Creativity in Art and Science and in the Song of Birds

by Mel Alexenberg

Three wolf-like dogs surrounded our car barking and baring their fangs to prevent us from getting out.? My father opened the door and put his leg out.? The dogs’ tails began to wag wildly as they rolled over on their backs. They recognized the scent of my father after our being away in the city for the winter. I leaped out of the car and threw my body on one dog’s belly while the other two licked my face. They were my summertime friends who followed me, played with me, and protected me during my days spent exploring the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York.????????

The dogs were trained to guard our neighbor Ben’s open barn welding workshops at night when no one was working there. They were free to spend the daylight hours with me during the summers when I was set free among salamanders, sowbugs and swallows.?

My days were filled observing the behavior of the creatures of the forest and lakes and the streams flowing into the Neversink River.? I made drawings and paintings of them interacting in their natural habitats as well as in imaginary worlds of my creation.? I had no clue that science and art were not one integrated human endeavor.

One afternoon when I stopped by Ben’s workshop to watch him weld a broken part of a giant earth-moving bulldozer, I spotted a tiny creature shivering in a pool of blood on the barn’s concrete floor.? It had fallen from a nest that barn swallows had made of mud plastered high up on the eaves of the barn.? The naked pink skin of the newly hatched chick was stained with its blood from a gash across its chest inflicted by a sharp steel shard discarded on the workshop floor.

I gently lifted the little creature and rested it in the cupped palm of my left hand while I pressed the index finger of my right hand on the wound to stop the bleeding.? I felt the pulsing of its heart as I raced home.? When my mother and my sister Fran saw the injured creature, they transformed our kitchen into a bird hospital emergency room.? Mom gave a bottle of mercurochrome to Fran to paint on the chick’s wound.? She brought an empty shoe box with a cotton nest in it that she shaped with her fingers.

Nestled in the shoe box, the chick suddenly opened its flat yellow beak and began peeping.? We were happy to hear it come alive.? Fran said, “Let’s call it Peeper.”? We read in the encyclopedia that swallows ate bugs rather than seeds like the canary we had had as a pet.? We spent our days catching flies, small moths, and crickets and digging for worms to feed the insatiable appetite of our small friend as his wound healed.

?My drawings of Peeper showed soft white down growing to cover his nakedness followed by the sprouting of slate gray wing feathers and radiant chestnut red chest feathers.? As flying lessons, I would hold him high above my bed and drop him. Days of plopping down onto my bed unaware of the function of his wings inspired me to make imaginary paintings of him flying free. He learned quickly once he discovered what wings were for. What an awesome sight to see him fly through the house at lighting speeds making ninety degree turns from room to room.

He soon learned to exit from my bedroom window, soar up towards the clouds and swoop down to the pond behind our house where Fran and I swam with the newts, frogs, and minnows. Our utter amazement at seeing the graceful flight of our wounded swallow was transformed into joy each night when he would fly back to roost on the edge of the shoebox by my bed.

I sensed that my intimate relationships with a swallow and three dogs were a kind of lifelike art of the awesome experiences themselves that spoke to me more powerfully than my artlike art that documented my experiences. The daily delight and wonder emerging from my summer learning in the verdant forest was lost in my winter learning in the concrete gray of the city.

What my winter school experience forced into distinctly different disciplines had been integrally one in my summer learning. Thinking the world apart rather than experiencing it holistically broke my soul apart until the snow melted on the pavement and I could return to the mountain breezes. My life in the Catskill Mountains provided intimate experiences with other species that created a vibrant dialogue between science and art that planted the seeds for my adult careers as biologist, experimental artist, and educator.

When leaves began to fall from the trees in the mountains, Fran and I half-heartedly returned to our third floor apartment in Sunnyside, next to Long Island City that touches the East River where Queens is connected to Manhattan Island by the Queensboro Bridge. After school began, when my mother crossed the bridge to shop in Bloomingdales, she would ask me and Fran if we wanted to come with her. My instantaneous response “yes” contrasted with Fran’s hesitance about missing school. Mom dropped me off in the pet shop while she did her shopping.?

I was surrounded by canaries, finches, fish of all sizes and colors, and golden hamsters standing on their hind legs like fuzzy miniature bears. When mom came to get me, I pointed out a hamster that I asked her to buy for me. “I won’t live with a big fat mouse in my house!” I compromised for a canary.

I saved up money and went back to Bloomingdales and bought the hamster and a cage with a wheel in it. On my way home, she chewed her way out of the cardboard box and slithered out of the bag snake-like to my mother’s horror. Two week later, Fran and I caught mom putting a piece of cookie into the stretched out hands of our hamster who we named Snooks.???

Snooks watched television with Fran and me and would get excited and stand up on her hind legs when she saw cowboys on their horses racing across our small black and white TV screen. Snooks probably thought they were hamsters racing as fast as she did in her wire wheel in her cage.

When I was in a toy store with Fran, she stopped to look at miniature furnishings for a doll house. I saw a red plastic tricycle and it popped in my mind that it would be a great toy for Snooks. When Fran and I were watching the TV show “Your Pet Parade” with dogs, cats, birds, and even monkeys performing, we thought it would be great to have Snooks on the show. We created a routine for her to present to Jack Gregson and Bob Russell, the hosts of the show. I cut my cylindrical cardboard Tinkertoy box into two halves. One half became a slide and the other half facing down became a tunnel. From wooden dowels, I glued together a ladder that I attached to the slide. I painted my sculpture sky blue.

Jack and Bob loved the act that we had we worked out with Snooks. He suggested that Fran, a pretty young girl, present it on the air. Snooks went through her routine like a pro. She opened the door of her cage, raced to the ladder, climbed up and slid down, ran through the tunnel, jumped on the tricycle and drove away. When Fran rewarded her with a snack, she quickly grabbed it and stuffed it through her mouth into her cheek pouch to save for later. She had had enough snacks to eat during practice.

When I read up about golden hamsters in the encyclopedia, I learned that Snooks was a descendent of a hamster in Jerusalem. In fact, all pet hamsters in the world today are also descendants of Snooks’ great-great-great…grandmother. In 1930, zoology professor Israel Aharoni discovered a colony of golden hamsters in Syria. He brought a mother hamster and her litter of pups to his laboratory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where a new colony was established. Professor Aharoni shipped several pairs of hamsters born in the Land of Israel to the Zoological Society of London where a third colony was established. They then spread out around the world ending up in Bloomingdales.???

During the years of World War II, I had nightmares that the Nazi’s would bomb the bridges connecting Long Island to continental United States and it would float across the Atlantic Ocean attaching itself to Europe where my family and I would be brutally murdered along with the millions of Jews there. A half century later, when I was a research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, I created a computer generated serigraph of Rembrandt inspired cyberangels in flight linking Long Island to art museums on mainland USA for safe keeping in their collections.

I was born, lived and worked on Long Island for thirty-six years. Brooklyn and Queens, both part of New York City, and Nassau and Suffolk make up the four counties of Long Island. Key events in my life happened in a Brooklyn in flux. In 1937, I was born in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, now Interfaith Hospital, and lived in Brooklyn for the first two years of my life until we moved to Queens. My bar mitzvah was in my uncle Rabbi Morris Wasserman’s synagogue on Coney Island Avenue, now a mosque. I married my wonderful Israeli wife Miriam in 1959 at the Park Manor Jewish wedding hall on Eastern Parkway, now an African-American Baptist church.

In Brooklyn, I was head of the art department at Pratt Institute, in Queens, science teacher at Louis Pasteur Junior High School, and in Nassau, science supervisor of Manhasset Public Schools.? In Suffolk, I taught science education at Adelphi University’s Suffolk College and digital art at Stony Brook University where I had a solo exhibition, “Mel Alexenberg: Computer Angels.”

After our wedding, Miriam and I lived in Queens where our children Iyrit and Ari were born. Ron, our third child, was born in Nassau County and our fourth child Moshe was born an uncle in Israel eighteen years later. We already had two granddaughters.? When Miriam gave birth to Moshe in the hospital in Beersheba, visitors greeted her “mazel tov savta” (congratulations grandma).

Fran and I lived with our parents and our pets in our three room apartment in Sunnyside. When my grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Kahn, passed away when I was seven, our grandmother Rachel and her two unmarried adult children, our mother’s siblings Matty and Hadassah, moved into our small apartment. My father took them in with opened arms. His warm personality flowed through our crowded apartment transforming it into a welcoming home of love and tranquility. The daily acts of giving and sharing with compassion and caring between my parents, sister, grandmother, aunt and uncle seemed to extend the walls of the small apartment we all shared.? Every word spoken in our home as I grew up was spoken with affection, thoughtfulness, and consideration.?????

My grandfather was born in Lithuania where he lived with his uncle close to the yeshiva where he studied. In exchange for his room and board, his uncle asked him to teach his daughters at a time when girls didn’t go to school. My grandmother told me how her cousin Shlomo, her teacher, would repeatedly say, “Rachel, put your mind into studying Hebrew and Torah seriously and I’ll marry you!” In 1900, he went to London to participate in the Fourth Zionist Congress chaired by Theodor Herzl. He never returned to Lithuania. He went from London to Boston where he worked to earn enough money to send a ticket to Rachel to come to America. They married and lived in Boston where their five children were born. I have their ketubah (marriage contract) in my home in Israel. It reads in Hebrew that they were married in Brookline in the State of North America.

During the Great Depression, my grandparents moved to Brooklyn with their children hoping to find better opportunities. My mother told of the days when her parents, brother, and four sisters shared a single roll as their sole meal of the day. Their life changed when my mother met my father Abraham. When he was courting my mother, he gave her unemployed father funds to open a Hebrew bookstore on Coney Island Avenue to feed his family, After they married, he gave his brother-in-law Morris Wasserman, a young rabbi, money for the down payment on a building down the block from my grandfather’s store, to serve as a storefront synagogue with living quarters above. Uncle Morris named it Congregation Beth Abraham after my father.

I remember fondly sitting on the counter in my grandfather’s bookstore when I was five where my grandfather taught me to read Hebrew. I learned to read Hebrew before English. Today, I speak Hebrew to my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends, and neighbors In Israel. I taught in Hebrew in Israeli universities and am author of the Hebrew book, Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Judaism and Contemporary Art published in Jerusalem. When I was seven, my grandfather passed away in 1944, four years short of seeing his Zionist dreams come true with the birth of the State of Israel. How happy he would have been if knew that the great majority of his offspring live in Israel today.

?When my grandmother lived in our home, she sat with me and Fran on Shabbat to show us pictures of Israel she had cut out to her daily Yiddish newspaper. When I moved to Israel in 1969 to teach at Tel Aviv University, I felt at home having become familiar with the geography of Israel and its historical and contemporary sites.

My father was born in Woodbine, where his parents were founders of an agricultural village established in 1891 in New Jersey for Jews fleeing to freedom from the pogroms of Czarist Russia. After high school, my father left Woodbine and moved to New York where he lived with his oldest sister and her family. When the Great Depression was approaching, he turned down admission to university and a pro baseball contract at a time when a player’s wage was meager. His successful housewares store in Brooklyn supported his extended family.

My father, his brothers, and cousins made up the Woodbine baseball team that became a top ranking team in Eastern United States. The pitcher was my father and the catcher was his brother. I benefited from his love of baseball and other sports. On Sunday’s, he would take me to Ebbets Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play. Sometimes for a change of pace, we would see the New York Yankees playing at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. When the baseball season ended, we would go to football games and to hockey games at Madison Square Gardens. I loved to be with my father at the games.? However, love of baseball skipped a generation. My son Ari became a professional baseball player. He was pitcher in the Israel Baseball League.

After my father worked for forty years in his store, he moved with my mother to Florida. He joined “Operation Grandfather,” a Federal Government sponsored program in which retired people volunteered to work in elementary schools teaching reading and math to disadvantaged children on a one-to-one basis. After taking courses in child psychology and educational methodology, he worked in the program for ten years.? When I would visit Florida and walk with my father in the mall, I enjoyed seeing excited African-American children call out “Grandpa Abraham,” run into his arms and hug him tightly.

After my intense and joyous summer learning being free in the Catskills, returning to school in the city became increasingly unbearable to me. My first and second grades in a small new school in the Young Israel of Sunnyside was tolerable. I went there with Fran who was in kindergarten. I felt comfortable in the intimacy of being in a class of only twenty boys and girls. My grandfather’s gift of having taught me Hebrew made me feel at home. After two years the school closed.

During the next two years, I was thrust into alien environments designed to rob me of my creativity.? From the third grade in a huge public school factory in Queens to the fourth grade in a Jewish school in Manhattan imported from the ghetto in 18th century Europe. I saved myself by going through a metamorphosis. I become a terrestrial isopod, commonly known as a sowbug. But a sowbug with 14 legs and breathing with gills is not a bug, not an insect with 6 legs, nor a spider with 8 legs. Although isopods are crustaceans like shrimp and lobsters that live underwater in seas and lakes, there are some that live their entire lives on land. They were my Catskill forest friends that emerged from dampness under logs and rocks to color my thoughts and drawings. I had created a conceptual isolation module in classrooms where I would be free to dream of sowbugs reaching to the moon.

My childhood thoughts were supported in adulthood when I received a phone call from NASA in Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) offering me a job to work on the lunar landing module. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” I explained. “I’m a biologist working on ecology of sowbugs living under logs in the woods.” “No, I‘ve got the right person,” he retorted. “You’ve worked out how to create a closed ecosystem where living organisms can survive in an alien environment.” At the time, I was test center coordinator for the American Association for the Advancement of Science curriculum project “Science - A Process Approach.”

On the Shortline bus climbing up Route 17 into the mountains, my isolation module split wide opened as I became excited about reuniting with two families of sowbugs, my dear friends. In the Pillbug family, if there is a scarcity of water each individual fends for itself by rolling up into a ball to protect its gills.? They look like “Pigmy Armadillos,” the title of my article in Junior Natural History, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History. In the Woodlice family, since they cannot roll up, they congregate so the outer isopods protect the inner ones. I made paintings of these amazing little creatures in their Catskill habitat. I compared the ecology of these two families in my Honors Thesis for my degree in biology at Queens College.

When my summer life with my sowbug and swallow friends came to an end, I returned to the city to begin my fifth grade at Yeshiva of Central Queens, a school a half-hour bus ride from my Sunnyside home. Fran and I and our parents felt comfortable with the school’s direction as a Zionist school where the Hebrew taught was the Hebrew spoken in Israel.

The redeeming feature of my new school, unlike any of the others, was that it had an art teacher. Paula Eliasoph saved me from returning to creating a sowbug inspired conceptual isolation module for myself at Yeshiva of Central Queens. Paula was a highly accomplished artist, a graduate of Pratt Institute art department, and a wonderful art teacher. She would have enjoyed knowing that I would become head of Pratt’s art department from 1985 to 1990.

She taught us drawing, painting, and ceramics, and how to be creative in multiple craft media for celebrating the Jewish holidays and decorating the school. Recognizing my talent, she submitted a painting I made of children playing in the snow to a state-wide competition that won first prize. She spoke to my parents suggesting that I study with her in her studio in the evening. When I came to my first class, I saw that I was in a class with men and women, doctors and lawyers, and others adults interested in developing their painting hobby and drawing skills. I was the only child.

I’ll always remember one of the many special art activities she devised for me. She fashioned arrangements of objects for my adult classmates to choose to draw in their sketchbooks for transforming into still life paintings. She told me to make drawings of two different arrangements on tracing paper rather than in my sketchbook. Then she said, “Place one of the drawings on top of the other and add a blank third piece of tracing paper on top.” She challenged me to explore the intersecting lines of the two drawings to create a new one that I could evolve into an abstract painting.

She repeatedly told me, “You must study the artworks in the Museum of Modern Art and discuss what your saw with me. It’s easy for you to get there. Take the same Green Bus you take home every day from your yeshiva in Jamaica but don’t get off in Sunnyside. Stay on the bus. It will take you over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan and down Fifth Avenue. Get off at 53rd Street and go down the block. You can’t miss the entrance.”

To take the bus to school every morning, I walked under a huge decorated concrete structure on Queens Boulevard that supported the elevated tracks for trains between Manhattan and Queens. When I was waited for the bus going east to Jamaica, I saw a bus going the other way that would take me to the museum. I raced back under the tracks in time to catch the bus to MoMA. This was the first of many times I enacted this scene.

As I explored the museum, my soul raced with excitement at the bright colors, electrifying energy, dancing forms, and the great variety of creative ideas: Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Paul Klee, Alexander Calder, George Braque, Ben Shahn, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Chaim Gross, Joan Miro, Charles Sheeler, Fernand Leger, Alberto Giacometti, and Isamu Noguchi.? This exciting world of modern art became the focus of my winter learning that complimented my summer learning in the mountains.

When the book Matisse and Picasso was published, I invited its author Francoise Gilot to give a lecture at Pratt Institue where I was head of the art department. That Gilot was Picasso’s companion from 1946 to 1954 gave her a front row seat to view the explosive birth of modern art through observing the artistic and personal friendship of Picasso and Matisse. She gave me a copy of her book in which she wrote: “To Mel Alexenberg, who sees angels in computers and computers in angels. Francoise Gilot.”

Paula recommended that in addition to going to MoMA, I should also go to see the wide range of artworks in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest museum in America. I got off the bus before it turned south on Fifth Avenue and walked north along Central Park to The Met. I climbed the monumental staircase into the museum and began wondering through what seemed like an endless labyrinth. I have the horrific memory of finding myself lost in a maze of rooms that made my heart beat in fear. Each room was filled with frightening paintings of a young Jewish man suffering, a wreath of thorns crowning his bloodied head, gangrenous hands pierced with spikes, Roman soldiers nailing him to a cross for the crime of being called King of the Jews.

Mixed with execution scenes were the pietas, paintings of an anguished Jewish mother holding her dead son. The varnished umbers cast a dark and dreadful glow. I sensed in horror that these pictures were visual lessons instructing people to torture and kill Jews. They screamed out, “Kill him! Kill Mel Alexenberg, Menahem ben Avraham ben Mordecai, the Jew!” I raced through the museum like a gazelle fleeing a hungry lion until I fell into the welcoming arms of Tahitian women. Out of breath, I was comforted by their soft bronze breasts and the fragrance of the flower petals in the baskets they held out to me. The room with Gaugin’s paintings was my hideout, my sanctuary. I felt the serenity of Gaugin’s tropical colors wash over me, cleansing me, reviving me.

The next time I caught the Green Bus to Manhattan, I got off at MoMA. Today, my pioneering multimedia etching “Digital Homage to Rembrandt: Jacob’s Dream” is in both the collections of MoMA and The Met.

I had been drawing with color pencils and painting with watercolors on paper. After my visits to the art museums, I grew anxious to make a painting with oil paints on canvas like the ones I saw there. I was so happy when my parents bought me artist brushes, colorful oil paints and a blank canvas. I had many ideas for subjects for my first oil painting. I was frustrated that none of them seemed meaningful enough for me begin to paint on my one and only canvas.

It was springtime and tulips were in full bloom. I enjoyed seeing brilliantly colored tulips walking on Fifth Avenue south of MoMA to Rockefeller Center and north to The Met at Central Park. I had read that tulip bulbs where brought to New York City from Holland when it was called New Amsterdam.

A week later while taking peas out of peapods for my mother to make lunch, I had a sudden flash of insight.? I could see my new tubes of oil paint spill out rows and rows of different colored tulips all over my blank white canvas. I grabbed my brushes and started to paint a field of tulips. My mother walked by while I was painting and remarked that tulips came to America from Holland. “Are you going to paint a windmill, too?”

My doctoral thesis at New York University explored the nature of creative process in art and science.? When active seeking ceases, when consciously preoccupied with unrelated activities, when we least expect it, the germ of the creative idea bursts into our consciousness. This sudden flash of insight is what Judaism calls Wisdom. It is the transition from nothingness to being, from potential to the first moment of existence. In the Bible’s words, “Wisdom shall be found in nothingness” (Job 28:12).

As we were collaborating on writing this book, Miriam and I realized that at the time I was making my painting, her father was driving with her mother, sister, and brothers past windmills to see the fields of hundreds of tulips in bloom. The official opening of the tulip season in Holland is on the first day of spring, March 21st, Miriam’s birthday. Miriam’s parents were born in Amsterdam.

The first book that I bought for myself was The World as I See It. Albert Einstein describes the essence of biblical consciousness in the soul of a creative individual from the spiritual viewpoint of a scientist:

“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.? It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer feel amazement is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. But the Jewish tradition also contains something else, something which finds splendid expression in many of the Psalms – namely, a sort of intoxicated joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of this world, of which man can just form a faint notion. It is the feeling from which true scientific research draws its spiritual sustenance, but which also seems to find expression in the song of birds.”

For years after having completed my painting, I always felt there was something mysteriously missing. It took me a decade to find the missing piece of the puzzle. It was meeting my wonderful wife Miriam when she was 17 and I was 21 when I saw her in the painting dancing through the field between the rows of flowers listening to the song of birds.

See parallel LinkedIn article "Growing Up Jewish Where Jungle and Ocean Touch" by Mel's wife Miriam at https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/growing-up-jewish-where-jungle-ocean-touch-mel-alexenberg/?trackingId=LZmNDLdzSiCW9OPfDkUYbw%3D%3D