Art and the Artist

With all the hype surrounding Michael Jackson’s untimely and tragic death, the last thing anyone needs is yet another rumination on what brought it about.  But I must admit that all of the speculation led me to start wondering:  Can you really ever separate the artist from his/her art?  In other words, is it possible to completely ignore bizarre, immoral or even just eccentric behavior and concentrate solely on the artist’s output?  And how much of the artist’s behavior is brought about by his environment and how much is just the artistic personality to begin with?

F. Scott Fitzgerald, drunk and diving into fountains in Paris, trying to write with shaking hands in a desperate effort to make money at the end of his days as a scriptwriter in Hollywood; Ernest Hemingway and the  cursed affliction; his eventual suicide.  Oscar Wilde and his promiscuity and debauchery, stoned in the opium dens of London; Elvis Presley and his handlers, his isolation, his eventual dependence on drugs that led to his own untimely death.

Even the more “normal” of the artistic set seem eccentric at best.  J. D. Salinger a famous recluse;  John Cheever, trying to seem like he fit into the suburban milieu he so brilliantly portrayed, yet utterly miserable, drunk, hiding his sexual orientation.  Even Anne Tyler is shy to the point of social isolation.

Is this the price the brilliant and gifted pay for their art?  Or does the artistic process lend itself to the behavior?  In other words, does the propensity to create art by necessity come of an introspective, tortured soul who can find solace only in drugs or alcohol?

Maybe it’s too much early success, followed by the almost unbearable stress of having to equal that early success.  But no, there are exceptions to that theory everywhere, the most famous probably being Vincent Van Gogh.  His work was scorned in the art world during his lifetime, leading many to speculate that this was the cause for his addiction to absinthe and his subsequent almost psychotic behavior.  Who knows what could have happened if he had succeeded, early on?  He may not have lived to create most of his immortal works.

This may be akin to asking the proverbial question, which came first, the chicken or the egg?  But it is definitely interesting to think about.  So many examples of tragic and artistic temperaments come to mind, I would bore anyone who made it this far in my blog.  But I invite speculation.   Is it pre-ordained that the artist suffer for his art?

The Silence of the Aged

Yesterday was Father’s Day.   Since my parents became less ambulatory, the holidays seem to be coming on with alarming rapidity.  We no sooner finished Easter than it was Mother’s Day; we took a breath, then it was Memorial Day.  Each holiday is nerve-wracking and emotion-fraught, as we watch my father stumble over each little crevice and my mother do her 3-point turn with her walker to get into my car.  My husband has revealed saintly qualities he somehow kept under wraps as he assists me in these transportings.  He is a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, and my mother is convinced that if anyone else helps her up the steps, she will fall to her death.  She exhibits a touching dependency on him, while still absolutely determined to do as much as possible by herself.  My father is the scarier figure.  He refuses all artificial aids for walking, doing a shuffle gait that is terrifying to watch.  His balance is so bad it’s a miracle he hasn’t bashed his head in.  He used to have a natural grace that made him an excellent dancer, and maybe that is what is saving him now.

We all want to get them out of their Assisted Living suite as much as we can, but the holidays have become draining.  Yet, as draining as they are for us, they seem to be doubly so for them.  My father was always a quiet man, quick to laugh at a joke, but  now not really able to quip like he used to.  My mother was the lively one, full of stories about her past life in Iran, always interested in everything the kids were doing.  But now that her world has become so small, and she feels so out of touch with the rest of the world, that storyteller that we used to think had exhausted all of us with her tales of the Mideast is curiously silent.  I watched them yesterday and for the first time they seemed to be not quite with us anymore.  They couldn’t really relate to much of what was being said, the kids’  quick humor going over their heads most of the time.  They looked pale and almost ghostly to me.  After my older son and I took them back to their residence and we drove away, I felt a tear trickle down my cheek and cursed myself silently for dreading the day as I had.  What would it be like when I no longer had them in the room?  As difficult as it was to get them in and out of the house, what would it be like when I no longer had them to worry about?

I wondered, too, about how quiet they had both become, how seemingly removed from the festivities.  Is that the first step out of this world and into the next?  I hope not, because I know that as tough as it is now, it will be unbearably painful then.

She looks good for her age

The other day I was sitting around at the gym (you know that’s my favorite place) chatting with a couple of male friends after my workout.  These are super nice guys.  We were talking about what was going on in our lives, nothing very important, when the conversation turned to politics.  It was about Guantanomo Bay and the prisoners, and of course, Nancy Pelosi’s name came up.  My one friend then says, “Nancy Pelosi’s a good-looking woman, though.”  We were gathering our things up and getting ready to leave.  Then he paused and said, “I mean, for her age.”

Naturally I had to challenge this.  I mean, I’m a female, right?  So I get very huffy and say, “Oh, why does it have to be FOR HER AGE?”  Poor guy looked a little flummoxed.  Then I say (melodramatic but jokingly), “That kills me.  You might as well have stabbed me in the heart.”  So I start walking up the steps with him behind me protesting his innocence.   I was secretly just giving him a hard time for the fun of it — it’s not like I haven’t said the same things myself, and about men – but then I got to thinking, “Why do we have to qualify that statement when we’re talking about someone over the age of 40?”

When I got home I googled Nancy Pelosi and it turned out she’s 69.  Then I thought, “Geez, she really DOES look good for her age.”  But I had to pause.  I mean, we go to the gym and work out 5-6 times a week, we exfoliate, we bleach our teeth, and the most we can hope for is “She looks good for her age???”

A couple of days later I’m at the gym and my friend shows up.  There’s another lady on a mat between  us, stretching after her workout.  So I go up to my friend — I’ll call him Joe – and say, “I googled Nancy Pelosi after we talked the other day and guess what?”  He says,  “She’s the same age as you.”  To which I responded by pelting him with one of my ankle weights.

I guess my vanity deserved that.  But honestly, can any of us look good after a certain age without that qualifier?

How much companionship should we really expect?

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, since my nest is about to really be empty in a few months. I want to write about this, because I’ve been puzzling over the parent/child relationship lately alot.

When I was in my twenties and thirties, my best friend was definitely my mom.  She was just like a super-wonderful girlfriend.  Always ready to listen, always fiercely loyal, always generous to a fault.  We could giggle at lunch for ages, and shopping was our favorite activity.  Even after I was married I used to spend the night there sometimes, if my husband had to work very late and be up at work early the next day, as we lived in another town.  Being with my mom was a special treat and even though we had our share of mother/daughter spats, our closeness was something very real.

I guess I always expected that I would have that kind of relationship with my own daughter.  Well, as fate and irony would have it, this super-feminine girly-girl had two boys.  At first I thought, wow — how does this work?  But I was so insanely in love with both of them at first sight, our closeness grew very quickly.  I really didn’t miss not having a daughter when they were growing up, because I loved being with them and they seemed to love being with me.  I treated them to pretzels and Cokes at the mall every Friday afternoon, sushi when they got older, chai lattes, and the bookstore was a favorite haunt of all of us.  I wasn’t even jealous when they fell in love and had girlfriends, so secure was I in their unqualified affection.

When my older son moved out to D.C. and in with his girlfriend, I took it in stride, not questioning the fact that he had to move on with his life.  After all, I still had the younger one at home on vacations and in and out.  My oldest called every day and shared his ups and downs with us.  He was happy to come to all family gatherings.  Nothing really seemed to have changed, except that we couldn’t run out to lunch at the drop of a hat.

But now the younger one is about to move out, too.  Even when he’s here, he’s busy online or on the phone. Most nights, he’s out with friends and his girlfriend.  His social life is that of an extremely busy, extremely popular 23-year-old.  And even though he sweet and polite, very affectionate, I know I’m not his number one girl anymore.  Can’t be, shouldn’t be.  Was I wrong to want my best friends to be my best pals forever?  Maybe this is the mistake you make when you love your kids so much, part of your parental role becomes sacrificied to your friendship role.  Because it wasn’t enough for me to have their respect; I wanted them to want to spend time with me.  But now they are moving on, and that is as it should be.  So why do I feel so sad?

About me

WordPress says I should tell my readers a little bit about me. There’s not a lot to tell – I’m an ordinary suburban wife and mother of two, living out the (probably) last quarter of her life in relative happiness and tranquillity. I don’t know how comfortable I am sharing my thoughts on a public domain. Can you really be honest in such a format? And that begs the question: Can you really be honest ANYWHERE?

I have two wonderful sons who are the light of my life, a terrific husband who has been with me for most of my life and is still handsome and funny, some loyal friends, and a VERY annoying but endearing cat named Phoebe. I am a gym rat and am kind of a fanatic about it — I came to this late in life, being an exercise dropout for most of my 54 years. But after I was laid off from my glorious paralegal job, I was bored and needed a focus other than going to Michael’s every day and filling the house with more and more craft projects. So my husband said “Do you want to join the gym?” I said okay, not very enthusiastically, and it truly has changed my life. I go 5 – 6 days a week, do cardio and weight training, have tried yoga and pilates, and plan on trying some other classes as well. There is a community of people there whom I look forward to seeing when I go, and some of us have bonded. At least, I feel that we have. Not seeing some of those people now would leave a fairly significant gap in my life — although I know all things are fleeting and we can’t count on anything.

That’s another interesting thing about the gym — you’ll talk to someone day in and day out and look forward to seeing them, and you may not really learn their name for months. I have a good friend there whose last name I still don’t know, and it’s been five years. I wouldn’t know how to find this person in the phone book. Yet we are friends. It is an interesting environment, indeed, and somewhat unreal.

That leads to the last thing about me. I write. That is, I love to write and writing is how I cope with and understand the things that happen to me. I study human nature in the hope to improve my writing and people who know me should know that they might be used as characters in a story or book I’m writing (not that anyone would ever see it). But I find there is endless material for my fiction out there in the “real” world.

That’s enough for now, and certainly more than enough about me. I’ll be back later.

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