valerieconstantino.net

Occasional Labor
(text excerpt)

by
Valerie Constantino

She stands at the edge of a shore, sweeping
sand into the incoming tide. Her broom is self-made - of pine needles
lashed to the end of an old branch with black rubber strips. It is
winter. She is wearing two nightgowns and a pair of handknit
wool socks. Her steps are small and measured; she moves up
and down along the shore. As the film loops around and around, her
actions are seen as repetitive. The room is modest. The floor is covered
with an undulating pattern of sand. Round glass dishes containing bits
of old lace and quail eggs are placed at regular intervals in the sand.
A lace curtain hangs from ceiling to floor in the center of this room.
A canvas beach chair is located close to the curtain. If you sit in this
chair, you can watch the films' postcard-sized projection on the drapery.
And you may also notice the interlocking thread construction of the lace.
Sand is prima materia. It occurs in the world through vast accumulations
of miniscule parts along many shores. Time, the cycle of returning surf,
is circular. Like a repeating motif, a ripple of water or sand, a
gestural sweep against the recurrence of unwanted dust.

Exactly one week before I was to graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, my father passed away. He was planning to join me in Chicago that week. He was, as was his way, brimming with enthusiasm and pride, and was so looking forward to sharing my success. Historically, our relationship was not easy, although his love for me was quite clear.

A pivotal episode occurred before his death. I had wanted to discuss with him, for once, what I had perceived as his disappointment in me. I had after all, dropped out of college at age seventeen, and run off to California, land of the free, free, free. I'd returned to the East Coast two years later, unemployed, married, pregnant, of course. Two years after that, I was divorced. My dad made no secret of his dismay, and who could blame him?

More than twenty years since and nearing the completion of the lauded graduate degree, I was determined to make it clear to him that with or without his approval, I was satisfied with my accomplishments. More importantly, I was willing to take responsibility for the choices I had made. I was as sure as I could ever be that those choices had been the right ones for me. And I also wanted to tell him that this Master of Fine Arts degree could very easily turn out to be quite worthless in terms of future, manifest success. I wanted him to finally drop any expectations he may still have had.

I had planned to have this conversation with him sometime during his visit. But dad was, if nothing else, an activity devotee. Every day he'd call with another idea: the Sears Tower , Lake Michigan , the Field Museum, "Les Miserables," and so on. Getting him to sit still long enough to talk about my concerns would be a challenge, probably impossible, and so I wrote to him instead.

He received my letter and called me on the phone. He had read it, and was just calling to say that he was very proud of me. He told me he understood all about what I had done and why I had done it. And he told me that he admired my courage . My dad told me he admired my courage. He told me that I reminded him of him. He had wanted to dance - and a great dancer he was. But he was afraid of uncertainty. But I had not been afraid, he said. Well of course I was and I still am afraid of the unknown, of the unrelenting current of insecurity my choices have resulted in. But we also seem to learn from our parents what not to do. And seldom are we granted the time to acknowledge these familial bequests.

Several days later, Tony Constantino returned home late from a dance. He drove into the garage, got out of the car and went through the door that led into the house. He went upstairs to his bedroom and probably even watched television for awhile. He went to sleep that night but he never woke up again, because he had left the car engine running. And the carbon monoxide flowed through the vents in the garage, contaminating the whole house, including the room in which he slept.

My uncle telephoned the following night. My friend Beth Reisman, also a graduate student at SAIC, came over to be with me and took me to the airport early the next morning. I arrived in New York City and was immediately taken by my relatives to the funeral parlor. They taught me how to make a Catholic funeral. Under a blustery sky, we buried my father. The weather-person told us that ...the clouds seemed to dance across the sky.....

It seems I feel, slightly too obvious to locate these events within the subtext of impermanence; as if the death of a loved one can be wedged into a meditation on the mysteries of beginnings and endings. Subjective loss is profound beyond such unqualified musings. Once I had grasped that my father had left the physical space of this world, and once I had understood the ways in which my life would be affected by his absence, I became aware of him in a startling other way. The quality of my father's substantive presence had changed, but it had not withdrawn. He inhabited the space that surrounded me, the air that I breathed. Like a quantum choice in layers of space and time, the familiar form of Anthony Constantino although not visible to my eyes, existed nonetheless, in some other un-seeable version.

And there was yet another aspect to this palpable experience, as I too migrated beyond the density of my own form, from the solidity of the ground on which I seemed to stand. I observed myself taking the trash out to the sidewalk in front of his house. I watched, as I opened wide the windows of that dark house in which my father had unknowingly inhaled his last breath. And then I felt the whoosh of waking, the sucking sound of dropping back into matter, while enigmatic and dear father particles dispersed. From time to time, they gather themselves up in my general location, but mostly, I imagine they have better things to do then hang around with me here.

Perhaps these experiences are no more than manifestations of memory and grief. I don't really know. Yet, experience is so often understood through the body, and the blood I share together with my relatives permeates and qualifies my perceptions. These events surrounding my father's death, anyone's death, I imagine, were transubstantiative. As the blood of one adored is ritually transformed for our consumption, our surroundings are charged with traces of our ancestors' potencies.

The very impermanence of grass and tree, thicket and forest, is the Buddha-nature.
The very impermanence of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha-nature.

- Eihei Dogen

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