Art

I bought this piece of art today at the famous gallery called “The Sidewalk Outside 7-Eleven.”  I even got to meet the artist, who offered blessings on my head along with my purchase.  I didn’t tell him that the picture was blessing enough, although I probably should have.

And all the way home I was thinking about art and artists, about creativity and courage, about vision and articulation.

What differentiates the artists from the rest of us is that they do it.  They draw or write or paint or dance while the rest of us do whatever it is we fritter away our time doing.  (Cleaning the bathroom?  Running errands?  Watching reruns?) (I’m not actually thinking about the time we spend at our paid work, because a great many artists have day jobs.)

There is one other thing that makes a difference, I think.  They put the work out there.  Yes, there are Emily Dickinsons who write to put poems in a drawer, but in general artists seem to work for the purpose of sharing what they do.  It’s a scary thing, sharing.  Some people won’t like the art.  Some people won’t get it.  Some people might feel like cleaning the bathroom would be a better use of time.

(It occurs to me that there might be an artist whose medium is cleaning bathrooms, but I am going to call that person’s work the exception.)

(My artistic medium might be the parenthetical remark.  At least today.)

I have a list of six miracles I would like to see happen.  I wrote it because I kept saying that everything would be fine if I just had six miracles and a pony.  (I no longer think the pony is necessary.)  One of those miracles is courage.

It takes courage to be an artist.  It takes courage to live.  Connection, the real kind, takes courage because in order to connect we have to open up the truth of who we are.  Some people might feel like cleaning the bathroom would be a better use of time, as I mentioned.

So.  This new piece of art I own is one I like intrinsically.  I like the artist’s framing of the scene, the immediacy, the way he used color, the inclusion of signs, both real and imaginary in the work.  I also like it for what it means for me personally.  It’s about the courage to create and connect.

I am going to make more stuff.

Light and Shadow

It is getting lighter a little later these days, so I am walking Cricket in the dark more.  Because I take a photo these days at some point when I’m exercising, this means that I’m taking a lot more pictures of dark things, reflective things, and the places between than I did before.

Changing my usual brings me to a different kind of thinking.  Or, more accurately, in this case, brings me to a familiar place from a new direction.

I am afraid of dark, reflective, between things.  I’m not literally afraid of the dark, but rather the metaphorical dark of the Depression Monster.  Oddly enough, one of the markers that indicate the Depression Monster’s approach is that I do notice literal reflections more.  My perception of how light works alters.  My eyes slide across the shiny surfaces of things, parse the patterns that light creates on curved shapes, suss out the way I have more than one shadow leading or following me as I walk between street lights.

I don’t mind the perceptive shift.  It feels creative, deepening.  It makes me hyperaware.

But even a familiar monster is still a monster.

Those reflections I see are reflections of the metaphorical knife, the Platonic knife that the Depression Monster suggests to me as the appropriate tool for ending my problems.  I need to walk along the edge of that blade if I want to keep the perception and the life both.

Eventually, August will give way to September and I will be better.

Being Jo

I blame Jo March.  I realize it is not fair to lay anything at the foot of a fictional character beyond what happens in the text, and maybe even that goes too far.  For that matter, blame is seldom useful, but in this context, I will risk it.

Like many girls who grew up when I did (there seems, in my unscientific opinion, to have been some drop since), I wanted to be Jo.  Jo was the writer.  Jo was the strong one.  And no matter what trouble she got into, she always managed to get out with a funny story.

Jo was also the one who was told, over and over, that anger was bad.  Every time she gets angry, something truly bad happens.  Her anger is the thing that crosses the line of what her society will tolerate, that makes her whistling and running and untidiness unacceptable.  Throughout Little Women and in glimpses through the later books and in other Jo-like characters, the message comes through:  do not get angry.

Like Jo, and like Marmee, to whom she pours out her troubles, I can’t manage not to get angry.  What I do, like they did before me, is try to suppress it, paper it over, pretend it isn’t there.

It doesn’t always work.  Sometimes my anger explodes out of me.  And, in some ways, the story is right:  bad things happen.

It’s funny (not ha-ha funny, but, as my former father-in-law used to say “funny like a punch in the nuts…”) that I still have so much to learn at my age.  I expected to have more figured out by now.  Which is probably why I am blaming fictional characters for my troubles.

Thing is, if Jo had been allowed to be angry, had been allowed to learn to express her anger in appropriate ways, had spent her energy on changing the things that made her angry in the structures around her, maybe her anger would not have led to general apocalypse.  Maybe I could have learned a different lesson from her.