Remembrance of Morris at the Hudson River, April 26th

Remarks made by Kathryn Kimball as a group of us gathered to remember Morris:

Here we are, on the Hudson River–significant to me because it was here, on this river, where I met Morris in 1968. Not far from here, the Queen Elizabeth set sail –carrying us on a journey that opened up our lives—and even more momentously, opened our hearts to each other.

This river was his last grand vista of water. He told us all about his splendid hospital room with a view, how comforted he was by the sight of the flowing water and the glittering bridge.

Then he came to Maplewood, where he spent the first of his last two evenings by the fire—as he had so many other nights—content, peaceful. “What a view I had!” he said enthusiastically, “I loved that view—Now I have fire. But this isn’t just a fire. It’s a hearth.”

Morris was an elemental man. But he was more. He was a mythic person to us who loved him. The last night of his life, Morris was thirsty—but the doctors had restricted him to only rinsing and wetting his mouth and then spitting out the water. He rinsed and duly spit out. “ I feel like Tantalus,” he said. “So close and so far away.” “That’s why I love you,” I said. “Who else would say it like that?”

Later that evening, he was restless as he was settling down in bed. “If I could only lay on
the bias,” he said, “I could rest.” On the bias? “Yes, diagonally. You know. On the bias.” Again, who else would say it like that?

I cut this ceremonial wrapping holding a portion of his ashes on the bias for him, our dear friend, brother, and uncle.

Morris was a legend while he lived, will certainly live a legend in our hearts. He is Orpheus, Greek and heroic, charmer even of the stones, the elements. Rilke imagined such a one as Morris when he wrote his sonnets to the mythic singer.

Erect no gravestone for him. Only this:
let the rose blossom each year for his sake.
For this is Orpheus: metamorphosis
into one thing, then another.

We need not search for other names.
It is Orpheus in the singing, once and for all time.
He comes and goes. Is it not enough
that sometimes he outlasts a bowl of roses?

Oh but if you could understand- he has no choice
but to disappear,
even should he long to stay. As his song
exceeds the present moment,

so he is already gone where we cannot follow.
The lyre’s strings do not hold back his hands.
It is in moving farther on that he obeys.

And so, let us obey his wishes and let him move farther on.

[From Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, V

In Praise of Mortality
Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus)
Translated by Anita Burrows and Joanna Macy]

Memories of Morris

If you would like to share your remembrances of Morris, leave them as a comment to this posting.

Remembrance

From Brenda:

“Honey, the worst kind of problems
are health problems. Money
problems, love problems, they can
be solved, but health problems
bring money & love problems”.

Morris Arrari

RIP old friend. We had fun the last
time we saw each other & I will
always remember you.

Memorial Service

A memorial service for Morris was held on April 10, 2008 at the home of Kathryn and Andrew Kimball in Maplewood New Jersey.

The program (as specified by Morris):

WELCOME
Kathryn Bush Kimball

REMARKS
Deborah Barlow

MUSIC
“His Eye is on the Sparrow”
Words by Civilla D. Martin
Music by Charles H. Gabriel

POEM
Ann Rae Jonas

MUSIC
“Dido’s Lament”
From Dido and Aeneas
Words by Nuhum Tate
Music by Henry Purcell

REMARKS
Andrew Kimball

MUSIC
“Amazing Grace”
(sung together)

BLESSING
Kathryn Kimball Mattis

A group sharing of stories about Morris followed the program.

* * *

REMARKS
By Deborah Barlow

Many people have been friends with Morris for more years than me. I cannot portray him with the narrative complexity possible from Kathryn or Barbara or Janet or Denise. Whatever right I have to speak about him is based on the mutual sense that we were cut from the same bolt of cosmic cloth—artists who also like to talk. A lot.

For me, Morris was a giant eyeball. That was once said of Matisse too, so he is in good company. Nothing escaped the Morris viewfinder. His perpetual surveillance camera saw it all, whether it be poorly chosen window treatments, a mistaken hairstyle, the mismanaged cut of a gown on Oscar night, an uninspired meal, a misfired art exhibit or a thread that might be dangling from the bottom button on your coat. And these observations were barked as if divine edicts. He had an opinion about everything and every opinion he had was Big.

My first conversation with him was more argument than commencement of a deep friendship. At first I thought we were too much alike and too combative to ever have a relationship that could resemble the lovefest he had with his dear Kathy Bush, the one who introduced me to him in the first place. But I, like all of his friends, soon learned “Morris Code”, a code that embodied an intricate grammar of rules and usages. Poor grammar was cell phones used in the gym, white earphoned ipod zombie students, roughhousing subway riders, rude customers, surly waiters, sloppily attired pedestrians, loud mouthed diners, and of course the myriad of aesthetic crimes committed throughout the world he was forced to inhabit on a daily basis. In Morrisland, the preferred grammar of behavior was soigné, respectful, elegant and gracious. In other words, like him.

But this highly developed grammar also allowed for explosions of excitement, delight, sensuousness. No one was more passionate than Morris when it came to sharing his tango music, extolling a moment of cinematic genius in a Wong Kar Wai film, or the theatrical flare with which he could deliver a joke, often deliciously off color. Which of course only made him delight in the telling even more. For many of us, just the phrase, “Is it larger than a breadbox?” starts paroxysms of wild laughter.

The Morrisonian sense of grammar also allowed his mind—which was utterly prodigious and relentlessly curious—to gallop through life with bravado and sure-footedness. In his view of things, everything was critique-able, and critique it he did. His intensity and range were enormous, and he delivered his ideas with such clear, articulate language. Adoration was expressed as passionately as disdain. He hated Matthew Barney’s retrospective at the Guggenheim as much as I loved it. We never came to a meeting of the minds on many aesthetic issues but I could always count on a great debate. And when we could agree—on the singer Carol Sloane for example—we were transported to a mutual state of bliss.

The many parts of Morris’ life that I knew—fashion designer, teacher, world traveler, bon vivant, polyglot, critic, artist, raconteur, audiophile, cinemaphile—are actually only a subset of a large inventory of gifts and masteries. The one part of Morris I hope I can continue to champion is the Morris that produced a body of drawings and prints. An example of his work hangs in Kathryn and Andrew’s hallway. I hope you can spend some time with it. The sense of form and color is exquisite. I want to work with Morris’ family—Denise, Thea and Amanda—to document and preserve the work he produced.

Whether at work in the domain of the visual or in the domain of the mind, Morris spoke his truth without apology or compromise. There are very few people in life who have the courage to speak without misrepresentation or shading, even when it involves your personal fashion choices or that latest haircut. Morris was a truth speaker, never effete or pretentious. He was just Morris, straight up, to the point, and usually right.

As I spent time with him over these last few months of illness, I still saw evidence of that signatory verve and passion even though it was being increasingly compromised. One of my favorite memories of him during this final chapter was a visit to Maplewood with my son Bryce who, like me, found Morris utterly fascinating. We arrived on a Saturday night, and Morris was struggling with his depleted energy and the physical demands of his disease. Within moments of arriving, I could see him rally his energies at the prospect of a gabfest. The fire burned down as the night played on and soon only the three of us were left, talking about music and movies til 2 in the morning. Well, actually, that was when I went to bed. I think Bryce and Morris went on even longer.

That night I remember watching the firelight reflected in Morris’ face. For that particular evening we spent together, his pain took a breather and we were gifted with one more Morrisonian light show. Embers of the lively passion that had always been Morris were still glowing, powering that eye and mind as he unpacked the mysteries of art, music, ideas, life.

One of my favorite lines from the poet Seamus Heaney brings Morris to mind:
”The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.”

Morris lived as far from timorous as anyone I know. His life inspired me, and still does. Blessings on you my dear friend.

POEMS
By Ann Rae Jonas

Time Dilation

Einstein said that
the astronaut traveling through space
at close to the speed of light
ages more slowly
than one left behind.

My sister, launched by death
into the thin air of memory,
has aged hardly at all.
She is still in her twenties,
certain that her life
will be filled with music.

Earthbound, I became
bound to the past,
when we wore matching watches;
afraid to change
beyond all recognition.

*Note: Morris asked Ann to read this poem about her sister.

For Morris

You needed something to write with,
in that dirty pizza place near Union Square.
When I gave you my black Parker rollerball,
you sketched a gown on a napkin, which
I did not save as a memento.

Last week I bought you a rollerball in Paris,
where you worked in fashion for thirty
years. Parker is not French, but the pen shop
on bvd. St. Michel is. You have only to glance
at the precise corners of the gray giftwrap
and maroon bow. The Parker Sonnet
is deep blue acrylic. Not as deep
as that moment between dusk and night–
closer to royal blue.

When I called, you spoke of the numbness
in your fingers. You have trouble opening jars
and drop soapy glasses in the sink. At times
is is hard for you to hold a pen. Soon
you will take an eight-week break
from treatment. For awhile your grip will be
firm. But even if you falter, a rollerball
does not leak when dropped
and writes smoothly with little pressure.

REMARKS
By Andrew Kimball

Last Saturday by the fireplace, Morris pointed at his scalp, shorn from the chemotherapy, looking like a skull cap, and joked he had received compliments on the new haircut. I think next I’ll try a 1950s ducktail like the Fonz, he said, or a loopy “banana wave” in the front. When Kathryn checked on him at 3 a.m. Sunday morning, she found him awake and climbed onto the bed beside him. “You always wanted to get me in bed,” he teased. By morning, he could only move his legs — which had swollen into heavy blocks — by grabbing his pajama cuffs and lifting. Looking down the bed at them, he observed, with his artist’s perspective: “I look like an oversized baby with fat feet.” Exactly, thought Kathryn with surprise, glancing at them. They breakfasted together on ice chips flavored with clementine juice. “Better than steak,” Morris opined to the hospice nurse, as she checked his blood pressure and could find nothing measurable.

“I think of him decrying,” one friend remembered, “yet another tacky gown on the Oscar carpet, griping about the bully in front of him in the Staples line or the uncouths at The Y, or cracking up telling dirty jokes . . . or the way he would grab your arm and go in his Dixie voice, “Mmmm, honey!” or the way he would marvel at the hard-knock waitresses at The Maple Leaf.” Morris was sweet & sour, a blend of tender and risky. He scorned the American habit of chomping popcorn at the movies, yet he adored Jerry Springer. He participated in the haute couture of Europe but also gloried in the meatloaf platter at his favorite American greasy diner. He was fascinated by Project Runway but disdainful of it at the same time. When he launched on a riff, there was NO holding him back. I found him one day relaxed on the living room sofa after a nap, oblivious to a hair arrangement that resembled angry fingers rushing upwards. After checking it out in a mirror, he dubbed it his Kim Il-Jong look. For a week, everything kitschy became Kim Il-Jong.

Although a Parisien for thirty years, he was also always a New Yorker too, combustible, aware, alive, with a personality that occupied space and left a footprint. At Columbia Presbyterian, hooked up for chemotherapy, he listened in steamy gloom to the patient in the next bed make four loud business calls involving altercations until finally interrupting with authority, he demanded: “Can you read the sign on the wall? That was your fourth phone call. I don’t want to listen to your business matters again.” There was no fifth call that day. The week before he had actually scared a cell phone user into hiding under a hospital blanket where she finished her conversation only in whispers, peeking out at Morris from down under like a turtle in its shell.

Last year, after paying his thousand dollar membership fee to a neighborhood gym with a no cell policy, Morris was outraged when on his first day a woman with a wide bottom and little visible commitment to the program took a call while her personal trainer calmly watched. Morris left his machine to complain, but the trainer glared and said his client had permission to talk to her brother who was hospitalized. A patient himself, Morris suggested icily that she consider visiting her brother, not phoning, and at any rate noted the gym had a foyer for phone calls. The muscle-bound trainer shrugged. Morris packed his bag, demanded his thousand dollar fee back, and passed through the foyer, where he noticed the trainer talking on a cell phone.

While a visiting instructor at Kent State, Morris created a furore when the local newspaper quoted him defending the use of slim figured models in the fashion show his master class was staging. For him, teaching design wasn’t about catering to political prejudice and it certainly wasn’t about clothing Walmart shoppers. He delighted in describing for friends the obese man who frequented the locker room at his Y, so fat he had to lay his underpants flat on the floor and step into them.

One loved the mix of familiar and exotic in Morris. His father was Jewish, his Mother was Greek Orthodox, Morris was neither and both. He loved the earnest young Mormon missionaries, he had no interest in their Church. He was familiar with the best restaurants in Paris or Tokyo; he was also patron of meatloaf platters in American diners. With an Italian friend he swapped tales of memorable cheese purchases in arcane shops in nooks of Florence and Paris and liked to recount overhearing one perplexed American tourist, confronted by the bounty of a cheese cart, groan: “Can’t I just get some vel-vee’-ter?”

Morris loved friends to praise his long eyelashes. When they grew even lusher from chemotherapy, he claimed he used them to sweep his floors or open a locked door and offered to share with admirers his beauty secret: chemotherapy. What I loved best were his eyes, which could be earnest or incensed or mischievous. As his body grew thin from illness, they seemed to dominate his expression and illuminate him. And always, his eyes truly saw other people.

He established human ties with his nurses, who were never just functionaries, who always had names, whether they emptied his vomit basin or injected red blood cells through his external shunt; and yet he could be withering with the dietician who stumbled into his scorn by asking how he found the hospital food. Waiting to be wheeled into surgery, he bantered with the shy pudgy morning nurse about her home town, with charm and genuine interest. He turned to the full-figured black nurse’s aide to ask the name of her perfume. No idea, she stammered; I splash it on mornings running out the door. The conversation would always continue from there, warm, personal.

At Columbia Presbyterian, to keep the cell calls and chatter out, he would listen to his iPod during chemotherapy. When the large-bodied attending nurse stopped by to check his infusion, he asked her, with a spark of mischief: You like rhythm and blues, don’t you? then he watched with delight as she inserted his ear plugs, heard Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and suddenly, awash in the beat, eyes clenched shut, began a finger-snapping floor-rattling half karaoke there in the cancer ward to a captive audience of patients tethered to IVs, and the entire room experienced a rare moment of delight.

When he happened upon an article in the Times that mentioned that his barber Claudio, also known as “Claudio the Barber” and doing business in a tiny shop on 116th Street in Spanish Harlem, had been indicted by the FBI in a sting involving “mobster pals” in the Genovese crime family, he rushed uptown for a trim. Claudio pampered him likka his own son, gave him a close haircut that’s gunna keepa him cool in the heat, dabbed him with an aftershave tart enough to shake loose a smile from the godfather himself, even offered advice on the cancer: Ya gotta eat, Morris. Ya gotta keepa uppa da appetite. But not a word about the FBI so Morris didn’t ask.

Morris loved Tillie our cat for nuzzling his feet after he fell ill. He loved fires, their mysterious comings and goings. Harold Arlen was his greatest songwriter. Patty Griffin he loved from the first time he heard her on a movie soundtrack. He loved old movies, art, anything of beauty. He treasured the physicality of his cell phone and his iPod, always in mint condition. Deborah Barlow’s paintings, he loved. His baby nephew Louis. He treasured dear friends, from Brooklyn, from sweetbriar, from Paris. He loved the ocean and loved equally the fish diner near the ocean. He loved fixing tossed salads for friends. He was impresario of conversation, anecdote, dialects. His attachment to family ran deeper than consciousness, earlier than memory. He cared profoundly for his sister Denise, for her two daughters Amanda and Thea. He worried about his sister’s job, about her heart-breaks, her finances. Last Sunday, he held on to life in a semi-conscious state for hours, until Denise and his nieces arrived from Long Island to stand with him as he left this life, traveling out of mystery and back again into mystery.

He hated the cancer which sapped him, he felt, of his physical charms and vitality. It stole from him the familiar boulevards and cafes of Paris, closed down the beaches in Greece and Spain, halted those summer days that stretched forever and hinted of endlessness. He mourned the years of life he would miss. Gone, the days of exuberant desire, the expansive ambitions, the satisfactions of material success. In their place, the colder reward of hard won patience and understanding.

He passed Maplewood nights in our rear bedroom. Out its second-story window, he could almost hear the click of squirrels hurrying up the great trunk of the oak tree, brushing past twig or single leaf. At twilight came the deep touch of living things back into earth, tangible with beauty. As the cancer progressed, Morris said, I don’t want to die in the hospital. He left there Friday and died here in this house, with Denise and Amanda and Thea and Kathryn around him, on Sunday.

Morris said once he would choose to return to earth — should that be our destiny — as a bird, high above hospital rooms, stomas, the gracelessness of ordinary manners — his artist’s eye quickened by the earth’s spiny geology, its interlocking clays and ores, its patterned waterways, the play of shadow across the landscape – observed this time from a distance.

“I was listening,” he wrote a half year ago, “ to a beautiful song by Patty Griffin about kites while on the train from Long Island. It was about the dreams of childhood. I had spent the day with my sister, nieces, and baby Louis who was passed around from one loving pair of arms to another. I said to myself, how wonderful for this little boy to be so loved and caressed. I fell asleep at some point, dozed off from the rocking of the train. When I woke, there seated in front of me was a visibly perturbed man staring fixedly at me, babbling and laughing to himself, sucking a finger, fidgety. The song, the baby, this man . . . I wondered sadly, wistfully what happens to either warp or construct our lives? how fragile we are.”

Time no longer apportions Morris into years or decades, or stages of life. Everything he ever was, everything he will be, exists now, always. He is charmer, flirt, artist, quick ear, sure eye, genius. He is forever the eleven year old brother pushing aside the false family friend whom he alone precociously intuited meant ill asking his little sister Denise into a private stateroom on a trans-Atlantic crossing. He forever sits beside our living room fire with a glass of wine and the most expressive earnest eyes, while uptown in room 140 at Columbia Presbyterian the cancer patient feels life ebb with each glucose and morphine drip, the yellow skin and eyes, shaven skull, frail starved body looking much like his father sixty-three years before making his way across Europe home to Salonica, the once accommodating city that now no longer wanted its displaced Jews from the camps. All these selves of our dear friend are forever outside time and history.

Morris Arrari, 1949-2008

Morris Arrari passed away on Sunday afternoon, April 6, 2008 after a long battle with cancer. At the time of his death, he was in Maplewood New Jersey at the home of his dear friends Kathryn Bush Kimball and Andrew Kimball.

Morris is survived by his sister Denise, his nieces Thea and Amanda and many, many friends.

Memories and stories about Morris can be left on this blog as comments. His family welcomes anyone to share their memories of this extraordinary man.