Teddy Bear Man
He comes back to me, the Teddy Bear Man, sitting in a storage shed a few miles away among a storage shed coliseum of small, medium, and large packing boxes, some labeled, some not in the final sprint to empty our house in Connecticut before the new owners took possession.
Of the labeled boxes, some were unpacked of their original contents and repacked with others but with the original labeling still on the boxes. All, labeled and unlabeled, are stuffed with books, files, letters, decorative cups, children’s caps and gowns and high school and college diplomas, kitchen equipment and silverware, family heirlooms, pizza pans, and a quesadilla maker. Along with carpentry and garden tools, three hand carts, one bought for the move, one left in the storage shed by the movers, and a third that the first two having sex is the only possible explanation for. Plus my father’s finely carved and painted birds and fish, family and other art work, and a couple rugs headed straight for the curb when we liberate them from the shed. All were gathered in with or cling to the whirlwind of our vow to start anew with a new house in a different state, all of us together again at last.
I’ve thought and felt much about the Teddy Bear Man for many years. He rises above his lowest denominator caricature style as the genius of Dickens, whom he looks like a character out of, elevated his own caricatures to the level of art. The man’s hair is black as the blackest night, an obvious dye job as he’s sixty if he’s a day. A ridiculously large tear runs down his face, others well up at his eyelids. Loose skin droops over jowls like an unmade bed. The Teddy Bear he holds in his arms is headless. The head lies on the ground.
The image is ludicrous, frightening, hilarious, forbidding. You can laugh at the Teddy Bear Man’s marshmallow sentimentality, having a big baby cry out of sight of his 9 to 5 ever-proper adult compatriots. Or you can stand frozen in the presence of pain you can’t take your eyes off of. Or you can turn away, annoyed with the artist for posing such impossible questions of his viewers. The English Romantic poet John Keats wrote about ‘negative capability,’ the capacity to sit with the insoluble problem and not demand an answer, even when it threatens to undermine your sacred vow to uphold reason at all costs. You need a bit of that to sit with what the Teddy Bear Man asks. Or does he?
And there’s more. How did the Teddy Bear lose it’s head? No clue, all surmise, and all further convoluted by the possibility that the Teddy Bear Man is, in fact, a child. Yes, his face could be an expensive Halloween mask, the kind you pull over your head, with the floppy neck hanging over the collar of the brown jacket and newspaper muscles stuffed in the arms of his sports jacket. The child hiding behind the man has just found his broken Teddy Bear. His reaction is a proper, free-of-nuance rehearsal of a young child for tragedy that waits up the road for him.
But today, studying the image today in my mind’s eye, a new question comes to me. Can you laugh at grief?
You can, as the observer, when the grief you see exposes itself as crocodile tears. You can, at your own grief, when you detect a note of falseness in it, a wish to be praised for your sensitivity, pitied and taken care of, mothered or cared for in other ways. Thus to make fun of false grief can be a healthy thing. And by mocking false grief, the artist in you bars the door before the House of Grief so that only those who can see and dare to can enter.
