“Yet I Do”

Some striking coincidences have occurred in my reading recently. First, back when I had just begun subscribing to literary journals, I received my first issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review in which I found a piece by Eva Saulitis exploring her Latvian heritage. It is a piece that struggles with itself and is not afraid to fragment. It embodies in words the effort to make sense of a complex and broken history. I was taken by the lyricism and beauty of it, even as it deals with the horrors Latvians experienced before and during WWII. Fast forward to last week when I received my most recent copy of The Sun Magazine, which always has an interview feature. This month’s interview was of Eva Saulitis, published posthumously, as she died this year of breast cancer. I began to read the introductory bio and discovered that she began her adult life thinking she would be a musician (an oboist). She attended Northwestern University on a music scholarship, however, a couple years into her degree, found her true calling and left to study marine biology, later becoming a writer and poet as well. As I read her biography, I couldn’t help but wonder, was there something in her writing that attracted my musical soul to hers through the written word? After her cancer diagnosis she, of course, continued to write, offering up the difficult and irreconcilable bits of her life and family history, turning them into art.

The next big coincidence: when I was in high school I chose Carson McCullers’ book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as my subject for an English paper. I don’t know how or why I came to choose it, but I did. Again, fast forward. This month, AGNI, another journal I subscribe to, published a piece written by a Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who wrote in 1940 about Carson McCullers, shortly after The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published. They had recently met and had started corresponding. In a letter to Schwarzenbach, McCullers describes how she woke up thinking about the Brahms Violin Sonata in D Minor and how happy she had been feeling since then. (Incidentally, or maybe not so incidentally, I discovered while brushing up on Carson McCullers’ bio, that she initially had plans to become a pianist, and perhaps to study at Juilliard, but either illness or her desire to write got in the way – the details are unclear in my sources). She goes on to try to explain to Annemarie what she wants to accomplish in her future writing and then writes, “Maybe a decade from now all the good people will be dead.”

Schwarzenbach is struck by this statement, and how such a sense of despair could come from one living happily in New York after the resounding success of a book. But she understands the despair, this being 1940, with Schwarzenbach’s home continent in tatters. She writes, “a whole future generation of musicians, painters, poets, and inventors, an unknown number of young talents, an army of dead, are laid out on the battlefield.” She goes on to say that, in the time she spent with McCullers, it was clear they were of the same mind about “the endless struggle to express life fully while at the same time living it to the full, however one can.” Schwarzenbach concludes, “I spent five weeks in New York, far from the battlefront, among well-meaning people, with that enormous city of the future and its limitless potential at my feet. So why this paralyzing despair?… On the lush green bank of this great river, under fleeting clouds of June, I no longer know. And wonder if it’s worth taking up my pen, and yet I do.”

The coincidences of these authors’ musical biographies and references are what caught my attention at first, of course, but the real message that the serendipitous convergence of these voices brings to me goes much deeper. What inspires me is that, in the face of all that the world holds (success, illness, music, war, disasters), and in the midst of all our responses to what the world holds (delight, fear, love, despair, grief) these women, Eva Saulitis, Carson McCullers, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, consciously chose to keep taking up their instrument of choice – the pen in their case – time and time again. Their lives and circumstances were complex, messy, and wildly imperfect, but their art served as a way to keep going forward, to try to express the fullness of existence. As writers, they could document, remember, and communicate in more exact ways than we musicians can, but in a certain way it is the same across all art forms, in that a space is being created where life can be more fully contemplated – and shared – imperfections and all. The simple fact of their words’ arrival into my life, in addition to the life-giving qualities that I see music (and other creative work) bringing to my life and others’ lives every day, confirms to me that continuing to pick up our instruments – whatever musical or non-musical instruments they may be – is what we must do, in whatever way we can.

The last two lines of that first piece I ever read by Eva Saulitis (“Third Person Displaced”) that I loved so much:

You must make something of this, however broken.

 And then you must tell them.

May we all follow their lead, making something from the fragments of whatever surrounds us – and share it.

About Angela

French hornist Angela Cordell Bilger enjoys a freelance career as a chamber musician, orchestral player, and educator. She recently moved to the Chicago area from Philadelphia where she was second horn with Opera Philadelphia. She plays frequently with The Philadelphia Orchestra where she spent the 2008-2009 and 2016-2017 seasons as acting fourth horn. She recently joined the Chicago-based Sapphire Woodwind Quintet and coaches chamber music at Northwestern University and Midwest Young Artists Conservatory. During her years in New York City, Angela performed with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and in many Broadway shows. In addition, she spent several summers at the Marlboro Music Festival and toured with Musicians from Marlboro. Angela has served as adjunct faculty at Montclair State University, Drexel University, and Temple University. She lives on the North Shore of Chicago with her husband, trumpet player David Bilger, and their two children.
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