Remembrance A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

Here, in this music by Aaron Copland, music from his opera, The Tender Land, there is a palpable feeling for the land, we hear intimations of the Nebraska landscape. Over the hard fields stars flicker and chant, while locusts sing soothing monotones from seedless furrows. The sky is with moon, underwriting with cool assurance the shapes and attitudes of trees. A meteor sparkles across the bone white stars in their stone silence--its reflection sings along the glass of an old brass lantern, there, on the sinking porch. We are in repose here, our moments full of nothing but the crisp glimmer of suggestion in this quiet landscape. It is our brief association with grace, this delicate clamor of the affinities between things.

One of these affinities I found recently, waiting for a plane connection in the terminal of the Pittsburgh International Airport. I was looking for something very specific, a personal symbol of childhood memory. And there, overhead, suspended from the large rotunda of the main terminal, it hovered: A monumentally sized mobile by the great Alexander Calder. An elegantly streamlined horizontal formation of black, oval plates over which a splay of vertical white plates surge upward into the atmosphere, rising like a great cumulus cloud.

It engenders a remembrance, or, in Wordsworth's words, a natural piety. For forty years ago, in the old airport lobby, long before this gleaming new one was built, this same Calder mobile hung. For me then, it is a sentinel of memory. Under it, holding my father's hand, in the mid 1950s, we would walk to the airport observation deck and watch the planes take off, feel the hot blast of the engine turbos, the swirling dust and deafening sounds. I felt alive, happy and adventurous there with my father--and this great looming Calder, calls back those memories.

One of art's capabilities is its timeless, transcendent reach through the years, where, in Byron's words, the "haunted cell" of memory is inspiration in the present.

"What am I," he writes, "nothing--but not so art thou,
soul of my thought, with whom
I traverse earth,
invisible but gazing, as I glow
mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth."

Art unifies memory and feeling, provides emotion and intellectual continuity with the past. But it also provides an enduring and eternal companion into the future.

If there has been one fundamental belief, one essential idea which has driven these MONA Moments, it is expressed best by Wordsworth:

"Beauty, whose living home is the green earth, surpassing far what hath by special craft of delicate poets been culled forth and shaped from earth's materials, waits upon my steps, pitches her tents before me as I move, my hourly neighbor."