Holy Acid Trip!!

First, I would like to thank Darin so much for allowing me to borrow a copy of his Mother’s Urn. Thank you Darin! (My copy STILL hasn’t come… ridiculous!).

Anyhow, before I had grabbed the book from Darin, I did a little research and tried to find an electronic copy of the text, to no avail. I did however find a few preview pages available online so I knew I’d be dealing with a complex text. When I picked up the book from Darin, he gave me a great piece of advice, and something I had read about other’s doing; he told me to first read it through with a focus on either the text or the illustrations and to “not get sucked into the drawings”. Oh my am I glad that I heeded his advice! If these illustrations themselves could be found in a museum, I’d be the person to try and “understand” them by gazing and analyzing them for hours. To pair them up with text was simply overwhelming for me. I wondering if many others felt that way also. I had to first, read the text, which was complicated already and said so much, even down to the word movement, text and color, then go back and look at the illustrations in depth, then go back a third time to finally work my mind to put the two together. I can say with certainty I truly do not understand the illustrations entirely. There is simply too much to see in some of them and many, many intricacies and complexities. I am hoping to grasp a further understand through dialogue in class.

If I had to summarize this memoir into one word it would be, “heavy”. It’s heavy both in it’s content, the subject, in the illustrations, through the usage of black, even the pages themselves. It just seems all around heavy to me. What I noted first were the black pages. Black pages, black pages? I don’t know how others took this but I immediately felt the emptiness, without, cryptic, gothic, dark feelings that this choice conveys to its readers. Perhaps others have another take on it but I felt that even the illustrations made me feel this way as well. It’s as if to say, the text made me feel sad, so did the illustrations and the black pages. It all worked together in conveying a sense of sadness, loss perhaps, darkness and heaviness. I felt her pain, 100% as I experienced the text in its entirety.

A few things that stuck out to me were the bloody noses on both page 10 and 13, without saying (although she does at a later time on page 14) I knew instantly that this represented both the beatings and implied the use of drugs, cocaine more specifically. This inclusion of drugs within the illustrations is found throughout the text over and over again with the blue little “v” pills (pages 14-17, 21-22, 26, and 32) for someone who comes from a household were drug abuse was prevalent, I can see how hard it would be to not include this in almost all of the illustrations, especially in a memoir-type book. It’s as if to say, it was everywhere, everyday, it influenced everything you saw, it explained so much and it was just all around ever-present in both her mothers life and thus in hers. Drug abuse.

Another illustration that I just found remarkably clever was that found on page 32. The illustration reminded me of the words found on page 5 where Kalamity J states she is a ”carbon cop[y]” of her mother and how the children were so apart, so from their mother. This illustration truly displays this sentiment. I hope that you all saw that there are two children in the illustration but the older child’s head is connected and forms out of what can presumed to be their mother’s head. I loved this! You can also see her digesting the valiums. It said so much to me and as I have previously stated, all around the illustrations were so heavy with meaning and also pain. This was one that conveyed that meaning to me clearly, among many others. The only glimmers of hope or at least connectedness I found was in the relationship between herself and her brother, which again is also displayed in the illustration on page 32. Even though this relationship is described in such a manner, the illustrations that display them together still express emotions of solitude and loneliness.

This memoir in general was simply very painful, heavy and complex for me on a variety of levels, not only because of the very intricate illustrations but also because the story seems so very close to my own. It expressed a beautiful pain, as I like to call it.