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<\/a>I imagine Nika getting grants, finding an empty store front, building the room and the antechamber.\u00a0 I wondered how to do the shelves where the clothing is stacked, and realized that they should resemble the shelves in a burial vault.\u00a0 Perhaps there should be some bones too.\u00a0 I also imagined covering the walls with tiny black & white photographs of women.\u00a0 From a distance it would look grey and blotchy, from close up, many individuals could be seen.\nInitially, I saw it as the death of hopes and inspirations, the death of joy and possibilities, the death of the ovaries and children yet to be born.\u00a0 Now I’m thinking about all those shoes, black tie shoes, old lady shoes, petty bourgeois shoes.\u00a0 They were all identical, no individuals here.\u00a0 And I wonder if this place does not represent the death of the attempt to fit in, to be like other people, to wear the “right” clothes, to be non-threatening and conventional.\u00a0 This woman has burned all that up and left it behind.
\nO gosh, I also thought that the room, with its blackened walls and stone shelves and ashes lying around resembles a kiln after the firing.\u00a0 I think of VW’s line “All desire to preach, to protest, to pay a score … was fired out of him and consumed.”\u00a0 And I think that Lammas is the festival of the firing of the clay, sacred to the God Lugh, god of artists and crafts people, god of human transformation of material.<\/p>\n
That’s about how yesterday felt.\u00a0 Blown apart early by the plane (see entry for Airplane Phobia<\/a>), I was never able to get back on course, even though there were only a few planes after that and I was well defended with the walkman.\u00a0 I felt so hopeless and helpless that I seriously considered making a cardboard model of the Holocaust Room, but wasn’t able to do it.\u00a0 I didn’t paint either, but I did do yoga and walk the dog.\u00a0 I guess there is still some level of being angry at myself that I’m still so affected by the planes.<\/p>\n Scared and depressed.\u00a0 Writing to comfort and support myself.\u00a0 I’ve gathered cardboard box, glue gun, board to work on, went to the hardware store for a mat knife.\u00a0 So now I’m ready to start.\u00a0 I wondered what music would support me, and dug out the album of Mauthauzen.\u00a0 I don’t think I’ve listened to it since I married Dana.\u00a0 Somewhere, there must be a page with words on it because I recognize some of them and know what they mean.\u00a0 “KANIS THEN IXERA POS ENA TOS ORAIA” \u2014 “Nobody knew how beautiful she was.”\u00a0 I want to build the Holocaust Room as a memorial to all those dead hopes, abortions, ideas strangled in the womb, art and people that might have flourished if it weren’t for someone’s pathological desire for power and control.<\/p>\n I told Sybil about the Holocaust Room, my dream, the vision of a chapel or shrine where people could go to mourn the unborn, the abortions, stillbirths, miscarriages, all those projects never brought to term, loves strangled by alcoholism, lives strangled by drugs.\u00a0 As we talked about it, it began to take several forms: I see it as a collaborative art project that could be built by a collective of women, it could have a home in an art gallery or an empty store front, there could be a travelling version: six sheets of plywood covered with paint and collage that could be set up to make the entrance and room.\u00a0 I think about the “descansos” Estes writes about, and the little shrines that Eugenia told me about.\u00a0 I see it as a place where women\/people could come, mourn their losses, especially of those things that never came to term, and leave something behind, a piece of clothing, a card tacked to the wall.\u00a0 I imagine little shrines, like the one I saw at the travelling Vietnam memorial, in fact one wall could be made of large pigeon holes where people who came could build their own shrines.\u00a0 I imagine a pot of black paint and a bucket of ashes to be always available for people to use as part of their ritual.\u00a0 I also imagine some memorial tablets: so many jews died in the ovens, so many gypsies died in the gas chambers, so many women were burned at the stake.\u00a0 It’s hard for me to imagine a group of women building such a thing in this area, a local landlord allowing us to use an empty store front.\u00a0 But I thought there are probably people in the Hanover\/Lebanon area who might find it an exciting project, Sybil said she thought her friend who was the Schlomo connection would be interested.\u00a0 I can see it starting with Jews, but don’t want it restricted to Jews, I want it to be a place where a woman can go to mourn the fact that she had to have an abortion and find forgiveness.\u00a0 I want it to be a place where women can mourn the loss of our traditions of witchcraft, healing herbalism, midwifery, the loss of our direct connection to women’s power.\u00a0 I want it to be a place where people can mourn the loss of a childhood to abusive parents, the works of art that were never made because of lack of self-confidence, or support.\u00a0 I want it to be a place where people can bring their pain, their depression, have it acknowledged and validated, bury it and walk out feeling more alive.\u00a0 I imagine one woman emerging and being interviewed: “But wasn’t it depressing?”\u00a0 “Depressing?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I left my depression behind.”<\/p>\n Mauthauzen: Part of a 1975 concert in Alexandereion Sports Arena in Thessaloniki. Farantouri performs “Asma Asmaton<\/a>” (Song of Songs). The first of four songs of the excellent “Ballad of Mauthauzen”, a set of songs inspired by the experiences in the Mauthauzen death camp. Music by Mikis Theodorakis. Lyrics by Iakovos Kambanellis. First performance in 1966 by Maria Farantouri.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been converting 1994 and came across my dream of the Holocaust Room in August It was a piece of sculpture.\u00a0 The entryway had two fa\u00e7ades with statues of round-faced & insensitive men.\u00a0 (Their heads looked like they were made … Continue reading