Everything That Rises Must Converge


 



We laid Tom Artis in the warm Sangamon County earth of Camp Butler National Cemetery yesterday, Friday, May 11, 2007. My brother Rob, Doug Rice (who had known him a lot longer than I had) and I drove down from Chicago to Springfield, Illinois. In attendance were his wife Kim, his children Deucalion and Hope Victoria, memebers of Kim's family (Tom had none), a bunch of guys from the tattoo parlor Tom designed for, tongues of fire and multicolored arabesques peeking out from their funeral suits, fans and old friends, and a squad of veterans on burial detail whose ceremony, while abstract, conveyed their solid conviction in the words they said.
Three rifle volleys were fired. Hopey held her ears.

The hasp on the book snapped shut and locked, Tom Artis's life becomes a fact instead of a miracle. It can no longer be entered into, just described, and maybe understood.

I can think of a world where Tom can arise, and go out from his slumber, and all the hobbles and crimps that impeded him are now fallen away, where his creativity spreads out in light circling higher like Dante's ultimate rose--and yet i don't know: creation so requires the conditions of stone and muscle, linen rags and graphite, and the finite human hand held just so, brought to bear on the dream and the idea. Tom as rose of Paradise seems less good to me: far better a sketchbook held upon a knee in a beautiful place, and eyes to see and marvel: to create, even God had to dip Her hand into the red earth.

But I don't know: maybe the rose is better. Or maybe the fact is all there is, and there are no miracles. Both survival and non-survival are frightening, unguessable, standing among the bright green grass and white stones and bright assertive warm blue day: the one thing you know is, it is none of this here. There is no place so aggressively material as a cemetery, and I think that frantic presence is brought there by the living: It's the gift we all hold in our hands at the service, and the only thing we lay upon the casket--the one thing we have in the face of all the implications death displays before us.

As we left to go to the restaurant, Hope Victoria, looked up at us, still too young to really be cuffed and knocked to the curb like the rest of us, and her face was covered with something. The kindly woman who managed the service for the cemetery had encouraged her to take a flower from the floral arrangement , and Hopey had mushed it up to her face to breathe in the scent.

And her mother wiped the pollen and the dust of flowers from Hopey's smiling face, and the funeral was over.

(Artwork ©2006 Tomosina Cawthorne Artis)

Posted: Saturday - May 12, 2007 at 11:10 AM        

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