Well, one does tend to think about things, while sitting at stop lights, and so on...
About the gold standard. I'm hardly an economist, or even much of an historian (unless said history involves royalty, nice clothes and great accessories), but I do know that all our paper currency used to be tied to a government inventory of actual, tactile bars of gold. Which meant that, unless there was a tremendous influx of precious metal from some newly-discovered mine, the monetary system was a zero-sum game. There couldn't be more currency issued than there was precious metal to support it.
Now, I'm not intending to launch into some economic diatribe (aside from mentioning my belief that all currencies are actually backed by the trust that goods and services will be provided when money is produced — that we are all, in fact, participating in a faith-based economy), I was thinking — probably at a stop light in Millburn, waiting... forever... to turn left — that this closed monetary system made an impact beyond keeping a tight lid on growth. I think that people learned to look at the entire world as a kind of zero-sum operation. I've realized that my family operated, emotionally, as though we were still living on a personal and emotional gold standard. If one person was 'too happy', someone else would necessarily be sad. One person's successes were certain to cut into someone else's opportunities. And of course -- even though the silver certificate paper bills were becoming more and more difficult to find -- one person's wealth meant another person's poverty.
Even at school, now that I think about it, we had the residue of this zero-sum game, embodied in the infamous and dread Bell Curve. Even though I managed to excel (generally) in school, I still always thought this model of distributing grades was perverse. If we, as a class, all did well on a particular exam, why couldn't everyone get an A? But no. There were only so many of these coveted little angular marks to be distributed — another imaginary limitation — and we students were either pitted against each other, in a struggle to keep up our grade point averages, or we gave up, resigning ourselves to the lower end of that cruel and arbitrary arc.
But school wasn't the central issue for me. School was the oasis. Home life was the desert, with its constant sense of dread and lack and limitation, and this lack-centric way of life made an impact that still holds sway to a greater extent than I would like. I could of course be fooling myself (hardly an unusual occupation), but I do think that I've resisted, or sabotaged, possible successes I might have had, because I still live with the idea that whatever good I achieve will rob someone else of their chance at a better life. And good people don't hurt others. If they can help it.
And now, for the Rescue portion of today's post.
When my mother was making her plans to escape the drudgery of having had five children in seven years, she casually mentioned, one night over dinner, that when she and my father were divorced, she was going to leave, and she would be taking one of us with her. Just... the one.
From that moment on, I was riveted to the task of pleasing and obeying and humoring this woman — a woman I would have idolized in any case, enmeshed as I was in my Oedipal phase. I lived and breathed Her. (Well, I did steal honey. She kept it in a little hidden, circular shelf unit, that looked like part of the cabinetry, unless you knew to spin it. I would drink honey straight from the jar, and then put it back in exactly the same place, hoping she wouldn't notice. Was that it? Was that why?) My entire value as a boy rested with my mother's pending decision. She could save me, or toss me aside. When she waved goodbye, she didn't seem upset at all with the decision she'd made. Which didn't include me.
There was the strange, suspended life in the orphanage, where I didn't know why I was there, or for how long, or whether I might go to live with someone else — someone other than my 'real' family. My father, when he visited, gave no indication that we might ever leave that place. And I desperately wanted... to be rescued. I wanted someone to see me, and value me, and lift me out of that sad place. I waited and waited. Along with all the other kids, who waited for the same thing.
When I was living with my father's second family, I used to fantasize, as kids often do, that I had been born to a different family altogether, and somehow my 'real' parents would discover the terrible mistake, and would come and take me away from the life into which I'd fallen, through no fault of my own. This fantasy was borne out, to some extent, by how different I looked from my father and brothers. It was only years later, when I saw my mother again, that I realized how much I resembled her. And how much my sister — the child who had been good enough — looked amazingly like my father. Each parent had taken the child who would most remind them of their former spouse. And my fantasy of 'switched-at-birth' died a quiet death.
Actually, when I was a high school sophomore, I came close to leaving moving away. Rescuing myself, if you will. I'd met a boy in one of my classes, and he told me about how he'd been adopted, and that his parents were really wonderful, and that if I wanted to come and live with them, I could. Rescue? Rescue. So close.
I told my father that I wanted to go and live with these other people. How odd it is, remembering him, sitting on my brother George's bed (the one to which he'd been chained at night), looking almost sad. He didn't say I couldn't leave. He didn't ask who these people were. He simply said that, if I left, my little sisters would miss me. Did I think this was his indirect way of admitting that he, himself, might miss me? I don't know. He didn't really say much. He never did. And, for who knows what reason — was it this quiet air of near-contrition? — I let this opportunity at rescue slip away.
While I was in the Air Force, I contacted the Red Cross, in an attempt to locate my mother. It had been over twelve years by then, since she'd waved goodbye from the front door of the house on Lilac Drive. A month or two after I filed the necessary paperwork, I got a letter — not from my mother, but from her father. My Grandpa Hebbard. It was a nice letter, considering we hadn't seen each other in about twenty years. What struck me as odd was this — the only mention of my mother, in this long-overdue correspondence, was a penciled-in address and phone number, at the bottom of the page. Later, when I was in college, I used to wonder if the older couple, in the car that had just passed me, weren't my grandparents, come up from Alabama to look at their grandson, and decide if he was worth the effort. If I looked okay to them, they would announce their identity. If I looked weird or unsavory (or... gay), they could just keep on driving past, in their rental car, and go back to Alabama, relieved at having sidestepped a losing proposition. Isn't this just another, twisted notion of the possibility of rescue?
The final rescue scenario that haunts me is this: some critic or other, some museum big-wig or collector, blunders onto my artwork, and decides to raise me from my basement squalor, and place me among the (current) array of creative astral bodies (let me be just an asteroid...) by which the rest of us navigate. I thought this rescue had taken place, in 1997, when Dale Chihuly (yes, that Dale Chihuly) purchased $15,000 worth of my artwork from a little exhibit I had, at the Everson Museum in Syracuse NY, and then insisted that I use the money to create an artist's catalog. Within two months, I'd located an excellent photographer, arranged for an essay by a credentialed critic, had an interview with the museum's junior curator, and found and hired a design firm, to help bring all the written and pictorial elements together. And six months after what I term 'the Chihuly event', the printer delivered box after box of my spanking-new catalog, with its own ISBN number, no less, all right there on the front porch.
Well, I thought -- if this isn't the ultimate career lubricant, I don't know what is. I pictured myself sliding upwards toward palpable success, with nary a hitch in the process. Using a contact list provided by the essayist, I sent copies of this new booklet to just the right people. Or so I thought. My favorite 'response' was the one from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Someone had taken the time and trouble to fold my catalog into a small enough wad to fit into an economy-sized envelope, and then sent it back to me with a note suggesting I might want to use it for something else. A doorstop, perhaps? Does one wonder why I hate crossing the Ben Franklin Bridge in the westerly direction?
That mailing did get one remarkable response, actually, from Kenneth Lay, at the Renwick Gallery. He said that, if he had to live on his acquisition budget, he'd be sleeping in a refrigerator box under a local viaduct, and showering at the bus station. But he really loved one of the pieces in the catalog — a piece I call 'Puff', because it's so not like a white kitty. I think he called it 'Sigourney Weaver meets Alien on the slag heap of love'. Music to my ears.
As it happened, I learned that Mr. Chihuly would be amenable to donating one of the pieces he'd bought, to the Renwick, and one of those pieces happened to be... Sigourney herself! With some wangling and paper-chasing, the transfer of ownership was arranged, and one day in the summer of 1999, an art van showed up outside my apartment building in Jersey City. I brought my work down, and watched with envy as it was carried into a space with better flooring that most of the places I've lived, in my ultra-mobile life. And sure enough, at the end of the summer, that very same piece was included in the exhibit 'Glass, Glorious Glass', along with works by many of the then-current glass stars. My work rather stuck out.
And, at the same time, remarkably enough, I was unbelievably lucky enough to be featured in an article in Sculpture Magazine -- and my own name was on the front cover! With all these good good good things, could validation and sound success (by which, of course, I mean $ucce$$) be far behind? Surely some gallery owner would resonate — would see the commission dollar signs (see above), and I would be a 'real' artist.
Well, not so much.
Of course there was more -- more exhibits, more ecstatic oral reviews, more work, and more indifference. When, as a child, I dreamed of being an artist — writing the word itself, with my new crow-quill pen, in a drawing book I'd sneakily bought without my parents knowing about it, and kept hidden under my mattress in the attic bedroom — I of course had no idea what being an artist actually meant. I think I assumed that, once the quality of my work (whatever that would be) was established, I would simply repair to my studio, and crank out stuff, which would be taken by some gallery representative, in exchange for enough money to live on, and to buy more materials... And so it was to have gone.
But as I've remarked to someone, at one time or another, I think that, instead of calling it an art career, one might more accurately call it an art careen. There doesn't seem to be a linear progression, or a graduated scale of accomplishments, or a set of logically-connected achievements which, when met, result in the presentation of the Keys to the Kingdom. Instead, it seems to me, there are ebbs and flows, high tides and low. And to judge by the distance to which my own personal art ocean has receded, there is either a tear in the crust of the art world, which is sucking up all available nourishing moisture, never to return again, or I'm in for one hell of a tsunami.
And I suppose, if I can stay afloat, that's a kind of rescue. Isn't it?
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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