Wakes

As a kid I was shielded from death. I'm not sure whether it was because my mom believed that "life was for the living" (as she would say) or that it was because she and my father had both lost a parent as kids. I didn't attended a funeral or wake until I went to college, and then only one. I still feel like a stranger at these events. We are a cremation family, and also one that likes to do memorial events, not funerals.

Sunday I went to a wake for the mother of a secretary. Her father had already passed, so now she is parentless (and an only child).

I told her I used to fear that when I lost my parents I would be an orphan, and how, to my surprise, the wealth of memories that I retain make me anything but an orphan. In fact, as I was telling her this, I was thinking that it was time for parents (or for me?) to stop hanging around in my mind. But I couldn't say that. I knew she was at a far different place in her grieving.

During the last couple of years I've taken a special interest in the display of snapshots at wakes. Her husband started giving me a lecture on photography, and how it is that photographs help us remember our beloved. He was so glad that he had photographs, and reveled at how these images jar his memory. I asked myself whether there was any profound change in our memories before and after the invention of photography. I knew, however, that this was not the time to win an argument, and since he felt secure in the thought that he would have images of his mother-in-law and their family celebrations forever, I didn't want to contradict him.

I looked through the three photo albums and the pictures on the two bulletin boards. One was from her parent's fiftieth anniversary, and a second from their sixtieth anniversary. In the albums, I looked to see how people were (or weren't) touching one another. And I wondered if the secretary was the photographer, because she wasn't in most of the pictures.

Then I went to see the mother, laid at rest, whom I had never met. It struck me a little strange that she was wearing glasses, not that deceased persons shouldn't wear glasses, but because it interfered with my ability to see the eternal peace that is usually expressed in a corpse's face. And my particular angle to her is not how I usually see people. Usually when we go up to someone they look toward us, so we don't see the space between their eyes and their glasses. But I just saw this foreign object sitting on her face. What was she seeing through these thick lenses, I wondered? And what was she hearing? She was very frail, and very tired. Is she is ready to be forgotten as she departs to that other world, I wondered? Must our lives go on?

List of Lists

1. Processes Lists. Glenn Alps, a renowned printmaker in the 60s, visited SMU when I was teaching there. He looked at a list of steps to process a lithographic drawing that I had written on a poster board for my students. He laughed and told me that lists don't work, because processes can't be broken down into steps.

2. Laundry Lists. Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, used to write down his laundry list on an ink slab before he sent out his laundry. He was a printer, and after the laundry came back, he tried to wipe the list off the stone with water. He noticed that the ink resisted the water, but the rest of the stone absorbed it. Low and behold, he inked up the stone with a roller, put down a sheet of paper on stone, ran it through a press and presto, had a mirror image of his laundry list. Lithography had been invented.

3. To Do Lists. Kim Mosley, the writer of this blog, has quite a few "to do" lists. Sometimes, though, he can't remember needed tasks long enough to write them down. Most of his items on the list never get done, or even, never needs to be done. Or inadvertently get done anyway, in spite of the fact that they are on the list.

4. Bad Lists. Then there is the Black List from the Senator McCarthy's days. These were people that you weren't supposed to hire because they were red. And don't forget the Most Wanted List from the FBI, a group of people we wish never to meet, except on the bulletin board at the post office.

5. Conservator Lists. One of the most comic lists I've seen was made by a museum conservator who was inventorying one of my photographs. I mistreat photographs, not because I'm mean, but because I feel sorry for them and feel that they need a little help. The conservator had to log everything I had done to this poor photograph. It sounded like a catastrophe. A staple here, a scratch there, some thread going through a hole in the middle, and an second scratch there. She didn't miss a trick!

6. More on To Do Lists. I'm not sure if organized people are more likely to make lists, but I do know that certain people won't do something unless they write it down. And then there is the proverbial "email me" which means "I'm more important than you and so you should make it your job to remind me because I don't have a list with me of things I need to do (you see that is a pet peeve of mine.) But I oblige the person with an email, and I also put the task on my to do list, because I know, in time, a second email will probably need to be written.

P.S. Wedding Lists. April is the cruelest month. If you've never made a wedding list (and had to pick between aunt Sima and cousin John) you haven't faced a real dilemma. You imagine that the unlucky one will face the disgrace of being the last to be chosen for a sandlot baseball team. You remember all the good and bad that each did to you, and you weigh the "contestants" out so very carefully and then you flip a coin and then you change your mind and then you decide that the stars aren't aligned properly and you need to come back to the list tomorrow, or better yet, next week. In the end, you never face the truth that most people want to be invited, but feel relieved to find out they are already booked for that evening.

Neve Shalom

Last night was the reception for my exhibit at Neve Shalom, a modest, but an incredibly special, venue. In Europe, one sees places of worship as they enter the towns. They are the highest and most elaborate structures. Neve Shalom is a secret, located in a basement adjacent to a home for retarded folks. The synagogue appears to run on a shoe string budget, but is abundant in sincere and enthusiastic people who might not be comfortable anywhere else. And it is led by James Goodman—poet, musician, and last, but not least, rabbi.

After hearing that people spend about eight seconds per artwork in a gallery, I start adding words to my pieces, hoping to engage the viewer a bit longer (I think it works). This particular exhibit is composed of digital paintings and text done in collaboration with Joan Lipkin, who participated in email interchanges with me during her visit to Little Cayman last year.

During the reception we sat around the joined tables to have a conversation about the pieces. I read a message from Joan, who is lost for the weekend in some remote area of Mexico. Then I mentioned some questions my daughter asked earlier at dinner, ending with the prizewinner: what one idea do we want to be our legacy for years to come? Even having one idea remain is quite an accomplishment, considering the population of Earth.

Next James Stone Goodman pulled a poem out of a crinkled envelope. I could see that he had printed it on discarded paper that had printing on the other side. Jim said that he had written the poem in three parts about our works, and that he'd never had been to Little Cayman, but that he did a little research on the place, which he loves to do. The poem was a wonderful impression of the enviroment we had attempted to create in our text and pictures, and soon it will be webbed so all can read it.

After a brief discussion that followed, the program moved to a musical concert ranging from John Coltrane to Middle Eastern music, "entitled SIN AND SOUL, music from the holy and not-yet-holy character of Purim festivities, also the holy ceremony Havdalah done in the old/new Breslover style and other delectables." It was stupendous, to say the least.

William Wordsworth, the hopeless romantic, wrote, "The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours. " Our lives are about things that don't really matter, things that don't connect us to ourselves, to one another, to the world, or to eternity. Yet, at Neve Shalom, there is a generosity where people lay aside the business of their lives and open their hearts to higher order concerns. It was heartening, to say the least, to be part of this secret enclave (dare I say ghetto?) where life (in the broadest sense) is celebrated through the creative arts.

Thank you, Neve Shalom, for making this world so much better.