On the arts and their value

Ensconced in a transparent plastic chair with file cabinets of sheet music on one side and a colorful array of instruments on the other, with bleats and squeaks and scales and low frequencies radiating from studios all around, I turn a page in my book and smile. Mozart, the resident dog, ambles over for a scratch behind his ears.

Although I've little musical ability, in Middle C each weekend, as I wait while Jack and Oliver finish their lessons, I feel at home. The test notes and amiable chatter and warm ups and expanding lung capacities are individuals at practice in a place that both challenges and nurtures them. I gravitate toward places like that and the people who both work and learn there.

I felt a similar homeyness during the AWP conference earlier this month, despite the fact that literally thousands were in attendance, and I knew approximately five. Armed with my schedule, badge, and a bag of books -I never go anywhere without reading material; do you?- I made my way from panel to panel, toggling between the convention center and the elephantine Marriott across the street. Lost among friends, really. And happily so.

This is not to say that all musicians and writers and artists are nice, expansive people. Good grief- of course they aren't. Some are egotistical and competitive, and others are pathologically shy. Some are troubled while others prefer words or paint to people. Many have wrestled with periods of feeling awkward or different. Many still do. Some have experienced abuse or trauma or stunning loss. Many are delightfully eccentric, some fit every stereotype.

I've often wondered just how mental health, creativity, and intelligence co-exist, for many have written of "madness" as creative fire, of angst as a torturous fuel, of tragedy and loss as a sort of generative phoenix. A spherical spectrum seems to fit the bill of any synchronicity better than a linear one. 

Most every artist I've ever encountered relishes or at least feels the utter need to get at the root of who they are, who we are, and to express those selves in some way. Communities of artists are like multi-celled organisms undulating toward kernels of truth and understanding, toward justice and inclusion. The arts push the boundaries of what is and should be accepted, what is and should be normed. They teach us empathy, allow us to better understand the beauty and strength in difference, usher in respect and tolerance, and diminish fear and hate.

It is not hard to understand why dictators seek to control messaging and especially artistic expression. So really, stay sharp right now in the face of alternative facts (bullshit), lies messaged as news (also bullshit), the spread of fear versus hope (carnage, anyone?), and attempts to quash the humanities (the Trump admin's desire to cut the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, disallow peaceful protests, etc). 

Politics aside, this post is actually a piece about me and the gratitude I feel for the arts.

When I was a young child, my parents (who both studied art history in college and have collected art for decades), sister, and I often played two games: one was an artist and artwork flashcard-based gig (more fun that it now sounds), and the other was a sleuthing game in which the player whose turn it was donned a blindfold, reached into a paper bag to pluck a cardboard object from a large assortment, felt its curves and angles, size and stature, and ventured a guess as to what it was.

I attended summer arts camps and took drawing and painting lessons for years. I have spent more than a night in Corning, NY, because my father wanted to see the glass museum there and specifically a piece, Jay Musler's Cityscape, in it. I remember that our B&B smelled like tequila and lime and that the proprietor was a zany woman who sang "Customers, come here!" when we knocked on the wrong door. Cityscape remains vividly seared in my mind, a stunning piece of glass rendered meaningful in a gifted man's hands.

Courtesy of the Corning Museum; isn't this magical? Although sadly, I read it so much differently than I did when younger. Now, though still beautiful, it strikes me as environmental doomsday.

And yet, with all that steeping in the arts, I wasn't comfortable expressing myself artistically until my thirties. The general aging process has helped, but I wouldn't be nearly as complete a person as I am (and let's be clear, it's a real work in progress with more work to do; likewise it's not painless!) without open artistic expression which began with cooking, segued into photography, slid easily into blogging about those things, and has evolved into so much more.

I don't consider myself a Writer yet (though I aspire to be such), but I do know that writers and artists and those who truly appreciate them are my truest tribe. The sensitivity and openness, the shared experience of some struggle and the gentle embrace of what has challenged each of us, the multitude of identities lived and loved and celebrated...all of those things are treasures, gifts, and each time I experience, witness, or grow from relationships forged in and around arts communities, I become more me. More of the me I want to be. More of that fully unhusked kernel of self truth.

Souvenir

Ten-minute freewrite from today, based on a prompt by the inestimable Jena Schwartz.

I bought one and stole the other, and not in that order.

Eyes, they are called. Oculi. Thick wooden rounds incised and painted with a star and crescent moon. Affixed to the bows of the wooden fishing boats, dhows, so common off the coast of East Africa. Looking out and across the sea to ward off evil spirits and danger.

I was in Lamu, a town on Lamu island, in Lamu archipelago, in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Kenya. My boyfriend? Lover? Amorous pen pal? I still don't know if ever we figured our terminology out. It didn't really matter, although it seemed to, then.

Anyway, he, a Peace Corps volunteer, and I, the pal to his pen, had flown east on a tiny puddle jumper for a few days off the mainland in a mysterious, enchanting place.

I was falling in love/lust/wanderlust romance with the tan, pony-tailed man who'd brought me here, who fed me fresh fish curry, and held my hand as we walked throughout Lamu town with its erratic electricity supply and dark corners and the joo-eece (juice) stand near our inn. 

But I'd flat-out given my heart to the creaky boats that listed dramatically when the tide went out and stood back to attention when it rolled lazily back in. The dhows. And that is how I found myself scouring blinding white beaches for their skeletons one August afternoon in 2001.

I told him I wanted an eye to remember our trip. Like so many men who, when faced with a "problem" work like hell to "fix" it, he did. We finally found my treasure, hanging from a tetanus-promising nail coming loose from the dhow's sun-bleached, time-worn hull.

But whose was it? Not mine, certainly. But could it be? We wrestled with this quandary for what was probably not long enough. Romance won, the promise of memory won. He pried it loose and placed in on my palm. Possessively, my slender fingers curled around it. Mine.

In town later, I bought another. To "cancel" out my theft? To make amends? Have a matched set?

Neither love nor lust made it, but the memories did. And so did my eyes. They hang on my library wall now, tokens of adventure in what seems a lifetime ago, under a framed photograph of a working dhow, floating upright in an azure sea.

An encounter on the train

Just after 9am, I slide into the fourth car of the southbound red line train, between, what I quickly realize, is a quiet lull in her screams. Headachy, tired, energy and thoughts focused on the day ahead, I sink into the first available forward-facing seat (motion sickness is never what I need) and pull a slim paperback from my tote. 

As we roll away from the station, the child begins howling again, guttural, high-pitched wails that reverberate throughout our car. Such screams would always be dissonant, but they are especially so in this sleepy time, in this dim place. 

The screams are near, and as I click my head from twelve o'clock to ten, hoping my left peripheral can grasp some evidence of source, I see her. Two rows back, hair in tiny, ramrod straight pigtails, body sheathed in a turquoise winter coat. There is another parka-clad child -a sibling?- with similarly styled hair, and a shadow of a person attempting to corral them. English is interlaced with a language I cannot place.

Throughout the car, mostly full of solo voyagers in various stages of dress and wakefulness, eyes cast, subtly and obviously, towards the trio two rows behind me. Gawking. Avoiding. Disdaining. Worrying. Wondering. 

The woman- I gather she is she from the tenor of her voice- is so tall and thin she resembles a scarecrow. Her short-cropped hair is sheathed in a knit winter cap. She has given one child her phone, but that has provoked warfare.

One child beats the other -I don't use the word 'beat' irresponsibly- with the gifted phone about the face and brow. The woman screams and issues seating placements. "You here, you there." Always she keeps one encircled in a bony arm. The child forced from the embrace resists exile and screams louder. Frustration, anger, sadness, desire all wrapped into a vocal vortex emanating from her tiny throat.

The tension in the car mounts.

The woman changes tack- she begs, pleads, embraces both children, one gaunt arm per one robust child. Peace is not established. 

I have put away my book. I am aware that my heart is beating rapidly and that my mouth is dry. I want desperately to intervene, but can I? Would some foray into their trio be welcome? Offensive? Rebuffed? Based, simplistically, on the foreign tongue dancing around me, still I cannot place it, would I be making a giant cultural misstep? And anyway, what would I do, and how? 

I scan the car and take in others' coping mechanisms. Louder, perkier conversation with seat mates, ear buds quietly plunged atop pounding drums, baleful looks, disparaging glances. 

My stop is approaching, and the children have not calmed. I swivel over my left shoulder, and without thinking, look directly at the source of most of the screams. I smile at her, whisper "hi sweetie," and wave. As I'm sure my children would have, she pauses, musters a jagged inhale, overcomes her suspicion, and smiles back.

She is beautiful. Face full, pigtails standing at attention, most recent tears drying on lashes and cheeks.

"Would you like an orange?" I hold up a fresh satsuma, glistening with produce wax, and hold it out to her across the empty row between us.

The woman sighs, "Take it," she says with a fatigue I recognize. "Take it."

Gently, I move back, erasing the separative space. Cautiously, I lean toward the woman. Cautiously I ask if she is OK.

"They are twins. They do this to me all the time. Fighting, screaming. I am so tired. My blood pressure is high. I am a single mother to these girls. We are heading out."

Her hollow eyes, her willingness to share with me. She is on the precipice of bursting. Of not being able to handle even one more straw. 

I know this place. I have been there. More than once. If one doesn't have reason to be fully dressed and riding into the city at 9am, the drive is desperation. 

"You must be exhausted," I tell her, putting my arm around her shoulders gently. "You must be so tired. I have two as well. It is so hard." 

The little girls are making sweet eyes at me, and I at them. One tense moment has been diffused. I have always been grateful for those moments of dissolution. Those moments of reprieve when I can take a full breath. I hope this mother feels she can breathe a bit.

The four of us get off at the same stop. I will head to a conference that thrills my soul. I don't know where this family is going.

I kneel down and hold the hand of the one to whom I offered the orange.  I look into their eyes and smile. "Sweet girls, will you be kind to your mother? She is such a good mom. No hitting, just hugs, ok? Can you do that?" They smile and nod, and one peels a bit more rind from the orange.

I stand and look at the mother and take in her shell shock and exhaustion. I hug her tight to me. "I know you must be so very tired. Good luck, ok?" 

They walk toward one exit. Mine is in the opposite direction. I watch them for just a moment, brightly-colored parkas and orange peel and the halting gait of a stretched mother moving farther and farther away. 

I exit at 9th and G and think of them during the half-mile to my destination. Where were they going? What will they do today? Will they be OK?