ART/art

Your life is your art.  This thought popped into my head this morning.  I was thinking of a woman I know.  She and I take long walks and talk about everything.  We talk particularly intently about art.  She is a visual artist and I am a writer.

What does it mean to be a successful artist?  Is it about money, acclaim, the praise of your colleagues?

A good life is like a good painting, a great movie—it is a life lived with purpose, with planning, with passion, and with individuality.

Sue and I talk about what will it take for us individually to focus on our art to the exclusion of all else.   Is that possible?  Is it necessary?  I have been raised on the idea of the artist as an outsider, without family or entanglements that might prevent or discourage the full abandonment of the individual to their art.

But I want it all.  I want an artist’s life, a family life and an individual life.  It seems to me that you have to carve out a spot in your life to be an artist.  You have to seize the time and energy to pursue your art come hell or high water.

You need a room of your own, a little charmed cottage in the woods.  Grow the hedges high, put in brambles and blackberries and thorny bushes that reach for the skies.  Clear out a well worn path around this little cottage that brings air and light and pleasant breezes.  Keep the boundary firm.  Only, only, only let others in when your working day is over.  Let the enchantment be broken at day’s end and then you can be a wife, a mother, a friend.

You have to keep “them” out,  but you also need to rein yourself in.  Art is not just a free flowing outpouring of spirit.  It is a disciplined focused expression.

Gosh, I can’t believe I am talking about ART.  I wanted to talk about how some people’s lives are art.  Art with the mess, with the unexpected, with the chaos.

When I sit in Sue’s kitchen in the little sitting area with Sue and her family and the dogs and the babies and the food scattered about, I feel like I am in the presence of a great artist.  A composer.  A conductor without a baton.

This kind of artistry generates no income or acclaim (except for those of us that get to participate).  It is performance art of the highest order.

Everybody hurts

Because of all the difficulties in my own family, I am thinking this morning about my relationship with my Father.  I did not have a good relationship with him.  He was a task master and sometimes cruel Father who had very rigid ideas about how children should behave and how chores should be done.  He was emotionally distant and judgmental.

He was the boogyman in our family.  Feared and hated and also belittled and bad-mouthed behind his back.

And yet we needed him and loved him and more than anything wanted his approval.  He did not gift any of his daughters with self-esteem.

As I grew older, my vision of my Dad changed.  He became more fully realized in my eyes, more rounded.  He did not exist in a bubble only in relation to me.  He had his own bubble, he was his own man.  But I still held on to my experience of him as a child–cruel, unpredictable and unapproachable.

He had had a rough childhood and early adulthood.  He was extraordinarily bright but didn’t have the behavioral skills to last through college.  He worked as an accountant his whole life, in a boring office job and supported five children. I imagine he was miserable, depressed, angry and bored.  He persevered.  He got a table clock for his fiftieth anniversary.

I remember the first time I saw my Dad as a fully realized human being.  I was already in my fifties.  I was visiting my parents in their condo.  My Mom was seriously ill with lung cancer and Parkinson’s.We were in their little kitchen area, my Mom and I sitting at the dining table while my Dad pottered around in the kitchen.

My Dad started haranguing  my Mom about not eating enough.  His words were harsh and upsetting.  I was going to yell at him and then I realized that fear was driving his response to my Mother.  He was frightened.  He  was losing her.   I was devastated for both of them. I felt his pain.  I felt his fear.  I could look beyond his presentation.  He loved his wife and didn’t know what to do.

My Dad was a rough and harsh man.  He was socially awkward and impatient.  He didn’t really know how to communicate tenderness or concern.  So he raged.  I would have wished he was different for my mother and our family.  I wish he had been more in touch with his feelings and able to express himself clearly.  But we can’t all be Mr. Rogers.  He did his absolute best.

Seeing someone clearly sounds simple.  Not so.  It seems to me that only when we can step out of our own heads, our own egos and experience other people as they are, not as if they have sprung out of our heads, can we see clearly.  What we think we see and what is true can be so different.

It took me fifty years to see my Dad as himself doing his best.

 

 

Inured to insult

This is us after the election.

Who’s laughing now?

 

I’m reading the paper this morning, then got on Facebook, and thought—stop all the dramatics and the theatrics.  Quit trying to explain why Trump happened.  You got it wrong when you tried to explain why Hillary was going to win.

We all got it wrong.  That’s the big Why.

We’re not the only asshole nation.  Look around the world—Putin, Netanyahu,  Duetarte, and now our very own Trump.

The world is scared right now.  People look to men (god help us), strong men to save us.  We don’t realize that these are straw men.  They can’t save us.  They will just get us further stuck in the mire.

I have been thinking a lot about the election night map and how the whole center of our country went Trump.  Why didn’t we know this?  Does no one talk to these people?  Why not?  A lot of us came from the center of the country.  Surely we must have had an inkling.

We were much too enthralled, though, by the sound of our own voices here on the coasts.It reminds me of an old cartoon “The callous sophisticates laugh at Judy’s tiny head.”  Well, Judy’s tiny head just exploded.