It's All About the Details

 

In her stream of consciousness-esque, perfectly cluttered visual narrative, author Maira Kalman explores her ethnic identity through the items and symbols in her environment. She gathers excellent, witty insights from her surroundings in an attempt to identify herself and understand the world. Kalman achieves her unique, thoughtfully-jumbled tone through sharp transitions, lengthy sentences, and her handwriting itself. Similarly, by illustrating certain objects and scenes around her, she allows the viewer to observe the details more closely and gather meaning from them. By picking through the details, she begins to understand the whole picture. 

One of the most notable aspects of Kalman's writing is her blunt transitions. Because of their randomness and severity, they create humor. She usually transitions from a light, obscure topic to one more serious and existential. Looking deeper, I think these transitions reflect the pattern of Kalman's own thoughts. For example, she states, "What can I tell you? The realization that we are ALL (you, me) going to die and the attending DISBELIEF -- isn't that the central premise of EVERYTHING? It stops me dead in my tracks a dozen times a day. Do you think I remain FROZEN? No. I spring into action. I find meaningful distraction. Lately I have become enamored by fruit platters. I paint them" (46-47). Here, Kalman explicitly states the function of her observations: a "meaningful distraction." I find it interesting that she explains her unquenchable curiosity about the world, but then suggests that this curiosity stems from fear. Does she really want to know more if it only serves as a distraction? However, I think a better explanation is that she thinks so deeply that her thoughts begin to scare her, so she distracts herself with small, interesting details. However, these details create the thoughts that scare her. So, she starts to think and speak in nervous circles wondering "what it all means." And that makes the story funny. 

Most notably, Kalman understands her ethnic identity through details. She spends a significant amount of time detailing her family's past in Eastern Europe, her experience as an immigrant in New York City, and the history of Eastern Europe itself. I think Kalman explains her ethnic identity in so much detail because it is the most concrete identity she has. While she questions the meaning of life and all its uncertainties, she grounds herself in her culture. And interestingly, without sharing her ethnicity myself, I begin to understand it in better detail. The small details of her past--her aunt's kitchen in Tel Aviv, the radishes in Brighton Beach, and her immigrant mother's jumbled map of America--are time capsules that form identity. I think this is why she provides history debriefs--to understand why things are a certain way as a result of the past. Her cultural identity is the one part of life she understands fully, and she cherishes it. 

Although I'm not sure how to connect this tutoring, I can speak about a personal experience that relates to Kalman's book. Personally, I appreciated her descriptions of Manhattan. As a New Yorker, I have experienced similar encounters with people, places, and things in the city that shape my perception of it. Like people, places have unique identities too. And I think--bias included--that New York has one of the most unique identities of all cities. Her descriptions of strangers on the streets and subways are not only accurate but hysterical, and the best part is that no one questions it. That's just the way New York is. I have some personal examples. In my teenage years I attended musical theater classes in Union Square, where I met Arnaud--a upper-west sider who owned a ski house in the French Alps and a Hamptons home, wore a lot of Hermes, and detested de Blasio, and Jeffery--a former Broadway star who didn't use social media and made (unarguably) the world's best olive bread. Now I assist a fashion photographer, and I've met an ex-celebrity makeup artist named Joanne from Australia and a German fashion model with piercing blue eyes and blonde hair that never speaks. I even remember people I never spoke to--like the woman in a key dress in Union Square and the self-branded "Park Poet" in Washington Square Park. And I go into all of this unnecessary detail because these people make New York what it is: diverse, unique, and electric. Like Kalman explains, identity shapes our perception of people and place, and therefore we take meaning from it to understand ourselves and the world.