Laurie Anderson Maria Teresa Teresa Maria Letras:
Last spring, I spent a week in a convent in the
Midwest. I'd been invited there to do a series
of seminars on language. They'd gotten my name
from a list in Washington, from a brochure that
described my work as "deals with the spiritual
issues of our time", undoubtedly a blurb I had
written myself. Because of this, and also because
men were not allowed to enter the convert, they
asked me to come out. The night I arrived, they
had a party for me in a nearby town, in a
downstairs lounge of a crystal lane's bowling
alley. The alley was reserved for the nuns, for
their Tuesday night tournaments; it was a pizza
party. And the lounge was decorated to look like a
cave: every surface was covered with that spray-on
rock that's usually used for soundproofing. In
this case, it had the opposite effect: it
amplified every sound. Now the nuns were in the
middle of their annual tournament playoffs. And we
could hear all the bowling balls rolling very
slowly down the aisles above us, making the rock
club stalactites tremble and resonate. Finally the
pizza arrived, and the mother superior began to
bless the food. Now this woman normally had a
gruffed low-pitched speaking voice but as soon as
she began to pray he voice rose, became pure,
bell-like, like a child's. The prayer went on
and on increasing in volume each time a sister got
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a strike, rising in pitch "Dear Father in
Heaven". The next day I was scheduled to begin
this seminar on language. I'd been very struck
by this prayer and I wanted to talk about how
women's voices rise in pitch when they're
asking for things, especially from men. But it was
odd. Every time I set a time for the seminar,
there was some reason to postpone it: the potatoes
had to be dug out, or a busload of old people
would appear out of nowhere and have to be shown
around. So I never actually did the seminar. But I
spent a lot of time there, walking around the
grounds and looking at all the crops, which were
all labeled. And there was also a neatly laid-out
cemetery, hundreds of identical white crosses in
rows, and there were labeled "Maria",
"Teresa", "Maria Teresa", "Teresa
Maria", and the only sadder cemetery I saw was
last summer in Switzerland. And I was dragged
there by a Hermann Hesse fanatic, who had never
recovered from reading ###130414, and one hot
August morning when the sky was quiet, we made a
pilgrimage to the cemetery; we brought a lot of
flowers and we finally found his grave. It was
marked with a huge fur tree and a mammoth stone
that said "Hesse" in huge Helvetica bold
letters. It looked more like a marquee than a
tombstone. And around the corner was this tiny
stone for his wife, Nina, and on it was one word:
"Auslander" — foreigner. And this made me so
sad and so mad that I was sorry I'd brought the
flowers. Anyway, I de! cided to leave the flowers,
along with a mean note, and it read: Even though
you're not my favorite writer, by long shots, I
leave these flowers on your resting spot.
Letras: Maria Teresa Teresa Maria Laurie Anderson [final]