my place. But if you must know, the key theme is discernment, observing what Ignatius called motions of the soul, the interior movement of thoughts, emotions, desires, imaginings, which he said can manifest themselves in two ways: consolation or desolation.”

  “Explicate for me,” Yadin said.

  “It’s ‘explain,’ in this case,” she said. “Consolation is being able to feel the presence of God, seeing God’s grace in the everyday world, having a deep sense of gratitude for His love and mercy and companionship, which makes us, in turn, more alive and connected to others.”

  “And desolation?”

  “The absence of God. Darkness and emptiness. Moving through life without any purpose or meaning. Being constantly assailed by doubts and regrets and temptations and selfish, materialistic preoccupations. Always feeling anxious and restive and cut off from everyone, leaving you without hope or the ability to love or think past yourself.”

  Yadin felt himself tingling with inchoate recognition. “How do you move from desolation to consolation?” he asked her.

  “I can’t tell you that. No one can. It’s an individual journey.” She nudged several magazines on a rack so they were spaced evenly apart. “Someone whose teachings appealed to Christian-leaning UUs, Forrest Church, he once said that religion is the human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. He had terminal cancer, but he didn’t blame God or ask for healing. He said knowing he would die, each day became more precious and beautiful to him. He said, ‘You walk through the valley of the shadow, and it’s riddled with light.’ Replace ‘riddled’ with ‘dappled,’ and you have Hopkins. He was inflamed by the beauty of the natural world, which he believed was not only God’s gift to us, but also God incarnate.”

  “So just take walks?” Yadin asked.

  “Not that complicated, is it?” she said. “Franklin and I used to go hiking all the time. That’s how we met—the Boston chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club. I was at BC, he was in seminary at Andover Newton. It used to be our favorite thing to do, rambling into the woods, camping backcountry, following each other on single-tracks. I can’t remember the last time we did anything like that, the two of us.”

  She looked down at the magazine in her hand, an edition of Newsweek covering the Arab Spring protests with the headline “Rage Goes Viral.”

  “Yes, just take a walk,” she told Yadin, lifting a hinged display shelf a
nd sliding the magazine on top of the back issues.

  “Where should I go?” he asked.

  “Anywhere. A beach, the woods. Look at the birds, the sky, the stars.”

  “And meditate? Or pray?”

  “Read the poems aloud, see where they take you,” Caroline said. “I’ve always thought poetry and prayer are sim ilar engagements. They both speak in apostrophes.” Before he could ask, she explained, “A speech or poem addressed to someone in the second-person—you, opposed to the first-person I or the third-person she.”

  He had never thought about it before, but that was what he did in lyrics. He nearly always wrote songs in second-person. Sometimes first, but never third, which he found awkward.

  “I don’t necessarily mean praying to God, or reflecting on God or the grandeur of God’s presence,” Caroline said. “Forget God entirely, if you want. Think of it as ‘the other’ or whatever you want to name it. Or don’t name it at all. The numinous can be anything—nature, life, the mystery of existence, whatever you perceive as an essence or abstraction outside of yourself. Enter into deep listening by entering into deep silence.”

  “What should I be trying to hear?”

  “Not an answer, if that’s what you mean. Don’t expect a voice calling to you, anything like that. The answer, if there is one, has to come from you.”

  She loaned him field guides for the flora and fauna in the area, and told him to keep a journal of his ruminations.

  The next Saturday, Yadin set out to Pismo Beach, near the harbor, with the guides and the packet, and walked along the shore. It had rained most of January and all of February. It was mid-March now and dry, but cold, gray, windy. He sat down on a mound of sand, and gusts from the northwest buffeted the pages of his packet as he held them on his lap. He read some of the poems out loud to himself and tried to let Hopkins’s words swirl and unfurl in his head. He peered up at the chevy of silk-sack clouds as they moulded and melted across the wild world-mothering air. He watched the teeming thrills of the swell, listened to the thunder-purple of waves as they bleared, smeared onto the mazy sands. He wanted to be inflamed, like Hopkins. He felt only frigidity, his face, fingers, and feet numb from the piercing wind.