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Honoring Emily with Art 2024: Impermanence

From Lisa:

The story behind this year’s project

In October 2023, I was walking with a friend and we were talking about the author, Michael Lewis, whose new book had just come out: Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried and cryptocurrency. One of the things that came up was that Lewis’ 19-year-old daughter, Dixie, was killed in a car accident in May of 2021, which was shortly after he had started working on the book. my friend said that she had heard an interview with Michael Lewis on the topic of the book, and that the interviewer brought up the loss of his daughter. Michael said that he had been amazed at his mind’s ability to figure out a way to keep going. My friend asked me if I felt similarly. I did not, and I later shared in an email: ‘I'm not sure what Michael Lewis means when he says that it's amazing how one's mind figures out ways of managing…That kind of thing doesn't ring true for me, no. It feels more like my mind will never figure this out. It will never make sense. Here's what I felt like right after Emily’s passing [which I wrote in a journal]: I feel like I've been pushed through a force field into a parallel universe, and I can never get back. It just doesn't feel like it should be this way. But we have to go on with things, this way, in this weird, parallel universe, where I can't get back.” 

 

About a week later, on October 20, I was in southern California walking and listening to the New York Times Daily podcast. The host, Sabrina Tavernese, was interviewing Rachel Goldberg whose son, Hersh, was one of the young people who had been attending a concert in Israel on October 7 and was taken hostage. This mother did not know whether or not her son was alive at that moment. She only knew that a video had shown that he had lost part of his left arm from a grenade thrown into a shelter that he and others were taking cover in before they were abducted. Days before the interview, Rachel had attended the funeral of Hersh’s friend Aner, who was also in the shelter and had been killed by one of the grenades. Sabrina asked Rachel Goldberg, “What did it feel like to come home after the funeral, Rachel? Was any part of you worried that you could be in those shoes as well?” Rachel answered: “Oh, there’s not been one day, I don’t think there’s been one hour that I haven’t thought, he’s dead. We have to keep going forward until we know that’s not true….It’s just a Twilight Zone of an existence that is so unfamiliar. It’s like walking on another planet.” The interviewer pressed: “What is that planet?” and Rachel responded: “It’s like living in a completely parallel universe, because I feel so close in proximity to this place I knew. I see these people and these friends…I’m hugging people and I’m very very close to them…but I’m different. There’s like a film between us, because I’m not in their world. Like I’m super close but I’m not in their world.” 

 

I felt an immediate kinship with Rachel, whose words about a parallel universe and being separated from the universe that we used to be in, that others were still in, were almost identical to my own words. I felt superimposed on her, in her pain. 

 

I continued to feel that kinship with Rachel through the months following the taking of the hostages. I had this feeling, this strong sense and fierce hope, that Rachel’s son Hersh was alive. 

Then, on the night of Sunday September 1, 2024, Labor Day weekend, I was walking  downstairs in a house we rent in Lake Tahoe when I heard Darrell downstairs saying “Oh no…” I asked him what happened, and he told me that six of the hostages from Israel had been killed, they were found in a tunnel in Gaza. We had been out on the lake all day, I hadn’t been looking at my phone, I hadn’t heard this news. My mind immediately went to Hersh and his family and everything contracted. I asked Darrell: Was Hersh Goldberg-Polin one of those hostages? He paused, looking for more information, and then he said: Yes.

The world imploded. I ran back up the stairs yelling No!!! No!!! No!!! I know this feeling, the ultimatum that is this news. This is not happening. 

But it had happened. I couldn’t stop repeating No and No and No. The person in the parallel universe with me was now here to stay, and I wanted so badly for her to be able to go back. 

I did nothing to hold back the feelings and I cried until I had nothing left.  It was pitch dark outside, the bedroom window was open, I had exhausted myself and all that was left was quiet. But then something else emerged: the sound of waves from the lake, hitting the shore and then receding. Hitting and receding. Hitting and receding. The water sounded like a rain stick when it receded, pulling back through tumbled lake rocks. I lay there without moving. I had given up to this sound and what it had lulled me into knowing: impermanence. Each wave happens – we hear it. And then it’s gone.  I don’t know where it has gone except to time that has passed. What washed over me as I lay there with that repetitive sound was a momentary sensation of peace, because I took in the reality that this is the way of all things. I surrendered to the idea of impermanence and it was a relief. It was a fleeting gift and I knew it would be the theme of this year’s art project. 

We will create something, and then it will go away, we won’t keep it. The focus will be on the experience of making the art, the process and seeing what we create. If you are not able to join us at the Art Center we’ll be sending out a link with instructions for our project, or you can create something on your own, any kind of impermanent art like an arrangement of leaves on the ground or drawings in sand. When you create your art, we hope you will pause and be with it, while it is with you.

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Art from Afar

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