After the Crash

Sometimes everything breaks at once: your car, your relationship, your child’s health, your printer, your heart. Sometimes, in a single moment, there is deep reparation that makes everything broken become fused, even for that second. It’s a moment so beautiful, so unbearably, painfully beautiful, that there is no other moment, thus there’s no past, no hurt, no present, no future. In one instant, you are completely consumed by beauty, warmth, ineffable well-being…like being in some sort of baptismal body of water.

Last week on a sultry lowering-sun summer Friday evening, I met my sweet, gorgeous friend Michael—Michael from long-ago Armani days, whose name is exactly like my father’s, but reversed, and who’s a fellow May Gemini, and born my same year, so I’ve always had a sweet spot for Michael—on the steps of the Met Museum. Even though we had not seen or spoken to each other in a year, the talk went immediately into the deepest part of the ocean, where no man has ever been, to the bottom of the ocean floor, where those fish with odd, boxy bodies and scraggly, snaggly teeth and lanterns dangling on antennae from their heads live.

There are some murky, suffocating sensations and visions at the bottom of the airless, light-less ocean floor. Only friends (and sometimes the random strangers one is given, on trains, bus stops, in cafes, who you may never see again) who are familiar with these darkest places will understand, and understand that the stories about them can be shared in a normal way, in regular conversational voice, in a normal setting, like the steps of the Met—that you can, in another moment, laugh and be silly and talk about fashion and shoes and food and how great your hair looks and what moisturizer he uses because his skin looks so young! And that friend won’t run away from you when you dive deep into the ocean, bobbing up for air, then going down in your diving bell for the real plunge of the story. In fact, he is right there with you. This is how it was with Michael at the Met.

While we smiled and laughed and explored the tangents of our conversation and could not wait for the other to finish sentences and  reminisced about the tanned, handsome Giorgio and all the wild fun we had, our old carefree-days-in-the-city talks were, as is so normal with life-long friends, entwined with the challenges, tragedies and griefs we never thought we’d face when we were 23 years old together at that glamorous Fifth Avenue showroom.

So while we caught up and told stories and watched the compelling parade of people climbing the steps (we were there for the Alexander McQueen show, but the steps were a show of their own: “Oh my god, are those two guys too fabulous or what?”) there were sentences like this from Michael:  “Nancy, oh Nancy,” he said, clasping my arm, in response to a story I was telling him of how I used to be not that long ago, “Don’t you know,” he said with his singing, deep voice in his deep Georgia accent, his stunning kind hazel eyes looking into mine, “that when you screamed like that, in grief, that it’s actually a physical force that takes you over…did you know it’s called the pain body?”  Pain body…oh. I looked at him like he was water on the desert because to be given a name for this consuming feeling, to give it a weight, a body…then that would be a weight you could maybe eventually shed. It gave emotional pain a visible, hopeful form, like a heavy backpack, something you could throw off when you’re done. For me though, it always felt like the soul in pain. And oh, it indeed had a voice.

After the crash, you look back and you hear the sounds that had come out of your lungs, your throat, your tongue, your mouth, and you want to cover your ears, like the Munch painting. You never want to hear yourself like that again, and you want to erase all memory of it from everyone and anything, from the world you were once in, from the world you are in now.  After the crash, you realize you don’t know who you were. So that means, your own soul was a foreigner to yourself, your own soul was a stranger.

But I wanted to ask him: If those sounds are the soul in pain—or the soul hijacked by this strange body or entity—then what is the sound of the soul worse than in pain—the soul beaten unconscious, the soul almost beaten to death, the sound of the soul crushed to death? Whatever that sound is—that indescribable, unutterable sound—I made it at one time or another during those incogitable moments of anguish  over my child.

Michael put his elbow out for me and we ascended the steps together, feeling the uplift one always feels when stepping into the grand salon of that museum. Oh, no matter what, there is the Met, and the vast room that greets you with 5-foot high fresh flower vases and columns and liquid, luscious light. And the orchestra was playing above us, so the notes carried us up the stairs to the Costume Institute. While we floated up the elegant center staircase, there was a soundtrack in my mind along with the string quartet and Michael’s musical voice pointing out sculptures and paintings as we strolled. Screaming is the soul in pain…there were days when the stepping into the Munch painting became so vivid…I not only thought I would have an aneurysm…rebelling against the truth of what had happened to my child…going through a grief process that is not a process, as it never ends…that I wished, I fervently prayed, that I would have one, before going to bed, in my sleep, waking up, and many hours of the day in between. Having one would have been a quick way to blot out the raw reality and truth.

But here is Alexander McQueen and the lines and the excited students, tourists, New Yorkers, a mixture of people so interesting and unique, we just fall in love with NYC over and over again. All ages and types of people were there to experience this tribute to the designer, who ended his life last year.  Immediately, we were drawn in by the incredible artistry of his tailoring from the first dresses on display. “Oh, this is fabulous! Look, Michael—look at this!”  “Oh Nancy, come and see—remember this show? Remember when he was the first to do this?” There were dozens of riveting designs and displays, some with videos of his famous, theatrical live shows, and some accompanied by classical music that immediately changed the mood. At every corner, there was surprise upon surprise. Some designs were too much like Halloween costumes, others were simply stunning. Michael and I stayed close, holding each other by the arm because we wanted to share every minute and not lose each other in the crowd.

Then we turned one corner and into a dark-painted room, and  I remember slowly walking as if on a lunar landing black and white film clip…Michael was somewhere just behind me.  I was drawn to a large column in the back of the room with, strangely, minute shafts of light seeping out of a few small, mysterious peepholes in the structure. Many people kept walking and did not notice this column. But we and a few others stopped,  drawn to these quiet, unobtrusive, tiny light shafts that were such a contrast to the wild exhibitionist mood of the rest of the show. I crouched down to look into the opening, because it was set lower than eye level. At first, you looked into blackness. And now music began, so exquisite, evoking an immediate sense of poignancy and loss that a kind of respectful silent sadness and expectation set in….and then out of the darkness something began to move.

From utter nothingness and darkness at first, so that you felt you were looking into infinite outer (or maybe inner, or both) space, infinitesimal glimmers of stars or swirling streaks of whiteness appeared in the blackness, and you realized you were watching a hologram.  That shafts of light from out of nowhere were creating an image hung in utter space. From the tiny stars formed then in lightening speed a tiny human body, spinning and twirling in a beautiful long white gown blowing in some mysterious wind. This creature appeared to me trapped in white space, yet free, like a spirit, or a firefly who you might catch and watch light up in the cup of your hand, or trapped in a glass jar, and then realize the firefly was a tiny, otherworldy creature with human form. This image we watched was a mesmerizing black and white hologram of the model Kate Moss, and you’ve never seen anything so haunting, uncannily lovely and strange, something between a dream and nightmare. Between the music, which was also so haunting, and this image that was created so seamlessly out of the darkness from light, it was like seeing some sort of birth, so ethereal, that you lost sight of the fact that this was a supermodel. She became a fairy from ancient woods, a revelation (something like Yeats’ “The ceremony of innocence is drowned…/Surely some revelation is at hand”).

This tiny being twirled and twirled, spinning in the wind, how beautiful this seemingly real-life spirit figure was as she turned so slowly with the music, then faster and faster and faster, as if possessed, and Michael by my side, though we were in our own worlds…and then she spun and spun into obscurity, back into the white, starry flash, into nothingness, and it was so sudden, the blackness again, it made Michael and me feel like crying and we found ourselves wiping our eyes. She disappeared, like a ghost of a loved one, back into the dark, leaving us who saw this image to decipher it in our own way.  We finished the show, but in a bit of a trance, because we could not leave the dream world of this hologram…the amorphous creature being created…the amorphous creature leaving us.

It was odd to think later that watching a supermodel had moved me to tears. Had it been during my younger days in fashion when I was working with models like Kate Moss—and I did work with her several times—it would have been an interesting work of art. But I was riveted, and drawn into the emotional aspect of this creature born from—and vanished into—shafts of light; that is, I transferred my own emotions and meaning to the image of her appearing out of nowhere, and then disappearing into the void, back to being a star in the sky, like McQueen himself, like all of the lost souls, like all of our loved ones who in one way or another did not make it—either from leaving us forever, or in other ways of leaving us.

You can perish from a crash. Or you can keep living, angry, or numb, or like the walking dead.  Or you can feel too deeply, all the bad, and yet all the bliss and glory and ecstasy, feeling like the hologram dancer moving in her otherwordly space. If you have to have been in a crash, or still live the effects of one, perhaps afterwards the Fates—or whatever it is inside you and outside of you—suddenly and without warning  might present it to you, envelop you, in this rapture.

Rapture is precious. It is not a household word or something a warped doomsayer can own. It’s not extreme religion. It is the whirling dervishes that happen to you in random, ordinary moments. It’s seeing a friend’s eyes in the low light of late dusk and marveling at them, green, and then brown, and green and brown together, like an undersea world and you can’t take your eyes off them and you end up swimming in them, even though you barely know him. You can cherish them, just for being beautiful in that moment when you happened to be there when the light hit them. Then there’s sun on the sides of buildings, making Harlem look like Orvieto, Italy, which has some of the most ravishing golds, yellows, burnt oranges and terracottas in the world that are lit up by its special sun.

And if you can’t imagine even one day of your future without a face contorted, with lips always turning down—how did this happen?– by profound sadness…instead one day you realize there is the joy from the screech owls in the woods, the sublime taste of cappuccino from a favorite café, eating a dear friend’s salad and simple, perfect summer food on a warm evening, being fed by her and her family in all ways of that word, after years of a landscape of deprivation, and how she lit candles for dinner to soothe my tired eyes, turning off the lights and oh how beautiful it was eating by that candlelight together, all making that meal taste and feel and look to me like the first meal of my life, or your hands when you tear basil and inhale the scent like your very first breath of it, or the Hudson River so flat some early summer days and the sky behind it so blue and the trees on the Palisades so green that you can see dolphins, whales, and giant serpents…

After the crash, if the crash flattens you…well if that happens, and it can, so easily, then so much of you is gone. Your viscera; your dimensions of sensual life. All of those rapturous moments, to have missed them.  I never know when they will happen, these fleeting moments, but sometimes they do, for into that deep black night where we saw that tiny being and her graceful, ethereal movement, it was our turn, my turn, too…for my heart and spirit to be twirling, twirling, whirling, into and beyond the darkness.

by Nancy Angiello Copyright July 2011