Still Life
Growing up With Death
A Visual Memoir
As planned, at the end of July 2008, I met my 66-year-old father in Central Park opening night of The Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park presentation of Hair.
The weather was perfect. The sky gradually darkened, the moon appeared and the actors emerged on top of the walls, sprawled on the grass, in the aisle of the audience.
Proustian moment
In some bizarre system, a cross between quantum physics, yearning, and a fusion of extraordinary energy and matter, I felt connected to my mother in a profound cosmic way.
There in the balmy summer night, with hippies sprinkled about, and that music is playing, holding my father's hand, we, my mother, my father and me, were all together.
I learned in astronomy and physics books that the speed of sound is variable and depends on the properties of the substance through of which the wave is traveling and the density of the medium
If that is the case, coupled with the fact that the speed of light is what we see from stars left them many years ago, my mother was present.
There in the warm air of a dark Central Park on some lingering sound and light wave; we were together, listening to Aquarius, somewhere in the universe, at the same time.
I'm confident of it.
I could sense something happening to my body, perhaps something spiritual and something physical. The musicians started quietly with their first song, Aquarius, the first line of lyrics starts:
"When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius...."
My body tingled with recognition on a cellular level.
I reached out to hold my father's hand.
I felt a bit heady and out of control, like when one has had a glass too many of wine. Surprising myself, tears streamed down my face as the music and lyrics continued to grow louder and faster. My father stroked my hand.
In the air that night, was the presence of my mother.
Proust had the taste of madeleines; I had the music of Hair.
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. - Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust