Play On

http://servefir.ruv.is/vesturfarar/e/NutBill.html

Above is the link to "The Music of Failure," by Bill Holm.  To me, it feels akin to My Antonia, a celebration of the poor, and the spirit of the world that cannot be found in money or in material success.   He writes, "Tomorrow," they said, but this was only another way of saying "yesterday," which did not exist quite as they imagined it,"  Which to me is reminiscent of Jim Burden's infatuation with nostalgia.  Jim wishes to live in the past, and Bill Holm alerts us to the fact that we want to live in the past, despite our apparent wish to live in the future.   He addresses the issue of immigration with poignancy, saying, "The first settlers of America imagined paradise, God's city made visible on earth. Grand rhetoric for a pregnancy, it was, like all births, bloodier and messier than anyone imagined at the moment of conception," which reminds me again of My Antonia.  The Shimerdas, and the Russians came to America expecting something beautiful and wealth-filled.  What they found instead was a life marked by tragedy and poverty- yet at least for Antonia, that life was not void of meaning.  Rather, the poverty and the tragedy marked her for a certain greatness of spirit that could not be bought or earned through traditional means of success.  A similar finding comes when Jim encounters Tiny Soderball after she has achieved success, and he notes that she seems to be almost lifeless, completely neutral to her own success, which theoretically should have made her happy.  Holm gives a similar sentiment when he says that he would love to have all of the world's leaders over for dinner, but that he doubts that they would make nearly as good company as his old neighbor Pauline.  This is where the similarity between Holm's article and My Antonia seemed the most strong.  Pauline seems to me another representation of Antonia, a symbol of vitality and life despite circumstances that don't seem "successful" according to the idea of the American Dream.  Holm writes of Pauline, "In the cities she would have been called a domestic, though her duties at Peterson's and elsewhere always involved nursing the infirm and dying. In Minneota's more informal class labeling, she was simply Pauline."  She is a woman who can do everything, and as such is everything.  She doesn't need to be described or given titles, her name alone suffices, much like Antonia.  What she offers to the world is the same as what the hired girls offer to Jim Burden.  Holm sums this up well, saying, "The gifts of the unschooled are often those we did not know we would need-the right words, the right music...
the Bardals were in that regard truly poor. But not poor in mind and spirit!"  At the end of the day, Holm argues that worthwhile people and worthwhile lives are not made with money or goods or leisure, but rather with an ability to understand others and bring joy to people's lives regardless of circumstance.  It is a beautiful idea, akin to the childhood adage that, "it is what is on the inside that counts,"  and yet I do wonder, always, whether such a concept can transcend the minds and hearts of scholars and college students who wish it to be the truth.  Cather, and Bill Holm, and Whitman, have a certain optimism that is endearing, and yet I am not sure if America, a nation so very set in the ways of materialism, will ever, as a nation, hear the "music," that failure plays.