Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Sorry, just getting back to this thread after nearly a month.

My computer took a huge dive, thanks to some virus somebody put in my computer several months ago. I thought I had quarantined it, but apparently I wasn't successful. 250$ later I am back on line.

Why does death scare us so much? We beat it back as if it was the enemy. Death isn't the enemy, it's pointless suffering that's the enemy.

Someone said lots of people lived into their 70s and 80s -- it isn't a new thing after all. Well, I admit that when I look at my recent ancestors, going back about 5 or 6 generations, many of them lived into ripe old age. But genetically, anyone that we are descended from today was one of the fortunate. The ones that died early on either didn't have progeny, or left their progeny ill-prepared to outlast poverty and orphanhood. It still IS a new thing in the history of humankind. 5 or 6 generations ago, people had some rudimentary ideas about hygiene and health. If I count 10 or 20 generations back, things were very different. People were dying of cholera and the plague, and too much bleeding with leeches after a brief illness. They died of asthma and bee stings and the flu and diptheria and childbirth and murder and starvation and exposure and bear attacks and SO many other things. The lucky ones were just dying of overwork, poor nutrition and unsanitary conditions, after about 30, 40, 50 years. Can you imagine dying of periodontal disease? Well, it happened. Sure, some lived to old age, but I'll bet that not many made it as far as we'd like to think.

Norman, it's all very well for the fortunate to embrace life, and the possibility of creation. Go for it. You have enough money to last for some time. You can buy oils and canvas and pastels and continue to create. You can go on vacations occasionally and when you come back you can resume your relatively secure retired (or semi-retired) life. You can keep yourself in reasonably good shape in this state because there's little to distress you or take up large portions of your time with mandatory obligations. My parents just got back from another cruise and my aunt and uncle just returned from their vacation cabin in the Adirondacks. My father will resume his genealogy research and my uncle will embark on a new novel that will never be published. You have someone to share this enjoyable time with, and that too, makes you want to live just a bit longer. I can certainly understand that.

The truth is, there are plenty of people with a lot less than you. They don't feel the same way about staying alive. I ask for very little, but I don't have the little I've asked for, and it's possible that I may never have it.

I don't want pity, but I have a nasty habit of answering questions truthfully on these websites, when they're asked.

Mnaz, rationalization? Yes, that's what works. It's another day. It may bring something. I'll eat and the food will taste good. I'll go to work and someone may buy a product from me. Or, someone may show up on the radar that will buy in the future. My boss might actually have a good day, so I don't go home tense. Or, she might have business that takes her out of the office.

Right now, I have a hope. It's a very unlikely proposition, and it won't happen, and by the end of this week I'll KNOW it won't happen. In the meantime, I keep myself pushing to the end of the week by telling myself MAYBE, MAYBE it will happen. You never know. It could happen. I'm doing what little I can do in the meantime to try to make it happen. Ask me on Friday, how I feel, and I'll be back to zero. I live on hopes. Some are bigger than others. This is one of the bigger ones to come along in quite a while, but for that very reason, it's out of my reach.

I have cats right now, and I know that if my life was cut short, they'd suffer. They are all adults. Some have behavioral problems that would guarantee their deaths. Others have illnesses that might make death likely. All are adults, and adult cats usually don't find loving, secure homes that easily. They are all supremely happy living with me and with each other. I can't mess up the lives of 12 innocent creatures, so here I am. It doesn't seem like a lot, but this is what I have -- an obligation and a bond of love to some little things who would have no other options if I disappeared. Maybe I ought to be thankful that I've got this obligation, but if they weren't here, I wouldn't have anything to make me want to live another day.

I keep looking for something more. It doesn't come.

You live as long as life is bearable to you, and as long as you feel some attachment to things outside yourself.

Dear Kat:

Nice to see you fly back in the aviary for a moment. I miss seeing your words.

You and I are, among the few ailurophiles I have known, probably in the top ten percent for nuttiness and devotion to the feline legions.

I have been known to become seriously ill over the death of a favorite cat, and they are all favorites. Right now I'm hoping I will launch into the Beyond before my current two make their exits.

All this by way of saying I appreciate your love and commitment to sustaining our little friends, and that, to me, it is not a small or mean or less than noble commitment.

Yes, I agree-- life has been good to me. I came from a family impoverished, uneducated, continually itinerant, alcoholic, deranged mentally and culturally deprived and ignorant, some of those conditions being self-willed. I was fortunate enough to be sponsored for college by state-subsidized schools, and encouraged by fine teachers, some of whom became personal friends.

While I am not an art careerist or a wage-earning writer, I have produced a sizeable body of work in both those zones. I am married and happily living in a tract house where the weather is fine and fire and flood have not touched me.

But there is also Jack, and his mystery-- one I think about more and more these days.

Jack just died on September 19th. We had known each other, just barely short of "socially" for about twenty-five years. He was my tax accountant.

But that wasn't all. We had gone to candlelight anti-war vigils together, talked endlessly about politics, religion, power, money, art and society. We were good friends.

Just before we received our usual invitation for our yearly visit, a letter arrived from Jack's business partner. My friend was dead at 72.

As Anthony Burgess titled the second volume of his autobiography, "You've Had Your Time." The title flickered across my memory as I read the obituary letter.

I thought of the last time I had faced him across his desk in that lonely little Dickensian hole he called his office, the FM radio blaring out hits of the 6o's through the 80's, of his son, who became a public defense lawyer and worked pro bono for prisoners-- of Jack's wife, who died of cancer when I was teaching in Southern California, and about whom he talked every single time I saw him-- even thirty years later. He was still in love, and she was lovely-- not like a movie starlet, but lovely as the person who started the first chapter of N.O.W. in our county-- a brilliant fighter, fierce, proud and smart.

And now Jack is gone, along with Louis Armstrong and Richard Feynmann and Degas and Isaiah Berlin and many others I admired.

Recently I attended an exhibit in LA from the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. It so happened that on that occasion, one of my living heroes, R.B. Kitaj

http://www.glyphs.com/art/kitaj/


chose to go to the same show at the same time, having recently moved to Los Angeles from London.

And there we were-- my art hero and me, circulating around the show, looking at the Bonnards and the Cezannes. I knew a great deal about Kitaj and own five books on his art, but I was just another face in the crowd to him. I admit that, for the first ten minutes, I paid nearly as much attention to him as to the dead artists whose glorious work hung on the walls around us.

He was a haggard, wild and rather frightened- looking figure, far from his vigorous and movie-star handsome young self one sometimes sees in photos. He reminded me of Coleridge's description of the Ancient Mariner. He had lost his wife-- his lifelong soul-mate, in 1994. She died of a sudden aneurysm in her early fifties. He was now seventy-two, and the survivor of a serious heart attack.

http://www.geocities.com/pantherprousa/ ... don01.html

( scroll down and you'll find her-- School of London, page 2)


He was alone and unaccompanied in the crowd of nosing picture-lookers, I among them. His eye was expert, like mine-- he was re-visiting favorites. So was I.

But he was world famous, yet anonymous. No one seemed to recognize him but me, only perhaps they did, and like me, left him alone.

And then he was gone, like Coleridge's character. Headed for the grave.

Why have I bothered to speak of these two characters, one rather close, though not intimate, the other an icon from my pantheon of important living artists?

Because they go where I am going, and there is little to ameliorate that fact. No one is ready. No one is expert at dying, and we learn from on-the-job training. And I think about it every day.

You knew me when I was young. You might barely recognize me now, but I have learned a few things in aging.

The best age to die is nothing we can know. We can only ruminate on whether it's better for a tax accountant or an artist to go at seventy or thirty.

But those Cezannes were marvelous, and it was nice to know that Kitaj and I were looking at the same painting of the Provence viaduct at the same time once before we die.

Peace, and be well.

Write some time,


--N

Death does not come
alike to all
the history of loss
begins it
not the ravishments of time
or the accumulation of days
death creeps in when the door closes
when the answer is no
or no answer comes at all
there is the voice of death
death is in the answering machine
speaking at the sound of the tone
death reschedules
death sets a time aside
for a later date
another place
death sits in
on little meetings
and in parked cars
on empty streets
Death is not
the result of age
or drink
or smoke or drugs or disease
death is the result
of a thousand little silences
and when the stillness deafens us
we die.

" . . .death reschedules . . ."

is marvelous.


--me