Laughing With the Dead

Last Friday, I mentioned that I was planning a Victorian picnic.  The picnic took place on Sunday.  I got the idea from Victorian Entertaining by John Crosby Freeman, in which he says, "The main barrier between you and the Victorians isn't their heroic attitude towards war; it's their romance with death, beautifully embodied in Victorian Rural Cemeteries.  It may strike you as grotesque or even obscene that Victorians used rural cemeteries as public pleasure grounds, even picnicking within their family plots."

This reminds me of the time I wrote about the sublime Joseph Cornell exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, about a similar sort of tension between how I actually felt, and how I was supposed to act.  At the exhibition, when I looked at some pages from a satirical homemade farmer's newsletter - complete with deadpan anecdotes and drawings of chickens - I laughed out loud.  People looked at me as if I had urinated in the exhibition hall.  This was Art.  It was Serious.  Did I not understand that One Does Not Laugh at Art?  This idea creates a tension for me in a modern art museum; if a piece of art causes a spontaneous welling up of joy, I must either crush it down with shame or accept that there is a social price I must pay if I choose to express it.  I personally think Cornell was trying to be funny, so I paid the social price and I laughed.

The tension in a cemetery is even worse.  Cemeteries are often full of newly bereft, crying people.  Most people who are there to visit the dead are full of conflicting emotions, the chiefest among them guilt.  Guilt for not visiting more often, guilt for not being more attentive (or even nice) to the person when they were alive, guilt for not loving the dead person "enough".  I can think up dozens of reasons one might feel like crap in a cemetery.  However, guilt is only half the story; the tension wells up when guilt collides with joy, pleasure, good humor, and laughter.

The picnic started out pretty seriously.  We found Grandpa's plot quickly, laid out the blanket, unpacked the spread, and we ate, while my partner told me stories.  Victorian Entertaining includes a "Bill of Fare for a Picnic of Forty Persons ... a joint of cold roast beef, a joint of cold boiled beef, two ribs of lamb, two shoulders of lamb, four roast fowls, two roast ducks, one ham, one tongue, two veal-and-ham pies, two pigeon pies, six medium-sized lobsters, one piece of collared calf's head, eighteen lettuces...four dozen cheesecakes...six pounds of butter..." so on and so forth.  My picnic was a simple loaf of bread, a little plastic container of mustard, a packet of sliced ham, another packet of sliced swiss, a small plastic tub of homemade cucumber salad, and a fancy bottle of blood orange soda.  We ate adjacent to, but not on top of, the dearly departed:

There's a nice, sentimental epitaph written at the bottom of the headstone: "We love you sweethearts."  It works no matter how you read it - whether the living are addressing the dead, or the dead are addressing the living.  I thought about my feelings for my sweetheart while he talked to me about his grandparents.  He loves them, and I love him.  That's why we were there, to honor that.  When the stories ran out, we packed up, and as we walked back down the lawn toward the car, my sweetheart showed me some of the other headstones he'd spotted on the way up.  He know that I have a passion for the written word, especially in signs, monuments, and other non-prose art forms, such as graffiti, and on the headstones (all of them flush with the ground to facilitate mowing) was a very particular sort of writing.  Each epitaph, carefully, carefully composed, told a micro story - about who the departed was, how the departed felt about the living, how the living felt about the departed, or what their hopes were for the future.

As a writer in this era, I think I'm supposed to be ashamed of sentimentality.  In order to write anything of note, I'm supposed to absent myself from my writing, write objectively, and have some big important thing to say, with lots of irony. Sentimentality is for selling romance novels and greeting cards; true art cannot be sentimental.  Listen to any of the literati mocking The Bridges of Madison County, and you'll hear it, that mockery and belittling of sentiment.  That I have internalized some of this condescending attitude is why I feel tender and exposed when I admit to you that "Grandpa Extrordinaire" started my tears welling up.  It's misspelled, for whatever reason, and that made me think of earnest, childish greeting cards made with cheap construction paper, crayon, and unashamed love.

It's my earnest, unashamed love that admits how the epitaph, "You are my sunshine," made the welling tears start to flow; I've always been a mushy mix-tape girl, and the mixes I make for my sweetheart are usually full of light and sunshine metaphors, because the first thing I noticed about him was how alert and alive he was, and the brightness of his expression.  When I read this epitaph, I saw my own potential future sorrow, and it slew me.  When my sweetheart saw me taking pictures, he escorted me on down the hill and pointed out another headstone he'd spotted on the way up.  I looked at it, and crab-stepped to the next one, and to the next one, and with each epitaph, I slowly began to understand how much joy and good humor and delightful mystery there was in the National Cemetery.  I'll bet you a hundred dollars this next guy was a lot of fun, and I can imagine him staggering back to his ship, drunkenly, with a smile on his face, and his sailor hat askew:

Next, I found a couple of happy gamblers.  I hope that Mrs. Domohowski spent her extra five years at Foxwoods with friends who helped her remember the good times with Mr. Domohowski.

After we were finished browsing the epitaphs on the gently sloping lawn (imagine that these are the folks who wanted to live off base, in roomier digs in the sprawling suburbs of some distant military town), we headed over to a columbarium, which is where they put the cremated folks who maybe didn't mind so much, living in base housing during their tour of duty.  In the columbarium, the atmosphere was much more intimate, with the names packed in cheek by jowl, like sailors in hammocks, or soldiers in a row of tents.  I know I'm mixing my metaphors, but it reminded me of a dive bar on a military base, with fresh, young wise-guys and wise-girls in uniform, swaying on barstools, each trying to out-drink, outwit, or out-joke the next guy, with the occasional quiet, poetic soul sitting on the fringes with a club soda.

If I have offended with my cemetery hijinks, as I offended the patrons at the Joseph Cornell exhibition by laughing out loud at the art, I ask you to think intuitively for a minute about the information you are given in a cemetery - not by other attendees, but by the cemetery itself, and by the dead.  The grounds of the National Cemetery are beautiful; do you imagine the sweeping grandeur of the lawns and the view is meant to suck you in and spit you out in five minutes?  Do you imagine that the stately, welcoming design of the grounds says "Keep out?"  The dead choose to lie here, and they want to be visited.  Do you imagine they'd go to all the trouble of ceremonies and memorial details so they'll be ignored, or only inspire a guilty five-minute slink across the grass, a five-minute bowing of the head?  No, they want you to stay for a while and appreciate the view.  And from what I can tell from the words they've written on their memorials, they want you to cry with them.  They want you to leave small tokens to mark your visit--beach stones, carnival glass, flowers, mardi gras beads.  And a lot of them want you to laugh with them, or they wouldn't have written such sweet and funny things on their graves.  Pay the social price, if you have to, and laugh.  Please, laugh.

I left the cemetery loving the sentimentality of the dead--their bravery, their panache, their good cheer, and their obvious value to their families and to one another.  I left the cemetery unashamed of my tears, unashamed of my laughter, and a little in love with the City of the Dead.

On Sunday, I had a picnic with Grandma and Grandpa Vabri, and it looked like this:

In memory of Vincent and Islea Vabri.
I wish I had had the chance to meet you.

I Will Remember You

There's been another confluence of events where all of life's details have brought me to an odd place, and I find myself doing something unexpected.  Tomorrow, I'll be having a Victorian picnic in a cemetery, to pay my respects to my partner's beloved grandparents.  To my regret, I never knew them, and unless the world works differently than I believe, they will never know how much hearing about them has inspired me.

The first event started years ago, when my father wrote his Navy memoirs.  After that project was complete, he interviewed his siblings and wrote down memories of growing up.  Both times, he ask me to edit the work, and I helped arrange the bits of memory into a narrative structure without substantial revision, not wanting to meddle with the voice.  Both memoirs came with photographs.  I'll get back to this later.

Next, my partner started telling me stories about his maternal grandparents.  They died nearly a decade ago, and he still gets tears in his eyes when he talks about them.  I had the germ of an idea; perhaps someday we would go and visit the cemetery where they were laid to rest and he would tell me more stories about them.  These reminiscences included a trip to my basement, which houses an impressive collection of objects I hope to photograph and write about someday.  Beloved grandparents, stories, photographs.  Stories, pictures.  A pattern?  Of course.

Several weeks ago, I went see my partner's living grandparents.  His grandfather has had pneumonia and a variety of other scary-sounding illnesses, and so we took the kids out to say hello.  This kind of visit is always scary and strange for me.  There's a kind of sad desperation to "I know you're really sick" visits.  If you don't go visit because you don't want to seem like you're freaking out, there's a fear that you won't get to see them again before it's too late.  When you do go, there's a frantic feeling of joyfulness.  We must go, and we must love as hard as we can, because these are numbered among the last days, whether we want to see it that way or not.  Maybe they'll live to be 110, but maybe they won't, and so you have to open up and give.

During the visit, someone dragged out an old green and white striped box with a manuscript in it. Back when manuscripts were submitted by mail (gasp!), it wasn't unusual for the writer to ship the manuscript in the box from which the paper originally came.  I started reading the manuscript in the living room at the assisted living home, while the children pinged around trying not to step on their grandpa's thin green oxygen tube.  (While I was reading, the other adults discussed grandma's fairy collection.  Fairies, fairies, everywhere.  Statuettes, mostly, enshrined and sacred, and staring down all around me.)  I wasn't expecting much from the manuscript.  Most manuscripts are bad, especially mine.  When I started to cackle in delight, the elders started to glow, and by the end of the visit, the manuscript was sent home with me so I could finish reading it.  Grandma threatened my life if any harm should come to it while it was in my care.

Next, a coupon for a Shutterfly picture album arrived.  By then, I planned to make copies of the manuscript and have it bound.  I'd been told that the elders had a habit of dragging the old thing out of the closet roughly once a month to admire it.  Reading a loose manuscript is difficult, and it's probably even more difficult if your hands aren't as nimble as they used to be.  I took the manuscript to the Staples Copy Center and begged the clerk to write DO NOT DAMAGE OR CLIENT WILL BE KILLED BY THE TEARS OF OLD PEOPLE! on the order form. The copies came out very well, and the copy clerks will have fun at my expense for a long time to come.  Everybody wins.

My partner sent out a call for photographs from his extended family, and then it was Mother's Day and plans came together.  We would be out of town for the actual day of Mother's Day, but he would buy a card, and we would go to visit, bringing: 1) the original manuscript, thankfully undamaged by the Staples Copy Center; 2) the Shutterfly picture album, which ballooned to a hefty price for100 pages of photos featuring four generations, assembled in part during a meal at Panera Bread between other engagements; and 3) a special surprise for grandma.

I'm annoyed with my camera, because it does not take good pictures, so please imagine that this framed item is about 20 by 36 inches and that it is lovely.  Trust me.  This is a counted cross-stitch (designed by Mirabilia Designs), which has been custom framed and hanging on my wall for about fifteen years.  I call this "thread-based paint by numbers", but I acknowledge that it takes some skill to do well, especially on even-weave linen.  It also takes quite a bit of time.  This design took me about a year, from the time I stretched the linen onto the stitching frame, until I got the finished piece home from the framer.

I'm going to give it to grandma.  She's eighty-nine years old, and she still thinks she's in her twenties, and she loves fairies.  I hope she'll be ok with us hanging this up on her wall in her assisted living apartment, and that it will give her some comfort knowing that she is well regarded.  I imagine how she'll sit in the common room with the thick album in her lap, holding court, as the other ladies examine the hundreds of photographs of her son and daughter, of her two grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.  She'll receive these gifts tomorrow, for a belated Mother's Day gift, and afterward, my partner and I will go have a picnic with the other grandparents, the ones who are gone, but not forgotten.  I'll write about the picnic tomorrow, when I come home.

I started this post with an anecdote about my father writing his family stories.  Yesterday, I got a box in the mail full of loose photographs.  Beautiful old photographs.  Putting together the big Shutterfly album for the elders had given me an idea, and my father cooperatively sent me the photos soon after I asked for them.  My family is having a big reunion this July in Oregon.  And wouldn't it be great if I put together another album, or several albums?  I have the text from those family stories, and I have all of these old pictures, and I have that sense of frantic joyfulness, because my family is full of variously frail elders too.  We have had so many losses these past few years that I find myself wondering whether loving someone can keep them in the world a bit longer than otherwise?  Can all of this STUFF ... pictures and written memories ... phone calls and e-mails ... reassurance and interest in their stories ... can all of this stuff be as good as cardiac surgery to keep someone healthy and happy, for longer?

Because I want my elders around for longer, as selfish as that sounds.  I want these people to stay here on earth as long as they can, and tell me their stories so I can write them down, and burn them into my heart, and help get them into libraries, and the artifacts into museums.  If you think libraries and museums don't want your old photos, your memories of wars and lifestyles past ... well, you're wrong, and I have proof.   My dad's words are sitting in the library of the town where he was born, lovingly preserved by those who care very much about remembrance.

Oh, My Bleeding Hearts

On my way to and from dinner in downtown Salem (Massachusetts), I took a short cut through the Ropes Mansion gardens and took a few photographs.  They have two varieties of bleeding hearts in the garden -- (Dicentra spectabilis) in pink/white and white/white.  I have the white/white in my garden at home and I envy the pink/white deeply.  My pink bleeding hearts are the wild variety (Dicentra eximia), which look like a less glorious, more shriveled up version of the cultivated variety.  For a long time, I thought my wild bleeding hearts were suffering from lack of water or bad soil because they looked so pathetic compared to the plump, lush blooms on the other side of the house but it turns out they are just fine as they are, and I will try to appreciate them better.

Need I say how much I love the name "bleeding hearts" for a flower?  The first time I ever saw this flower was in the well-maintained front yard of a friend's grandfather's house in Scituate, and I have loved them ever since.  He has recently passed away, and I'll remember him for his sturdy kindness and his flowers.  He was one of those people in whose home you cannot truly feel like a stranger, because the light is too homey, the occasional silences too companionable.  You can't look at this flower without thinking about love, the passionate love of a sweetheart, or the companionable love of family.

There were irises in the Ropes Mansion garden that remind me of my college mentor, who I think still lives in California.  I remember sitting in her narrow office surrounded by books on ancient Greece and Rome, the professor telling me about scattering shell in her garden for flowers, most notably, the acanthus (which I've chosen to show here instead of the irises).  My mentor loved the acanthus flowers best because she had a passion for ancient Greece, and Corinthian columns are decorated with acanthus leaves at the top and at the base.  I can't see an acanthus plant without thinking about her.  Once in a blue moon I get a regular card or a postcard in the mail from her, which I tack onto my office wall because they usually have a beautiful picture of Greece -- buildings, people.

She generously taught me my second year of ancient Greek in her office.  I wrote my compositions on her board, and together we puzzled through translations of wonderful ancient texts.  Another professor taught me medieval Latin in the same manner, 1:1 in his office.  He has since moved on in the world, tending a Victorian bed and breakfast in Nova Scotia, a place I will visit, one day.  These flowers will always remind me of the generosity of spirit of professors who are moved to give of their time like this.  Can you imagine being so lucky, to bend your head over an ancient text with the whole of a scholar's passionate attention fixed on you?  I was so lucky. I am so lucky.

Although these are white rather than purple, these white wisteria remind me of my father, who has a purple wisteria blooming next to the sliding door of his small house on a small lake in California.  Every once in a while, he sends around a new photo of a sunset shot over the little lake, and the photograph is always lovely.  I'm glad that my father has such a nice view, and that the wisteria smells so sweet in the summer.  The smell is so fulsome and gorgeous that I don't even mind the bees and I wish I had a wisteria plant like his, with its twisted trunk and heavy spikes of blossoms.

My father is recovering from cardiac surgery that he says was like "getting hit by a truck."  It's a miracle of medicine that he can go out the sliding door, down the driveway, and walk along the lake to his post box.  He says he's going a little farther each day, and that he's determined to "stay on the green side of the grass."  His spirit and his quiet, iron will reminds me of my partner's grandfather, who when asked how he is says, "I can't complain.  Wouldn't do any good."

Then, there was this rose, and my thoughts catapulted to my home office, my computer, files and files of research on roses, the old antiques.  I remember folders full of photographs I shot on Highway 127 along the Massachusetts coast, especially of greenhouses, much like the one behind the Ropes Mansion, pictured below.  Roses and greenhouses and magic.

I've never had a garden like the one I have now, and the one I have now is in full bloom, but I haven't taken any photographs of it this year, because I've been too busy quitting writing.

I see this rose, and I think of my research, and also my very first herb garden, which I planted in a half whiskey barrel on the terraced part of my back yard.  There's chives and oregano, orange mint and thyme, basil, sage, and cilantro.  I'm watering them and hoping with all my heart that I will be able to cook with them soon, the idea of pulling something from the garden that I nourished that will in turn nourish me an exciting prospect.

I want to know what's in the little building behind the greenhouse.  I can see into the greenhouse, but the windows on the attached building are covered with vinyl blinds.  Maybe it's full of statues or spare parts or moldy sofas or piles of gardening clogs.  I don't know what's in there, but I get the sense that it can be whatever I want.

Vanishing Act

Hello, my name is Joy, and my last post was over two months ago.  To be honest, I looked at the date very closely to be sure it was dated March of 2012, because it feels like longer than two months since I've written anything -- much longer.  This post was inspired by a question asked of me on Facebook, when I reported my ecstatic feelings about the Cindy Sherman retrospective I saw at MOMA over the weekend.  What's the appeal of all those disturbing pictures?  (Between the lines: the artist herself, shot 500 different ways, most shots emphasizing the grotesque, the artificial, the hideous.)

Let me first say that I appreciated being asked that question.  I appreciated the interaction in and of itself, and also because, due to a confluence of highly-charged emotional events and situations, I was moved to write something again.

This is a big deal to me, because over the past five years, I've quit writing for good at least a dozen times.  My answering the question about Cindy Sherman marks the end of a ten-week quitting streak.  Once I've quit, it's (obviously) hard to start back up again at all, much less with any conviction, so I'm grateful for any jump start whatsoever.  Whenever I quit, you see, there's an accompanying relief that's hard to resist.  I feel a bright wash of intense job security and comfort knowing I will always have good health insurance, and a 401k match, and the only nagging guilt I'll feel is when there are weeds in the garden, or dishes in the sink.  These chores take an hour to remedy, and then I'm back to watching Dr. Who and rearranging the plastic shopping bags in the pantry.  Whenever I quit writing, I rejoice that I'll be able to afford to visit every museum in the world if I want to, and eat at every single one of the world's 50 best restaurants, and I can just shut off that thing that gathers all the details into a pool of anguish in my midsection and makes me cry in the car.  In this dubious state of safety, if I drank beer, I could buy the really fancy kind of beer to cry into, if I wanted to.

Thus, I went to Manhattan without intending to write a word about it.  Not a single word about seeing puppet sex in Avenue Q at the New World Stages (imagine an underground cinema multiplex, only it's 5 stages with live theater).  Not a single word about staying in Hell's Kitchen, which seemingly has a 1:1 tourist-to-restaurant ratio, or roughly 400 restaurants per square foot.  Not a word about the turkey, bacon, and swiss crepe and the French woman wielding the little wooden crepe Zamboni, or the solid offering of tapas from Solera, or the sublimely choreographed six course tasting menu at Daniel (see the link to the world's 50 best restaurants, above).  (Click on the link to Daniel at your own peril - apparently, they are one of the world's top 50 restaurants, but they have not gotten the memo on how annoying opt-out music is on a website.)

At Daniel, your fancy-pants handbag gets its own little fancy-pants ottoman.

I'm name dropping (Daniel! Daniel!), because this is how I am soothed whenever I quit writing.  I roll, I loll, I luxuriate in the opportunity that security and leisure afford.  I eat forbidden food in the presence of stuffed animals. I can do this without feeling gauche because I know I am in a feast year, and famine is just around the corner.  I accidentally spiraled to this place, and it's possible that my famously volatile industry will spit me out next year, and I'll be back on Ramen noodles and unemployment.  It's feast or famine, and I'm on the feast cycle.

So I went to MOMA, and I did not intend to write about the apple spice cake with creme fraiche gelato.  I did not intend to write about taking two pieces of candy from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres installation, one of which I intend to give to the co-worker who mentioned that very installation when expressing her confusion over the value of modern art.  I intended to go to New York City and stuff my face and look at art, and go home, and go back to sleep.  Except I bought the Cindy Sherman catalog, and I was asked what the appeal was, and I cried on the way home in the car.

From the catalog copy: "Cindy Sherman's photographs are not self-portraits.  It is true that she is the model for her own pictures, but that is beside the point."

"The fact that Sherman is in her photographs is immaterial, but the ongoing speculation about her identity gets to the very heart of her work and its resonance.  The conflation of actor, artist, and subject and Sherman's simultaneous presence in and absence from her pictures has driven much of the literature on her, especially in relation to debates about authorship in postmodern art... it is Sherman's very anonymity that distinguishes her work.  Rather than exploration of inner psychology, her pictures are about the projection of personas and stereotypes that are deep-seated in our shared cultural imagination.  Even Sherman's public portraits are manufactured, such as the 1983 Art News cover (which carried the title Who Does Cindy Sherman Think She Is?), featuring a bewigged Sherman in her studio, enacting the role of the 'artist' and recalling figures such as Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and Gilbert & George, whose personas loom large in their work."

"[Sherman's] invented characters speak to our current culture of YouTube fame, celebrity makeovers, reality shows, and the narcissism of social media.  More than ever, identity is malleable and fluid, and Sherman's work confirms this, revealing and critiquing the artifice of identity and how photography is complicit in its making.  Through a variety of characters and scenarios, she addresses the anxieties and status of the self with pictures that are frighteningly on point and direct in their appraisal of the current culture of the cultivated self."

How to explain what this does to me.  If you're not into modern art, what you've just read is probably meaningless babble punctuated with jargon.  I tease at work about business-speak, and "leveraging the synergies," and any set of phrases you repeat over and over again starts to sound like sporksporkspork if you try hard enough.  Nonetheless, I was touched by what I saw and what I read.  The artist, who in projecting herself everywhere -- vanishes.  She vanishes into story.  The art arrives when the artist is herself lost in those larger-than-life, grotesque prints splashed all over MOMA, and it's such the polar opposite effect of what I try to achieve by quitting and vanishing.  When I vanish, I vanish without a ripple, much less leaving an end product that will be studied by generations of art students and ravished apasionados.

The Sherman retrospective reminded me that art, as it affects me most profoundly, is not safe.  It is not something you buy to match the couch, or to cock your head and coo at.  The art that moves me rips my heart out and shows it to me.  It rides in the chariot beside me and reminds me of my mortality in terrifying whispers.  What happens if you die with all this stuff still inside you?  What makes you so different from everybody else, that you crawl away and stuff truffles in your ears so you don't have to (inevitably) make a fool of yourself trying to express that thing that seems so beautiful in your head.  Why are your fears so special-snowflake that you get to quit?  Mean little son of a bitch, that whisper.

In fiction and non-fiction, I write through the Joy-lens.  The fiction is artifice, and features my dreams and nightmares.  The non-fiction is the genuine article.  In my non-fiction I have about as much artifice as a toilet plunger (if you've ever seen a dolled-up toilet plunger -- please send me a link).  The photo on my website, however, is not me.  It is me, but it's not me.  It's me only at a certain angle, and in a certain light.  Trust me; I do not really look like that, except in my imagination.  In real life, I look like a brown sparrow woman, like any woman with dark hair and eyeglasses and a shawl.  In real life, I am invisible in plain sight; I don't need to vanish into my art in order to vanish.  If I cared about how I look more, I would cut my hair, wear contact lenses, go to the gym, take lots more pictures at that one certain angle.  As these things go, I only put on my diamonds and emeralds when I want to get good service in a shopping situation.  I have actually been kicked out of an upscale antique shop for wearing a denim jacket with a Tweety Bird on it, and I've learned my lesson about how to blend in so I can look at the marble statues.

I went to Manhattan not intending to write about anything, ever again.  Then I saw a retrospective on an artist whose art is made when she is lost, and I read a book, and I answered a question on Facebook, and I cried halfway home, and here I am now, un-quitting again.

Hi.