December Grading and Goodbyes, on the Death of Hyacinthos.
On a bright December day, we visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Starting with the Italian and Northern Renaissance masters on the top floor, we explored the Mexican art of the period, the Crucifixion Diptych, Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and St. John, the massacre of the innocents, St Sebastian's wounds, the college kid’s beloved Duchamp readymades, and the majestic, Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), from 1915-1923, the winter light pouring from the sky through the cracks, reflections and shadows, ideas and shades splashing across the room.
Ever an absurdist, drawn to that space between Spanish Punk and the Surreal, the teenager looked on, studying the details.
We’d been here before, when she was born two decades prior to her sibling joining. I always loved the play of dada.
Floor after floor we walked, from medieval arts, through the American wing and its encounters with difference, comparing notes. The teenager did a talk on the annunciation.
My mind kept trailing back to the dreams the night before, still running through my mind, the conflicts and inconsistencies, internal fears and anxieties, the family curses and affiliations, King Lear’s family jealousies, Gereon Rath and Charlotte Ritter, rummaging through the porn files in Weimar, taking on the fascists in Babylon Berlin that we watched before we went to sleep.
I found myself reflecting on the “Death of Hyacinth,” on the third floor. The work is inspired by the story from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, of Apollo playing with Hyacinth, lost in his enthusiasm, inadvertently robbing the mortal of his life, Apollo filled with length, deep regret, anger at himself, sadness at his fate, all of our fates, trying to make right, transforming his friend’s blood into a flower. Other versions of the tale trace Hyacinth playing carelessly, inviting his own demise. "Thine is the suffering, mine the crime" laments Apollo, the flower to live forever, eternal nature, in of it, beauty confronting tragedy.
Yet, not all of us have our blood spring into flowers, not immediately at least. “Your fate is mortal: what you ask for isn’t,” writes Ovid. Still the bard reminds us, “Nothing retains its original form, but Nature, the goddess of all renewal, keeps altering one shape into another. Nothing at all in the world can perish, you have to believe me; things merely vary and change their appearance. What we call birth is merely becoming a different entity; what we call death is ceasing to be the same. Though the parts may possibly shift their position from here to there, the wholeness in nature is constant.”
Earlier in the month in book group we discussed The Vegetarian by Han Kang, a tale of a transformation, not unlike the Metamorphoses: “Look, sister, I'm doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands...they delve down into the earth. Endlessly, endlessly... yes, I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom,” wrote Kang, her protagonist eluding the social controls and sexual violence of her community, not unlike the nymph Daphne, the mortal who turns to a laurel tree to avoid Apollo and his advances.
Connecting everything we could see, we walked through the second floor of the museum.
“Think” demands one piece.
Saint Sebastion is still wounded on the third floor. The massacre of the innocents continues, the ruins of Rome become a site of a bath. The struggles are everywhere, one story, ebbing into another.
On the second floor, we explore, "The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure...." The kid compares the work with the the Bob Tompson show she ran tours for on the West Coast; I thought of William Johnson and the entangled questions about our lives: "This 'we' that is 'us' in the margins, that 'we' who inhabit marginal space that is not a site of domination but a place of resistance….” says the bell hooks quote from Marginality As A Site of Resistance, “I am speaking from a place in the margins where I am different. where I see things differently. I am talking about what I see.'” What do you see, I imagine asking my students, the students who give my life so much meaning. I think of the stories I learned from them this year, teaching at CUNY, from my friends in book group, who i read with through the years, book after book, from 2666 to Infinite Jest, Pedro Paramo to the Vegetarian and The Body Artist, The Red Book/Jung, The Question of Palestine, Dead Can Dance, Infinite Jest/Wallace, and Memento Mori, story after story.
The kid and I stop before, “"Untitled (I’m Turning Into A Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going To Haunt You)" a work by Glenn Ligon referring to a play by Jean Genet, a meditation on art, on AIDS, on selves.
Jenny Holtzer’s words follow: “It takes a while to learn to step over inert bodies and go ahead with what you were trying to do.” Images flash of city streets, full of homelessness, of bodies in migration, and our callousness.
We stumble upon a puppy and a dancer, works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. You know his story, the kid asks, telling me about his method. No studio, he visited brothels, painting what he saw there, hiring models to paint, finding companionship, as well as a little love.
On we explore stories of Mexican Modernism, stop for coffee and tea and make our way back. The kid jumps on a train to New York. I stay in Princeton with my brothers and mom, thinking about the year that came before, the losses, Aunt Glady, Navalny, Karma, Louisa, Kris and Elliot from the movies, Steve from ABC, Teddy from Rev Billy, my cousin Scotty, political failures, And the connections we’ve all forged through time, the three arrests, steps forward, backward, the climate superfund act and congestion pricing become law in New York State.
My grades are due.
Our activism continues.
I make my way back to Brooklyn, back through the month of December.
A few highlights:
December 11th
I met the @voiceofthegowanis gang for the VoG Meet ‘n Greet Happy Hour, for information sharing, questions, and meeting our members and your neighbors.
"This is a forever toxic place..." says Martin "a formal wetland, a toxic floodplain..."
"For discussion: the expanding Soil Vapor Intrusion investigations into indoor air and contaminated groundwater, new hotspots, the National Grid lawsuit that’s halting the mitigation of contamination at ‘Gowanus Green’ on Smith St, odors and health effects near the Sewage Retention tanks construction site on Nevins St. Reality hits: this is forever toxic land, the NYS DEC, EPA and City plan is not a full cleanup..."
Word from a friend.
Louisa died of an OD,
My mind flashes back to a night in the rain in the Bahamas,
so gorgeous all those years ago.
Uppers and downers and booze, she was out.
Vigil for a squatter.
RIP Steve... thanks for being there for us
That Friday, I rode my bike to Freddy’s.
Don't think twice with 47 cents.. a night with Cosmic Clouds, rolling from Park Side Lounge with Ray and Wendy to Punjabi where we ran into Haley... and Village Works ... and into the night... lost friends in my mind... the world changing along with us ...solstice is coming... the earth is sleeping... magic light everywhere…
Met mom for lunch the next day for cassoulet. Mom and I chatted about the holidays and life. Then I joined my friends for an end of year meetup. Finishing Genes party Baby C and I watched the gorgeous screen adaptation of Queer at Alamo. "Lola’s was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola’s. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times," writes William S. Burroughs, in Queer.
My kid in Boston found themselves digging through the archives and found all these stories. They tell me about their paper, sending it my way for a look at their research on ACT UP Boston, a chapter no one really thinks about any more. Strange moment, the paper about ACT UP Boston, their ascent and decline in 1993, 1996., recalling the difficult down after the Berlin conference in 1993.
Anyone know anything about what happened to ACT UP Boston, I ask comrades on facebook.
Liz Highleyman replied,
“What do you want to know? I moved away from Boston in 1994. ACT UP was still around, but on the decline. Unlike ACT UP/SF and ACT UP/NY, there was never a real ideological split. I think Benjamin is right that people were discouraged about the lack of progress on treatment in the years before the protease inhibitor breakthrough in 1995-6. And a lot of members left Boston (largely for NY or SF) around the same time I did.”
David Hamburger added, “Yeah, I think Liz has it. Also, I think that all groups that are bound together by anger tend to burn out. You can only run on rage for so long. It's weird how one year, you can be going to 4 meetings and demos a week, then a year later, you just can't. We definitely didn't have any major split in Boston, although a lot of people did move on to shiny new Queer Nation, too. But, like in NYC, most people who did stayed involved in ACT UP too. But splitting people's attention probably didn't help….Also, the timeline on that page is definitely off. I think that most of the stuff listed under 1995-6 happened much earlier. The Cardinal Law demo (which I organized) was definitely in June, 1990, right after Stop the Church in NYC, which inspired it. It brought us a lot of attention and a ton of new members, which was probably the peak of the group, in terms of members and activity. (1990-1992.) QN/Boston formed a few months after the Law demo.”
It's heartbreaking and amazing to read and see all this.
That Sunday, we spent the afternoon in a book group on the Vegeatarian and the Body Artist, discussing the metamorphosis that grips us, the parallels with Virginia Woolf and The Awakening. Walked over to the Gowanus Dredgers for an art show, looking inside and outside at the Transformations. "Beyond climate despair.... self healing ...inner transformation.. as intervention... show up with more peace..." says Olive.. The teenager was home. We joined Aunt Caroline for dinner on a long lazy Sunday, looking back at a long strange year.
All week, the students ran their final class presentations. Some of the students ran groups on suicide prevention, others on trauma informed care with adolescents, others on stress among college students, from theory to practice, we learned, they supported each other all semester long. I love the human services students. Last day of trauma informed practice, students showed up ready to write one or two full bluebooks, reflecting on trauma and recovery. Students researched wounds related to breakups and absurd parental expectations, migrations and childhood neglect, the french sexual abuse scandal and hiv, books including i know why the caged bird sings and sophies choice. We are all learning from each other. I'm lucky to learn from them every day.
Thursday, the kid arrived from Boston. After meeting them in Midtown, I found myself reading Lear and the New Yorker at a union meeting, singing Christmas carols with Monica, gossiping with my comrades at Sophies, toasting to Chuck and Steve and Brad and Ken our other lost comrades, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, what an end of the year.
Says the Bard, “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.” Feels right for the family drama of the holidays, unfolding year after year, kids departing, arriving, families ever expanding and contracting, on and on.
We woke to the first snow, greeting the Solstice with folk songs, Pete remembering Woody, townes van zandt exhuming blaze foley' grave, stories of girlfriends lost in chicago, on the way to Rosendale New York for a hike, lunch at Port Ewen diner, coffee and eggs, glorious crisp light in the air, an old abandoned squat in the snow, a view of the river below from a cliff in the woods on a magic snow day with the teenager djing the day away, tripping on that high and lonesome feeling, listening to Sierra Ferrell crooning, debating whose version of Pancho and lefty is better, Willie and Merle or Townz' …:
They all sang:
“Living on the road, my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath's as hard as kerosene
You weren't your mama's only boy
But her favorite one, it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams.”
We all sank into those dreams, ever enveloping us.
Each day, a different story or feeling, a different novel, a different friend, a different meeting point.
Will, John and I watched Casablanca with Mom. A story of resistance, John knew all the lines, reciting them like a true cult movie. I still get goopy when they sing La Marseillaise at Ricks, out blasting the Nazis. "Round up the usual suspects ..." "This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship..." We are all human. Ricks a reluctant hero, his efforts offer an important lesson.
That morning, Nico looked about, at the new tassel in the bedroom.
Fly and I exchanged books, telling stories of the squatters.
Walking around the Lower East Side, I thought about the good feeling i was having. It's been a wild few weeks. But I'm ready for 2025. We've been here before. I recall the grief that turned to passion and a mission in Emma Goldman's thinking, in her heart after the murders of the Haymarket Martyrs. As she wrote in her memoir, Living My Life:
"I had a distinct sensation that something new and wonderful had been born in my soul. A great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own, to make known to the world their beautiful lives and heroic deaths."
Later the next day, Billy and I strolled through Greenwood Cemetery, Visiting Lenny Bernstein and DeWitt Clinton, talking about Teddy saying goodbye. That's part of what we do. We say goodbye, ushering people through it all, he told me, reflecting on his work in the community, walking past grave after grave, looking at the city and our lives.
Goodbye Karma, Scotty, Steve, Teddy, Kris, RIP.
Hello Jimmy, we wrote in our scrapbooks in 1977. I was in first grade, living in Atlanta at the time. The Allman Brothers campaigned with him. A Southerner, he made us proud to be on the right side of history for once. He signed the Community Reinvestment Act into law his first year in office in 1977, signing peace accords, opening up a space for a lot of us. Waging peace, he did the right thing in a complicated world, sacrificing his presidency instead of bombing Iran after the hostage crisis. Mom voted for him in 1980, Dad for Reagan. I remember the day the hostages were released in 1980. I was in Fifth Grade at the time. And he was as low as he could get. Yet, he bounced back, waging peace, fighting poverty. I saw him speak a dozen years later in 1993 after Clinton was elected, again making us proud, still talking about waging peace and teaching Sunday school. I can't find that old Carter scrapbook. But he still made me proud.
"My vision of this nation and its future has been deepened and matured during the nineteen months that I have campaigned among you for President. I have never had more faith in America than I do today. We have an America that, in Bob Dylan's phrase, is busy being born, not busy dying.” Jimmy Carter 1976
RIP Jimmy.
Mourning Jimmy, i think of the places we've been this year, road trips with the teenager listenning to folk punk, sojourns with mon amour to Mexico City and Crete and Berlin and New Orleans, trips to see art and music, through Kreutzberg with the college kid, arrests with summer of heat, adventures in London and Brussels, busts with my union, poetry walks from the West Village to the East, from Judson to Village Works, reading the Red Book with 2666, embracing the empyy nest, looking deep inside, feeling greatful for my students and buddies and the road ahead into the faabulous unknown.
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