Motel of Life
May 20, 2008

I am sitting in the kitchen, in the dark.

I feel like I am in a motel.

The refrigerator rumbles like a groggy, forgotten god.

The clock ticks like a memory of a debt owed.

The table shakes as I type these words.

Maybe this is a motel: The motel of life, where every room is a rental, every day borrowed, everything feels foreign.

The darkness is not complete. Besides the light from the computer screen I have a clip-on light pointing at these hands, pointing at the plastic computer keys making their frantic kissing noises as I type onto them.

This is a table at which my family and I played games. Card games like Uno and war; board games like Scrabble, Life, and Monopoly.

As such the memories of experiences at this table are not all pleasing. Games played at this table often lurched off into yelling, fighting, bitching, cheating, and -- occasionally -- a final act of slamming the fucking games into the drawer and vowing never to play them -- or anything else -- ever again.

On the other hand something I learned about myself is that the past is no different from the present. I project into both, selectively remembering, selectively nominating one trauma after another to various positions of my psychological cabinet only to find each of them neutralized with a single sentence, a single spoken word.

It's strange the things you remember. I also remember my sister and me giggling ourselves sick at this table, sometimes with my mother. I remember with pride my great 7th grade Scrabble triumph: the word QUIZ on a triple word. I could not imagine a single word being worth 66 points, but I did it. I did it!

I do not sit at this table as much as I imagined I would when I brought it up here from Florida, but I like to think the time here is well spent. I do not play games here. I write, eat, and read. I feel the breezes blow through the window, and I listen for the sounds of the neighbor's wind chimes.

It is raining. Rain drops hitting the window sill sound like unused punctuation marks.

A couple of months ago I found a stack of blank papers in the lobby of this building. Someone had left the paper for trash or recycling. It was notebook filler paper, Mead brand -- about 300 pages of the stuff.

Remembering a time in my life when free paper was nothing short of gold I decided to seize the blank pages and fill every one of them with something. That something turned out to be mostly words, and it was at this table that I began the desultory job of finding words to possess the pages.

My self-appointed habit of writing about my fascinating existences could be dubbed a fetish for its unhealthy absurdity. Some days my hand can not write fast enough to get even a fraction of the words in my head onto the page, other days the hand just putters along, forcing crap out for the sake of the crap, and solely for the sake of the crap.

Nevertheless I love filling a page, lifting it, and placing it across the table onto a separate pile. The other pile is for the weathered pages, the pages whose constitution is riddled with wordly slashes and daggers. I've written through one complete pen. At the head of the table sits a large NEW YORK NEW YORK coffee mug, a mugh which holds the emptied hulk of that pen. The coffee mug serves as a paperweight and as a receptacle for what I imagine will be 5 or 6 pens needed to fill all these pages.

The act of writing, of documenting one's days, is theater. It is a solitary theater whose acts are played out in retrospect, in the hum of silence while your lovers read the poetry you wrote for them, in the quiet light of a computer screen at which someone far away reads the things you had to say to them, in the traveling of a letter from one post box to the other.

A friend sent me a copy of House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski. Talk about theater. I had described Avital Ronell's "The Telephone," explaining how that book (sitting on my shelves since the early 1990s) demonstrated what I imagined the written word could be. Traditional novel formats, I somewhat stupidly announced in defense of The Telephone, made the words prisoner to the page. The strictures of the document served to interrupt and upstage the shape of thought, which I think can be expressed topographically as well as mentally.

I was not given House of Leaves just because of this conversation.

No, my friend was inspired to send this book later, after I shared the story of a strange incident at Calvary Cemetery.

A couple of weeks ago, while standing inside the grounds, I got an e-mail (on my cell phone) from someone who wanted to know where in Calvary an attached picture was taken.

It is not altogether unusual for me to receive such inquiries, though I do not get as many of them lately -- and I have never received one while actually there at the yard.

I could barely see the picture. I nearly decided to give up trying to tell where the picture was taken. The picture was very small on my Treo's screen, the sun shining too bright for me to see it clearly, but I wanted to respond quickly to the e-mail if only to let the person know I was at the cemetery right at that moment, and to ask if she had more information for me to work with.

I responded to the e-mail, saying I thought the photo showed Section 48, but that I would look more closely later. I idled around a bit, then found some shade, which made it easier to see the screen. Here is her picture:

It did indeed appear to be at or near Section 48. In fact I looked at the picture, then looked around to find that I was standing about 30 feet from the spot where this picture had been taken. The picture shows Section 53 at a point where it directly abuts Section 48.

I reported back with that information, thinking that might be the end of the correspondence. I took a photo from what I guessed was the same spot where the e-mailed picture was taken, discovering later that my photo (taken almost exactly a year later) was a virtual copy of hers:

The correspondence continued.

Her brother died before she was born. The spot where I stood (the same spot her picture was taken) was about 20 feet from the burial site of that child.

She sent me the boy's exact burial location, and I quickly found the grave. I took pictures of it, intending to share one or more of them with my correspondent.

For her entire life her family had prayed to this boy, who died at 1 year of age. They didn't pray for him. They prayed to him. He was their angel.

With Mother's Day coming up that weekend this woman had arranged to have flowers placed at the grave site on Saturday. It was her (and the boy's) mother who wanted this done. No one in her family lived close enough to New York to come visit the grave or to see the flowers, she said, but if I could get pictures…

There is a lot about this scenario which did not make sense to me. How could she not know where the picture she sent me was taken when she had the exact burial location of the child? Also, her e-mails came from her place of work, and based on her e-mail boilerplate lines she did not appear to be all that far from New York.

I asked no questions, though. Why would I?

There are things she does not know about the correspondence -- things she does not know I know. In particular: Despite her accurate information about the burial location she did not seem to know the name of the cemetery.

Most people in her position find me by typing something like "calvary cemetery queens" into a search engine. I discovered that she found me by looking for something like "cemetery where the godfather was filmed."

The funeral scene from The Godfather was, in fact, filmed at Calvary. Our paths might never have crossed without that piece of trivia.

On the following Saturday I made the promised trip to the cemetery. I was a little skeptical that this random arrangement among strangers would actually come through according to plan. Why, I asked myself, would they arrange for flowers to be placed someplace where their best chance to see them was through an unusual scheme such as this?

None of my questions mattered when I got to the site and found a radiant collection of flowers. Someone had done their job well. I took several pictures for all who might want them. I hurried home, thinking the pictures might evaporate or somehow go missing. I e-mailed them as soon as I got home.

I told this story to a friend, who remarked that the child's last name was the same as that of the author of House of Leaves, an experimental novel that seemed to fit my vision of books that comprise more than just words on the papers.

To be sure this book (which arrived at my 181 the following week) is a strange, swirling carnival of type. An adventure. It looks entertaining, though I am inherently skeptical of anything that gained even a particle of its reputation through the Internet, as may be the case here (according to comments on the inside cover).

I am, in fact, skeptical of any creative work that originated or has roots on the Internet.

At any rate, upon receipt of House of Leaves (or as I call it: "Louse of Heaves") I promptly took an apple from the refrigerator, washed it, and placed it (still wet) on the book's cover. This arbitrary ritual was meant to add yet another dimension of physicality to the volume, in the way the pile of papers I found downstairs are now characterized by their encounters with me and my thrashing writing utensils.

It remains to be seen how much farther the connection goes from that infant's grave to wherever this 700 page extravaganza might send me. I have a mountain of books to get through. Poetry of John Logan, Mark Strand, and Elizabeth Bishop; a short fable by José Saramago, given to me by a chef who named a dish after that author; a massive biography (which I'll probably never finish) of Ed Dorn; "The hour of Our Death," by Philippe Ariès.

And, now, the House of Leaves. In conversation I refer to it as "Louse of Heaves," suggesting nothing to do with Mark Danielewski but perhaps evoking the title of a high school literary magazine. Lousy with heaves, lousy with mental heaving, lousy with … ah whatever. Back to my stack of blank pages.

Library of the Living
March 10, 2008

A few weeks ago, for a couple of days, I felt like nothing. That could be called an improvement over other days on which I feel like less than that.

If someone mentions a future event I have to sooth the tiny panic lurking in my guts -- panic at the possibility that I might not live to see it or any future event. I have no specific reason to think that my immediate future is in peril. Apparent facts are not relevant. The platitudes of daily life are erased, leaving nothing to support the flimsy obliviousness to life's futile march. These mornings the strength to craft a simple thought is like doing push ups on two broken arms. The weight even angers me. If you tell me I need to cheer up then you do not what you are talking about.

My life would be incoherent without these episodes. Depression and the singular physical sensations it produces (pain, numbness, a feeling that something is genuinely falling apart) make more sense to me than life's fatuous illusions. I would argue that this capacity for consummate discomfort with the shell of life allows for a more realistic view of the world.

The panic takes many forms. During this bout I opened a book of Li Po poetry. A sentence in the introduction describing the Tang dynasty as "a most brilliant era of culture and refinement, unsurpassed in all the annals of the middle kingdom" did not uplift or inspire. It humiliated me as an example of how much knowledge I will never possess or even comprehend. Time has no future, only the wasted past. The sound of laughter fills the air, but the laughter is at me, and the laughter comes from everything. Cars drive past outside, like patient breaths, self-satisfied and eternally remote. The sound of running water cackles, heaping disdain on me as it passes down the drain. Every drop of water is a century. The sound is cruel, I feel it should stop, but it pressures and destroys my ability to think.

I've been writing a poem about a place in which the evolution of human knowledge marches toward nonexistence. What passes for knowledge is front-loaded into the young while the elders have nothing and say little. Tiered levels of communication based on age endure out of the earthly excuse that wisdom is shared among peers.

At present I call this poem "The Library of the Living." The library is a Borges-ian structure housing the books and writings of every living human. One could never find the beginning or the end of the place, but as with the specter of nonexistence one would never so much as contemplate it.

At the Library of the Living
the authors sat at tables
near their books. 

This structure housed 
no published works,
no books by the dead, 
no works stinking of
immortality.

The young had filled more pages then they had read.
The shelves of the elders were nearly empty.

Maintaining the earthly lie of wisdom
a few elders had slim notebooks
of lightly littered pages, 
a few sheets in a drawer.

As the supreme elder I had nothing.
No stories, no poetry, 
no waste of the written word.
My pages had 
evaporated into the silent present.

As I aged I made fewer spoken utterances,
my last spoken words an obscure tomb, 
untranslatable glyphs of breath
decrying the coercive relationship among 
words written, spoken, and unknown.

Through translation earnest and fearful,
my words were passed among the others:

	Thought
	is made trite the 
	moment it is uttered.
	No words are immune to banality.
	All words signal
	a disdain for the shell of life.

By my decree:

	To live is to fail

the ancients were dismissed.



But the dead responded with fire.

	Fire. 
		Fire. 

Lianas of angry fire 
raced through the stacks, 
mad snakes of lightning
snapping up books like 
rain washes chalk from a sidewalk
leaping from room to room 
wrapping shelves of books,
incinerating them.

Some tried to escape but 
most looked to me
as I welcomed the flames.

Too wise for panic but firmly terrified 
they listened and reported to those who fled:

	This is how the story is told.

The young put it crudely, but heroically:

	If the building burns then so do we.


The Library of the Living vanished
so the dead could survive.

 

I do not know if this poem is going anywhere. I lack depth of knowledge in Lacanian linguistic theory and Taoism, the magic combination of specialties that might give me more guidance. I don't know why I make myself the supreme elder in this poem, except that I had a dream a few weeks ago which evoked a similar setting.

I read William Styron's "Darkness Visible" a few years ago after a friend described it as the seminal book of our time on the subject of depression. It may seem strange but I found that book irritating to read. I don't blame the author, who I suspect would understand my reaction. The overlay of story-telling seemed pretentious, and when I read it those years ago I felt the author used blame, anecdotes, and drugs as salves to obscure his own free will.

My clearest memory of this book has little to do with its content. In August, 2005, I woke up in a cemetery with "Darkness Visible" lying on the ground in front of me.

The sun, rising over on an already 90-degree morning, burned my eyes. I had not been asleep there for more than a few minutes but I had been up all night, passing 32 hours without sleep. When the sun started coming up I drank half a bottle of cheap wine left open overnight.

As Hemingway might have said: The wine was rancid. I drank all of it. Then I went outside.

That is a long and torrid story, though, as the many pages of text to follow would have proven had I not just erased them.

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March 08, 2008

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Told
February 12, 2008

I have nothing to say about something once I've said it. A story told once is told for all time.

I don't know whose philosophy it might embody, but I believe that a story told is a story told, whether heard by one, by millions, or by no one at all (the story forgotten the instant it was whispered through the creator's mouth).

Stories told in my mutterings to self, experiences written into a notebook, secrets shared with a random drunkard at a forgotten pub – tales like this are told, and to repeat a story or even an idea is some kind of compromise.

I have felt sickening remorse at telling a story and feeling it was wasted. Stories from raw thickets of my gut, saved at an early age for someone I could trust, stories that make my throat tighten just to think about them – some of these stories have slithered away to people who could not care, the consummation of these stories were grotesque failures.

But those stories can not be told again. A story told is a story told.

I tend to forget there are people on the other side of this screen. Live humans thinking things, doing things, looking at this mental rotgut and squinting.

On an obscure level I imagine that story-telling and the gift of memory exist in a realm of purity where readers do not exist.

I am reading a volume of Bukowski's poetry these days. He disappoints me when he stops telling a story and addresses his audience. Words like "reader," "critic," and "writer" sound laborious and heaving coming from Bukowski.

"gold in your eye" would have made its statement more impressively without the finger-wagging at the "critics / the writers / the readers".

They are good, though, the Bukowski pages. He and Robert Lax have me writing poetry, something I thought I would never do again. I forgot how much power a blank line can carry, or how simply indenting a word can infuse it with new meaning. I like Lax's ideas of the poem as an object of contemplation, the words turned into a thing.

Bad poetry, though, slithers onto the page and molders there like an unflushed turd. That, in fact, is how those stories felt after I wasted them.

Men at Forty
January 30, 2008

This is my journal entry for today, my 40th birthday:

(Explanations reserved for darker corners of my notes to self.)

Today I followed through on something planned in childhood. I read Donald Justice's poem "Men at Forty" to see how it resonates today compared to when I first found it over 25 years ago.

 MEN AT FORTY

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

I do not find this poem grand and lofty like when I read it so many times at 13 or 14 years of age, but I still like it. The language falls a little flat for me, and the "mortgaged houses" come through like an unwelcome return from reverie to reality.

Funny, I felt the same about those words at 14 as I do today, though I may have lacked the words to articulate that criticism.

I forgot the lines about rediscovering the face of the boy in the mirror. I do that. I see the boy not just in my mirror but in the faces of men I know who would seem to have moved far along from childhood. Few things change about a person as the years gather, and the man at 40 differs little from the boy at 12.

The line "They are more fathers than sons themselves now" seemed ominous to me as a young person, suggesting that fatherhood transformed a person in ways beyond their control. Indeed, that sense of dread seems to have sustained and even fulfilled itself. I think I would make a good father, but I have managed to avoid any situation in which fatherhood was even a remote likelihood.

The opening lines have, in numerous circumstances, proven to be words to live by. I don't think of it as verse, but as advice: "Close softly doors to rooms you will no longer use" is a metaphor that reaches into all manner of circumstances, whether I am leaving a place or a place is leaving me.

"Something is filling them" are the words from this poem that have sustained their strength over time. This line has surfaced in my mind thousands of times since childhood. Something is filling me, and maybe this "something" will finally cull the echoes of youth that linger in my mind like wind chimes.

I feel that that "something" complements the "Western Wind" of the great 16th century anonymous poem (which I prefer in ye Olde Englysh):

WESTRON WYND

Westron wynd, when wilt thou blow
The smalle rain down can rain
Christ yf my love were in my arms
And I yn my bed again

In the anonymous poem the western wind symbolizes death itself, or its inevitability. To me the "something" of Donald Justice's poem represents the distractions (euphemistically re-named "achievements") that occur before death, or the fulfillment of a life's earthly promise.

My love for the Westron Wynd poem comes partly from how I found it: Randomly. In 1992 or 1993 I discovered the "finger" command. If you typed "finger sorabji@panix.com" and hit enter you could read my .plan file. For years my .plan file contained a long poem by Ed Dorn, at other times it contained pithy quotes and dada-esque nonsense.

I will not get off on the tangent of what a .plan is or what "finger" does except to say that I believe the .plan represents the Internet's first blogging platform.

Having spotted their e-mail address on Usenet I "fingered" someone in a far-off country (I think it was Korea). My screen went dark except for those four lines of poetry and the "anonymous" signature. It was dramatic how the screen completely cleared, save for the poem, and it was astonishing how this poem (itself reaching me across so many centuries) had traveled completely around the world from Seoul to my screen in New York.

After all these years of virtually living online I find that I still do not take for granted the miracle of electronic communication.

Faces
January 28, 2008

I was seven years old in the summer of 1975. At a hotel in Bangkok, I was with my family among a herd of Americans ordered to evacuate Laos. Hundreds of Americans, mostly military, filled the lobbies and halls of the hotel (wish I could remember which one).

Activities were organized to keep us young people occupied. A conference room became a movie theater where we watched American television (something I had little memory of ever seeing until then). I sat with the other youngsters on the floor toward the front of the room. My mother sat with the grown-ups toward the back of the room.

The room was dark.

At some point this is what I thought happened: I thought my mother stood up, walked to the front of the room, stood in front of me and looked into her purse asking "Where did I put them?"

Sitting cross-legged on the floor she looked unbelievably tall to me, her face barely visible in the darkness of the room. Standing in front of the bright movie screen her face was further obscured by shadows.

I said something to acknowledge her question, and she stepped from the room into the corridor where brighter lights let her see inside her purse.

Her leaving like this did not make sense to me. Minutes passed and she did not return. I repeatedly turned away from the movie screen and toward the door, expecting to see my mother return, losing track of whatever was playing on the screen.

I don't know how much time elapsed, but after some time I stood up and went into the corridor to find her.

The problem was that that was not my mother. My mother, sitting at the back of the room, was looking right at me the moment I stood up and left the room. Puzzled as to why I just up and left without saying anything, and concerned about a 7 year old wandering around a vast hotel at a chaotic time, she came after me.

She found me looking over a railing at the crowds of people milling around in the lobby below.

She asked what I was doing. I explained "I thought you left!"

I explained what I thought had just happened, describing the woman with the purse.

My mother thought this incident extremely odd. For her part she had no memory of seeing anybody but me leave that room, and maybe she was a bit miffed that I would mistake someone else for her. How could I not recognize my own mother? I probably lacked words to articulate that this other woman's face was in the dark and that was why I didn't recognize her. "She sounded like you!" I remember saying.

I remembered this incident today (speaking of faces) after a correspondence with the author of Faces of Laos, an unusual picture book I found in my father's desk drawer after he died.

I have known of this book for as long as I can remember. I saw it on the coffee table in the living room in Vientiane, and it appeared on bookshelves and in drawers throughout my childhood. It was always kept in a safe or prominent place.

Seeing the pictures again after at least 2 decades I was amazed at their quality. As a child I did not recognize their artistic merits, nor did I understand their significance. Numerous searches through library card catalogues and publishers' catalogues returned no information about this book. Internet searches on the author's name and other identifying information from this slim volume also returned nothing.

I scanned the pages of the book and posted the series to my web site. I did this mostly because I felt these amazing pictures should be seen, but I also did it with the vague hope of making random contact with Americans stationed in Laos in the early and mid 1970s.

Months later I got a letter at my Post Office Box from none other than the photographer himself. His son had stumbled across the pictures and sent him the web address. George Archer was happy to see these pictures on the web and declared no commercial interest in the book or the pictures, quelling my concerns about copyright and such.

Last week another correspondence came, this time from the author's former wife. It was she who organized the photos and coördinated a gallery showing of the photos at the American-Lao Binational Center in 1973, and she was equally if not more excited than her former husband to see the pictures online.

She was also, I find myself thrilled to know, the dedicatee of the book. The identity of "mela" was a mystery that nagged at me any time I saw that page. Though not a source of deep dismay I thought this tiny mystery would get lost in time -- if it had not been lost already.

I found this book in the desk drawer in which my father stored significant objects and mementos. This drawer contained pictures of my sister and me, military medals and honors, and other such things. The presence of "The Faces of Laos" in this place of honor surprised me at first, as my father was not much for the arts or photography. But he was proud of his two tours of duty in Laos, and I know he recognized the uniqueness of this volume.

Looking out the window
January 23, 2008

Trying to erase from my memory the sounds of yesterday.

Filling the stairwell of my apartment building, a woman cried "DON'T DIE ON ME I NEED YOU OH NO!"

Catherine's father died.

Fire trucks and ambulances appeared outside my window. Noticing this I was alarmed to see a stream of firefighters and medics file in to this building. I opened the front door of my apartment to see a grim parade of uniformed young men headed upstairs. Their lack of urgency seemed to betray the fact that none thought they were on a rescue mission.

Catherine yelled "YOU CAN'T BE DEAD IS HE DEAD?"

One of the medics perfunctorily assured her "We're working on him."

Her screams were gut-wrenching to hear. They filled this building and wafted into the street outside. She was not dying but it felt like she was, as if her screams were his. I remembered my own reactions when, standing on this very spot, I took word that my father had shot himself through the head. Catherine, though we hardly know each other, had been so kind to me in talking about that.

Ten minutes later I looked out the window again and saw Catherine standing in front of the building, her face raped by tears, turning around aimlessly, joking about her (and her dad's) illegally parked car. "Look at that! Our car is there! Haha!"

The body lies in state until a detective arrives to investigate and rule out foul play. Natural deaths receive lowest priority over murders and suspicious circumstances. Sometimes the family, with nowhere else to go, stares at the corpse for hours until blood and pus burst from their father's eyes. A police officer acquaintance of mine (who explained all this to me) described cleaning blood from a body's face and eyes so a daughter could give her father a good-bye kiss before the detectives arrived and took the body away.

I looked out the window and saw the stream of firefighters and medics who had recently entered the building proceed to get back into their vehicles. I expected to see the body taken out, but the ambulances drove away empty. I remembered then that these first responders likely left the body in place for others to evaluate. To be honest this made me a little uncomfortable, and I left this building for a while.

It seemed like something should have stopped, but nothing did. Looking out the window I saw the man across the street getting ready to go to work as a limo driver. A man I've spoken with but whose name I do not know walked past hurriedly, as is usual for him. The hum of yellow cabs and other traffic resumed after the firemen re-opened the street. It was nice to think that at the very least a city street would be shut in recognition of one's passage. Catherine left from the building to stay with family somewhere else. As soon as quiet returned to this building I heard people coming home, talking and laughing in the hallways, unaware of the earlier events.

Looking out the window today I think I saw a detective come through this building, taking pictures and seeming to gather facts from the owner of this property. Or maybe not. Maybe the old man's body lies there now, exploding.

Filled with emptiness
January 15, 2008

I got a job organizing confessions that were either non-coerced or not given under oath. I am unclear of the status of these confessions or of their value, but the job interested me enough to make an elaborate 2-trains-and-a-bus commute to the office.

The subway train conductor announces the World Trade Center stop. I take the escalator to the WTC Concourse, which I find either fully restored or never destroyed. The buildings are gone but I find myself looking up for them.

I realized I left my bag on the train. The bag, and a scrap of paper in particular, had the information about my new job. It was the only way I could know where to go, who to call, or the name of the company. I remembered none of these things.

An emptiness filled me, and in the mental weakness of the moment I imagined that this paradox presented a philosophical abyss that none could rationalize.

I went back down to the subway to see if I could find the bag, realizing then that there never was a bag, that the job I wanted was in the Twin Towers, and that the scrap of paper I sought disappeared 15 years from now.

Filled with emptiness. Awake it sounds like a feeble philosophical dilemma, even a cliché. In the dream it caused dry heaves of the soul, which come to think of it sounds like another cliché.

Johnston Mausoleum
January 14, 2008

For as often as I have wandered the grounds of Calvary and other New York City cemeteries I have, with the exception of groundskeepers and cemetery workers, never approached any live person. I go to these places (Calvary in particular) for the beauty and the serenity, not to meet and mingle.

With some trepidation I walked up to a gentleman at Calvary on Saturday. He did not appear to be mourning an ancestor. He was taking pictures -- lots and lots of pictures -- of the mighty Johnston Mausoleum, a structure that has interested me for many years.

The Johnston Mausoleum is bigger than many houses. It is so large that it would appear to have functioned not just as a crypt but as a full chapel. Conspicuously visible to drivers on the nearby Kosckiuszko Bridge, this great tomb even makes an appearance in "The Godfather" (See my then-and-now analysis of the funeral scene of that movie here).

I approached the man at Calvary because of his apparent interest in the mausoleum, and to ask if he knew anything about it. I thought he might be a researcher or historian. He knew as much as I, meaning nothing. I offered up my theory, based on a burst of misguided research I did about a year ago, and that ended our conversation.

Having never met anyone with a mutual interest in this palatial crypt I found that the encounter, however pointless, re-energized my interest in the question of who built the majestic Johnston Mausoleum.

I found my answer, and the story is indeed interesting, as the tomb is occupied by prince and pauper alike.

John Johnston, the head of the dry goods firm of J. & C. Johnston, Broadway and Twenty-second-street, and one of the best known merchants of this city, died of heart disease Sunday evening at his residence, 7 West Fifty-third-street. He was born on the banks of Lake Erne, County Fermanagh, Ireland, in 1834, and came to America in 1847. Settling in New-York, he obtained a situation with Ubsdell & Pierson, engaged in the dry goods trade on Canal-street, remained with them for 17 years, during which time his sterling qualities secured him rapid promotion, and in 1864 left their employ and, with capital saved during his term of service, started the present house of J. & C. Johnston, on the corner of Ninth-street and Broadway. The depreciation of values following the close of the war caused widespread mercantile disaster during the earlier years of the firm's existence, but Mr. Johnston's able management and rare financial ability carried it safely through this very critical period, which saw the downfall of many old-established houses. The firm, which included Charles Johnston up to 1880, when he died, was uniformly successful, as was also the branch house of Johnston & Reillys, which was established in Albany, and this success was mainly due to the business ability, consummate tact, and unbending integrity of the gentleman who has just passed away. Personally Mr. Johnston was a public-spirited, open-handed gentleman, greatly beloved by his employes, some of who have been with him since the firm began business, 23 years ago, and have watched its growth from its humble beginnings. He was noted for his public spirit, his generous, though unobtrusive gifts to deserving charities, and his friendship for his employes in his large business. He was entirely self-educated, but was a diligent and discriminating student. History, literature, and mathematics were the favorite pursuits of his leisure hours, and of the last two he had attained a knowledge seldom possessed by those outside the ranks of professional scholarship. The affection which he bore to his brother Charles was remarkable, and for some years after the latter's death he could not divert his mind from his loss, and as a consequence much of the responsibility of the business has been borne by Robert A. Johnston, the youngest brother, who has been connected with the house since 1864. The business will be continued on the same principles upon which its now deceased projector founded it. The funeral will take place to-morrow morning at 8 o'clock, when solemn requiem high mass will be celebrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral by Mgr. Farley. Mr. Johnston was a Trustee of St. Patrick's Parish for many years past, and were it not that Archbishop Corrigan will have to sing the requiem mass at the funeral of Vicar-General Quinn later Wednesday morning he would have been pleased to take part at Mr. Johnston's funeral. The interment will be in the family chapel in Calvary Cemetery.

John Johnston died May 17, 1887, seven years after brother Charles and seventeen years before his other brother Robert A. Johnston. John Johnston's full obituary from the New York Times (which I transcribed) appears to the right, and summarizes the life and fortunes of a man much loved and respected by his peers.

John Johnston led the J. & C. Johnston company, and the J. & C. Johnston department store at Broadway and Twenty-Second Street was a popular source for dress silks and other fabrics. The store was among the most successful of its time, prospering during an era when similar companies frequently went bankrupt.

The fortunes of J. & C. Johnston took a drastic turn for the worse after John Johnston's passing. Responsibility for the company passed to Robert A. Johnston, at whose helm the business failed. The bleak account of Robert A. Johnston's demise, also transcribed from a New York Times obituary, recounts a spectacular fall from grace:

"Mr. Johnston possessed millions when the business came to him through the death of his brothers, but he lost all in a few years, and in 1888 the house went out of existence. He retired to his palatial home at Mount St. Vincent, on the Hudson. Later the place was sold at foreclosure and the house burned, the owner having a narrow escape. Since then he had lived alone in a barn on the property, refusing charity. He was found sick with pneumonia and insane ten days ago."

This obituary makes tantalizing reference to the mighty structure that has fascinated me for years: "[Robert Johnston's] body ... will be immured in the magnificent family mausoleum built many years ago at a cost of $300,000 in Calvary Cemetery."

The dismal circumstances of Robert Johnston's death did not cost him a space in the family mausoleum. I find it arresting to know that the mausoleum's presence today echoes the success and personal fortunes of the Johnston name, while at the same time housing the man who wasted it.

No mention of survivors is made in any of the Times obits for the Johnston brothers. The obit for John Johnston says he died of "heart disease" while the write-up of the funeral service says that he "died suddenly." The latter words, I know from experience, are often code for saying that a death was a suicide.

That is just some gawky speculation, though. I am good at gawky speculation. I expect to fill in more and better facts for this story.

This story may interest me far more than anyone else, but it is nice to share for anyone else interested in the story behind the great Johnston Mausoleum at Calvary. I have several photos of the structure at the Mausoleums and Stained Glass section of my Calvary Cemetery photo series.

What
January 07, 2008

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Motel of Life May 20, 2008 Library of the Living March 10, 2008 O March 08, 2008 Told February 12, 2008 Men at Forty January 30, 2008 Faces January 28, 2008 Looking out the window January 23, 2008 Filled with emptiness January 15, 2008 Johnston Mausoleum January 14, 2008 What January 07, 2008 238889 December 17, 2007 That. Is. All. December 09, 2007 Writing blind December 07, 2007 Grids and girders December 05, 2007 Palmbreathers December 04, 2007 Gretchen am Spinnrade November 28, 2007 Utter Waste November 27, 2007 My Response to Shoeboxed.com November 27, 2007 Mundane ramblings from this day October 11, 2007 Richard Nixon's Piano Concerto #1 January 08, 2007

words of the days

Oleander February 26, 2008 Lifework February 22, 2008 Polecat February 20, 2008 All the Way February 19, 2008 Wonder February 18, 2008 Lugubrious February 15, 2008 Intracranial Cavity February 14, 2008 Dross February 13, 2008 Banalize February 12, 2008 Folderol February 07, 2008 Lacrimatory February 06, 2008 Blastoderm February 05, 2008 Lousy February 02, 2008 Periphrastic February 01, 2008 Thunderstruck January 30, 2008