Thirty Years in the Madhouse

Consider this photo:
 

They had worked in the same studio in Paris, when they were young, before life had carried them where they didn’t want to go. Or perhaps they did, who knows?

I sit in this café and peer at the photo. Notice, for example, that the lady on the right, has her hand on the lady on the left. But she? Her arms are akimbo.

“They’re trying to poison me,” sang Joyce DiDonato in the epilogue to Jake Heggie’s song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire. Well, she may have said it, but the lady on the right—Jessie Lipscomb—came away saying it wasn’t true the Claudel was insane, and a friend of Rodin’s echoed the statement. More tellingly, the doctors were never entirely convinced that Claudel needed to be in the madhouse—they once wrote to suggest that she be cared for at home.

Reading the account of her life in Wikipedia, her family seem to be the villains. The brother—who signed the form that committed her, managed to visit seven times in 30 years. To be fair, part of that time he was in China, part of the time war was ravaging Europe. In fact, she died in the middle of World War Two; was that why she was buried in a mass grave? And by the way, the brother managed to specify to the centimeter—practically—where he wanted to be planted.

Still, the brother managed to cross occupied France to see her before her death. But what about the sister—who dropped in just once?

Then we come to Mother—who had never fully accepted her daughter’s embrace of the arts. And Wikipedia seems to imply that Mother, acting through Brother Paul, was the driving force behind the commitment. Because Mother didn’t visit once—thus laying to rest the claims about those ferocious maternal instincts.

Then we come to her relationship with Rodin: Joshua Kosman had this to say in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Her relationship with Rodin, which was both artistic and erotic, caused her as much grief as any such romance between mentor and protégée, and came to an end after she aborted their child. 

Hmm—don’t know about that. Wikipedia states, “in the early years of the 20th Century, Claudel had patrons, dealers, and some commercial success,” and she had stopped seeing Rodin regularly in 1898. She exhibited in 1903, and produced this work in the same period:

Claudel destroyed most of her work; still, about 90 pieces remain. She’s been the subject of a few biographies, a few films, and a few exhibitions. Some people feel that she is a spin-off of the infinitely more famous Rodin—to me, their work looks nothing alike, but what do I know?

The question is whether she was mad, and if so, what if anything caused it. I look into the faces of the photo, and what do I see? Jessie—an English sculptor—peers at us, as if to say, “yes, world, remember us. Remember that we too were young, that we lived and loved, and went our separate ways. Yes, this is the last visit—we won’t see each other again.”

And Claudel?

She’s withdrawn. Nor had she wanted to see her old friend, but rancor? It’s a young person’s taste. The picture makes it clear: they are tied to each other by their history, by their fights, perhaps by their envy or jealousy. And they parted for many years. Jessie married, Claudel spent the final 30 years of her life in a madhouse: I see understanding in Jessie face. And in Claudel’s?

Resignation….

The View From the Fence

Right—time to get straight down to work and settle once and for all the vexing question of the death penalty.

I’ve never particularly bought into the standard liberal line, you see, nor do I do well with the standard Puerto Rican line. Why? Because if you ask about the death penalty here on the island, you will almost certainly be told: “only God can take a life.”

Guys? Can we just call it a theocracy and stop the pretense of separation of church and state?

I felt, for most of my life, that there were some crimes so unspeakably heinous that a nice, swift execution was the best thing to do. Consider these savory characters, who come to you from Wikipedia’s article on Sister Helen Prejean:

In addition to Sonnier, the account is based on the inmate Robert Lee Willie who, with his friend Joseph Jesse Vaccaro, raped and killed 18-year-old Faith Hathaway on May 28, 1980, eight days later kidnapping a Madisonville couple from alongside the Tchefuncte River in Louisiana and driving them to Alabama. They raped the 16-year-old girl, Debbie Morris (née Cuevas), who would later become the author of her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking[4] and then stabbed and shot her boyfriend, 20-year-old Mark Brewster, leaving him tied to a tree paralyzed from the waist down.

You’ll have guessed—Sister Helen Prejean is the author of Dead Man Walking, and very likely you’ll have seen the movie. So it won’t be news to you—as it was to me—that Sister Helen wrote Dead Man about her experiences with guys on death row. She champions the abolition of the death penalty as ardently as the pope champions priestly celibacy.

Here’s my problem—I follow all the rules (well, mostly) and as a consequence am expected to fork over 20% or so of my annual salary to the government. That money goes to support guys who haven’t followed the rules, but who have committed crimes that often have devastated the lives of innocent people. These people are rotting in prison, doing nobody any good. Oh, and they don’t even want to be there. 

I know—that’s not the way I’m supposed to think. But that 30 grand we spend annually because “only God can take a life?” I’d really like to put that money to work beefing up education, treating PTSD in our veterans, or supporting opera companies. And those guys on death row? Well, couldn’t they be doing something?

Am I arguing for the return of the chain gang?

Look, it makes more sense than what we’re doing now….

OK—let’s back this car up.

One of the things about a blogger’s life is that you have to go sifting around, looking for things to write about, and then things get tied together in ways that you don’t expect. Because I had been watching—for reasons I no longer remember—a remarkable video of an interview with Stephen Levine, who for many years worked with dying people. And one of the stories he told was of an angry, bitter woman—a woman who had driven everyone away.

It was a problem—the woman was so negative, so hostile, that the nurses had to force themselves to work with her. But it was hardly just the nurses; her own daughters were estranged from her, and wanted nothing to do with her, even though she was dying.

One daughter, however, took on the challenge: could she go and sit down at her mother’s deathbed and, with an open heart, accept her mother as she was.  Could she wish her well? Could she—if not forgive—at least move away from what Levine calls a “business model” of human relationships? You give me love and nurturing and I’ll give you love back. You hurt me and I’m outta here….

So the daughter—a Zen Buddhist, and she’d have to be—sat and let her mother into her heart, without expecting or asking or even wanting her mother to change. Which was fortunate, since on the day of the mother’s death, she looked at her child and said, “I hope you have the most miserable life ever!”

Levine’s point? The daughter had done what she did for herself, not for her mother. The daughter didn’t want to carry the anger, the bitterness around forever. And so she had endured abuse up until the very end—in order to free herself of it.

As you’ll see in the clip below, Dead Man Walking became an opera as well, and I can tell you that because, in my nightly forage for carbohydrates, I found myself eating jellybeans and watching—who else?—Joyce DiDonato.

I might as well confess it—I am electronically stalking DiDonato. How bad has the obsession become? Well, fully as bad as last year’s obsession with Martha Argerich, and to tell you how bad that was, I give you the fact that the computer has not put a red squiggle under Argerich. The computer, you see, not only knows perfectly well who she is, but is totally bored with it.

Oh—another fact. I’m so desperate for any new video of Didonato that I watched an interview of her in French. And when was the last time I spoke French? Well, let’s see, I graduated from High School in ’74….

So there I was, looking at Joyce Didonato and Jake Heggie talking about their upcoming—well, as of two years ago—Carnegie Hall recital. And you know what? I am not going to introduce the computer to Heggie, because I don’t like him.

OK—be fair, I’m envious because, besides being handsome, intelligent, way-talented, and having his opera Dead Man Walking presented over 40 times in five continents—I mean, how much stuff can one have in life—he’s also a friend of Joyce DiDonato.

But here’s where I’m at: if I were the relative, the father of a murdered child, how would I react? Impossible to say—but here’s what I’d hope.

I hope—like the daughter of the bitter mother—that I’d forgive, that I’d say no to the hatred and the desire for vengeance. But on a societal level?

Damn, still haven’t figured it out….