I slept in the shadow of mimes. Creepy mimes. Sad mimes. Mimes in the middle of what looked like a three-ring circus with lions, people riding on the lions, and a Charlie Chaplin look-alike sitting on a trapeze in the right corner. Mimes as street performers, hanging off light poles at night, without any pedestrians to see the performance.
This was the art that decorated my childhood bedroom. I thought about putting the word art in quotation marks because it doesn’t feel right putting them into the category of art, even though someone did paint these images. Art is a difficult word to define. Every dictionary has a slightly different definition than the others, and every artist has said it in ways that slightly contradicts all other artists. Although, almost every definition states how art should make a person feel something. These definitions can be boiled down to something like this: a work created that elicits and emotional response from the viewer. What that emotional response is, is up to the viewer’s interpretation of the subject matter.
Well, almost every night when I closed my eyes, at least for those first few months, I felt scared, so the mimes must be classified as art.
The art of miming is interesting if you can get passed some of its oddities – that is, oddities to our 21st Century minds. Some of what we know as classically “mime” actually has practical origins. Today we think of miming being a purely French art form, but pantomimes and miming goes back as far as the ancient Greeks and Romans. The first written record of a mime is from almost 500 years before Christ.
Mimes painted their faces white when they performed on stage so audience members far away could more easily see their expression. Often mimes wear black clothes to draw attention away from the performer and more to the emotional response elicited by the movement, gestures, and facial expressions of the mime.
Miming is not simply an eccentric form of French dance, as I used to think. Claude Kipnis gives a number of definitions for what mime is:
- The art of re-creating the world by moving and positioning the human body
- The art of creating the illusion of reality
- The art of imagining the world together with others.
Therein lies the beauty of mime. Yet, our world has grown uncomfortable with some aspects of mime. I don’t think it’s the face paint, or the dress code, or simply because it is no longer as popular as it once was. Instead, mimes do a few things our culture hates: they force us to use our imagination and sit in silence.
Having sat in silence with those art prints, I will now use my imagination to try to explain their presence in my room.
The story of how these art prints came into my families possession is, in my mind, part true, part legend, part fill-in-the-blank, so I filled in my own blanks. In the early 1980’s, for about 6 months, dad had a job as an accountant for an international corporation based out of South Carolina. I don’t know what the corporation did or sold because that was never important to the story when I was younger. Perhaps it is less important to me now.
These art prints that first graced our living room walls and then graced my bedroom were from the company story. Since these prints came from a company store, I’m assuming that at some point in history there was a market for these paintings, and they were appreciated and even enjoyed. I’m also assuming that the people who appreciated this art never had to sleep next to them.
Two things are important in this story: 1) the company store. Part of a person’s paycheck was company dollars that could be spent at the company store. This was not cash you could spend anywhere else. It was a play out of the old coal company playbook as a way for the company to make even more money. The store had certain items for sale – some of them unique like, for instance, “famous” paintings of mimes.
2) The owners were corrupt, stealing money from the company, and potentially about to take all the money, learn a bit of Spanish, and jump ship to the Dominican Republic or some overseas haven before the government figured out about their fraud. Here my imagination may be getting the better of me. The point is that the company and the work was a charade.
Dad was either privy to this information or had figured it out as an accountant. I like to think he was smart enough to figure it out on his own. Clearly, this job he and mom moved to South Carolina for was not going to be a long-term career job, so they decided to pack up and head back to Oklahoma. There was just one thing he had to do first – execute one of the most daring and important art heists in all of history.
We moved into our new house when I was in the 2nd Grade. This was when the mime paintings were demoted from the living room in our old house to my bedroom in the new house. Mom and dad bought nicer art prints to adorn the new living room and dining room. By nicer, I mean art that elicited less of an emotional response. Compared to the mimes they were nearly lifeless.
Eventually, mom and dad – probably primarily dad – decided to buy some original artwork. Most of it was nice. Some of it was… unique. I’m not an art critic, so I will stop there except to say that all of it was better than the mimes.
These original pieces of art, even the ones I didn’t quite understand, were still interesting to look at. There were some with faces that stared back, but the faces were not heavily plastered with white makeup. Some had scenes with many people, but none were at a circus. This was a vast improvement.
Year after the year the originals took up more space on the walls throughout the rest of the house, and the prints were removed, probably to the dumpster or attic. There was no need for the non-originals – only the originals would do. This decision, of course, was not up to me. I would have gladly taken any of these lifeless prints that were hauled off to the attic or dumpster to replace the mimes dancing over me at night.
Instead, all of those mimes stayed right where they were. The last time I went home they were still hanging on those walls. I used to think it was because I didn’t speak up or because they were out of sight, out of mind for my parents. I have since come to a different conclusion.
There is one consistent thing that made my parents successful when they were working, – they always cared about people, especially those who relied on them. This is one of the things they passed on to my sister and me, which has made us both successful early on in our careers: me – a pastor, her – a banker. Things tend to work out when you actually care about the work you do and the people you work for.
Before mom and dad loaded up everything and drove back from South Carolina, halfway across the United States, dad wielded the power of the pen for those in the company who relied and depended on him. He did not write any prose or essays. He did not craft any eloquent letters to the IRS or letter to the editor of the local Greenville, SC newspaper. Instead, all he used were some numbers and his signature.
He cut checks for all the employees who would soon lose their jobs and potentially get wrapped up in this scheme of their bosses. Dad made sure the employees got paid or that their child’s daycare was covered. I’m sure he even got what he was owed by the company.
But, then, just to stick it to the man; just to make sure the bosses knew he had been there and done some real, lasting damage, he went into the company store and stole some art prints of mimes (and one by Salvador Dali of Columbus landing on American soil for the first time, which has some interpretive issues of its own as well as the face of Elaine from Seinfeld floating on a banner for some unknown reason.)
Way to go dad! I’m sure they felt the sting of losing that inventory!
When art is created, there is always the fear that it will be misinterpreted from the artist’s original intent. Although, I still don’t know if there is a correct interpretation of those images hanging in my childhood bedroom. When mimes perform in front of us, we must imagine what they are wanting us to see, and there’s a chance we will not see what they want us to see. This is why the pantomiming game Charades is so popular, we don’t have to sit in silence and wonder if our interpretation of what we are seeing is correct. Instead, we shout options and interpretations of the gestures until we land on the correct one. Ironically, the word ‘charade’ is an old French word for ‘conversation.’
But, art is more than just a thing to be interpreted. An original piece of art is a kind of topographic map. Most paintings have texture to them. There are high peaks and low valleys. The observer can see up close how heavy or soft the artist pressed the brush or a finger or a piece of wood or stick or anything against the canvas. In those brush strokes he observer can see the artist’s mood: anger, compassion, ecstasy, and any other emotion that we feel when we experience the art. Even watercolors have texture and expression in each brush stroke. I assume other mediums are the same, I’m simply ignorant of the fingerprint of their artists.
Some, perhaps most of the emotion is lost in the print version of a piece of art. You could stand close to a print, look at it at an angle, and only see the sheer flatness of the paper. The topography leveled. The artist’s emotion is gone, or at least diminished.
I’ve come to think of those mimes that hung on my wall as some of the brush strokes of dad’s life. As ridiculous as those prints felt, and still feel, to me, they were important reminders to dad of a particular part, an important and formational part, of his undulating life. What felt like a valley at the time eventually was caked with more paint, creating a peak he could look back on with pride.
Sad mime, street performer mime, and circus mime, he would never admit, but I think meant more to him than many of the original paintings he bought in the later years of his life. The emotional response they raised in him – pride, overcoming, uprightness – were far different from the emotional responses they raised for me as a child. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to talk to him about this. The paintings didn’t seem of any importance until after his death.
Thankfully, those prints are about to be completely disposed of, to never again cause any 8, 9 or 10 year old to lose sleep thinking about a hand, caked powdery white with makeup (you couldn’t tell 8-year-old me that mimes wore gloves) reaching out from under the bed and yanking the covers off.
Instead, there are other images that I’m more interested in. None of them are paintings. Instead, it’s the iconic photos of mom and dad that will always come to mind – him sitting on the teal Harley Davidson in front of the old office building, plaid shirt and mustache in full early-1990’s glory; the one of her angrily pointing a finger at dad during her parents 50th wedding anniversary celebration, dad somehow acting like he’s innocent, even when everyone knew he was not innocent.
Then there are the new pictures I’ve seen since dad died, which elicit more of an emotional response than any painting I could ever study. Side note: this is how we tend to start the process of grieving – someone dies and the picture albums immediately come out. It’s our most prominent and newest evolutionary instinct.
There are three square images that we found last summer and measure, at most, 2”x2”. They are so small it is difficult to make them out, but if you squint hard enough you can see dads stringy, straight, 60’s era hair flowing from under his motorcycle helmet. Another one shows him and what has to be his older brother, but his face is too blurry to make out. They are both on the ranch they grew up on in New Mexico, cowboy boots planted on the ground, posing on what I can only assume are their new motorcycles, smiling from ear to ear.
Then there is another picture I had never seen before that my grandmother sent me. Dad is sitting in the recliner at the old house (sad mime on the wall in the background), my 6 year old sister is squeezed in to the left of him, clearly reading a book out loud, showing off her skills, and I am sitting on dads right leg. I am three.
In the picture, dad is lovingly looking down at me. You can tell he’s enjoying the moment, both of his kids in his lap, my sister reading a picture book. It’s just a photograph, but I know he looked at Steph just like he looked at me, the picture just happened to be taken while he was looking in my direction.
I don’t remember him ever looking at me that way again. Perhaps I was just oblivious to it. I tended to be emotionally oblivious from childhood until my early teenage years. And, in all my years growing up, I don’t think he ever said he was proud of me. I could have simply forgotten, though – **cue cliche music accompanying a therapist pulling out her notebook.** Although, one time he said “Good job, son” when I drove us to church the week I got my learners permit. I don’t need these affirmations now, the pictures say enough, but I clung onto those three words for years.
Our minds do interesting things. It can remember things we don’t want to remember. It can forget things we don’t want to forget. It can block out the things we don’t want to see, or change our memory to make things more palatable.
Eventually, I stopped seeing those mimes because I didn’t want to see them anymore. They were there, always present, but they stopped having any consequence in my life after a certain amount of time ignoring them. Then, when new people came over to the house and mentioned the paintings, it was like I was rediscovering them anew. I had created a new reality for when I stepped into my room. That may not be the healthiest response, but it seems to be what we do as a people.
Somewhere in this essay is a sliver of truth, but even I do not fully know which parts are or which parts aren’t. I’m assuming people, societies, and cultures have always been in the grey area between truth and untruth (whatever that means), the issue has simply become more acute with the onset of social media. One of the major issues in our world today is that we only see what we want to see, we only hear what we want to hear, and we only believe what we want to believe. Everything else is either idiotic or we quite literally ignore it when it is right in front of us. In essence, we create our own realities.
Mimes are in the business of creating the illusion of reality. While mime is no longer a popular form of art, that same work lives on in almost every aspect of society – literature, politics, science. Most will agree on those first two, and most will disagree with me on the last one. Let me simply say: there will always be more to discover which will add to our understanding of the real world in front of us.
Even on social media – platforms created to showcase our own, individual realities – our lives are often an illusion. We show people what we want to show, and they see what they want to see. The images we curate for the world are only part of the picture – a picture that can’t be fully understood through a screen or in print.
We don’t need any of the pictures, although we love them, both the ones from our lives and the ones passed down to us from our ancestors. We don’t need the pictures because we are all products of the artists who came before us. My sister and I are products of mom and dad, the artists. Their hand, their brush strokes can been seen on our lives. The contours of our own lives, and how we live through the peaks and valleys of our lives on the canvas comes mostly from mom and dad.
When I look back on those old family pictures, I can see where those brush strokes came from: dad’s contrariness and moms fierceness. I see their work ethic in pictures of them at the office, and I see their spirit of dreaming in the pictures of the office building renovation and the new house build.
My life has been brushed with these strokes so many times I forget they are there. The contours of the paint on my canvas have now become part of the canvas. You could scrape away as much of the paint as you wanted from the canvas, but the shades and the imprint of color would still be there, even if you couldn’t make out the full picture.
The picture is still being painted, obviously. I am no work of art but a work in progress. Although, now I am doing much of the painting, and often, repainting.
Unfortunately, I work on myself less and less these days. Instead, my wife and I are working on our son. We have different approaches for how to paint his canvas. For me, I’m trying to take the prettiest parts of my image and transfer them to him, leaving out the shadowy parts of me that I am ashamed of, although, some of those parts have already started to slip into his life. I cannot completely hide myself from him or the world.
As I try to only show him the good parts of me, I’m finding that those good parts have become more instinctual. It is almost as if I could have changed the parts about me I didn’t like years ago, I guess I just didn’t want to or have the motivation to. Simply by existing, Bennett has become an artist of his own, smoothing my rough edges, adding fresh color to brighten the once bright spots that have been dulled by the world, and helping me paint over the shadows to see myself in a new light.
I’m starting to understand that no work of art stands alone. None is completely unique and without influence. It is always in conversation with the artist and the world. Humanity is the same. It is unpopular in the current culture to say that no one is completely unique, but it is true. We are all individuals, but we are all cocktails of the people who came before us, who raised us, and who we surround ourselves with. We are all simultaneously painters and paintings, adding paint and texture and an emotional response to others, just as they do to us. Claude Kipnis reminds us that mimes are in the business of helping us reimagine the world together.
I wonder how we would live if we thought of ourselves as painters and as works of art in progress, rather than fully formed masterpieces that cannot be improved upon.
I wonder how we would live if we always remembered that we are inspired and inspiring creations. I think those mimes were an inspiring reminder to dad of who he wanted to be. And, who he wanted to be is who he was, in part because of those mimes.
I wonder how the world would be if we didn’t just live in the illusion of reality or if we actually imagined the world together with others.
I won’t say I’m sad to see the mimes go. Their faces still give me the chills from time to time, and they always will. I am sure of that. That is a minor price to pay for what I think these paintings meant to my dad, how they formed his life, how they have formed me, my sister, and now my son. Then again, who knows, maybe this was all just a charade.