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maria teresa teresa maria - laurie anderson lyrics

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 b-lls
rolling very slowly down the aisles above us,
making the rock blob stalact-tes 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 her voice rose,
became pure, bell-like, like a child’s.

the prayer went on and on
increasing in volume each time a sister got 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 sidartha,
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 decided to leave the flowers,
along with a mean note,
and it read:

even though you’re not my favorite writer,
by a long shot,
i leave these flowers
on your resting … spot.

- laurie anderson lyrics

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