Choice

There was a terrific piece in the Times on Sunday that focused on the attitudes and experiences of American Muslim women who wear both a burqa and niqab -a conservative layering of cloth that covers their body and most of their face. I'd read several analyses of, and histories of, the veil in Islam before, but had never encountered one in which the wearers themselves spoke so freely, and with a disarming mix of piety and humor, about their experience. By the time I got to the end of the article, I felt that I understood a choice made by tens of thousands of women, in much greater depth than I had.

And that choice was thrown into even greater relief if one simply allowed one's eyes to drift, for a moment, from the article. The bulk of the piece appeared on page 12; opposite, on page 13, the Evening Hours column featured small photos of a number of New York socialites, including a young woman in a miniskirt, heels, and a rather vacuous, pleading gaze towards the camera. She wore the opposite of a veil, it seemed, in her bald attempt to solicit the desire or curiosity of the absent viewer.

I'm not sure that Cleo will ever stand before her closet, while preparing for an evening out, and say, Niqab or miniskirt? But, in a more abstract sense, she will face - as we all do, at times - the common choice between modesty and promiscuity, or between religiosity and secularism. But why stop there? On some level, we're always making choices, about how we represent ourselves, and what we choose to pursue. Any pretense that we live in a determinate world seems wishful, or too pat. Or, to put it differently, even the niqab and the miniskirt were never inevitable poles; rather, they were inventions, the result of sudden inspiration (or flirtation, or conviction).

That notion that we live in a sort of flux of constant decision is an idea that held a strong appeal for composers such as John Cage, who were affiliated with the group that called itself... well, Fluxus. Cage consistently created indeterminate scores that hinged upon a performer's choices instead of insisting upon a supposed absoluteness. For instance, in an Aria for solo voice written in 1958, Cage offered 20 pages of score without a declaration of tempo; that, and the very style of singing (scat? operatic? con brio?) were to be determined by the singer. The result was a piece that did away with the principle of the composer as a sort of god, and that yielded instead a work that was, at least on its face, the result of individual and local choices and decisions.

Niqab? Miniskirt? Cleo wears a onesie today, with a little Orioles logo on her breast. And while it would be a stretch to say that she chose it (she's usually more interested in a stuffed rabbit on the top of the changing table than in her outfit), it's a given that in a few years she'll be standing before her closet, with a choice of styles and tempos before her.