Tuesday, July 22, 2025
D+256/184/1277
1946 The militant Zionist organization Irgun bombed the British headquarters for Palestine in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people and injuring 46
1991 Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men in 1978
In bed at 8:30, up at 5:25. Nasty pain in both hips, mostly on the one I was sleeping on, but also the other. Less pain in the shoulders. I looked at my notes on this date last year and saw "awake at 4:45, up q5 5 at 00[sic] with painful hip and lower back. Very painful to walk from bedroom to TV room. . . . In the afternoon, I am experiencing throbbing pain, even sitting on the recliner. " Two years ago on this date, I woke up with what was even then my normal backaches, moving about at will between my shoulder blades and my hips. I wonder how long I've been spending each day with these arthritic/rheumatoid joints and back pains. My journal entries from early August 2022 make no reference to them. 65°, high of 80°, extreme heat watch starting tomorrow.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 8:40 a.m.
There is an op-ed in this morning's NY Times by author and journalist Alissa Quart titled My Mother, the Artist, Discovered at 90. Reading it prompted a lot of reflection on my part, none of which was particularly new, and saddened me. Her mother is a retired professor of literature at CUNY. She has cancer, and either the cancer or something else will kill her soon. Throughout much of her life, she painted paintings. We might call her a 'painter' or an 'artist', as her daughter has, but what she did was paint paintings - some 400 of them, which she kept throughout her lifetime. Quart's essay describes her efforts to distribute her mother's paintings to keep them from being destroyed in one way or another after her mother's death.
I noticed early on that Quart never mentions her mother's name. The mother is identified throughout the essay only by her relationship to her daughter, the narrator. I went to Wikipedia to see if her mother is identified in Quart's listing there, but no, she is identified only as one of two "college professors" who parented Alissa. I went to Elon Musk's AI engine GROK and asked it 'Who is Alissa Quart's mother; and it provided me only information based on the op-ed I'm writing about, concluding "Beyond her professional and artistic life, no specific details, such as her name, are provided in available sources." The subject of the essay is still alive, her paintings are still extant, she is the subject of an essay by her famous, accomplished child, and nowhere do we learn her name. I highlight this fact because it seems so relevant to the point I write about here, how quickly we evanesce once we're gone, for some of us, even before we are gone.
I have more than once reflected in these pages on what will happen to my paintings, drawings, 'Life in the Time of Covid' sketchbooks, my memoir, and my journals when I die. I know the answer, of course: they will sooner or later end up in a landfill or incinerator, just as I will end up in the 'green' portion of Forest Home Cemetery. My stuff, like myself, will go the way of all flesh and other stuff.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. . .There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
I think that I spend much of my days trying to outlast myself, trying to hold off my evanescence, my complete and utter annihilation, my disappearance, not only from the face of the earth, but from all memory. Why did I go through all the trouble of writing a memoir chock-full of information that only I am interested in? Wuzupwidat? Why have I spent (I used the word advisedly) nearly every day for the last three years bothering to compose thoughts (or even to copy and paste someone else's thoughts) in the pages of this journal? Why have I held onto most of my drawings and paintings, covering the walls of our basement, our TV room, and my bedroom with them? Why do I treat my "Live in the Time of Covid" sketchbooks as treasures? Wuzupwidalldat? I must be like the philanderin Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck, whose wife Rose asked her daughter Loretta's fiancé, Johnny Cammareri, why men cheat, and was told, "Perhaps because they are afraid of dying." The wise Rose (Olympia Dukakis) was onto Cosmo and wiser than him. Catching him sneaking in late at night, she told him, “I just want you to know that no matter what you do, you’re still gonna die! Just like everyone else!” He knows she sees throught him and understands him and replied, “Thank you, Rose.”¹
There have been times when I have indulged the thought (or fantasy) that, when I write loving, praising words of my mother or my sister, that by putting them on my blog, into the cybersphere, I am transmitting them into Space, the Universe, communicating them to whatever intelligence may be receiving signals out in the Cosmos, keeping the memory of them, the fact of their existence, alive somehow. Even if there is no receiving intelligence on some other planet, the information is on the internet, on a public site, probably searchable and thus in some sense permanent, or at least more permanent than our ephemeral lives and the ephemeral memories of those whose memories die with them. Goofy thoughts, I suppose, eccentric. Call me Cosmo Castorini.
Back to Alissa Quart and her artistic mother. I am touched by her efforts to keep her mother's artwork from a landfill or incinerator, or tucked in the corner of an attic or basement for a while. Nonetheless, I accept that eventually those paintings that meant so much to her mother, and perhaps to her, will end up like mine, trashed. If I were a better Buddhist or Christian, I suppose I wouldn't feel so sad about that. As it is, I do feel some sadness about our mortality and about the vanity of our works, and perhaps even more sadness that I don't even know Alissa Quart's mother's name.
¹ Oddly, while in the throne room on a break from writing the above, I read a short piece by Christopher Urban in this month's Harper's Magazine titled "At the Window," with this paragraph:
"What's your greatest fear?" said the woman from the garden in a whisper. Her voice was soft in my ear. We were both standing outside now, although where exactly, I couldn't say. . . . . I thought about my answer for a moment, too long it turned out, for she replied on my behalf with that characteristic impatience of hers. "Oh, come on. It's the same for everyone," she said, trying to give me a hint. I was still racking my brain for a reply when she uttered, "Death!"
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