Life with Mozart
by Allison Kinney
When Mark Chmiel visited our class a few weeks ago, he asked us what questions we have been thinking about over the past semester. The first question I wrote down in my notebook was, “How do I seek and appreciate beauty and love in a world of ugliness and hate?” Though it was asked rhetorically, I do believe there are individuals who have lived the answers and their very lives are a witness to their accomplishment. The life of Mev Puleo is a testament to the ability to embrace the joys of life, while not shutting her eyes to misery and suffering.
Mev saw the world. Like a sponge, she soaked up the despair of the children in Rio de Janeiro, the suffering of Haitains, the homeless of Saint Louis, and the joy of being in love with Mark, spending time with the Arco Angels, drinking coffee at Au Bon Pain. No stranger to the two different worlds she was living in, she learned a way to live in both without denying either. She celebrated Mozart even when others said there was no Mozart. I, too, want to celebrate Mozart and Mev is teaching me how.
I distinctly remember telling a friend a few months ago (prior to Mev) that I did not think I could ever be truly happy or peaceful until everyone in the world also was happy and at peace. And since I knew for a fact there was great suffering and misery in the world, I thought I was limited to two options: close my eyes to the suffering and be happy, or be aware of the suffering and forego my own happiness. These options sound quite foolish to me now because Mev has taught me the importance and possibility of celebrating Mozart amidst despair. She writes, “there were days in Barrio Liberdade when Mozart soared in the crackle of slapping spoons the outburst of dance in church…” I do not have to choose between joy and ignorance. Mev did not choose, instead, she followed the advice of Wendell Berry, “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”
Mev’s journals do not represent a naïve optimism that is detached from the real world, rather they show a women struggling with the diametrically opposed worlds she lives in. Undoubtedly, there were days when Mev could not celebrate Mozart due to seeing starving children, rampant illness, and polluted streets. Mev writes in her journal, titled “Life without Mozart,” “today here is no reflecting, no understanding, no hope.” Mev experiences days where she can find no relief or joy, yet that does not mean she abandons all possibilities of hope in the future. Within the same journal she is even able to share insights into her findings of Mozart amidst the vast despair. The smile, love, joy, and beauty that emanated from Mev’s spirit is characteristic of her ability to enjoy life. Her tears, anger, frustration, and breakdown are representations of her desire to engage in the reality of the world. Her ability to fully experience and delve in to each of those realities, both the nimiety of beauty and ugliness in the world transformed how I hope to live.
At the same time I was reading Mev, I was also was given some writings of Etty Hillesum. Both women viewed life through a similar lens, although they lived during different distinct periods of times, in different areas of the world, experiencing different horrors. Etty writes, “I am in Poland every day, on the battlefields, if that’s what one can call them. I often see visions of poisonous green smoke; I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; there is room for everything in a single life.” Etty and Mev did not overlook either the horror of hunger and death, or the beauty of jasmine. They were able to hold the tension between death and life in their hearts at the same time. Allen Ginsberg offers a reflection on a poem by John Keats, in which he writes, “This means the ability to hold contrary or even polar opposite ideas of conceptions in the mind without freaking out—to experience contradiction or conflict or chaos in the mind without any irritable grasping after facts (354).” Etty and Mev experienced the contradictions but were not paralyzed by such conflict, but instead continued to live and love in the only ways they knew how. Mev and Etty, teach me.
Upon Mev’s return from Haiti she wrote a letter to friends and family and she ended with these lines, “Death lingers in the air, but there is such a spirit of LIFE—when people care and show love, it brings LIFE to the darkest situation (173).” Throughout Mev’s life she brought joy and love to the world, so that even in impoverished and death-filled countries such as Brazil and Haiti she was to bring and experience LIFE.
How does one attain such a gift? The ability to experience misery and death, but not be consumed by it should not be and can not be relegated to saints or the holiest of people. Although Mev is a truly saintly and holy person, I, along with the rest of the world, can achieve such a holy state of being. Of all the things I learned about Mev and life, through Mark, is the capacity to say, even in times of death, “What an honor it is to be alive and looking at this tree! This flower! This marvelous blue sky! What joy! Ecstasy! Orgasmic delight (264)!”
Allison graduated from Creighton University in 2007.