Art Hurts and a Sandwich
Mortality, pickles, and art teachers
The Art Hurt came on a Friday afternoon, as the last act of the working week. On the spectrum of Art Hurts, it wasn’t a huge one. I’d say medium-sized. Not one of the real boulders that can flatten you for a stretch, not as insignificant as the Goodreads review declaring “I couldn’t stand her or her brother!” But an Art Hurt nonetheless.
Everyone deals with career wounds, setbacks, uncertainties. Art, though, can be a bit distinct in the degree and intensity of the uncertainty. It is possible to work for years on a project and watch it evaporate in a simple, “Love her writing, but feel like this has too much Mexico in it!” Beyond the psychological wallop, there’s a financial one. I have found that, for me, to begin any worthwhile artistic project is to take a big leap into, not necessarily the unknown, but the barely known. What I’ll call the Zone of Emerging Curiosity. What will you find there? 1960s memoirs by rural British art teachers? Obstetrics textbooks? Government reports on bioengineered goats? Who knows! Maybe something people will pay $27 for at Barnes and Noble, maybe a long road that eventually leads to a fellowship in a castle, maybe just a heckuva lot of random knowledge about orb spiders.
The Zone of Emerging Curiosity is about sensing something interesting, powerful, unique, that touches on all your own little personal nodes of fascination. You can’t program it out, you can’t be sure it will produce anything the culture anoints with value. You have to take on that risk, trusting that, if you explore with enough dedication and discipline, eventually a project will begin to cohere. The trick is, as you get older and have to do things like replace the bricks in your chimney for approximately 8 million dollars and buy new snow boots for children and whatnot, it gets harder and harder to take the risk. The risk is increasingly weighted by worry and desperation. The genuine curiosity of it, the play, so essential for lighting that spark, fizzles out in the need to justify it in a larger schema of worth that is, at the beginning at least (not so much later on, when tweaks that make the work more commercial/digestible can also make it stronger) antithetical to it.
What are you talking about, you ask? Basically, art entails risk, and it gets harder on many levels to justify that risk as one gets older. This is not whiny, I promise you! I chose this life, I am very grateful for it, I love the work I do. BUT – with all the risk and vulnerability of a project come The Art Hurts. The rejections, the nos, the snubs, etc, etc. After which you really have to step back and do a painful audit, and ask yourself, does this art suck? and then be honest with the answer, and either way, the answer will hurt, because if it’s a yes, well it’s back to the drawing board, and if it’s a no, then you just keep on keeping on hoping somebody somewhere will say, we will give you enough money for this wonderful thing!
So I got an Art Hurt. And I used to spiral a bit with these, flounder around in self-pity, righteously declare I was becoming a park ranger and the world would get no more art from me! etc etc. This time, I ate a sandwich. I still felt all the feels of the Art Hurt: the wounding, the mild indignation, the insecurity, the worry. But I found myself appreciating just how good the sandwich was. Sour, salty, spicy with chipotles, on good bread. It then became almost funny to me – the sandwich was inadvertently distracting me from the Art Hurt. It was almost like life saying, HELLO! Here I am, with pickles and ice skating! HEL-LO! And I listened! I heard it! This is not to say that I wasn’t worried about money and work and my writing and my career and the whole of it, but that at age 40 I can say, damn, I am so grateful for this sandwich.
Perhaps it helped that I was listening to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. Whoo-eee, if you ever want a little perspective to step away from your sulky, whining, worrying self, this book will do it. I listened to it, and during the final few chapters, I was cooking chili for some friends. I wept with such force that I worried the chili would contain some deep inner essence of grief. I wept so hard my eyes swelled and Jorge came into the kitchen, concerned, asking if I was alright. Kalanithi never finished the book – he died when it was only partway done, and this is part of the story itself, its essence. I haven’t read a description of death as painful, beautiful, poignant, raw as the one in this book. We so rarely read about birth and death. So rarely discuss or confront them; in fact, we might actively avoid them. And here it was, in all its immensity, and what we see as readers is a person learning how to die, and bravely, humbly, accepting it, even in grief, sadness, and fear.
At one point in the book, soon after the gravity of Kalanithi’s cancer is revealed, his brother comes to visit him and reassures him that he’s accomplished so much in his life. And Kalanithi laughs at how beside the point this is. It’s not that he doesn’t love his work as a neurosurgeon and deeply value it, but its prestige – its accomplishments – provide little meaning at such an existential moment. Rather, he seeks mooring in relationships: to his patients, to his family, to his work in all its capacities.
The next day I called my mom while I was running and told her about weeping into the chili. She remembered a story from when she was in high school: how the father of a friend of hers was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The father was a deacon at their church. He told his children, “I taught you how to live, and now I’m going to teach you how to die.”
Anymore, when I meet people who try to place me based on my status – where have I gone to school, what have I accomplished, what institutions I can link myself to – I sense the deep shallowness of that status, how little it says about me. I used to believe in it very much. I used to believe it was a shorthand for, honestly, how interesting or important I was. Now I think what is most interesting about me are the parts that have almost nothing to do with traditional markers of value. Like the part that finds pinto beans beautiful. Like the part that sits silently for twenty minutes almost every day. Like the part that suddenly understands that building a community is a real accomplishment as big as any book, who takes her daughter and friends ice skating and ties their laces and feeds them hot chocolate and watches them cling to each other’s arms when they slip.
In his book Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World, David Orr writes, “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places.”
Getting older, perhaps this awareness of the shallowness of “success,” of how little status actually translates into meaning and happiness, balances out the increasing aversion to risk and creative play. They temper one another. Success comes to mean not only being valued, compensated, recognized by certain people and institutions, but living in a kind of alignment, nurturing ways of being and seeing that may be directly antithetical to the very institutions one turns to for valuation.
I am reading an absolutely delightful book from 1968 called An Experiment in Education, by Sybil Marshall, a British teacher who ran a one-room schoolhouse in the mid 19th-century. In it, she describes a moment in summertime when she is sitting in a field with her students, painting. The students loved painting al fresco so much that, she writes, “We used to bundle all our equipment into a wheelbarrow and set off to record some cottage or barn pictorially, leaving a bold note for any school inspector…GONE PAINTING. FIND US IN THE FIELD BEHIND THE CONGREGATIONAL CHAPEL.”
One day, an inspector comes searching for her, and offers her a job at a brand new, prestigious school just being built, with a “lovely modern flat.” She declines on the spot, opting instead to stay in her ramshackle, ancient rural house and her one-room school that contains a single cabinet, almost no materials, but children who have come to love the art she teaches. The inspector wanders away, leaving her “knee-deep in ox-eye daisies and yellow bedstraw, in the shade of elms as old as the chapel or the dove-cote we were painting.”
“He seemed genuinely surprised,” she writes, “by my refusal to exchange the gold for the glitter.”
When I finished my sandwich after the Art Hurt, I hiked through the park to pick Elena up from school. HEL-LO, life called, in a hay-and-navy sky. HEL-LO, in the snow dusting the bare trees. And I heard it. I listened.
Recommendations:
When Breath Becomes Air, obviously; I loved the audiobook. This NYT piece about menopause; I tend to be very wary of medical solutions like hormones, but this piece is complex and nuanced and WOW doctors do not study menopause AT ALL in med school?!?! I absolutely LOVED this podcast about raising “spicy” kids and I really respect Julie Bogart. It is very easy to cook yummy stuff with this cookbook.
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Extra special bonus feature today! I am trying to do one kind thing a day. Just trying to put kindness a little bit more at the center of my life. I am thinking VERY small here, like literally smiling and saying hello to a stranger, letting people make the insane and maddening Pittsburgh left (IYKYK) without ranting about it, complimenting someone’s dog, calling my mom, dancing to nineties music with my child when I don’t feel like it, etc.
So I’m asking you to leave in the comments: what’s one small kind act you performed this week? It can be towards yourself, too! Let me know below. 😄
I drove (well, sat in a car ;) for two hours to watch my grandson’s basketball game when I was tired and starting to get a headache, but I really wanted to be there for him. We had a coffee which took away the headache, and I ended up having a lovely time.
This was a particularly good newsletter. I hope your Art Hurt heals quickly x
Ha, one day! I think it is the human condition, though. Only something we can become more and more aware of.