MY 68TH BIRTHDAY: 3/28/24
MAMA & DADDY, JOHN SINGER SARGENT, FLOWERS FOR MY PHARMACISTS, CATE BLANCHETT, and THE GREAT GOD PAN
(Above: Cate Blanchett from the cover of L’Uomo Vogue. March 2014. Portrait by photographer Francesco Carrozzini. Blanchett: “I think that's what I love about my life. There's no maniacal master plan. It's just unfolding before me … Things present themselves to you, and it's how you choose to deal with them that reveals who you are. We all say a lot of things, don't we, about who we are and how we think. But in the end it's your actions, how you respond to circumstance that reveals your character … The world’s changed. It’s very difficult to know where to be. Because sometimes life is so fast and so absolute that the only way you can change things is by actually shifting your life utterly and totally to a different hemisphere. You can’t partially change. There’s no semi-revolution.” )
(Above: W. Graham Robertson by John Singer Sargent. 1894. From the Tate Britain’s current “Sargent and Fashion” exhibition. Robertson was an artist himself who was also an illustrator of children’s books. He designed sets and stage costumes as well for actors Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry. Later, he became a successful playwright. The portrait, considered one of the artist’s masterpieces according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s site [although I’m not sure Sargent was capable of creating such a thing] was painted at Sargent’s request. He had been struck by Robertson’s appearance, calling him "so paintable,” which sounds more than a bit flirtatious, but Sargent seemed not only to use his commissioned art as a social entrée, but also his blank canvas as a blanket excuse to flatter the handsome young males among his set and to use as a reason to focus more intently on their faces, their bodies. The folds of richly draped fabrics in his work in the current Tate show are the surfaces stroked into being as he seemed to be imagining what lay beneath; it is the costumed undulation of these portraits that is finally what is most striking about them for Sargent noticed the under by focusing on how it affected what was so elaborately needed to cover it up. And yet there is a shallowness to it all - that what lies beneath - because it did not thus capture the character of a subject but instead the slightly hidden away, the kept aside. There is a dashed-off dashing flatness to much of the work, a flattering flourish that his brush could accomplish that has the affectation of his tinkling a bit of his favored Fauré on a client’s piano as if it were an offhanded moment instead of its being just a tad too studied and not, well, really well-played but played well-enough to impress someone not familiar with Fauré. There is, to me, no hope in Sargent, only an aspirational esprit that is there alas to camouflage something rather too fashionably furtive. Robertson was twenty-eight years old at the time of this painting, yet Sargent accentuated his youthful appearance, depicting him as the quintessential dandy, with an elegant, patrician air, chesterfield overcoat, jade-topped cane, and poodle companion. When he objected to wearing an overcoat during the summer, Sargent replied, “But the coat is the picture." There is a sadness in that. I wish Sargent could have painted that - the sadness - instead of just the damn coat. All of Sargent is there instead in that poodle’s puddle of a paw - or, more to the point, the three he didn’t choose to paint.)
(Above: My mother, Nancy Carolyn Britt Sessums)
(Above: My father, Howard Jean Sessums)
I woke up on morning of my birthday on Thursday here in London and before setting off to see the Sargent show at the Tate wrote a Facebook post about my parents. If you missed it on Facebook or an abridged version on Instagram, this is it:
“Last night as I was walking home from the tube station and I was saying my end-of-day prayers and meditations and affirmations and acknowledgments, I, as always, acknowledged my mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and all my guardian angels. And also, as always, when a birthday is arriving I had to stop and realize, as I did so, that I am now more than twice the ages of my parents when they died at 32 from a car accident (my father) and the next year from cancer at 33 (my mother.) It still can astonish me, that fact. Move me. Explain so much about my life. And then I said aloud in a whisper I am certain they heard, ‘Thank you, Mama and Daddy, for my life.’
“And then I heard myself unexpectedly say, ‘Thank you for fucking.’
“And I knew - I know - they heard that, too, and, like me, smiled. Chuckled. Chose to shake their heads along with me in bemusement.
“So I said this: ‘You're smiling. I feel it. I made you smile.’
“It is hard to explain how much I felt their smiles last night. And feeling that so deeply, I began to cry a little bit, too. Not sadly. But knowingly in a new way of my being knowing - not with a self-satisfied cynicism but a sense of wonder that wonder itself has not wilted yet in my own continuing life even though it has had so many reasons and opportunities to wither on its thin determined vine. That was Mama and Daddy's smile last night I felt so in my aging body that will always be a boy's in some way, the one who, shoulders squared, heart pounding, grounded but on the wrong ground there in Mississippi, was left standing in their stead: an imbuing of wonder, a renewal of it. My pilgrimage began when they died and I knew that with such sadness and loss came the freedom to set out anew. Back there in that Mississippi of 1963 and 1964, I began planning how to do so once I had the agency to do it. My whole life has been a pilgrimage that began in a little boy's sorrow that sent me on my way to find again somehow the sense of wonder that I thought had died along with Mama and Daddy and to find it again within me since somehow I knew in my early knowingness that I had given that to them when I was born: their first taste of wonder maybe themselves. Oh, I know they probably felt the fear that all new parents feel when they look into the face of their firstborn. But I trust - I know - they too also felt wonder. It was the first time they saw my smile and I saw theirs. I had never remembered that moment until last night when they reached out to me from wherever they are now. Maybe death is just experiencing wonder in a way we cannot fathom so we choose to fear it. Fear and wonder: the makings of the human heart.
“That is my pledge to them and to me and to this path I am now even more deeply on for my birthday: to live more deeply in wonder, to find its agency in my life.
“I realized also last night as the three of us continued to smile on my walk home that pleasure went into the making of me, such pleasure. I had never thought about that. On this pilgrimage I am now on, I am finding new ways to experience pleasure that is no longer simply the search for the sexual - and new ways to keep walking home.
“Onward ...”
(Above: Pan playing his pipe at the Tate Britain from this section of Chris Ofili’s commissioned 2023 mural, Requiem, which commemorates the Grenfell Tower fire. The vast mural unfolds in “three chapters” over the museum’s North Staircase with the central section dedicated to the Gambian-British artist Khadija Saye who died in the fire. “Public art can hold spaces of grief and it can keep alive collective memories of events that might otherwise completely just fade away in time. As a whole I intend the mural to invite reflection on loss, spirituality and transformation.” Anyone who knows me well knows I spiritually acknowledge the transformative Great God Pan each day as part of my prayers and meditations. I had no idea this mural was at the Tate Britain museum until I happened - yes, wondrously - upon it and thus happened upon him. I thought I was going to see that “Sargent and Fashion” show but I discovered I was surprisingly and more importantly coming to encounter this. I, at first, thought I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing but such Heightened Coincidences often happen in my life when I am mindfully aligned. Moreover - more wonder - anyone reading my serial novel here at SES/SUMS IT UP knows how eerily appropriate this was since Pan’s manifestation plays such an important part in that narrative. I have been writing about Pan and thinking about Pan for weeks even more than just in my daily acknowledgements. I actually gasped when I saw this mural on my birthday and then just felt a giggle and felt comfort and felt acknowledged myself.)
(Above: Untitled by Mark Rothko. 1950. Tate Britain.)
(Above: Seascape with Distant Coast by J.M.W. Turner. 1840. Tate Britain.)
After writing that Facebook posting above and eating a bit of porridge at my local Starbucks in Kilburn, I headed over to the Tate Britain to take in the “Sargent and Fashion” show. I got there a bit early according to my ticket time. After encountering Pan, I decided to head off to see some unfinished Turner landscapes - more rended than rendered - which are grouped together in a room which also holds a purposefully juxtaposed canvas by Mark Rothko, his stacked stoicism of color his own rending of what landscapes leave behind when, like Turner, an artist peers past geographic constructs to render what he sees hovering there. Birthdays too are like that, something rended from the geography of time then stacked up stoically to render a construct of life. Rothko greatly admired Turner and in 1966 said, “This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me,” seeing, in saying it, past the construct of time’s geography. Three years later, Rothko gave a group of paintings to the Tate, hoping they would be displayed near those of Turner. I found being in the room with the unfinished stoicism of them another unexpected birthday gift for someone turning 68 and seeing past that to my closing in on 70.
After being so moved being in the room with Turner and Rothko, I was disappointed in the wearying fashionableness of the Sargent show, as I explained above in the long caption below the portrait of W. Graham Robertson. I found the work just this side of kitsch actually. It felt, after viewing it all, like I had eaten too many rich chocolates from a box in which they all had the same soft centers.
(Above: Shameeha, Shak, and Fatama in the pharmacy at 56 Dean Street.)
In order to jettison that taste, I headed over to Soho and 56 Dean Street, the address of the building that houses the remarkable HIV health clinic where I have received two months of my HIV meds while in London. I have been so impressed not only with the design and functionality of the place but also how kind and professional and empathetic the members of its staff are. It is my practice to give a gift to others on my birthday as a way to pay kindness forward in my life. I wanted to give the pharmacy staff there flowers this year, but once I got off the tube at Oxford Circus I was having a hard time finding any place that sold flowers as I walked toward Dean. I therefore walked on past it to circle back way-out-of-my-way to the Sainsbury’s on Tottenham Court Road where I knew there would be an assortment of flowers from which to choose.
On my way across Old Compton Street, I noticed a woman noticing me as she walked toward me. I am often stared at on the street - not sure why, maybe because I’m odd looking, or look oddly familiar, or have a certain sort of style, or my bald pate catches the light in some way - but I do notice when I’m noticed. So I stared back at the woman who looked sort of oddly familiar herself. And then I realized why. She was Cate Blanchett. Hair pulled back. No makeup. Glasses. Trench coat. Sneakers. But unmistakably: Blanchett. I smiled and folded my hands in prayerful wonder and slightly bowed my head toward her as we passed and she, with bemusement, smiled back. I presumed she was on her way to Dean Street herself to meet someone at The Groucho Club. I had almost stopped her to tell her it was my birthday and ask for a selfie so I could send it to my buddy Jonathan Groff who tends to acknowledge her in the way I acknowledge the Great God Pan. Indeed, I think my passing her in a shared acknowledgement was a kind of birthday gift from Pan. I was getting a bit perturbed that I was unable to find any flowers and had to keep walking so far out-of-my-way to do so, but if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have passed her and witnessed her bemusement which in many ways had mirrored mine when I had happened upon that mural of Pan at the Tate earlier in the day as he conjured himself and that of my parents when I spoke aloud to them the night before about the pleasure that had conjured me.
I turned back to watch Cate Blanchett disappear down the street and heard my voice call out slightly, “I love you …” It was not a shout really, more of an offhanded affirmation. There was a shush to it as there had just been to the swing of her trench coat as she strode by, Fauré played for myself instead of a client who might find the sound of such music cloying anyway. But the saying of it cleared my head, and cleared too the path where this pilgrimage of mine lies. And thus began another birthday … Cate and Pan and Sargent and Rothko and Turner and Ofili and hemispheres of difference and unfinished stoicism and flowers finally found and the finally felt smiles of two dead parents and this finally, this: the durability of wonder.
The Rothko quote about Turner, the whole thing...this is why I read you.
This is my favorite of all your poetic posts. Happy Birthday old friend! Love from your fellow 68er's.