Av 5786: Between Memorials

Joseph Skibell concludes his reflection on mourning and memory in "Between Memorials," moving from a sweltering theater at the University of Texas, where friends and former students eulogize his mentor Jim Magnuson, to a Rothko exhibit in Florence, a museum in Portland, and a retreat with Shefa. Across two memorials in sixteen days, Skibell traces a single thread: the way grief opens a kind of seeing, where the visible world becomes a threshold to what lies behind it. Guitars, paintings, a forty-year marriage, a friend's ordinary kindness — each turns out to be a vessel for something larger, glimpsed only once the person or the moment has passed. Part II of a two-part essay in honor of the month of Av

Part II: In the Speaking Silence

First of all, it’s hot. They’ve moved the memorial from the Harry Ransom Center to a theater in the University of Texas Student Union to accommodate more people, and the air conditioning isn’t working.

This is Austin in June, and as people file into the theater, they’re taking off their jackets and fanning themselves with their programs. The stagnant air makes it feels like we’re all being baked inside an oven, and I’m reminded of that famous quote from General Philip Henry Sheridan. Asked by a reporter what the newly arrived Sheridan thought of the great state of Texas, the General sniped: “If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.” 

Large fans are dragged in, bottles of water are being distributed, and everything starts late with a profusion of apologetic, self-congratulatory props from the master of ceremonies about our collective fortitude and endurance.

And the second thing is: I’ve been threading my way through the seats in the theater, saying hello to people. It’s strange to come back to a place after 30 years. Not that I haven’t been to Austin in all that time, but never in a group with the people I knew all those years ago. 

A poet who was 50 when we were here in school together is now 80; the two Alexes both have grey hair; people keep telling me, “You look great!” but it only makes me wonder how bad I must have looked the last time they saw me. 

Strangely, I’m recognizing some people only from their posture. 

“Who is that fellow with the curved slouch?” I say, leaning in to ask my wife Barbara, after we’ve taken our seats. 

She looks in the direction I’ve indicated. “The man talking to the woman in the red shirt?” 

“I’d know that slouch anywhere.”  

 “Yeah, I don’t know.” She shrugs.

“Oh, my God. It’s – that’s Bill!” I tell her. 

Bill is someone I’ve known for only a few years in North Carolina where our daughter is living. He’s Jim’s brother-in-law, a renowned scholar of the South, but he’s a little out of context for me here. 

I get up and walk down the aisle and offer him my hand. 

“Bill, hi. It’s Joseph Skibell,” I say, knowing that I’m out of context for him as well.  

“Joseph!” he exclaims. “You look great!”

I laugh, privately, to myself. 

“You’re looking great too, Bill.” 

“Marci,” he says to his wife, “it’s Joseph. Doesn’t he look great!”  

This is the second memorial I’ve been to in sixteen days. The first one, for the guitar-maker Ken Parker, was in a bar in Gloucester; this one, on the campus of the University of Texas, is for the writer Jim Magnuson. 

A novelist and playwright, Jim ran the Michener Center for Writers here at the University for 23 years, from 1994 and 2017. The interdisciplinary writing program, originally endowed with $13 million from James Michener, gives 10 aspiring writers each year the money and time to find out who they are as artists.  

I was a student in the Center’s first official class, and it’s no exaggeration to say that Jim changed my life. He guided and encouraged me through the writing of my first novel, and when it was finished, he found an agent for it. Later, he brought me into the Center to read and to teach, and he remained a trusted mentor and an advisor until his death in January. 

Like Ken, Jim was a big presence, a talker, an enthusiast, a person who seemed enthralled with life and the possibilities of his work, and I felt more than privileged – I feel blessed – to have known both and to have called each of them a friend. 

The air is still off, but the fans are running, and the water has been passed around, and after a few more rueful remarks about the heat by Bret Anthony Johnson, the current director of the Center, the eulogies begin. 

You’ll be lucky if, like Jim, your eulogists are professional writers. Nine such writers have been asked to speak – poets, novelists, essayists, people whose books have been turned into movies. 

It was quite different at Ken’s memorial. Ken was an innovative luthier with instruments in the permanent collection at the Met, and not all, but many of the people who spoke at his memorial were musicians. 

With instruments in their hands, they remembered Ken mostly ad lib, their comments, like interstitial song patter, decorated with a filigree of guitar noodlings.  

But not here. 

These writers have come armed, not merely with notes, but with complete drafts, and these are people who make their living by describing things, and as they take turns reading, replacing one another on the hot stage, a collective and highly precise portrait of Jim begins to emerge. 

Nothing they say is surprising or unknown. Without fear of contradiction, I think I can say that Jim – bald, bespectacled, portly, with white hair and a white beard – came off as a good-natured, affable, sometimes even goofy Midwesterner of Norwegian descent. 

Neither a rube nor a sophisticate, he was the kind of writer who would rehearse the plots of his books with anyone he had dinner with, carefully gauging their fluctuating interest level. He greeted strangers in restaurants or would give a thumbs-up to people he didn’t know who crossed his path on a walk around Town Lake: “Ah, there he is! Good man!” he’d say to the stranger’s utter bewilderment. 

He was famous for pounding his friends on their hearts with his fist, or shaking them by the shoulders, to buck them up, and no matter what he was talking about – your books, his books, your wedding, the birth of your child – his mantra was always, “It’s gonna be great!” 

Once, taking a tuna fish sandwich out of his overstuffed briefcase, he was momentarily confused. “I thought I ate this already,” he said, horrified to realize that he’d eaten last week’s sandwich, and that this week’s sandwich was the one he was holding in his hand.   

Perhaps on the principle that a tree is best measured when it’s down, as speaker after speaker describe these familiar, comically charming traits, a deeper portrait begins to emerge, and it’s a portrait of a man of unfathomable generosity, a man of unquenchable caring, a friend, a mentor, a macher to perhaps hundreds of writers both young and old, a man whose son never once saw him angry, and who – according to the poet Marie Howe – appeared nightly to her, after his death when, following her heart surgery, she had trouble sleeping. 

This is the Jim we all knew, and yet it feels like his greatness – his tzadek-ness, his bodhisattva-ismo – now so clear, had somehow been hidden all this time in plain sight. 

I turn to look at Barbara sitting next to me – our time in Austin at the Michener Center was a large part of her life as well – and I see that she has a tear in her eye. 

She and I have been traveling together for weeks. Rome and Florence, Sicily, New York State, Boston and Ken’s memorial for me, Durham first for Barbara and then for the two of us, then Atlanta, and now Austin before we’re scheduled to finally arrive tomorrow in Santa Fe where we usually spend our summers. 

After more than 40 years together, the traveling has given us an opportunity to spend some intimate time, looking back, reflecting, taking stock. 

Have I been a good husband? Have you been a good wife? Have we given each other the love we deserve?

In Florence, we went to see the Rothko exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi. It was Shabbat, we had all afternoon, and we made our way through the galleries slowly, often sitting on benches or low windowsills, letting the quiet paintings speak to us, as each room emptied and filled and emptied again with visitors.

The paintings are remarkable in the commanding silence they evoke.

Rothko, an intellectual who lived a rich culturally Jewish life, and who was the only child of his family sent to religious school during what we might today call his father’s ba’al teshuvah period, was surely aware of the concept of chashmal.  

The word comes from the Book of Ezekiel, in the prophet’s description of the Divine Chariot, but it could easily be a description of a late-style Rothko: “a great cloud with flashing fire, and a brilliance surrounding it, and from the midst of the fire, something like the appearance of chashmal,” which the Talmudic rabbis, employing their playful etymologies, define as a speaking silence.

The exhibit, which covers Rothko’s entire career, moves briskly through the early styles, slowing its stride when it comes to the later work, and there’s a lot of it to see. Despite the time we’re taking with it, when it comes to this late work – those luminous fields of colors shimmering over luminous fields of color – it can be a case of seen one, seen them all.

“You know,” I whisper to Barbara, “as great as these are – and they are great …” 

“They are great,” she agrees. 

“…wouldn’t it be amazing to still be young enough to have your life changed by an art exhibit?” 

The last time I saw a Rothko was in the Portland Museum of Art in late January. 

I’d arrived in the city the day before a Shefa Retreat, a Jewish psychedelic experience, and after lunch with another participant, a young man named Ben, the two of us went to the museum. 

This happened also to be the day I learned of Jim’s death. When my plane landed, I turned on my phone and found the text from a mutual friend letting me know he had died. 

In the Portland Museum, where Rothko’s Jewishness had been erased – he was identified only as a Russian-born American artist – Ben mentioned the idea that perhaps these cloud-like shapes of color weren’t the true subject of Rothko’s painting but were instead barriers painted over the true subject.

In Florence, this idea hit me profoundly, and looking at the paintings, I understood them in this life-changing way: I understood that, with an informed imagination, what we’re not allowed to see allows us to see what we’re not allowed to see. 

I know that hardly makes any sense. 

Let me see if I can put it another way: that matter, the physical manifestation of the world, its materiality – at times dark, at times luminous, but always impenetrable – simultaneously reveals and conceals its deeper essences. That the big ol’ friendly Midwestern writer might, in fact, be a hidden saint. That his big ol’ Midwestern friendliness might have been the easily overlooked delivery system for some kind of divine love, a love without limits and boundaries. 

Or that the exquisite and conscientiously innovative guitars Ken designed and built aren’t primarily material objects. As though hidden in plain sight, each guitar is instead an impeccably designed portal, a vibratory resonator, without which we wouldn’t be able to hear the music that is otherwise always playing, and that Ken, too, was a resonator, one more portal, one more filter the music used in order to be heard.  

Or that a spouse of 40 years, traveling with you through time and space, and in that moment standing beside you in the final room of a Rothko exhibit in Florence, is a presence so stable and familiar that you often can’t see her as the conduit of love and caring she has always been.  

This seeing behind can make our lives seem fractal – I think that’s the word for it – with each part referencing a larger whole. 

I mean, I still don’t understand how, on a Thursday, at Ken’s memorial in Gloucester, his old business partner, Larry Fishman, can tell me he has dreams so intense he doesn’t know which is his real life – the dreams or his life – and two days later, napping on a couch in Durham, I dream of a Blue Man in a dream so intense I wake up from it, not knowing which is realer: the dream or the life going on all around me in the living room where I’ve fallen asleep. 

And now, sitting here, sweltering in the Texas heat, with my life partner of over 40 years to my right, and my friends of 30 years sitting to her right, mourning a man who, without my realizing it, gave me almost everything I needed to become an artist, I understand what Rothko understood: that in the speaking silence, in the shifting ratio of matter to essence, what we’re not allowed to see will one day allow us to see what we’re not allowed to see. 

And Larry’s probably right: isn’t it clear that our lives aren’t quite real? As we age, Time picks up speed around the curves, like a drag-racing teenager, leaving skid marks in its wake. Thirty years can whir by in the blink of an eye.You can leave Austin, Texas, as a relatively young man and return to find your companions older and grey-haired. Friends arrive and depart. Love is mysteriously easy and then, just as mysteriously, it’s hard. 

We want our lives to matter, but in the end, as I think one day we’ll all be allowed to see, there’s nothing material about anything that matters. 

Joseph Skibell is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in Humanities at Emory University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program, and the former director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. He is the author of A Blessing on the Moon, A Curable Romantic,Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud, and the forthcoming Dr. Bopstein and the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming, among other books.