It’s happening. For the first time in almost twenty years, I am drawing again. It started yesterday when it occurred to me that the Figure Skating Club I had just joined had no logo to herald its lofty presence. So, why not see if I could come up with something grand to represent it? My voice has begun to flow out of me through pencil on paper. Oh, beloved pencil, it has been too, too long since we last touched. I remember now how I once loved the Steadtler 2B; it had the warmest, smoothest feel, effortlessly painting lines on thick white paper. Now a cheap number 2 pencil feels just as wonderful, because I am guiding it, and it does my bidding…
Eighteen years ago, I went to college full of hope and ideas, and obsessed with art. I had been a budding watercolorist and oil painter, ripe with the anticipation of my arrival on the New York art scene, and full of the kind of know-it-all confidence that only a teenager can have. However, after one year of college art courses filled with depressingly disingenuous critique sessions, I found myself disillusioned and listless. This artist’s life was not at all what I had hoped for, and this art world was not interested in what my art had to say. If you let art speak for itself, no one wanted to hear.
Then I met a professor who changed the course of my life. At the time, he seemed to provide the answer to my disillusionment with the art world- leave it and become an electrical engineer. He crushed my enjoyment of drawing one day when he saw me sketching at the dining room table, walked up behind me, slapped my back so that my pencil went flying and the wind was knocked out of me. “Why aren’t you mowing the lawn?!” he bellowed, then laughed at my astonished expression. I was so shocked, I froze. That was the last time I had ever drawn with any desire to do so- each time since then it was in spite of my sluggish reluctance, because after all, the Professor told me I am “going to die one day, so why bother with your art?”
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
CONFRONTING CHANGE
Change and control seem inextricably linked. I want total control, so that I can change my inner and outer environments to be in whatsoever state I desire. Well, unless things are exactly as I want them to be. Then I just want them to stay put and not change.
The sun stays out longer and longer this time of year. This is a GOOD change. Wrinkles form on sunburned skin, with time. That is a BAD change. All change is catalogued in my mind as good, bad, or indifferent. I am aware that this is immature, unrealistic, impatient. I am like an infant who cries to achieve its aims. It is furious at its utter dependence on others. That is me. I want to change to world, yet I feel like an impotent baby.
If I can affect change, then I have control. But changes that ‘just happen’, like the rising and the setting of the sun, are to be confronted, because I can’t control them. I try to ignore the ones I don’t like, and revel in the ones I do like. This is not a solution I am happy with, but it’s as far as I’ve gotten in this pursuit of satisfaction, of wholeness, of completeness.
I am reminded of the Serenity prayer:
“God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change those things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.”
This prayer is a prayer because it’s an appeal for help from on high. But If we were to ask what we’re really thinking, it would go more like this:
“ God grant me the ability
To Change what I want to change
The courage to change what I want
And the wisdom to like my changes”
The sun stays out longer and longer this time of year. This is a GOOD change. Wrinkles form on sunburned skin, with time. That is a BAD change. All change is catalogued in my mind as good, bad, or indifferent. I am aware that this is immature, unrealistic, impatient. I am like an infant who cries to achieve its aims. It is furious at its utter dependence on others. That is me. I want to change to world, yet I feel like an impotent baby.
If I can affect change, then I have control. But changes that ‘just happen’, like the rising and the setting of the sun, are to be confronted, because I can’t control them. I try to ignore the ones I don’t like, and revel in the ones I do like. This is not a solution I am happy with, but it’s as far as I’ve gotten in this pursuit of satisfaction, of wholeness, of completeness.
I am reminded of the Serenity prayer:
“God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change those things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.”
This prayer is a prayer because it’s an appeal for help from on high. But If we were to ask what we’re really thinking, it would go more like this:
“ God grant me the ability
To Change what I want to change
The courage to change what I want
And the wisdom to like my changes”
A STORY I NEED TO TELL
Thirteen is a lucky number. After 13 years in hell, I finally made it out alive. Thank you, my blond savior, for putting a fire under me, and catching me as I leapt from the frying pan…
Each night, I re-live the escape from hell in my dreams. Sometimes, I can’t leave, because I can’t find some item I think I need to take with me. Other times, I try to scream at the man who imprisoned me, but my throat is dry and there is a thousand-pound weight on my chest. There have been a few occasions, however, when I tell that man off, that he is a bad man, that he should not have treated me the way he did, that he owes me an apology. His reactions vary from nonchalant indifference, to mock friendliness, to violent rages like the ones he had had in life. His catch phrase had been “Why don’t you just Fuck off and go to hell”- I must have heard it thousands of times. It was always my fault- whether I had exhibited so-called “malignant stupidity” for the unintended drip or two while painting his furniture for him, or had related one of my dreams to him in too “boring” a voice for him to endure. There was nothing I could do right, there was nothing he could do wrong, EVER. But I stayed and stayed and stayed for 13 years, thinking one day it would get better. I suffocate at the thought of it.
Nearly five years have passed since I came out into the light. Life is an exultation which I never want to end. The scent of spring flowers in the trees is the highest form of beauty. I can breathe. I can feel the sunlight on my face. So why are my nights filled with these dreams of dark, fetid halls and bitter tears? Why won’t this man leave me alone? He invades my dreams and terrorizes the morning with his acid tongue. My chest burns at the thought of him. I am an old rag, twisted dry so that every drop of turpentine is wrung out.
I want to world to know the injustices this man did. Not to save anyone else he may harm next, though that would be a great benefit to those that love them, but because I have story to tell, and I just have to tell it. And I want him to read it one day, and writhe in bitter agony realizing the wrongs he committed. Surely, when his time comes, HE is the one who will “fuck off and GO TO HELL”.
Each night, I re-live the escape from hell in my dreams. Sometimes, I can’t leave, because I can’t find some item I think I need to take with me. Other times, I try to scream at the man who imprisoned me, but my throat is dry and there is a thousand-pound weight on my chest. There have been a few occasions, however, when I tell that man off, that he is a bad man, that he should not have treated me the way he did, that he owes me an apology. His reactions vary from nonchalant indifference, to mock friendliness, to violent rages like the ones he had had in life. His catch phrase had been “Why don’t you just Fuck off and go to hell”- I must have heard it thousands of times. It was always my fault- whether I had exhibited so-called “malignant stupidity” for the unintended drip or two while painting his furniture for him, or had related one of my dreams to him in too “boring” a voice for him to endure. There was nothing I could do right, there was nothing he could do wrong, EVER. But I stayed and stayed and stayed for 13 years, thinking one day it would get better. I suffocate at the thought of it.
Nearly five years have passed since I came out into the light. Life is an exultation which I never want to end. The scent of spring flowers in the trees is the highest form of beauty. I can breathe. I can feel the sunlight on my face. So why are my nights filled with these dreams of dark, fetid halls and bitter tears? Why won’t this man leave me alone? He invades my dreams and terrorizes the morning with his acid tongue. My chest burns at the thought of him. I am an old rag, twisted dry so that every drop of turpentine is wrung out.
I want to world to know the injustices this man did. Not to save anyone else he may harm next, though that would be a great benefit to those that love them, but because I have story to tell, and I just have to tell it. And I want him to read it one day, and writhe in bitter agony realizing the wrongs he committed. Surely, when his time comes, HE is the one who will “fuck off and GO TO HELL”.
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