A Woman of Noble Character

Anyone who knows me knows that I cry easily. But I cried hard yesterday afternoon at the news of Dolly Parton's death. The world feels so dangerous these days, so actively hostile in so many ways, that Dolly's death feels like losing a shield. 

One of the hardest lessons of growing up is the discovery that adulthood confers no special knowledge or skills. Even if we grow up in happy, functional homes, we begin to suspect in adolescence that our parents don't know everything, aren't always right, and sometimes might not even mean well. Cultural icons turn out to be as human as everyone else, with flaws commensurate to their talents. 

Which makes it all the more precious when we encounter someone who seems to embody the ideals we might have aspired to as children. Proverbs 31 lists King Lemuel's standards for "a wife of noble character": 

She considers a field and buys it;
    out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.
She sets about her work vigorously;
    her arms are strong for her tasks. 
 She sees that her trading is profitable,
    and her lamp does not go out at night.
In her hand she holds the distaff
    and grasps the spindle with her fingers.
She opens her arms to the poor
    and extends her hands to the needy. 

The list is longer than that, but you get the idea. It's a standard beyond most of us, but I thought of it immediately when I saw yesterday's news. Dolly Parton was the Proverbs 31 woman. 

She is clothed with strength and dignity;
    she can laugh at the days to come.
She speaks with wisdom,
    and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
She watches over the affairs of her household
    and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children arise and call her blessed;
    her husband also, and he praises her:
“Many women do noble things,
    but you surpass them all.”

She never had any biological children, but in a real sense we were all her children. She wished us well. She didn't judge us. She did whatever she could to support the aspirations of innumerable people she'd never meet and create opportunities they couldn't have imagined on their own. Her Imagination Library alone has empowered generations of new readers and sustained hundreds of authors and librarians. 

And what powered it all was her own art, her own joy, her own matchless gift of music. A quotation circulated yesterday on social media: "Find out who you are and do it on purpose." You can't always trust the internet for accurate attribution, but I believe she said this because it was exactly how she lived her life. 

The Talmud says the world has no fewer than thirty-six righteous people in each generation, the tzaddikim. Their identities are secret, even from themselves, because a truly righteous person wouldn't presume to call themselves that. If Dolly was one of the tzaddikim, who will take her place? 

She would say that we all should. 

 

Dolly had so much in her own catalogue, but this cover of a Tom Petty song — made for a tribute — didn't get enough attention when it came out. We took her talent for granted. 

 

 

Profanity, Civility, Community

(This is where I would have embedded George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on TV," but it's an age-restricted video you can watch only by going to YouTube.)

The Washington Nationals' home opener last Friday, against the World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers, started spectacularly well: two shut-out innings from starting pitcher Miles Mikolas, three unanswered runs from the Nationals including C.J. Abrams's home run. It hardly mattered that half the people in the ballpark were Dodgers fans. 

And then the game took a turn. Mikolas collapsed, setting a new club record for runs given up by a single pitcher (11). The Nationals' new manager, wunderkind Blake Butera, didn't pull him until the fifth inning. The bullpen kept the Dodgers to only two more runs, but the final score was a demoralizing 13-6. 

Somewhere around the seventh inning, a man in the row behind me lost his patience. He started bellowing that the Nationals should be ashamed, that this was a disgrace, that the managers and players were bums. He was loud, relentless — and profane. The Nationals weren't just a disgrace, they were a fucking disgrace. The game was a fucking disaster. The owners were fucking robbers, and the whole thing was a fucking insult to the fans. 

Eventually another man across the aisle, a season-plan holder I think of as the Mayor of Section 100, told the heckler to shut up, or at least to quit cussing. "There are kids here." 

The heckler took offense. He was much the worse for drink (which was pretty impressive since even American beers cost just under $15 apiece at Nats Park these days). The two men stood up and confronted each other. 

Eventually an usher noticed the disruption. When he came down, the heckler insisted that he'd been insulted. He refused to back down, calm down, quiet down, or moderate his language. He demanded that the usher call the police. 

Everyone told the man that no, he didn't want the police. Seriously, dude. Just settle down. Don't make this a thing. 

But since the heckler insisted, the police came — and took him away in handcuffs, as he protested the unfairness. A rotten way to end a day that was supposed to be nothing but fun.

The thing is, the guy wasn't wrong. It was a miserable performance before a sellout crowd. Butera should have pulled Mikolas after the third inning, though even that might not have been soon enough. Hell, Mikolas probably shouldn't have had the ball that day at all. But the combination of rage and alcohol made the angry fan feel it was okay to use whatever language he wanted in an environment that included small children, and most of us in 100 were grateful when the Mayor spoke up. 

Yesterday the President of the United States posted a threat of war crimes against the people of Iran unless they opened "the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards." And I posted a comment to BlueSky that the President was using language most of us wanted to keep out of our children's mouths — to which, because it was BlueSky and that's the nature of that community, a complete stranger snarked at me for taking offense to the language. 

But the language matters. I'm as sweary as the next person when the situation calls for it, but language is always a tool. Language conveys not only what we think and feel about what we're saying, but also what we think and feel about our audiences. It conveys who we are. And it expects a response. 

Words' meaning and power change over time, but we identify members of our community in part by agreeing on acceptable usage. Last Friday, Section 100 got a reminder of our microcommunity's acceptable boundaries. Yesterday, the President of the United States scoffed at them.

The Cautionary Tale of Constance Mayer

 

The Soul Breaking the Bonds of Earth
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, 1821-23 

The Louvre is almost mandatory on one's first trip to Paris, so off we went on a Sunday morning last month. Had I visited the Louvre on my first day in Paris, my impressions of the city might have been very different. I'd already had three days of Paris as open, intimate, and unexpected. The Louvre is a literal fortress full of looted treasures, crowded with people who feel obligated to be there and are apparently incapable of looking at art except through a phone screen. Why, why does anyone need to take a cellphone photo of an artwork? Will they ever look at it again? Could a cellphone photo possibly be better than the postcard that costs a single Euro in the museum gift shop? Je n'ai aucune idée, non, et non.

The irony is that I did try to take a photo of this painting — and somehow my phone did not save it. (Of course the Louvre is haunted. It's probably as crowded with ghosts as it is with people.) I'd never seen this painting before, nor heard of the artist. This image is from the Louvre's website, but does not do the painting justice. What caught my eye was the brightness of the white paint used for the central image and the cascading water below. The painting in real life is bluer and darker than it looks here, and the white is correspondingly brighter. 

This was Prud'hon's last work, left unfinished when he died. It seems to have been a response to the suicide of his collaborator and longtime companion, Constance Mayer, who slit her throat with his razor in 1821. Mayer, 16 years younger than Prud'hon, had been his pupil, then became his housekeeper and raised his children after Prud'hon's wife was committed to an insane asylum. When Prud'hon's wife died, Mayer understandably assumed that she would become the next Madame Prud'hon. Prud'hon made it clear he had no intention of marrying again, sending Mayer into a suicidal depression. After she died, Prud'hon organized an exhibition of her work, returned to paints to create this remarkable image, and died himself — of alcoholism, apparently, though some say it was a broken heart — less than two years later.

Scholars agree that Prud'hon and Mayer worked closely together from 1804 until her death, and that Mayer painted some, most, or all of several works credited to Prud'hon during that time. Prud'hon preferred to work in pencil and chalk; Mayer was a painter. He would draw an image, and she would paint it. His was the more famous name, though she exhibited her own work, and that work hangs in galleries around the world. Paradoxically, her paintings seem to have survived better than his have; he was apparently bad at mixing pigments, and his paintings have darkened. Except for these flashes of white on the painting he left unfinished.

. . . .Aaaand we're back.

After almost ten years of salaried work, a reorganization has put me back into full-time freelancing. 

If I've ever told you I simply didn't have time for your project, that's no longer true. I have time, and I want to help. I want to see your manuscripts and projects and help them be whatever they need to be. 

In the meantime I get my own voice back, after hiring it out to employers for years. The world is a marvelous place, and I've been on it a while. I have Thoughts. I'd like to hear yours. Watch for new posts on a regular basis, and chime in through the comments.