The Liz List: The Next Best Thing

Maira Kalman's book jacket is a good start (or, middle, as she would say):

What is this book?
What is Anything?
WHO AM I?
WHO ARE YOU?
STOP IT
FORGET IT

This is a Year in MY LIFE profusely illustrated. Abounding with anguish, confusion, bits of wisdom. Musings, meanderings, buckets of Joi de Vivre and restful sojourns.

The first the line of her book says it all: “How can I tell you everything that is in my heart.” She ends the sentence with a period because she can't. But she tries anyway. Although we are born alone and die alone, we will just as surely die without connection, so we have to try to connect. We have to try.


Remember A General Theory of Love from my last post? Remember how the neuroscientists discussed the over prioritization of the neocortex (home of abstract thought) vs. the limbic brain (emotional centre vital to our well-being and survival)? Well, Kalman’s book illustrates the struggle between the neocortex and the limbic brain: throughout, she wrestles troubling, difficult concepts to the ground because she wants to understand loss, but when she loses the battle to understand loss through words, she resorts to pictures instead. As I witness this entanglement, I finally get the difference between the two – except for poetry, and some poetic prose, language seems pressed into the service of explicating, while images exhibit. They don’t explain, they show, they perform, they reflect and they relieve. There is nothing we can do about the passing of time and the loss of loved ones, or even about the beauty in our world. We can only look, respond with our hearts, and carry on.



To illustrate her view, Kalman pits the extinction of the dodo against Spinoza's attempts to figure out a rational explanation for everything.


Kalman tells us that Spinoza was looking for Evdaimonia, i.e. the state of happiness. “… when I used to tell my sublime mother I wanted to be happy she would say 'what is happiness?'" In the end, however, Kalman informs us that -- surprise! -- Spinoza dies, just like the dodo. She wonders if he had his loved ones around him at his death bed. She sounds like she hopes so. Her painting of him, however, gives him another life, the life in Kalman’s imagination, and a life in this book, which gives him a life in my imagination and in anyone else whose imagination Kalman’s painting sparks.


Kalman poetically illustrates her recognition and acceptance of the immanence of death, (she lost her own husband, which, she says, will make her collapse if she thinks about it) in this juxtaposition of the rabbit and the fruit platter. On the rabbit page, she writes:

What can I tell you?
The Realization that we are ALL
(you, me)
going to die
and the attending DISBELIEF -
isn't that the centreal PREMISE of EVERYTYHING? It stops me DEAD in my tracks a DOZEN times a day. Do you think I reman FROZEN? NO. I spring into action. I find meaningful distraction.

On the fruit platter page she writes that lately she has become "enamored with Fruit Platters. I paint them." Such a simple statement. I paint them. Because what else is there? I understand exactly what she means. We paint what we love. We express what we love. Or, shortened to its essentials, we love. Behold, Evdaimonia.

In this sublime, exquisite and heartbreaking book, Kalman's gift is to paint for us the stuff of life:






And to remind us to find someone to share it with . . .


And to let us know that life gets even better when friends and strangers wear really great hats!