The final pages of the ninth School Sketchbook remain empty, an emblem of pregnant absence aching to be caressed by the unflinching pencil of Miss Jelish. There rest no clues or no ciphers on these final and/or any previous leaves to account for Naomi and her family's anonymous egress. As epitaphs reach, this example goes no way beyond its available capacity (as so with the late Extraneous infants, which are awarded an unnecessary poetic institutional significance by virtue of their weathered state). One finds a more poignant aside resting on the final page of the Private Sketchbook (PS.50). Unfortunately the left hand panel of this reflection has been sacrificed to old father time. Still, what is left is no less horribly affecting. The retreating hands of mother and child paralleling the association between spectator and subject, slipping further and further apart as time weaves its mesmerising spell, dragging us deeper and deeper in to the shadows, further and further from the flame of truth, further and further from Naomi V. Jelish.
Page 50 of the Private Sketchbook
Back where we began, our situation similar to Naomi's, each avenue explored culminating in a similar lack of fruition, each symbolic fruit yielding insufficient harvest. Possibly the most wretched element of Naomi's story is the lack of resolution, her and our own inability to close; to see what will be and what could have been. Naomi does not, will not, cannot have the opportunity we are able to exercise in reconsidering what has gone before. She can have no distance, no objective sigh, and no second chance. Despite my ongoing (and lifelong, I imagine) efforts to delineate a course of potential future and history for the young genius, I still twinge with pain when I think of the decisions I made, the decisions I did not make, the time lost, the opportunities sacrificed. All I can offer to you the observer, the viewer, the reader, the scholar is the work. The work screams volumes beyond anything I will ever enunciate so, hopefully, it is be the work I leave you with. Enjoy!
John Ivesmail is a retired schoolteacher who now works as a freelance local historian.
Pdf Version of this document (3.66 MB)