2018

31 Ghosts 2018: October 25 – The Exhibition, 1

I don’t go to the museum much, but when I heard there was a Werner Baumann exhibition coming to the MOMA, I absolutely had to go. His “Moon over Dresden” ranks high on my favorite paintings ever – his use of colors to evoke both the sleeping city with its streets featuring dabs of faint streetlights below and the exuberantly luminous yellow and gold moon above never fails to take my breath away. A poster of “Moon Over Dresden” adorned my dorm room wall never failed to lift my spirits.
Unfortunately, life being as it tends to be I didn’t get an opportunity to go until the week before the exhibition ended. They’re open late one day a week, and Sarah agreed to go with me. I figured the line for the exhibit would belong, and the long snaking line of people didn’t disappoint! Fortunately, the line moved faster than I expected, and between the people watching and gabbing with Sarah, we found ourselves ushered into the first room of the exhibit with “Werner Baumann: From Surrealism to Late Modernism in Post War Germany” projected on a wall with an blown up detail of “Moon Over Dresden”.
“Oh my God, Sarah!” I excitedly tapped her on the shoulder.
“Right, girl?!” she beamed back.
Entering the exhibit I was struck suddenly by how little I actually knew of Baumann, especially looking at his earlier, more surrealist works.
We stood in front of a painting I hadn’t seen before of a garishly colored airplane that looked like both a biplane on one side and a more modern single-wing fighter on the other. Both Sarah and I fiddled with our little read audio tour devices. “Jenna, what’s the number for this one?” Sarah asked.
I craned my neck to read the small print on placard next to the painting. “5-4-0-7,” I read.
“I wouldn’t bother, ladies,” a voice came from behind us. “Baumann eschewed much of his earlier work. This painting in particular he called ‘obvious’ and ‘amateurish’. It’s only here because the Ernst museum overpaid for it at auction and insisted it be part of this traveling exhibit to try to boost it’s worth,” she gave a little scoff, “good luck with that!”
We turned to see a woman in all black, the palette the museum docents wore. Her dark hair was up in a tight bun under a jaunty beret which stood out because none of the other docents wore hats. She didn’t have a name tag, but saw our quizzical looks and quickly added, “Good evening, ladies.” Putting a hand to her chest she introduced herself, “Greta. And put those dreadful things away,” she waved at the audio tour devices. “I’ll take you around.”
Sarah and I looked at each other. “Are you sure?” Sarah asked. “It’s pretty crowded. Is it okay for you to just take us around?” she added emphasis on “us” because, well, we weren’t the fanciest (read: hoity-toity-est) dressed around.
“Absolutely! Please, let’s step over here to ‘Nude #12’ which Baumann remained proud of throughout his life. Pay particular attention to the line detail in the body of the model and contrast that with the more rough lines in the face…”
We drank it in. Greta didn’t stop at every painting, but waved off some as “lesser” and went on at length for some time on others. And like with the airplane painting, she provided backstories for many of the pieces. “Werner kept this on display in his house when he was living in Berlin,” she explained in front of one landscape. “Dealers practically hammered down his door trying to buy it off the wall, but he loved this painting. These are the rolling hills outside of Mainburg where his family grew hops. He loved that area tremendously,” she smiled as if recalling a memory. She snapped out of her reverie and started, “Pay no attention to this next painting – just a commission,” resuming her tour.
It took us a good hour to get through the majority of the exhibition. Ocasionally I noticed the side-long looks of other patrons, but I chalked it up to envy – no one else had a docent for just their party. More surprisingly, though, no one tried to eavesdrop on our tour. I’ll admit I’ve been known to position myself near enough to be within earshot of a tour guide giving an explanation in a museum, but not so close that I’d have to actually join the group. Blissfully, Greta was all ours!
The currator clearly wanted to save Baumann’s most famous work – “Moon over Dresden” – until near the end, and when we came into the room my breath caught audibly as I saw the painting I’d adored for so long alone and perfectly lit on the far wall. “You’re never quite ready for it, are you?” Greta said. “I could go on for hours about this one, but I’ll just let you enjoy it.” She said standing back and letting me openly gape. After a long time – though no period of time could have been enough – I tore myself away and rejoined Greta and Sarah and we started into the last room of the exhibition.
Sensing the end, I said “Greta, thank you so much for this tour!”
“Yes,” Sarah added, “This has been an invaluable wealth of information. Thank you!”
“Oh,” Greta dismissed us with a hand wave, “I’m passionate about Werner Baumann, and I’m happy to share my knowledge! Come, there are a few more you have to see!”
And there were! The last room represented the late years of Baumann’s career, and the surrealistic nihilism had given way to vibrant, rich colors and scenes that clearly grew out of the meteoric success of “Moon over Dresden. Greta had finished describing the influences behind a still life, and we regarded it with rapt attention for a few long minutes. When we didn’t hear Greta insisting we move on to another painting, I turned and gasped.
“What?” Sarah said and turned. “Oh my god.”
Greta stood behind us, but not in person. The final painting in the exhibition perfectly captured her unmistakable features, her hair in a bun under a beret, her black outfit. In the painting she sat reclined on a red sofa, a wry smile on her face, her eyes staring directly at the viewer as if having shared a joke – or an anecdote. We cautiously approached the painting. Sarah and I traded looks and we both fumbled for the red audio tour. “Number?!” Sarah asked hurriedly.
“5-4-7-3,” I said.
A moment later we had the earphones on and a short melody played before a man with a deep voice began, “Baumann only painted longtime companion, Greta Holzer, once despite the many years the two spent together. An American, the two met after the war during one of Baumann’s infrequent trips to the United states. Married at the time, Baumann kept in correspondence with Holzer, an up and coming artist in her own right. After his wife died, in 1962, Holzer moved to Berlin and the two were inseparable, though they never married. Following his death, Baumann championed his work until her death in 1975. Many of the works here are from the Holzer family private collection.”
We turned in our audio tour devices in an utter daze.
“Did you enjoy the exhibit?” the smiling woman receiving the devices asked.
“It was… unbelievable,” Sarah said.
“You have amazing tour guides,” I said, leaving the woman to trade a quizzical look with the man cleaning the headsets.

31 Ghosts 2018: October 24 – Something In The Field

The man stood on a dirt service road that ran the perimeter of the vast wheat field. Though not yet full, even in the dead of night he could see furious movement throughout the field – the rustling of many stalks of wheat, the quick patter of feet, and the slow methodical plodding of tamping down stalks.
“Quite an operation, isn’t it?” The voice from behind him made the man jump. He turned to see an older man – clearly a farmer. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you…”
“It’s… it’s okay.”
“Name’s Deke,” the older man said, offering his hand.
“Eliot,” he said, shaking it.
“Haven’t seen you around here before, Eliot,” Deke said, staring out over the field.
“I, uh… I just got here. I, well, I…”
“You died. Come on, you can say it. We’ve all been there,” Deke said with a grin.
“I died,” Eliot managed with effort.
“Atta boy,” Deke said slapping him hard on the back. “So I betch’er wondering what’s goin’ on out here?”
“Yeah, I was trying to figure it out…”
“Where you from, Eliot?”
“Had a soy bean farm up in Illinois….” He drifted off thinking about it.
“That how you died?”
Eliot nodded slowly. “Yep… tractor accident.”
“Goddamn, that’s a shame. But Oklahoma is pretty far afield from Illinois…”
“Well,” Eliot started, “I couldn’t bear to sit around and watch my family mourn me and go on without me. Watching them without being able to do anything to help… that felt like hell.”
Deke coughed out a wry laugh, “Don’t I know it. Don’t I know it.” He took off his hat, scratched the short gray hairs around the perimeter of his head. “So you decided to take a walk and see what the rest of the country grew,” he said putting the hat back on his head.
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Eliot, what if I told you it’s possible to go a lot farther than you can imagine?”
Eliot raised an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”
Deke nodded slowly. “Well, we’re part of a group…”
“We?”
Deke gestured out to the jostling in the field, “the collective we. Some of us have traveled pretty darn far since passing on.”
“Like Australia?”
“Like Alpha Centauri.”
“The star?”
“Mmm hmm,” Deke said. “And farther. Once you realize you’re not tethered to one place and you’re not bound by physics… sky’s no longer the limit,” his gaze tracked up to the moon above.
“Huh,” Eliot said, trying to take it in. “Find anything?”
“Oh yeah. That’s why we’re here in this field.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Eliot, in the vernacular of our lamentable president, there are some serious bad hombres out there. But unlike the aliens that Cheeto in the White House complains about, these aliens really do mean us harm.”
“Really?”
“Sure as shit. So we learned their language, their lore, what makes ‘em afraid. Like, blood-chilling, hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck (if they had hair) scared.”
“There’s things that scare aliens?”
“Words. Symbols, really…”
“And you guys are… drawing them?”
“Press calls ‘em ‘crop circles.’” He shrugged, “they can call ‘em whatever the hell they want. When the scout ships break atmosphere, spot an ancient warning symbol, they high tail it for the next habitable star system.”
Eliot was silent for a long time. “I’ve got a question, Deke.”
“Yeah?”
“What do you care? You’re dead… you’re all dead. Aliens can’t hurt you. Who cares?”
Deke chuckled a low bass rumble. “You’re new dead.”
“So?”
“You’re gonna learn that there are things even the dead fear. The Grays? They don’t discriminate between the living and the dead. In fact, they’re obsessed with figuring out what makes a ghost a ghost… and harnessing that for themselves. It ain’t pretty.” Deke shivered and fell into silence. Finally, he added, “You’ll see. In time.”
“This is a lot to take in.”
“Damn right it is.”
“What about everything else that’s rumor?”
“Such as?”
“Bigfoot?”
“Real.”
“Loch Ness Monster?”
“Eh,” Deke held out a hand and tilted it back and forth. “It’s complicated.”
“Chupacabra?”
“Heh. Real. There’s a story there…”
“Elvis?”
“Didn’t you ever hear ‘Jailhouse Rock?’”
“Of course, but is he still alive?”
“Oh, hell no. He’s been dead.”
“Vampires? Werewolves?”
“Fake as shit.”
“Okay,” Eliot nodded. “This is a lot, but… it makes me feel better. I feel like maybe there’s a purpose for me.”
“We can always use more hands,” Deke said. “Lemme introduce you. We’ll put you right to work. We’ve got to finish this one by dawn and we’re a little behind.”
“What’s it say?”
“Fuck you, you fucking fuckers,” he saw the look on Eliot’s face. “Well, that’s a loose translation…”

31 Ghosts 2018: October 23 – A Welcome Visit

I woke up from this dream and went straight to the computer to write it before I forgot it leaving even my glasses on the nightstand. I fixed a couple little typos for readability sake, but otherwise it’s entirely intact from that just-woken-up state. My family believes when a loved one shows up in your dreams they’re actually visiting you there. I believe that strongly, which is why I hurried to capture this “ghost story” as genuinely as I could. —Jordy
Trying to sleep as long as possible this morning, I turned my early alarm off and verified the “latest you can safely sleep and still get to work” alarm was set, and drifted back into a fitful sleep. I arrived home late to a townhouse I shared with my mom (gee, I wonder where I was thinking of townhouses…). The front door was wide open and the lights were on — at least in the front room. I grabbed for my knife with my right hand and my phone with my left hand and I called my mom from my “Favorites” menu (I still haven’t taken her number out of “Favorites”). I stepped in and immediately saw the hall closet had been ransacked – all the picture albums had been shoved down from the top shelf as someone clearly had been rifling through looking for valuables. I stepped over the pile of clothes and albums on the floor and into the house as my mom picked up. “Mom, we’ve been robbed!” I said, agitated. “It’s okay, honey,” she said in a voice immediately calming and I found a little irritating because, shit, we’d been robbed! She shouldn’t be so calm!
I went to look at the kitchen and found it relatively unscathed. And before I had a chance to go into the back rooms, mom was there.
I explained what I’d seen. She nodded and smiled. She led back to the back bedrooms which were dark.
“Mom, wait, let me go back and get my flashlight… and my knife,” I realized I wasn’t holding it anymore.
“It’s okay,” she said, still smiling. But it wasn’t alright because I didn’t have a flashlight or my knife and I didn’t know if whoever did this might still be here. She continued, unperturbed.
I remember we went into her room – which made sense because she would want to check on jewelry – and it was still dark. She didn’t turn on any lights. She barely put her hand on the night stand where she kept her jewelry and immediately said, “it’s fine.” She smiled to me. “It’s fine,”  and I could see it even in the dark.
I woke up. The realization my mom has been dead now for more than four years and that bittersweet feeling of getting to spend a moment longer with her – even if just a short period in a dream that in the light of day makes little sense – feels precious and yet pokes at the wound I thought more healed than it feels right now. And I’m crying as I type this and I don’t care because I’m trying desperately to cling to the the memory of her smile in that dream even as it evaporates like the fog rising from the river as the sun comes up. I miss you so much, mom.