Sex, Birth, and Singing Alto in the Sacred Harp

My partner Raider is an extraordinary lover. When we were first together, he would take me to bed with no thought but my pleasure. He spent weeks and months exploring my body and listening to what it told him. In quiet persuasive whispers he got me to give up all the secret wishes I'd been harboring, and then he made them come true. He was like a guide leading me into my dark secret places, and sex with him was like psychoanalysis, spiritual revelation, deep epiphany. Every time. I could tell you about the orgasms I had with him, and how they started deep in my body, centered in my womb, and spread out from there, pulling all my muscles into one great clenched fist, and then letting go. I've always thought I was so good at giving birth because he helped me find the muscles in my deep core, got me acquainted with the iron earth. But after awhile, I didn't always want to have sex with Raider. Nobody wants to have a life-changing experience every time they go to bed; who can stand to be that in touch with her deepest parts, bodily and spiritually, day after day? Sometimes you need a break. So we had to learn to have sex that was merely very good, that was satisfying but didn't leave me drenched and mind-blown, that didn't have me staggering through the next few days, dazed and happy but unable to balance my checkbook or safely drive a car.

This is exactly why, although singing alto in the Sacred Harp is one of the things I love best, I don't do it at every opportunity. There's a local singing twice a month, but I only go occasionally. There's a larger one two hours away; I make it once or twice a year. I love the Sacred Harp, but I don't trust it. It's too powerful. Singing the Sacred Harp reminds me of the time I was bodysurfing in big waves in Hawaii and got tumbled about when I missed my timing; I made it to the beach safe and sound, but when I stood up in the shallows, the water had taken my swimsuit off.

Mary Rose O'Reilley says in The Barn at the End of the World that the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto are rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. The trebles, by contrast, "sing a descant line composed of ecstasy, light, purity, jet contrails, and self-surrender." O'Reilley isn't wrong, except about the malice, perhaps--she seems to have encountered a meaner and more self-interested brand of alto than I have. The altos tend to take the grounding line, the steady drone that keeps a song on the earth. We tend to sing the notes that give the harmonies their rough edge, and we do it sometimes by staying still while the other three parts move around us. Sometimes the altos are holding a steady, solid note and the music shifts around us and I hear a buzzsaw digging into lumber, I see the invisible whirling blade that, one time, took off the end of my father's thumb, I taste the sudden spurt of blood.

Singing alto in the sacred harp isn't for the dainty or squeamish. It's loud and raw. It helps to have had some really good sex, or to have given birth a time or two without anesthesia, to know where the womb is with its hidden muscles, the strongest in the body, some say, but locked away and not for you to command. Singing Sacred Harp has something in common with sex and birthing: all three are done better if you can set aside self-consciousness, modesty, and concerns for propriety, if you're willing to lay it all out there.

It helps, too, to have grieved a time or two. You can see that right in the music, that it was created and sung by people for whom death was always present. The Sacred Harp birthday song goes like this:

Youth, like the spring, will soon be gone, by fleeting time or conquering death.
Your morning sun may set at noon, and leave you ever in the dark.
Your sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks must wither like the blasted rose.
The coffin, earth, and winding sheet will soon your active limbs enclose,
Will soon your active limbs enclose. (Morning Sun, 436)

We sing it as a joke, but the people who originated this music weren't making fun of death. They were living side-by-side with it.

That's one of the dangerous things about the Sacred Harp, to my mind: the way you take on someone else's religion for a few hours or a couple of days at a time, belting it full-out like you're a believer, too. I always feel, when I sing, like I'm pushing at an invisible membrane between me and some woman not that different from me, who sang this music a hundred and fifty years ago, who struggled with her husband to make a go of a farm with poor soil, who had buried a baby, say, as well as two kids at once the year cholera came through. A woman who carried all of the hard work of her days, all of her losses and disappointments, to church with her, whose church was her only consolation.

Sacred Harp was a teaching tradition, originally, and we still call a short sing a lesson, an all-day sing a school, and a group of singers a class. It's not just the music we're being schooled in, though; it's the lives and faith of the original singers, the times they lived in, the God they worshipped.

Mary Rose O'Reilley writes, "The trebles have by now burst the bounds of earth. They will all call in sick on Monday." She writes, "The singing over, we drop like birds who have been buffeted to the edge of the oxygen zone. We have barely escaped with our lives." And that's the thing, that's the answer to why I don't show up twice a month at my local singing and drive two hours every month to the singing in Kalamazoo, why I go to only some of the conventions, and often for only one day. It's not just to save my voice, though that gets raw enough after awhile. It's to save my life, the life I'm living now and love, the one I could lose if that membrane ever ruptures and I'm not just getting a view of another life, another faith, but dropped into the middle of it. I don't want to find myself face-to-face with the God of that gray woman; I like the God I have, so much friendlier, more loving, less capricious. The God I have lets me keep the things I love best.

I walk away from a Sacred Harp singing sweaty, hoarse, wrung-out, and with a sense of having narrowly escaped being turned into something else, someone else. It's a good thing there's not an altar call in the afternoon, in place of the Memorial Lesson, or after four hours of singing to God with my whole heart, I'd be on my knees in the center of the square, accepting Jesus as my personal savior.

Convicted as a sinner, to Jesus I come,
Informed by the gospel for such there is room.
O'erwhelmed with sorrows for sin I will cry,
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. (The Rock That is Higher Than I, 496)

It's like a kind of Russian roulette, every time I sing. I never know when the hammer will come down and boom! I'l be on the other side of a change I can't easily come back from. I carry my songbook into the square and settle myself in the second row of altos. Today, I have decided, I'll take my chances.

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Reality Television, Baader-Meinhof, & More About Memoir

Until recently, I had never watched a reality TV show. It's not that I'm above bad TV; there is some bad TV I love. But I never have much time for watching TV, and I didn't think reality TV was likely to be my thing. I find it excruciating to watch people be awkward or embarrassed (this is part of why I also rarely watch sitcoms). I assumed that reality television would have a lot of that kind of thing, and that it would be tacky and stupid and full of people being mean to each other.

Recently, though, it occurred to me that I had let this whole cultural phenomenon pass me by, and so, sometimes, late at night, when there's nothing else on, I have been dipping into reality TV. I've watched 10 minutes of Hoarders, 7 minutes of Dance Moms, and as much as 5 minutes of several other shows. Usually that's all I can handle, because it's pretty much exactly like I imagined.

Last night, though, I watched an entire episode of Toddlers & Tiaras. And I might watch another one sometime. It was exactly like I imagined it, and yet...I kind of liked it.

My thoughts on Toddlers & Tiaras:

1. One of the moms named her daughter after the calamari she craved during her pregnancy.

2. Was that one mom really that nasty, or was she playing it up to get screen time?

3. I thought the mom who worked as a wrestling "ring girl" and raised extra money by putting out a sexy calendar of herself was actually quite awesome.

4. I was amused by the winking-at-the-audience way the show undercut the moms' claims about their daughters. "The thing is, Destiny is just a star! She absolutely sparkles!" Cut to Destiny, slumped against a wall, finger shoved up her nose to the second knuckle. Or: "Camari loves doing pageants. She has a total understanding of what it is, more like a 6 or 7 or 8 year old would, she's so mature, and this is just absolutely where she wants to be." Cut to montage of Camari's assorted tantrums as her mom tries to get her to practice her moves, tries to get her into the makeup chair, tries to get her dress on her.

5. The biggest prize you can win in any given pageant is a thousand-dollar savings bond, yet one mom said she had spent over $30,000 on pageants in the last two years, and another one admitted that she had maxed out the family's "emergency" credit card on pageant stuff.

6. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought these kids would actually be talented. I mean, I thought they'd be precocious little hoofers, a whole generation of Shirley Temples. But they were pretty much like any 2- or 3-year-old you've ever met. Their moms usually went on stage with them and pushed them around like little rhinestone-bespackled sacks of meat during the "beauty" portion, and during the "disco" portion, when they were supposed to dance, they usually stood around blankly until their moms, signaling from behind the judges or standing on-stage prompting with whispers, reminded them to do their "moves." Their "moves" were a handful of gestures their mothers had taught them--blowing a kiss, doing a John Travolta disco point, shaking their chubby little hips, putting their hands under their chins and batting their eyelashes--which they did at more-or-less random intervals and which were universally unnatural-looking and somewhat disturbing.

7. The show followed three girls, but there were quick-cut montages of the other contestants. I really wanted to know more about the boy doing the disco bit.

8. One of the girls had a white ring around her mouth because she wouldn't take her pacifier out when she was getting her spray tan.

9. I really missed an opportunity not getting the Tiny Tornado in on this.

Speaking of the Tiny Tornado, a friend posted this to my Facebook wall:

On the one hand, it's perfect. On the other hand, it makes me feel that I could have been more creative in coming up with a pseudonym for her. Who knew "tiny tornado" was a cliche?

Or it's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, two days ago I wrote a little stub about memoir and the tension between Art and Relationships. Hit a dead end in the writing, and I still don't have a place for it to go. But I do want to say a bit about the possibilities.

What got me thinking about this issue is that I attended a panel of memoirists at the Festival of Faith & Writing last month, and this question came up. The panelists were asked about how they handled writing about real people, how they dealt with the possibility that what they wrote would hurt someone's feelings, violate their privacy, make them angry. What made me sit up and take notice was that all of the writers on the panel gave priority to their relationships over their writing. They came at this question with an underlying premise--"relationships should be respected" that was the opposite of the one I was acculturated to, "your art is the most important thing."

So each of them had developed strategies for preserving their relationships. One gave her manuscript to people and asked for feedback about how she had written about them, though she reserved to herself the right to make final decisions. Another actually gave some people veto power, though she was an extreme outlier. Many made specific changes to protect people's identities, creating composite characters or putting one person's words into another's mouth. One woman gave a single character all the thoughtless and hurtful things her friends said to her after her daughter was born with Down Syndrome, for instance.

One writer made such dramatic changes to people and situations that I thought she had crossed a line and was no longer writing memoir. For instance, she took a conversation she'd heard two adults have and, in order to disguise their identities, put it into the mouths of two imaginary children on a playground. To me, inventing characters and settings wholesale is fiction.

I was interested, though, to hear them say that much of this was pointless anyway. One writer, after carefully disguising someone, was surprised that everyone figured out who she was anyway (though she refused to confirm their guesses). Another got her brother-in-law's approval for her book, but after it was published he told her that it was different actually having it out there rather than just reading the manuscript, and there were things he regretted allowing her to include.

The other piece of all this is that I feel quite differently about this issue than I did when I was young. I have, in recent years, even found myself relieved that certain pieces were never published, or at least never published in any place my family might happen upon, because they would have hurt my mother, and right now in my my life, I don't want to hurt my mother.

I know people who remain estranged from their families of origin, and for good reason. But I also know many people whose relationships with their families have evolved. I'm one. My parents, for instance, are never going to match up with the picture of ideal parents I have in my mind. But over the years, I've learned to do a better job of taking them as they are; they may not express love in the ways that I craved as a child, but as an adult I can see the ways that they do express it. Despite their failings, I've become very fond of them--not just loving them in the automatic way that children love their parents, but fond of them. I like seeing them. I enjoy spending time with them. I respect them--my mother in particular was an extraordinary young woman who made her own way in the world at age 16 with purpose and intent and discipline.

I have a friend whose childhood was undeniably bad. But she has a pretty good relationship with her father these days. She says, "The thing is, he's a much better parent of grown children than he was of young children." These things are complicated and they change as we change.

As a middle-aged person, I am glad that I didn't recklessly burn any bridges during that young adult time of feeling that my parents had failed me in every possible way. Because my parents, love them as I do, are not the kind of people to get over that kind of thing.

I still have to wrestle with these issues. I am a writer, and the thing I write about most often is my life. This means that if you are in my life, even briefly, I will almost certainly write about you. Sometimes people like this--if I spend time with your kids, I will probably write something about your kids, probably privately, and sometimes I send a collection of what I've written to the parents and they think it's great. On the other hand, sometimes I mention something that seems innocuous to me and it hurts someone's feelings. Or I think I'm being funny and the humor doesn't come through, and they're offended. No one has stopped being my friend because of this, but I know that some of my friends--I'm thinking of one in particular--have a love/hate relationship with my tendency to write about them.

And there are a few things I absolutely long to write about and can't because David doesn't want me to. He is a very private person and is remarkably patient with my tendency to hang our laundry out to dry--indeed, he loves my writing and is my biggest fan--so I try to respect those few things around which he has drawn a line. I try. And I almost always succeed.

What It Was Like When We Were Young & Took Ourselves Way Too Seriously

As a quick aside, I'll mention that I am at the discouraged stage of learning to crochet amigurumi. A month ago, when I started, I was just thrilled to be able to do it at all, and if things came out a little lopsided, well, I didn't mind. Now I am ambitious. I really wanted the Tiny Tornado's hamster to come out well, and it...didn't. (Not that she minds.) I'm disappointed. This is the part where it's hard to stick with it until my skills catch up with my higher ambition.

And now, our feature attraction:

Years ago, when I was a Serious Writer hanging out with many other Serious Writers, I participated in many conversations about what responsibility, if any, a writer had to the people she wrote about in memoir or poetry. In my MFA program, at OutWrite (the Gay & Lesbian Writers' Conference I attended for many years), in casual coffee-shop conversations, we talked about it. And talked about it.

Being queer and feminist, we saw the writing we did about our own lives as important. We were always "breaking silence." People were writing about child abuse, sexual abuse, rape, harassment. About childhood crushes, same-sex experimentation, the hidden homosexuals in our family tree. One year during my MFA program, I swear half the class showed up with stories about their grandmothers' abortions.

All of this felt very meaningful. We saw ourselves as the inheritors of the second-wave feminists of the 60s and 70s, of the wild energy that drove the crowd at Stonewall. We thought it was an act of courage to write honestly about women's lives, about lesbians' lives, about children's lives. We thought it mattered to tell these stories. We thought it mattered to us, as we made sense of our lives and grew into our work. We thought it mattered to the broader culture, which had simply chosen to ignore a great deal for a long time and needed a reckoning. We thought it mattered to other women, to other lesbians, to girls and boys who didn't have words for their experiences, and who didn't know they weren't alone. In many ways, we were late to the party: second-wave feminism's mad ferment was already starting to die down, and Stonewall's 20th anniversary had come and gone. But we felt like we were part of it.

On the other hand, we didn't see much reason to be loyal to the people we might write about: mom, dad, the great-uncle with the roving hands, the drunken grandpa, the big brother or cousin who had much to say on the subject of dykes and faggots. My first lover's father sent out word on the family grapevine that he knew we were lesbians and he wasn't upset about it and nothing bad would happen, he just wanted her to be honest with him. So she was, and he suddenly realized he could no longer afford to pay her college tuition or help with living expenses. My own parents responded to my coming-out letter by not saying a word about it (the letter, or the topic) for a good fifteen years. I had one friend who'd been institutionalized as a teen for being bisexual. My David, an only child, lost both his parents in the same year, and was attacked by his uncle for bringing his same-sex partner--who had lived with his parents and cared for them in their illnesses--to his own mother's funeral.

In the realm of bad things that happen to people who are queer, most of our complaints were small. But we were connected, through our broader community, to people much worse things had happened to, were still happening to. We were just old enough to have been a part of the AIDS crisis; we'd seen The Normal Heart in Greenwich Village, we'd volunteered with Gay Men's Health Crisis, we'd viewed The Quilt at the March on Washington in 1987, and stood silent and tearful in front of the panels of friends and acquaintances and loved ones. Sometimes they were panels we'd sewn. We felt--even us lesbians--like we were part of a community that was under attack in a time of grief.

My point is, that when anyone asked whether what we were writing and publishing and reading out loud might hurt someone, we tended to say, "Who cares?" If we were accused of abandoning all family loyalty, well, for the most part they abandoned us first.

When I started writing this, I knew where I wanted to go. But I can't get there from here. I can't seem to get anyplace else, either. I've been banging my head against it for the better part of the afternoon, while the laundry molders and the children run amok. I give up. I didn't want to write a whiny rant; I wanted to start with this thing I'd been thinking about Art v. Relationships and take it someplace more nuanced and thoughtful. But the Muse laughs!

So, I'll just leave this here. Maybe something more will come of it sometime. Or maybe not. Sometimes all you get is a fragment.