In Memory of Rosalind D. Al-Aswad

The Swan, Rosalind Al-Aswad

Christopher Al-Aswad’s Journal Entry – March 14, 2003

My mother died on March 13, 2003. She died so peacefully, is what I told my friends. I said she died without resistance. And that’s how I want to live my life, without resistance. Easing up into the ceiling, without resistance. Sliding into the sky, without resistance. Her body; simple a case that imprisoned her soul. Now that soul journeys through the sky. My mother is liberated. She moves and speaks. Mother, you have unlocked a part of my soul and allowed me to see beyond what I could see before. I let go, there’s no point in carrying all that weight. Mother, I’m beginning to think that you’re in every room that I pass through. I can feel that spirit that passed out of your body and dissolved into the bedroom spread through the apartment. I thought of how it would move through the city and out to Indiana by the morning. All along rising as you spread. I’m imagining you here with me now. There’s nothing to perform mother, this is just the beginning of a very long conversation, we’ll speak more often now.

Speak Up

Alter of Revolution

Spirit Mother, Christopher Al-Aswad, 2005

The spirit that dwells in my
mother, trickster and artist
alike, prods and pokes its way
into all of our lives. She likes
to cause problems, to upset
balances, to displace realities.
The conventional is her foe.

Her presence almost makes
you nervous with the sheer
abundance of energy dancing on
her force-field. At any moment,
this abundance of life can rise
to an unheard-of pitch, and
suddenly, mysteriously, break
into a marvelous crescendo
of hysterical and contagious
laughter. Laughing in the
company of my mother is an
experience of ecstasy, complete
unconscious immersion
whirling in the absurdity of life:
crackling, squealing, shrieking
laughter. She feels her emotions
from the center of her being;
total emotion, not inchoate
half-feeling. Complete pain,
complete joy, complete anger.

My mother cries in a movie
theater like no Jewish mother
has ever cried in public before.

She lives at the maximum
threshold and her life is
overflowing. She lives, not apart
from the world, but within the
tumultuous movement and
ever-changing flow of it. She
lives without regrets, without
even the longing of unfulfilled
desires. Anything she wants
to do in this life, she does.

Lovers

Good Morning America

Portraits of an Examined Life

In 2005, Lisa Wainwright, Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, curated Rosalind Al-Aswad’s Portraits of an Examined Life, an exhibit featured by the Art Institute shortly after her death in 2003. The exhibit depicted the three phases of Rosalind’s artistry, clearly portraying the progression of a career regrettably shortened by illness. In a review that reveals the strength and spirit of feminism that was evident in her art, Wainwright gives the artist a voice that conveys not only the meaning of her work, but the soul memorialized within each piece.

The legacy of Rosalind Al-Aswad resides in the dozens of paintings and drawings she made of herself and others from 1985 to 1999. Like many before her, Al-Aswad became an artist later in life, bringing to her canvases the complexity of myriad roles as business woman, mother, wife, daughter, citizen, friend, and artist. Her life’s journey informed the paintings and gave them their poignancy and critical edge. Al-Aswad gazed deep into the world of human relations and chronicled the dynamics she found there. Using models and props within her reach—family, friends, and the trappings of suburban life—she probed the mundane as a code for unlocking a deeper moral message. The work could not be made fast enough to accommodate all that the artist wished to say.

Meet the Collins

Left Behind

Rosalind Al-Aswad was an expressionist of sorts. She faced her demons whether in the workplace, on the domestic front, or in the face of death. And all of this made its way into her painting for us to behold with wonder. We should all have the strength of purpose that Al-Aswad demonstrated in so many ways. Her children do. And along with the painting, her legacy is alive in them. I never knew Rosalind Al-Aswad, but I know she was an extraordinary woman. She once claimed, “I guess I have always seen life as a series of parts you play,” and now these parts, and all that they entail, will linger in my imagination for some time to come.

In memory of my mother, Rosalind Al-Aswad (1942 - 2003)

During her studies at The School of the Art Institute, Rosalind Al-Aswad was concerned for her fellow classmates who were working hard to make ends meet. Many times, Rosalind would purchase art supplies for students who were experiencing financial difficulty. In memory of Rosalind, the family has created a fund for student assistance, and in building upon her legacy, it is the hope that one day this fund will also provide scholarships for students residing in the Middle East. If you are interested in making a gift in memory of Rosalind and benefiting art students for many years to come, philanthropic contributions may be made to The Rosalind D. Al-Aswad and Christopher Al-Aswad Memorial Fund at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and mailed to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Office of Development, 37 South Wabash, Suite 814, Chicago, IL 60603. For information about the memorial fund, please contact the Office of Development at (312)899-5158.

Escape Into Chris - Entry 12

Sketch by Chris Al-Aswad

January 2008 – Normal, IL

We can learn by
living in reality
by dispelling illusions
And illusions are desires
forget desires -
Just be – live in the moment
of what you are doing
Otherwise we cheat ourselves
We trade in counterfeit
We never understand truth
We never understand goodness
We ourselves are false
We can only do one thing
to get out of this cycle
of birth and death
And that is to discern what is
true from what is untrue
Real from what is unreal
So for me, greatness
cannot be attained by simply
desiring it.
Awash in the dreamy world of
illusions and ideals
that does not get you to the
thing itself
that does not get you to
greatness
that does not get you to
love.
Greatness must desire you
Love must desire you
Only by renouncing these illusions
by refusing to perpetuate them
By living, in reality.
Reality has its own desires
Reality has its own will
its own push, its own momentum
We have to be aware of
the way things are
before we can transcend them
otherwise we will only have falseness
to adorn ourselves with.

Escape Into Chris - Entry 9

Sketch by Chris Al-Aswad

April 2009 – Normal, IL

All is incomplete
Can you handle
being
a work in progress
Can you handle
incomplete
unfinished symphonies
novels
portraits

The moments of perfection
of completion
like finished work
that you set your gaze upon

When I stop to think about
the shuffle and
that John Lennon song
pops into my head
the one about the wheels
it occurs to me that all we have
and all we’ll ever have
is unfinished work

I guess the realization comes
when you realize you’re not headed
to some moment of perfect
but just another
moment of unfinished
incomplete work

It was a dream I had
before I went to bed
I said ‘Dad-
both of us were in the car
on a strip of the highway
Both of us stared into the
light on the road ahead

What – my dad answered
Is it always like this -
I mean do you ever get
to the end of the road

That’s when the desert appeared
in and out of the shadows-
and cacti made faces

Your work is never done
and the road never ends he said-
Then are we lost I wanted to know-
No, we’re not lost, we’re just driving

Gustave Dore's Sketchbook

is a poem cycle I'm beginning that joins my love of visual art and classical literature. Gustave Dore (b. 1832-1883) illustrated scores of literary masterpieces including Paradise Lost, Idylls of the King, The Divine Comedy and Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I purchased a book not so long ago that presents his illustrations alongside thirteen of these literary works, and just recently the thought occurred to me to make use of this edition by taking certain selections and writing my own poems based on the original works. I foresee the poem cycle as an assemblage of literary classics, each a fragment from a larger work, placed into a context of my own creation and its development, but reflecting the Romantic style of Dore's illustrations, and the styles of the authors from which each poem will take its inspiration.

The first poem of my cycle is based on "Geraint and Enid," from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. The poem follows lines 314-344 of "Geraint and Enid". I use the stanzaic structure of the original poem as well as employ some of the exact words or lines in the original.

Then Lethe awoke and stood before his bed,

he didn't know if it was early morning

or if the shadows on the floor meant night.

he looked and saw that all was ruinous

here sulked an unfed plant and here

the milk for the cats, licked to the last

drop, like a plate of steel burnished with neglect,

like a bowl that remains empty for weeks,

and the carpets collected parts of insects,

wings, antennas, torsos, trapped

by monstrous dust while brown stems

grew along the wallpaper and made a map

of bifurcations, and looked like a deserted

territory some poet once dreamed up.

And while he waited in the living room,

the voice of Rosalind, Lethe's mother, spoke

directly from the pencil drawing he hung

on the wall beside the door, and the voice

confounded him, as an unprotected child

whose parents have marooned him in the night,

becomes startled and thinks what other person

could be trudging through the rooms, whose nerves

begin to quiver with the slightest noise he hears,

so the voice of Rosalind shook Lethe;

and made him like a prisoner who jumps

at the sound of keys rattling when the guard appears

and lifts him out of a cold, unwanted bed,

so the shock passed through Lethe, who thought,

"Here is my dead mother."

We are attracted to the infinite

for the moment it lasts

something like the mathematics of miracles or continuous space

we sense it under every mundane awareness

we seize it once or twice

I imagine we're split into particles

each a smaller copy of the whole

we undergo a transformation

with our sudden sprawling capacity

we define an infinite goal

we are not the size of our own height

but the size of what we see

and it may seem foolish to even talk about

these moments

but we're tessellated and amplified

with electricity buzzing through us

even when the infinite seems improbable and distant

we're two mirrors exactly

parallel with our dreams

nesting a shared intuition

that must be discrete.

The theater is self-contained

and then self-enclosing, like an oyster shell

pink ribbons and flesh-colored brilliance

reflecting on the inner wall,

sudden darkness once the shell

has closed. The origin of the world

may never be found, locked in a mass

of tangled ropes, swaying with the tides,

a prisoner of our dreams, a captive

of our senses, how can I nurture this life?

Where you feel the pulse racing

through a tiny muscle in your neck,

the wheel keeps on turning, it turns

until it stops. Childhood spliced

into fragments, the records tossed

into a vain shoebox, opened irregularly

and easily forgotten; outside a parade

sweeps past the suburban block, girls and boys

hold hands, french-kissing in the crowd,

parents sulk in the heat, holding flags.

Above all, the clouds pull apart like taffy

and the center reveals a satin hue,

it's nighttime and my devotion to these spectacles

is constant and mad, as if I'm viewing

my own poor imprint on the world.

I carry home a banquet and pry open

the door, flies emerge from a carcass

I never knew I had. Unreason dresses me

in the morning and I'm weighted down by

superstitious charms, I don't even have to travel

to hear sermons for what I'm after;

delusion wears a costume of elegant ties

and writes verse in an empty cell.

I'm back at the beginning

as if I've gone nowhere

I demand my rose and my pearl

both were lost along the way

look over this cliff

do you see tomorrow receding

beneath yesterday's waves?

every wrinkle of hope

belongs to another part of me

I don't think we can save ourselves

it is too cold, too deep

the world, family, strangers

reside in far off places, rarely visited

by myths and fables

here the spiral moon talks

to a chorus of insects

I envy your silence, your faith.