Ambiguity

Two Years Ago

For five days, Feb 23 through 27, David and I went to MGH every day for his fourth round of decitabine infusions. At the low dosage he received, decitabine is not technically a chemotherapy. Rather than kill leukemic blood cells (and healthy blood, hair, and gut cells as collateral damage), the hope is that it will reactivate the tumor suppression genes in individual cells.

Last day of February 2017

Jim and I had a stay-cation last week. Monday, we went to Springfield, in Central Massachusetts, to see James and Laneth Dick.  Back in New Jersey, circa 1977, James Dick was my bishop. Now they are on a six-month mission. We spent the afternoon together and had lunch at The Student Prince, an iconic German restaurant in downtown Springfield that opened its doors in 1935, and nearly closed in 2014. Jim discovered it years ago, when he had a client in the city. We've been there a few times, including once with R'el: that night I got the sampler platter of game meat.

Wednesday, we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For a new program, called “Up Close”, they installed a single painting, The Annunciation, by Piermatteo d’Amelia (15th century Italian), in a room by itself, with explanatory text on the wall. The piece is beautiful, and moving. In the far corner of the room, a flat screen TV played an 11-minute video: Bill Viola’s Emergence.

I found the video disturbing. An older and younger woman lean against a large marble box, filled with water. After several slow motion minutes of watching the grief-stricken women, a dark-haired head begins to emerge and the water starts to spill out over the edge. The younger woman looks up in amazement. The older woman finally feels the spilling water and looks up. Slowly a chalk-white motionless man with closed eyes rises out of the water, which continually flows out. The women gently pull him out of the water and lay him on the ground. The younger woman takes a long, flowing cloth, and lays it on top of the still, seemingly lifeless figure. She rests her head on his chest while the older woman cradles his head in her lap.

It bothered me, a lot, since it seemed focused on death, while The Annunciation depicts one of the most joyful events in history, the prophecy by the Angel Gabriel that Jesus will be born to Mary. On the wall behind the flat screen, a small print of a fresco, Cristo in Pieta by Masolino da Panicale depicts Mary and the Apostle John laying Jesus in a tomb. The box in Emergence is similar, and the Pieta was the initial inspiration to Viola.

Of course, subconsiously (why do I so often not recognize these things?) the images brought up memories of David’s last night, a year and a half ago. For days after watching that video, I felt a familiar, physical ache. It seemed so disconnected, unattached to thought, that I wondered if it was bipolar depression. Now I know it was not depression, because it didn't last.

Watching a YouTube video about the making of Emergence, I understand more of Bill Viola’s vision. He had seen the 15th-century fresco by Masolini, but didn't do anything with it immediately. When he did get back to the idea, he took the image, removed the historical context, and explored, through very slow motion photography, emotional aspects. As some Getty educational material suggests, “the emphasis becomes...the viewer’s individual response.” Over the past week, it certainly has evoked a response in me.

At first, I thought Viola was reworking Jesus’ story. But learning more, I gained more appreciation of his art. He seeks ambiguity: has the young man drowned or are the women midwives to a sort of birth? Is the water a deathtrap or life-sustaining amniotic fluid? How does this scene relate to the experience of the mother of Jesus and her grief the day of his death? Viola, for me, has achieved what every artist must strive for, a work that stays with me, that moves me to examine my experience in a new way and consider it in a larger context of the human experience.