21 May 2020. Tre Madonne.
Thinking about it later, the first image that came to mind was Susan herself, sitting there against the patterned wall, holding little Genevieve in her lap, a little to her left. I saw both their faces, the calm on Susan's, her smile--and all felt right in the world. Calm and majestic, even--I'm not sure why--the formality of their pose, or maybe how it was framed...
The occasion being brother Geoffrey, his role in Starving Artists, a film from 1997, which Susan was showing to a group of freinds, gathered together on Zoom this way, peering into each other's lives for a moment as we watched, as if side by side. The view into the rooms, some people eating dinner, others turning tend to this or that, some of us simply sitting comfortably, hand on cheek...
Geoff, still young ("the sexiest man alive," a comment that flashed by) along with so much else, the story looping in and out of itself, playfully convoluted, filled with references to previous scenes--songs, laughter, murders and kisses, all jumbled together in an improbable Buster Keaton sort of way--with doors opening into hallways like clown cars, nothing ever quite resolving--but then somewhere that was the point, a celebration of ongoingness, where the neighbors are killing people, and the heavies arrive vis singing telegrams--along with the touching impossibility of love...
They're all 23 years older now, ourselves included, and Geoffrey has departed from this plane--but to peer back this way into a life-being-lived, even in play--well-lived, with friends and companions, inventing a future, re-making a now...
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Susan's pose, with Genevieve, was it the Cimabue madonna--or the slightly later one by Giotto. Bill Midgette showed them to us, side by side, in one of those evening gatherings for the handful of art students at Reed. That would have been sometime in1963, he was fresh back from a Fulbright year painting in Italy, new etching press in hand, now in Portland. (He was later at St. Anne's.) We were blessed to have such a teacher--even if we didn't quite know it at the time. The conversation seemed so natural--his questions so real. And he genuinely wanted to know what we thought...
