Putting up the pictures
It’s a museum almost, but a living one, becoming ours as it comes into its own.
In the kitchen, a mystical fish, a carp I think, with black and orange stripes moving among water lilies in a pond of water of pale greens and pinks and yellows by the imagination of the painter, not Rachel Carson-like pollution.
In the dining room off the kitchen, four Zambian women, each balancing a large wicker basket filled with maize and cassava on her head. On its side near the dining-room table, a painting of prehistoric bulls on brown wrapping paper, still deciding since it can’t have the cave.
In the living room, a double exposure photo-painting of a singer, eyes closed to hear the song before she sings it. On the wall next to it, an egg-shaped Mexican sun coming up with a fiery mane over a blazing desert. A black thorn tree in the foreground.
In the main bedroom, a woman with a baby at her breast, looking out at something but not at you.
Above the stairs going down in this split-level house, a skydiver, forever young, flying or falling over a moonlike planet.
In the study, a photo of Guatemalan refugees on a raft bound for Mexico. Ocean waves like stormclouds burst around them.
In the family room, a poster of Baptiste, the 1840s mime in Les Enfants du Paradis, Children of Paradise, filmed during the French Resistance.
In the bedroom, an Irish setter named Tess in the woods, pointing.
In the music room, a burst of flames of greens and reds and yellows trying to send a cable from another cosmos.
And more in every room and hallway, many of them from the house of grief and love in Connecticut. Past and present are changing before our eyes, too fast, or too slow, for us to see.
I started this blog planning to move gradually from individual and family grief toward social and collective grief, with the culminating last few posts taking up national grief. It worked out differently, more organically, a switching of lenses from post to post or within a post, asking questions more than answering them. Feeling my way toward a fixed point. If I’d known better at the outset I’d have asked for a consult with my brother the jazz musician.
I’m not sure whether I’m an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist, but it may come to the same thing, in closing. I’m thinking of ways of grieving and of responding to grief that come through and with grief, which is ours and us. These must be ways that, to paraphrase Yeats, can sustain us in our hearts’ deep core, cobbled together person to person, group to group, pollinating each other.
We used to be known for making things. Not so much now, maybe, and without the same deep well of optimism to draw from. Traces of those skills and that disposition may persist, though, to be put to different uses for a different time.
Can we make an American Grief we can live with?
Readers, my thanks to all of you.
