A Guild

Statement

When I started college in the 80s I decided to take voice lessons and I needed an accompanist for seminar. There were lots of music majors who would have been happy for the beer money but I had a good rapport with a French major who was also a talented pianist, a kind human being, and a really funny guy. He wasn’t out at that point — not a surprise given the time and place — but he never pretended to be other. Bill and I rehearsed for performance at seminars, sang together in choir and opera workshop, and during senior year, he accompanied me flawlessly for a full recital. Soon the valedictorian of our class would fall ill and die and no doctor could figure out why.

Bill was adopted and grew up in a remote area of northern Minnesota but his quick intelligence and wide ranging talents guaranteed him an interesting life and engagement in the world. Accolades in several graduate programs stacked up easily for him. He worked internationally but settled in Paris, a city he adored, where he found great success in business and started a company of his own. He also found enticements that included narcotics; these eventually led him to heart surgery and an extensive hospital stay. Still in Paris three years later, he was shot and killed, or that’s what someone published online. His death was unexpected, to be sure. The universe placed the news of this violation in my hands one evening as I was hurrying out the door for choir rehearsal— kids fed check laundry in the washer check email about a friend wait. Stop. My God.

No.

I held onto the news within the exquisite sound of 19 other voices as we rehearsed Roberto Caamaño’s setting of Psalm 114, a work Bill and I had sung together in college. Near the end of the composition is the line “Quia eripuit anima mea de morte, oculos meos a lacrymis, pedes meos a lapsu” and Caamaño wrings the salt from this text with real gentleness and a quiet, humble understanding of the unspeakable relief inherent in its promise.

If you’ve ever driven into Chicago from the south, there’s a curve inbound as the Dan Ryan meets the Stevenson, where traffic generally slows to a crawl. The compensation for the slowdown is a lingering view of the skyline, but staring out the windshield one summer evening my attention was drawn instead to my left, to the crevice where the concrete median meets the asphalt. A tomato plant was growing there, no small one, about 2 feet tall, with a few little fruits. It was supported by the median that gave it a level of protection from traffic and held it up toward the morning sun. I figured someone had tossed a taco wrapper out of their car window weeks before, and a bit of uneaten tomato eventually washed into the crack after a rainfall and a seed had taken root. I wished I’d had a camera with me then.

Many years later I saw the same phenomenon in a mall parking lot by a yellow concrete pillar. The thing about these tomato plants growing in odd places is the same thing about any plant that has germinated- it has no choice but to grow. Once it starts up, it keeps going as circumstances permit. On a certain level, life always wins. On a certain level, error is simply a shadow cast onto the screen of visible form. From that level we can look at our arrogance, and laugh at ourselves in recognition of how obtuse our egos can be, and forgive ourselves for thinking that life is somehow under our jurisdiction, to take or to give. From that level we can experience something better, but here and now.

In the painting there’s a figure walking away in the upper left, his head in the clouds, as though he’s leaving that pile of used tires for the rest of us to deal with. I took the reference photo for this segment of the painting from the third floor of the Madison Public Library, so it’s an overview or a witnessing, a vantage point where you can’t miss what’s there (I added the tires later). I’m not sure if the figure stands in for Bill on his way out and up, or if it’s the guy who shot him, leaving the scene in calm unrepentance. What really happened to Bill I still don’t know. Maybe the details don’t matter, but on that certain other level, there’s something to be said for not glossing over what you don’t want to see. We’re all here so we all count, the whole time, from coming in to going out. There are clumps of grass dotting the asphalt, growing anyway, living anyway, and the little figurine emerges from that place too, his attention toward the idea of his younger self perhaps and away from the storm grate, with memories of a city and the clear blue sky above him.

Bill is interred in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, in the same cemetery you’ll find Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and Maria Callas. He’d approve. And Bill’s LinkedIn page is still active. There’s a certain sweetness, a jellybean of kindness that a line of code continues to add 1 annually to the number of years he’s been working as the founder of his business. It’s like a bit of him is still going here, a tiny perpetual movement within the infinity of time.

https://www.windycitytimes.com/lgbt/PASSAGES-William-Vollman-dies-at-50/41966.html

https://fr.linkedin.com/in/williamvollman

A Guild, 24” x 32”, 2016-2024, was painted in egg yolk tempera and oil with hand-refined linseed oil (water only) on glue-chalk gesso over glue size on cradled hardboard panel.