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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
The next big coincidence: when I was in high school I chose Carson McCullers\u2019 book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter<\/em> as my subject for an English paper. I don\u2019t 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<\/em> 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\u2019 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 \u2013 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, \u201cMaybe a decade from now all the good people will be dead.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s home continent in tatters. She writes, \u201ca 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.\u201d She goes on to say that, in the time she spent with McCullers, it was clear they were of the same mind about \u201cthe endless struggle to express life fully while at the same time living it to the full, however one can.\u201d Schwarzenbach concludes, \u201cI 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\u2019s worth taking up my pen, and yet I do.\u201d<\/p>\n The coincidences of these authors\u2019 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 \u2013 the pen in their case \u2013 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 \u2013 and shared \u2013 imperfections and all. The simple fact of their words\u2019 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\u2019 lives every day, confirms to me that continuing to pick up our instruments \u2013 whatever musical or non-musical instruments they may be \u2013 is what we must do, in whatever way we can.<\/p>\n The last two lines of that first piece I ever read by Eva Saulitis (\u201cThird Person Displaced\u201d) that I loved so much:<\/p>\n You must make something of this, however broken.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>And then you must tell them.<\/em><\/p>\n May we all follow their lead, making something from the fragments of whatever surrounds us \u2013 and share it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. Continue reading