In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Daleth

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Menorah

Three little candles...

 

Hermitage III: On Choosing a Staff

This side of sixty, I find walking in the woods just a little dodgier. The numbness in my right foot, the result of some serious lower back defects, has advanced enough these last couple of years to affect my balance on uneven terrain. It doesn’t help that I snapped a tendon in the other ankle on a flip turn in the pool one afternoon about five years ago, either.  I’ve arrived at the point that, scrambling over roots and stones, a walking stick feels like a comfort and a reassurance.  

And also: an admission of advancing age; a reminder of the tenuousness of physical health; a challenge to my gay male fixation on fitness and a body as toned and strong as I can keep it. If I need a stick now, will I even be able to take this walk at all in fifteen years? Or in ten? Everything that arises, the Buddha tells us, is subject to dissolution. That would include me. Or at least, would include what I habitually think of as me. 

I’m not yet ready to buy the stick I expect I’ll eventually carry more continuously. So setting out from the cabin down the slope onto this afternoon’s trail,  I scanned the fallen leaves for likely prospects. I found a thin, supple, surprisingly straight piece of vinewood, probably left there by someone who’d used it as well. I liked the spring of it, how it responded to pressure. I could count on it, but not for too much. It offered just enough reassurance, gave me just enough added stability to feel more fully the pleasure of starting off down into the ravine. I had to pay conscious attention to it as a companion on the journey. In return, it reminded me that I was a man of a certain age, walking a trail exactly as a man of a certain age should do.

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Menorah

Two little candles...

Hermitage II: Paths and Road Maps

I remember, decades ago, joking with friends in college about the words of a fundamentalist Sunday School song: “I’m using my Bible for a road map.” Already when I was twenty, it seemed like a bad metaphor to live by. Looking back now, I see that I needed humor as a way of defending myself against claims of biblical literalism: perhaps I still had misgivings at gut level that maybe Jerry Falwell and his crew were right.

Long since, I’ve pulled  far away from the notion that Scripture (of any tradition) could function as instructions-in-advance for how to live from day to day. I no longer spend much time dwelling on whether other people still believe that. Except that I know how much damage it does in the world to have fundamentalists loose in it, raising kids, running school boards and local governments--and coming to wield increased influence as well at a national level. Or for that matter, declaring brutally repressive caliphates, or justifying the seizure of Palestinian land. 

I’m sitting at the kitchen table of the cabin I’ve rented to allow myself a week’s retreat. I’m gazing out at the Indiana woods of my childhood. Speaking of fundamentalists: the smiling, photogenic, soft-spoken fascist governor of this state will become Vice-President in six weeks. A heartbeat away from the office that will be occupied by a narcissistic charlatan who’s currently conducting the selection of his cabinet like another season of The Apprentice. 

Sometimes, in the interest of keeping hope alive and saving strength to contribute to the next struggle,  in however small a way you can, you just have to detach from what’s happened to the level of public life, and go inward for a while. That’s what I came here for.

 

The wood stove in the middle of the room is softly whistling as it draws air. There’s a nuthatch outside doing laps around the trunk of a hickory tree. Later I’ll warm up soup for dinner. I’ll go on writing, perhaps read, perhaps use the Tarot to help me look at something in my life a little differently. At the end of the week, I’ll spend an hour in meditation in front of my altar, before I disassemble it and pack my belongings to head back to the bland sanity of Canada before dawn. 

Earlier this afternoon, in the best light the day had to offer, I went for a walk along Trail Number 3 through the state park where I’ve rented my hermitage-for-a-week. I found great pleasure in (a) not knowing where I was going and (b) trusting that someone did, who long ago groomed the trail. It felt like gift and adventure to see only ten or twenty paces at a time ahead of my feet. 

Maybe I started contemplating the difference between road maps and paths because the road ran parallel to the trail for a good fifteen minutes, curving up the same rise, twisting back again, before I finally headed off down another slope toward a steep ravine where a rivulet laughed underneath a footbridge. In any case, I’ve come to a point in my life where spiritually, as well as literally, it feels both more honest and more satisfying to walk a path on which I know only as much of the route as I need in order to take my next steps, in trust that somehow, I’ll go on finding myself where I’m supposed to be.

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Looking Forward to Hanukkah

Oscar gave the title "Menorah" to a series of images of men posed with one arm raised. Hanukkah starts very late this year (the evening of December 24, aka Erev Christmas), but there's no time like the present.

One little candle...

Hermitage I

Deep in the forest

where ice hasn’t formed--a pool

still flashing sunset.

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

 

At the Black Eagle, Church Street, Toronto: Oscar among his tribe.

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Korban

 

Abraham and Isaac, as relocated to corporate downtown Toronto.

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

You might see this photo as sacrilege. Look again, in faith that nothing created is unholy. Take it as a playful invitation to contemplate the link between our flesh and our religious identities.

 

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

Oscar's deep knowledge of seventeeth-century painting informed many of his still lifes.

 

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Devir

"Devir": as commanded in the book of Leviticus, the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies within the Temple only once a year. The rope around his ankle refers to a Talmudic midrash, which speculates that it was needed in order to drag him back out, in case God was in a bad mood and something went terribly wrong...

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Entartete Kunst

 

 

The title of Oscar's second solo show, which he raced to complete in 2011 shortly before his death, was "Entartete Kunst." He borrowed the title from shows of "Degenerate Art" mounted by the Nazis in the 1930's as examples of decadence intended to justify National Socialist policies. As he pointed out, those exhibitions paradoxically introduced many viewers to modernist art who had never seen it before. In Oscar's show, he often substituted "Entartete Kunst" for the conventional "Untitled" of many photographs, the above image among them. Lengths of ribbon wrapped around the arms of men in a camp chorus line replace the tefiillin of orthodox Jewish prayer practice.

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Akida

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Akida

"Akida" is Hebrew for "binding." The word is often associated specifically with the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. Oscar evoked the episode in multiple photographs.

 

 

 

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman: Jeremiah



“I’m on gay cruising sites every morning,” said Oscar in an interview in connection with one of his solo exhibtions. “The advantage of the sites I use is that men show photos of themselves nude, so I can determine if they will be suitable. For the same reason, the other main place I find models is at the gym, where locker rooms and showers become audition venues. There are always a lot of muscular older men with long white beards in biblical tales, so if anyone reading this looks like an Old Testament prophet, contact me.”

 

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

Joseph

 

 

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman

"Jael and Sisera." The title of Oscar's first solo exhibition, "Midrash," referred to the Jewish interpretive practice of filling in the material missing from Biblical narrative but required to make full sense of the story. This photograph offers a midrash on Judges 4:4-22.

In Memory of Oscar Wolfman (d. November 21, 2011)

Among Oscar's most memorable photographs was a suite of four images of a man dancing nude in a tallit (prayer shawl).