Again, this won't be a long entry. Well. For me, it's not that long. Oh, who am I kidding? It's long.
Writer's Block Is Painter's Block
I have been blocked at the painting table this last week. I have been dreaming paintings for weeks, but the moment I sat down to paint after the week of storm chaos, nothing.
I sat with my taped down paper, all my beautiful brushes, my tissue papers, everything out for me to use and... nothing.
The demon voices from childhood clamored instead, in their original forms and in the "grown up" permutations.
"You? An artist? Your sister was the artist, not you." This voice is the counterpart to the "You? A writer? Daddy wrote the book. You haven't published a goddamned word, except for that Stanford stuff. Advertising, really. Just schlock."
Clever voices, those. You all know enough of my family to be able to figure out how those got there. And here is one of my favorites, interchangeable for singing, song-writing, regular writing AND painting. I call her Mom's 'Demon for All Seasons.'
"You just like the sound of it. I am an Artist. A Writer. I am apart from the rest of you somehow. Who do you think you are? You're not such a much, any more than anyone else. Do something real with your life. Something practical. If you won't be a teacher, get into banking, or something that will pay the bills. An artist. Save that for the weekends."
That one is the age old WASP voice of New England. Modesty is THE virtue above all virtues, followed closely by practicality.
And there is the one that goes, "You know you'll screw it up. You haven't really screwed something up in a while, so this one is going to fail. Really. Why even bother?" And I sit there, with a loaded brush, poised, terrified to put it onto the paper.
Yes. Terrified. And what will happen anyway if I "screw it up?" Yes. The earth WILL swallow me whole and spit me out as unfit. Even the earth will find me objectionable. Yup. And the painting will be so awful it will confirm the other demon voices and I will never paint anything someone will want; I will never paint another painting I like; I will run out of money because I never paint another painting that is anything; I will have a shopping cart and sleep in a cardboard box and wind up having to use a surf board with wheels to get around.
And I get so engrossed with that bizarre image that the paint dries on the brush and I start laughing and give up for the day.
That was a game Jessie and I used to play when she got into her own "I'm a loser because I cannot write this paper perfectly" mode. We'd play, "What's the worst that can happen?"
And Jessie and I would build this elaborately ridiculous story of how her life would be over, she'd lose her friends, all of her family would reject her and--Jessie liked this--we would spit at her when she entered the room, and she would become homeless and die. This usually got her writing just so she could "Get it over with and be homeless and done with it all." (And she rarely got lower than a B+, much to her brother's disgust.)
Only with me, I would simply start laughing and then remember Jess and tear up and then walk away.
We also have the "Your ideas suck and who the HELL wants to read your drivel or see your torn paper scribbles?"
Any of these voices sound familiarly inane? And toxic?
Okay, so I do know that you simply have to keep showing up at the blank paper, no matter what. I have done that with my writing--whether it's with the work I do offline or my blog. I have looked at the blinking cursor for so long that I've written songs to its beat. Bad songs, but songs, nonetheless. In my head, where I cannot possibly see them as productive work. God forbid I should actually admit to myself that writing songs, good or bad, is showing up at the page! After all, my intent was to work on that poem I thought of when I was cleaning the kitchen, NOT some song that no one will ever sing because it is so pathetic.
Finally, we get to "You are almost sixty. Who on this EARTH will care what a sixty year old, overweight woman who walks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame has to say or paint? Where on earth do you get OFF even trying at this late stage? You are no one." Yeah. That one is my favorite.
Light through the Wall of Voices
Only finally, I hear Julia Cameron talking to me. I was lucky enough to do a workshop with her several years back. I see her and hear her voice. "If you wait to start, then you'll be even older than you are now, so why not start?" Sometimes she words it differently, but always the point is the same. So you feel you are too old to start now, so you are going to wait even longer to do what you love? And is the only reason you do this to make money? NO. I have no idea whether I can make a dime more. And I'll certainly have no idea if I do not produce anything.
I write because it is the only way I can process my life EVER. I started my first journal when I was twelve. It wasn't a diary. It was a journal, and it's where I first wrote that poem about the old man and his shack, with the eagle. Since that time, I filled more than forty journals. I tend not to have journals per se any more. I have random musings in a folder on my desk top, and a beautiful handmade "journal" by my bed for snippets when I awaken in the morning. But writing was a habit I developed long ago. And when I peek into a really old journal I see drawings, too...
When I get to the voices I've acquired through the years that are NOT demons, I feel the change inside. I feel something fomenting. First it is anger and all those pathetic tapes that run no matter how hard I try to silence them. And I start telling each one off. You may laugh at me in this, but it is the only way I know how to ditch them. They will never shut up permanently--they are ingrained. However, I have learned how to get them to shut up long enough for me to find my groove again. And once I start, I am very glad I live alone, because I do it aloud.
I scream at them. "Jean Ellen would be HAPPY that I am painting! And Dad would LOVE it that I wrote for Stanford. How DARE you tell me that was schlock. It was good work. It was wonderful work and IT WAS WRITING MY BEST! I can be an artist if I want to be!"
Oh, yes. God forbid I do anything quietly or rationally. Did I ever mention that when I went off to college, I thought I would be an actress? Big surprise there, right? I address them all. That happened Friday morning. I was just plain ANGRY.
The Transformation begins
And Friday night I lugged a formless, nameless painting --the one I began on my retreat -- upstairs. I did not work on the one I thought I would begin. I worked on one where all I knew is that it kind of looks like choppy water. I said aloud, "PLAY with it, for God's sake. Don't worry about what it is, what it may be, just play with it. Screw the voices. To hell with anything but the process. JUST PLAY." I stomped my foot, which, of course, hurt, but when you are six, you don't care whether or not it hurts. If you are mad, you're mad. Stomping is what you do, at least, if you are six-year-old Jetty.
So I played. And then it began to look like the Lake on a choppy day, the way it did when I'd gaze, unfocused, down from the picture window in the cottage, the one by the giant field stone fireplace my grandpa built--on the daybed, tucked there under the window, with the enormous wood box at its head, the old record player in its beautiful wood encasing at the foot. The room always smelled like pine. Sometimes I would open the wood box top and just smell. I'd climb onto the wood box, crouching, and leap from the box onto the daybed, making sure my feet never touched the floor so that the alligator under the bed could not get me; a cheetah pouncing. Then I'd lie on my stomach and slither up to the window, lean on my elbows that rested on the sill, push my nose against the glass and stare. I was a hissing cobra, and my elbows and head were the hood. But finally I would simply lose myself, seeing nothing but the water, dancing. White caps and sparkles and every shade of blue. Sometimes a maple leaf would drift in my line of sight, and I would blink.
And Grandpa would bring me back home with his laugh, having witnessed my transmutations.
And so I began painting nothing but water. I collaged long lengths of tissue with the flat side down, curves and bumps on top, in every shade of blue I could make.
When I was done for the evening, I stood my lake against the oak desk that was at the cottage, too. The one Grandpa did his paper work at, by the one light, in the evenings. If I peeked in after bedtime, opening the swinging door from the bedroom hall, I would see him bent over papers.
"Jet. Aren't you supposed to be in bed?" I would see an eyebrow raise and I would giggle and run to my room again.
I played last night, too. And again, for just a little while this morning--long enough to get that darker blue just so, there, toward the top, to balance something or other that I cannot name.
But now I have to shower and get ready to go tutor my nephew. He is working on an essay about the difference between Lao Tzu and Confucius. And then he needs help understanding Mendel's Principles and how to make and use a Punnett Square. And he wants to get the jump on mitosis...
My brain will hurt by the time I get home on Monday, so I will leave my playground upstairs for now, so that I can use it and recover.
But here's my point. I am working on a painting for real again! And I like it. And maybe no one else in the world will like it, too, when I am done, but it does not matter. And that's the point, isn't it? Today I will be doing something that matters for and WITH my nephew. We manage to have fun in the misery of it all! I love science, which is why I loved my work for Stanford. All of it is real.
Life's a gamble most of the time, isn't it? Every day it is a 30-70 shot whether or not my legs will work. The odds are in my favor, but as the day progresses, the odds shift drastically. Yet I get up. I show up and I make them work. I'm not so sure that my painting and my writing are so very different. I have a friend who asked me why I bother trying so hard to keep walking, since I cannot do the things that are FUN--hiking, going to art shows and museums, taking a trip to New York and things like that.
I walk because I can. I walk because I can still take care of myself as long as I keep on walking. I'll do other things for fun and take the trips inside my head. And I don't know what I might miss if I STOPPED walking just because it's hard.
What will I miss if I stop writing just because I don't know whether or not other people will want to read what I write, let alone pay money for it? And what will I miss if I stop painting? I remembered my grandpa again. He lived for me as I painted. I had not thought of those days in a long, long time. I can smell the cottage again. All from playing with my papers and paint. What will I be missing if I do not try to paint the autumn leaf that will drift into my view, there, over the blues of that water? What will I remember when I paint a few sparkles there, among the white caps?
I don't know. It isn't worth the risk, the not trying. Isn't that why we do what we do? Isn't that why we search for the picture to snap? The painting to create? The story to tell? Is that why the Stanford professors just had to start another business when the first, second, and third didn't quite work? Are they afraid they will miss something important if they do not take the risk?
Somewhere or other, with people who are driven to create, to explore, the risks of missing something outweigh safety. I don't think that would necessarily be the right thing for every person to do, but perhaps it is what drives some of us. I don't get a rush from the risk itself; I get the rush from the process and then something indescribable when it works. I don't like the uncertainty, actually. I hate it; but I need to do it anyway. It has little to do with courage, though. I simply love to fly.
Not an original thought among any I wrote today, but they are the thoughts that get in my way, and the thoughts that take me home ... and the thoughts that allow me to fly.
What about you? what are your demons and what thoughts are the sails that catch the wind for you?
Oops. I had best at least get my shower taken! Have a wonderful couple of days? (well. More than that, but it will be tomorrow night before I get back.) Editing will not do for today, and I hope that I read about your demons and what you do to shut them the hell up.
Showered, dressed, and studying my Mendel. I had to turn my painting to the wall, so that I am not distracted. Bye for now.
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
20 comments:
As I read, I was saying, come on, you can do this, painting and writing and walking and breathing. You can and you will. By the end, when you spoke about your grandfather, I had tears and sobs stopping me from reading on.
For what it is worth, today you talked yourself into doing. That's the essence of being alive: get up, move about, take care of yourself, and express your thoughts. In the end, these actions define who we become, day in and day out. Our parents, our grandparents, our friends, our children and spouses sometimes help, sometimes hinder. But they are part of how we navigate.
And they are part of the air we breathe.
And they are part of the forces we fight to stand up and declare our existence time and time again.
I'm rambling, having entered your thought process and understanding it all too well.
I tell myself, now is the time to do what you, only you can talk about, write about, paint or put music to words about.
I wish I had all the talents you have, J. Being able to express yourself in so many ways is enviable!
No. Not enviable. It's a blessing.
Enjoy these blessings.
Thanks for giving voice to all those thoughts that become stumbling blocks for all of us.
ah yes, my dear, that was a very short post, heeheheeeee
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.- Pablo Picasso
I remember growing up being 'the smart one'. My brother and sister, my mother's 'real' kids from her first marriage rather than the rebound that was her marriage to my father, they were the artists, like her. My brother could have been a cartoonist, my sister a painter. Me, I was the bookworm, the tomboy, the one who would go to college. So when I picked up my camera, I still was not an artist. The last straw for me was two years ago when I had photos accepted into a local exhibition and my brother was out of the country, my sister was in a drunken stupor, and my mom couldn't fit it into her schedule. It really told me all I needed to know. I was an artist, and they'd never see me for me.
But still I write, I photograph, I cook, I garden. We create in so many ways, don't we? We are always exposing ourselves in whatever we do, aren't we? Keep that the focus and everything you do will be an indication of yourself as an artist in your life...you are a natural.
In other words, you're feeling pretty good right now? So why is it that when you are feeling pretty good, you still make your readers cry?
well, Rosaria and Bruce... I thought the ridiculous messages I give myself were universal nonsense, but when I read the whole thing again today, I guess some of it was kind of serious.
I AM feeling pretty good now--although I seem to have doubts about whether or not I successfully explained Punnett Squares and cross pollination to my nephew...
This was the first time I experienced a painting block, so I found it interesting that it was no different from a writer's block.
I think that essentially, Bruce, I'm just one o' them sadists at heart! Yeah, that's the ticket.
I'm more than pretty good. I came int the door and there was my new painting and, here we go. I went, "How did that get there?"
Or perhaps, what I am is hopeless.
Oh, Hell. I can't even write a short COMMENT!! Thank you Ecogrrl. what I discovered this time was what it was about risk that I liked, never having figured out what it was that came after that was so worth the fear, the self-punishing voices... that it was the process itself and the rush of creating.
But you are right. Cooking, gardening, singing, writing, painting--all of it speaks to who I am.
I never met a rule or a recipe I did not want to break or alter.
Shut UP Jeannette. Okay. there.
No, don't shut up.
No chance of it, Bruce. I've tried to shut up often in my life. It never seems to work...
I did edit a bit. Could not live with some of the typos. There are some ungrammatical things my father would simply shout, "Oh, GAWD, Jetty" at. Tough. I was thinking about the "feeling pretty good."
Progress! I actually tutored five hours yesterday, went out this morning, grocery shopped after driving an hour and a half, AND it is just three hours since I got home and the PAIN HAS SUBSIDED!
This is HUGE for me. Grocery shopping alone can lay me up for the day. So pretty good would be the pain level--ecstasy would be the emotional part of it.
I have to paint sparkles. I did some white caps. This will take a LONG TIME, this very simple painting. What fun.
And I am remembering a walk with my Grandma Magee, the one who found it so hard to say good bye to so many colors...
show up is one of the biggest rules in writing and painting...it is a discipline...some days its just not good, lets face it...but we do it anyway and maybe one day we will use a line...of maybe just one wave comes in handy later...
what if i gave up...that is a haunting question as i think it would take part of my soul with it...
There is some pithy quote someplace that states basically that in the history of human endeavor the biggest obstacle to creativity has been the critical self.
Think what humanity might have without it.
On the other hand, I can think of more than one piece of art, music, poetry, literature, invention, etc that the world would be just as well without. I suspect that blocks are our "this is crap" filters locked in an endless loop. Sometimes they can destructively block us, and sometimes they spare mankind yet another _________ (fill in the blank with a piece of creative effort that makes you wonder...for me it would be most 12 tone music, anything by Jackson Pollack or gasp! I'm from Pittsburgh! Andy Warhol, and bigger gasp! the entire complete works of poetry by all of mankind).
I have come to a grudging acceptance that these things are indeed works of art, it just that I have not evolved the eye, the ear, or sense of iambic pentameter to appreciate them. I have also tried to rationalize that it really is not Jackson Pollack's fault that some people are willing to pay millions for works art that can be found for free in the back of any house painter's work van.
There was an article in the New Yorker several years ago about Jeffery Deitch, some luminary in the New York art scene.
For those with active New Yorker print subscriptions you can read the article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_tomkins
I relate this story by memory, because my Kindle subscription of the New Yorker is not recognized as a proper and fitting subscription allowing access to the New Yorker's article archive.
Anyhow there was a banquet of rich art patrons either thrown in honor of Deitch or by him. Built over the banquet table was some sort of superstructure in which a sizable group of men performed some sort of combination of theatrical dance and aerial acrobatics in the nude. At the climax of the performance, the naked artists were choreographed to form two groups...one above the other. While the rich art patrons dined below these artists, the upper level performers urinated into cups held aloft by the lower level performers.
"I say my dearest Martha, is that tinkle on your escargot?"
You know sometimes relative poverty is a blessing.
Nice post as always.
Brian: It's good to be back, even if it's in a compressed time and then I rush back to the painting.
Sextant: you made me laugh. A lot. And I know how you feel about poetry, my friend. I feel that way about lots of poetry, but not all of it. Not by a long shot, and sometimes poetry is the way I can express some things that I do not want to discuss so much as evoke. whatever that means.
But I trust my actual voice that can stand back and go, "YUCK. Maybe you can fix it, or maybe you can work long enough to figure out where you ran amok." Sometimes those are on the back of a success. I may be at that point with my lake. Although, I think I CAN fix it. the white caps are white blobs. Not the effect I'm going for. But at MOMA, when I was small, I saw "White on white" and turned to my big sister and asked, "Why is that art? I can do that by practicing my numbers with white paint. Then the mistakes wouldn't show!" Jean Ellen had no answer.
Never been a Warhol fan. I think the thing is, I would not THINK of the stuff as art, but these guys DID. And someone agreed. I call some works of art I see "Studies." They look to me as if someone was experimenting to do something on a piece and then decided, "What the hell. If I frame it maybe someone will be convinced it's art."
Think " a hunk of prairie sod mounted and then hung on a wall." Another of my favorites. I thought we should take part of Mom's rock garden and glue it to something, spray it to death so it keeps the colors, then fasten a rock, too. We could call it, "In my mother's garden."
Thank you for your response!
Jeanette, you ARE an artist, and a writer too. Never, ever let anyone tell you who or what you are. We spend our life journeys getting to know ourselves, and no one else has the right to tell us what we can or cannot do. That is the height of arrogance.
There is only one you ~~ and no one else like you in the whole world, in the whole 7 billion people on the planet, only one you. That in itself is unique and special. You can do and be anything you want to be. Only you can make that decision.
Cheers!
P.S. I liked your lovely comment on my post about Occupy Vancouver, and when I went back to reply to you, the comment was gone. I was sad. :-( I liked what you had to say.
I was sure I commented (and it was probably a long one too). I also suffer with the voices in my head that assure me of failure. In every aspect of my life. I cannot evict them, but I can (sometimes) move them to a back room where their voices and power are muted.
Irrespective of what your demons are telling you you are an artist with both words and paint. Thank you for both.
I think that most of us who have had powerful figures in our lives try to keep us down from a very early age experience this sense of nasty "voices" in our head holding us back. And perhaps most people who choose a very creative, different path have been up against naysayers and have somehow absorbed bits of those people's judgments in our heads.
The trick is to ultimately live the life we know in our guts, deep inside where we live--to live that "off-beat" life and let the voices do what they want. It usually silences them pretty well.
Except the most powerful voices, and those I DO tend to throw a tantrum at and find some way that works for me, some way to get them to shut up and let me breathe. I'm generally successful.
After so many years of struggle on different levels, I find that I wind up fighting them with the part of me that is that very child they tried to silence. I figure if I have to physicalize her and actually act like a kid at times to get to the place where I can write and paint without them clamoring at me, that's fine with me.
Perhaps, though, it IS good that I do not have someone living with me!
Those family voices can be so influential. As a child I suffered a great deal of illness, so was in bed a lot and read a lot. My younger brother was a doer with his hands. The family voices said I would be an architect and design houses that he would be build. Eventually we both ended up as teachers but early on we each took the allotted path. It was only when we began to turn off those paths that we found our own ways.
Another one suffering from ingrained 'not good enough' syndrome? Another one working her way out from under that suffocating blanket of self-doubt?
Good for you, for me, and others like us. Perhaps many of us are blogging because we need to write it out and we need to prove to ourselves that the voices are wrong.
WRONG! you hear?
ah, Friko, you bet those voices are wrong. The thing I'm so happy with is that it took a week, and all the while I WAS fighting it and stubbornly showing up to paint. And they have not said a WORD this week. I think they are afraid of six-year-old Jetty. They should be.
Yup, I hear and so do you.
I think that I blog to try out my story, to try out my own voice. And it has worked. But you are right, with every entry, every poem, every photograph, every painting--for those who have those damned voices that run the old lines, every time we read a "stranger's" compliments, or words of how our art affected them, we slap those voices down and write/paint/photograph more.
It's a wonderful thing.
And the painting is really coming along now! Thank you so much, Friko
You are an artist and a writer, that is more than obvious.
Thank you so much, Cait. In my heart, I know it's true... but those @3&(ing voices don't always shut up!
What you say supports what Cameron and Anne Lamott tell us, that writing out all, everything, no editing, just writing it out, brings things to the surface that we would otherwise not find. I finally learned this, after sitting dumb in front of a white page, editing myself before I even began. The flow seems to do something, dislodging crumbs of crumbs from nooks and crannies of our minds and hearts. It's really cool to see how this works for you between writing and painting.
I, too, wrote through my own anger in the early days of writing. It is how I process too. It is my soul work.
Write on. Paint on. It is what you do. It is necessary. We get to know your soul, but most importantly, You do.
Yes, Ruth. I have books by them both and sometimes when I feel a bit lost, I can simply open to a random page of a work by either and right myself again.
I could not stop either writing or painting any more. Not for more than the length of a "block"-- they are too necessary to me now.
It felt a bit like a miracle when I moved beyond writing anger more and more... when it was enough to write "I'm MAD" a dozen times, then move on to something more, to get to the root of the thing, exorcise or metamorphisize.. metamorphize? Oh, phooey. I like that first spelling even if it is NOT a word.
Everyone's comments have made me think and that is such a wonderful thing. But now, for sleep
thank you for sharing your sons story with me tonight...it made me smile. I hope that you have a lovely weekend.
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