Louise Nevelson on a Messed-Up Day

A small section of Dawn's Wedding Feast from http://arttattler.com/archivenevelson.html.

This has been a colossally strange day. Worst, Jupiter’s cancer is probably back, much sooner than we’d hoped, but we won’t even know today because the real diagnostics have to wait til a biopsy on Wednesday. Keeping fingers crossed that it will be rogue scar tissue, though it’s likely a swelling new tumor.

I couldn’t even drive Jupiter to the appointment as planned because I myself suddenly was having dizzy spells and staggering around after getting up on a step-ladder to get into a box in the closet early today. It was a mess indeed, as my car was in the shop and I had driven Bruce to campus and left him without a car. He couldn’t get home, and I couldn’t go get him, and we had this appointment for the cat, and I was trying to negotiate with the guy who has been redoing our rotten gutters.

In the meantime, my blood sugar went down to 45 mg/dl, which contributed to my panic and confusion. Was I having a stroke for real this time? What did it mean that even my right hand didn’t seem to type right? Might I pass out? Should I call 911? My right side seemed uncoordinated and loose.

Finally, after Bruce borrowed a car and came home to check on me and take the cat in, and after my blood sugar normalized, I realized that I was feeling in some ways very good. I didn’t want to drive to the vet’s but I could go, too, and on the way I realized that my body was somehow just adjusting to some kind of nerve or ligament or muscle release that had occurred in my shoulder when I stretched so awkwardly in the closet. After about four years (four long years!), some tightness in my frozen shoulder had finally let go a bit, and suddenly my nerves were learning to control my movements again. My dizziness abated, and I suddenly felt my arm more than I have in a long time.

Earlier in the day I was planning to post my usual sad, maybe sentimental song as I usually do on Mondays. But by now, I feel instead the call of the intensely cool, the emotional in deep reserve, the less obvious feeling, and so I’m posting a picture of a Louise Nevelson sculpture, whose work Dawn’s Wedding Feast I first saw at the Whitney in 1980 and which was recently recreated at the Jewish Museum.

Louise Nevelson is another one of those artists for whose work you just have to be there in person. The small pieces make up much larger rooms, and the work’s power is stark, its emotion apparent only in accumulation, the subtleties of its colors and shades are much more moving when you stand among the pieces as large as you yet made up of pieces as small and unique as every moment of your individual, irreplaceable, inexplicable daily life.

I just feel like that today: there’s no way to convey it. I was here. It was an odd, odd day in a thousand little details. That’s all. You know what I mean.