I found myself watching the Masters this past Sunday. My mother loved to watch it. Though she had played golf only briefly when younger she loved to watch, and weekend afternoons some tournament often was on the television. The Masters was above all others though, maybe for a Canadian who grew up mesmerized by Gone with the Wind, maybe because of my father being from Georgia, and the azalea, and tall tall Southern trees, and the perfect greens, it was captivating to her as to so many even at a distance.
The final day is the Sunday of the first full week in April, so it always fell around my sister Jane’s birthday. If we’d gathered to celebrate, the Masters was often there with us. If not Georgia, I feel sure we were all transported to springtime in Virginia, where we’d lived for ten years and where the azalea are also quite fine.
So thinking of my mother, my sister, who had a landmark birthday this year, and all those upstate NY Masters Sundays, I put it on early Sunday afternoon. Palm Sunday. They’d had an unusual early start due to impending storms, so I joined around the 15th hole. And it was something to see, all the more as I had no idea Tiger Woods was even close to such a return. Rebirth, really.
Who had not watched, or looked away, horrified the past decade as he fell from grace, one of the most talented athletes of all time caught in a seemingly endless string of misconduct and missteps that ended his marriage and threatened his career. There were extreme physical challenges and so many surgeries. I know what my minuscule in comparison sports injuries have been like, difficult to comprehend the will and grit required to come back from what he faced.
Come back he did. Storms looming to the west, eleven years after his last Masters victory– one of the announcers, I was impressed to hear, actually mentioned the parallel of solar cycles that run eleven years– he won again, for a fifth time. His roar of release and joy after the last putt was impressive, but what really got me was his young son Charlie running into his arms as he walked up the hill, as it turned out in almost the exact spot Tiger and his father had embraced 22 years earlier, when Tiger won his first Masters as a 21-year old phenomenon. They showed the two shots back to back, and it was impossible not to tear up. His father is gone now, but his mother was there, and along with his son, his daughter, and girlfriend.
Fitzgerald proven wrong again! There are second acts in American lives. And third and fourth. I’d always felt for Woods. Though I never followed the story closely, it seemed that a ridiculously talented guy whose father it’s said, surely mother too, pushed him incredibly hard to unimaginable heights had got there and more, and then fucked it up but good, and then all the stone throwers came out to take aim. Glass houses be damned. When some of the worst was being uncovered I knew one woman who used such especially harsh epithets against Woods, I wondered what had gone on in her own marriage to merit such criticism.
It certainly isn’t a new story. But still feels especially tragic. It was good to see a new chapter in this man’s life. It felt like grace, and redemption, and if he can endure all that on the stage of the entire world, you want to say, and find a way up and out, there’s hope for so many lesser mortals.
On another continent Monday, a fire ravaged one of the world’s most iconic cathedrals. I saw a few ridiculous Twitter battles about how praying for a building is ridiculous, and the Church behind the church is responsible for destroying Aboriginal populations and unspeakable crimes for two milennia and– shut.up., I wanted to shout. Just, be quiet. Reflect. Maybe it’s impossible to separate building and deeds, but come on. An amazing structure, period. For me, the first that I remember really understanding that perfect symmetry is displeasing to the human eye, and thus there must be imperfection for aesthetic perfection, was looking at the towers of Notre Dame. Too much perfection doesn’t work for humans. Such a lovely metaphor.
I could not believe my ears when I heard, or eyes when I got to a screen; when the spire fell over I thought, this can’t be happening. A fire, there, in this day and age? I guess initially some people criticized the pompiers, firefighters, for not getting there in time, or something– three words: Paris, rush hour. Experience it for yourself before you speak. I had my own up close and personal with Parisian pompiers in 1992, when I ran barefoot into the street with Christophe in my arms, because they said, go, and I did, and they went in. Here was one lovely homage to the pompiers who likely saved Notre Dame from complete destruction.
The image of so many centuries reduced, so quickly, takes your breath away. What came to mind for me, Catholic raised, on Monday of Holy Week, was this church, or maybe Church, like the world around it is going up in flames, some kind of flagrant disregard run amok. I keep coming back to the world burning thing since summer of 2016. What next. The Mueller report that’s what…but that, another time.
Much of the story around the Notre Dame fire contains bits of wonder, more are sure to emerge. That the copper statues of the 12 apostles surrounding the spire were removed as part of the ongoing renovations a week before the fire. And that the rooster, which contained three relics, that sat atop the soaring spire was found battered but intact in the street, amazing.
It is incomprehensible– beyond human comprehension, or mine, at least– that so many centuries, beloved and viewed and visited for so long could be reduced in a relative fraction of time. Time is a concept that eludes our understanding. And there likely are so many messages and lessons in this fire, who knows where to begin.
Trying to rebuild eight centuries doesn’t seem to me a point of departure. It feels absurd, though it is soothing in the raw aftermath– the desire to make it better, and the conceit that we can. It seems overwhelming to let it go. That would be the far harder work than fundraising and a competition to rebuild. I agree with author Kristan Higgins’s perspective about whether funds should be raised to reconstruct this eight-centuries-old building.
In graduate school I had the good fortune to study with James Young one semester when he was visiting Princeton from U Mass Amherst. He is an extraordinary and prolific scholar who has worked primarily on– this from colleague Stephen Clingman’s retirement tribute two years ago– “the forms, uses and histories of memory, particularly in relation to the Holocaust—a field in which he is one of the world’s major figures.” He sat on a number memorial competition juries, including that for Germany’s national Holocaust memorial in the late 1990’s and the World Trade Center in the first decade of 2000.
Young’s The Texture of Memory was part of my dog-eared stack as I wrote my own thesis on historic memory. How humans have chosen to store memory in solid forms and structures and why is pretty interesting, to say the least. Notre Dame was a living, functioning church, as well as meeting place, concert hall, and repository of parts of the French identity, some they might want to forget. The desire to create a structure that can carry on its purpose is understandable. But the 12th-century desire to build an edifice soaring toward heaven, does it transfer to the 21st century? Is their a way to honor that history and purpose that does not lose sight of the now? Or require so much money?
Such different events, Woods winning the Masters and Notre Dame nearly destroyed. The need to let go of the past in order to move on, though, for me is evident in both. Our history can drag us down, ever back into the past. Or it can inform our forward motion and bring redemption and rebirth. An experience of grace– a memory or event that seems to obliterate all intervening time, the words of a scholar, a son’s embrace, a miracle– takes so many forms. For us, just to be present to receive it.