artoflifelifeofart

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My desire to be beautiful (a woman's desire), to create beauty (as an artist), to live surrounded by beauty (a citizen's sense, which is both aesthetic and, in the entirely public sense, cultural) are connected only by the word.  They are in themselves quite different things.  I sought the agility of mind that could find their relation.  For I sensed that if I could find a relation to beauty in which beauty is truth, I might also discover a relation to history that is generative.

A Romantic Education by Patricia Hampl

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I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

C.S. Lewis (via beingblog)

This makes me think of Michel de Montaigne - the first blogger says the New York Times and Brainpickings

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” 

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He was trying to take in the fact that his life was no longer the indefinite thing of which he'd always been the subject, it was a closed thing, a finite thing, an object.

England and Other Stories by Graham Swift

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Mother, Interrupted

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the interruptions my children make when I’m doing my writing.  I’m in the habit of doing 10 minutes each day after we’ve had our breakfast.  I’m not sure where this writerly experiment might end up, but I thought I’d post an entry here from a few days ago.  In it, I’m writing a post about German parenting versus American parenting, and, because it’s my daily diary, a few odds and ends and daily impressions, but I include the things my children do as they orbit around me during the session.  Here it is:

March 23, 2015

German parenting post.  First draft:

The first thing I remember about arriving in Germany is going to the playground...

8:47 A’s pink ice cream has fallen on the black counter.  “Khhh” he says, his word for lion, then scribbles some more.  It’s like a rorschach test.  Now he points to the mess and says “ba” (ball), then “gaga” (cracker) and “Daddy”

...there was nobody there, in contrast to the local playground in Brooklyn where we cued for the swings.  The second thing I noticed as I stood taking in what I knew would be a local, long-standing haunt for the year,

8:49 A has “painted” on his spoon with his ice cream.  Now he says he needs a new spoon.  He’s pointed to the counter, the table, the bowl, and the wall, all of which have become his canvas this morning.  “Ta da!” Now he picks up his spoon again and says, “Uh oh!” and begins to “paint it” again.

...was that the “eco” playgrounds so fashionable in Brooklyn were the norm here.  It was so strange to stand before what would be “hot commodity” in Brooklyn, and see it as an ordinary, local place, not much noticed.  It was like stepping through another world, one in which nothing was commodity, no child so stuck in crowded competition that they had to be “groomed” early on.  Which leads me to my third surprise.  There’s no...

8:55 “Mom!” A yells.  He’s dropped his spoon.  He pretends to burp and carries on using a popsicle stick.

...helicopter parenting in Germany, only parents sitting, chatting, looking away, and, amazingly, I don’t see any of the conflict I see in Brooklyn playgrounds.  I guess the kids sort it out.  But at first, I feel uncomfortable, I hang around the kids, making sure they’re safe on the slide, or don’t take that kid’s ball.  It takes a few weeks for it to sink in: I don’t have to do this anymore, and it’s a great relief.  Now I sit like the others in the local “square” as it’s called, on the benches that face away from the playground.

8:58 A has thrown his ice cream bowl on the floor.  I take him out of his high chair.  Actually, I try, but he doesn’t want to come out.  I will need to change him soon.  “Prrr” he says and points to his nappy.

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Every Child is an Artist

Creativity is: Physical, Curious, and Present

I’ve been fortunate to have many great teachers, but my children are better teachers of creativity than any of their predecesors, of which there are many - from art school to music camp to masters-level writing classes.  Here’s what they show me every day: 

-Be Curious.  A child’s world is physical - sand, water, flour, paint; these all inspire endless patterns, stories, and movement.  My children take a deep interest in the “stuff” of life.

-Be Present.  Wherever my children are, that’s where they want to be, and more than that, wherever they are, they create and make a world unto themselves

-Be Curious - in every concept that arises they are curious and unashamed in their naivete.

The Dilema

As I navigate this difficult world of parenthood and creative practice, I am trying to “lean into” parenthood, even when the draw to make work is almost physical. To me, there’s an ambivalence that comes with this.  It’s possible to feel both productive making scaled-down projects, and feel deflated by the lack of big chunks of time to make deeper, wider progress.

Further Reading

I’ve been re-reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.  He writes about how the artist’s role is to create his own world unto himself.  It made me better understand Tolstoy’s idea that the art of life is the highest art.  And this one via Austin Kleon’s newsletter this week: “The child is the first artist. Out of the material around him he creates a world of his own.” -Carleton Noyes, The Gate of Appreciation

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So I’ve been thinking about my inner-critic lately.  You know the one, the voice that says “Give Up!” just as you're getting close to something really juicy.  To be creative in any field, you’ve got to find a way to make friends with that inner-critic.  So I recently thought, “What would that inner-critic look like if she was a person.  What would her name be?  How would she behave?”  Then I stumbled on this video.  It’s a hilarious spoof of Disney’s “Let it Go” put through countless layers of Google Translate.  That’s when I really got it.  My inner-critic is just like that.  It takes this powerful, wholesome intention, puts it through several filters and subverts it into something frightened and superficial.  My inner-critic is Elsa singing “Give Up!”  So here’s my question to you: What character is your inner-critic?

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Gifts from the Underworld: How Birthing my Babies Impacted my Creative Life

In birth one is at one’s most naked.  Literally and proverbially, one is both at one’s most vulnerable and most powerful.  What I remember most about both births is small: meeting my midwives naked.  It was an act so unthinkable before hand and so ordinary in the moment.

My son’s midwife once said, “I don’t understand it, birthing women go down to the underworld.  When they come back up and tell their story, they come up with: contractions started at this time, then I went to hospital, then this, then that.”  So when my pregnant friend B asked me to tell her about my birth stories, I felt keen to share my story, aware of how little we women share our dramatic experiences of birth.  I wanted to share the whole spectrum from the traumatic to the empowered, but didn’t know how to go about it.  I thought, Where did our oral history go?  Are we losing our voices to medicalized birth?  That didn’t seem quite right since natural birth communities seem to create their own rhetoric that can feel alienating.  Why can’t we speak plainly about this?  It’s like some fundamental part of us doesn’t have the language — is literally dumb.

To me, the biggest impact of birthing two babies is how connected I am to women now.  At first my whole life, unbeknownst to me, was shaped by men, by a patriarchy.  I didn’t feel feminine in any way I could put words around, except in the obvious tropes of romance and fashion.  During the first few months of my son’s life, my second child, I left the PhD which had tapped into my self-discipline, but left the whole self-care part of me in a total mess.  I was wearing this try to “be something” badge academically, and try to “be someone” badge as a mother.  There was really no self left at all, except in my diary, which — because it was easeful, joyful, personal — I thought of as a non-existent entity, a nothing.  The patriarchy is so deeply problematic it’s not out there at all, but within me, and not in a self-sabotaging way, but in a structural, wiring, hypnotic sort of way.

As it turned out, the moment I had some childcare during a family holiday, ideas that had been dormant came flooding in.  These ideas had been there all along, only I was so busy trying to take my place beneath men  (First in the art world, where all of middle management were women and all of the senior leadership were men.  Then in academia, where by dint of the absent “I” of the so-called empirical writing style, the feminine was totally expunged.)  I want to write from my whole self and there was no space for that in academia.  In birthing my son, for those few hours, I was my whole self, my self at my most powerful.  Alongside a woman, I birthed that baby entirely myself, without men’s tools or frameworks.  If I could do that, I could do this.  So for the first time, I stepped into the unknown.

In a strange way, because it was my son’s birth that changed my inner-relationship to patriarchy, a change that will impact the life of my eldest child, my daughter, most of all, this new perspective is his gift to her.  The birthing woman in me, is embodied and lives on not only in my children, but in myself, through my diary.  The diary represents, to me, the female mind, and in birthing my babies, what was once invisible to me has gradually become my greatest gift.

What I want to say to you, B, is that as bodily as birth is, my son's birth was magic.  The powerhouse of a woman, my midwife, who helped me birth our son in our home, she and I created an alchemical change in me so that a few months later I found myself at our kitchen table in Brooklyn with two friends, raising a glass to “dropping out” and found myself saying, “I have no idea what I’ll do next.”  

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I used to keep a bamboo box filled with index cards that had ideas written on them. (See Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird and Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit to see where I stole this idea from.) Since moving to Germany, I got this new box and am totally stuck for what to fill it with. I want inspiration of a whole-hearted, intelligent variety. Ideas?

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Hi all -

I've just submitted - eek! - this essay to the awesome magazine and online platform of creative people's lives, The Great Discontent.  It's partly inspired by a fantastic film, Drops of Joy, about the crisis of lack of play in children's lives.  I hope you enjoy it.  And yet again, thanks very much for reading!

How to be a Pirate

I sat at the Macaroni Grill in Rosedale Mall in a suburb in Minnesota.  My mom sat across from me.  The table cloths were made of paper and a plastic cup of crayons sat on the table.  I draw a rabbit.  I burst into tears.  My mother looks bewildered.  Her uniquely Russian gaze, shaped by the struggles of immigration, look at my fawn-like American girl eyes.  “How could she be so soft?” her eyes seem to say.  The waitress comes to take our order.  (I don’t remember what I ate.  Comfort food?  Macaroni and cheese?)  She looks about my age.  What did you do after college?  My mom asks.  I hide my tear-stained face behind my menu.  I did an internship, she said.  Bunny tells my mom its fears.  Bunny says, I don’t want to be a starving artist, but I love art.  Bunny says, I’m afraid I won’t succeed.  Bunny says, I’m lost.  Bunny says, I knew what I was doing in music (I dropped the major freshman year of college after being a violinist since age 4.) but I don’t know how to do this.  I don’t even know where to start.  You’ll start, my mom said, with an internship, then you’ll go to graduate school – abroad.  So it was conceived there – the long string of striving to fill a CV, and the counterpoint, to appear sophisticated, part-of-a-scene of living in the twin cities of my dreams, London and its step-sister, New York.

The Psychoanalyst Carl Jung lost himself like this once – had a nervous break-down in fact – and went back to doing what he loved as a child, building with blocks.  That’s how he discovered his adult passion for building.  A child doesn’t have the anxiety that led to Jung’s breakdown, because a child plays with the whole string of their being.  Like a flying kite, a child is at once in the clouds, and on the ground, the whole string of life held in a small hand.  Laundry baskets are boats, white carpets are skating rinks, and blankets are capes.  There is no wrong turn.  Nothing is forbidden.  There is only one rule of play: Flow.  Flow is your voice.  It’s not your recording of your voice, your bio about your voice, but YOU, messy, silly, sloppy, genius you.   Jung, in his regression, found this string again, sensed its presence in the dark, and picked it up.  He stepped through the looking glass and back into a child’s world.  In so doing, he brought himself back to life.

In the years that followed, I came back again and again to this question: When did I last know myself, whole and complete?  I remembered, in fits-and-starts, when my grueling scheduled allowed, myself as a child: playing music, drawing, stringing Fruit Loop necklaces, and marching through dinner parties of my parents’ academic colleagues shouting “We are pirates!” 

When you split yourself off and make a name for yourself, you threaten this inner-child who wants to bring her whole self, her love of life, to all she does.  She doesn’t think of her image, only her curiosities.  Curiosity is small.  In its miniature proportions it is like a child’s world.  What seems trivial is actually the stuff of life.  Hustle is passionate.  It’s big.  But without the inner-child, it’s empty of the most important quality: absorption.  However big you become, you should be like a child stringing beads, industriously working with your whole heart.

In London, I became a brand I sculpted.  But like the worst brands, strip away the spin, and it’s just a cheap sweater from China.  There was nothing that distinguished me from the crowd because there was no ‘me’ left.  Only me with a capital ‘M’, the one I was willing to sell.  I had stepped through the looking glass, and become an academic at a dinner party.  I was a fraud.  The cloud of adulthood had descended on me; I was no longer a pirate.

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How to Become a Creative Professional in 10 Easy Steps: A Hopefully Humorous Guide

When I came to London I totally flat-out failed to do what I came there to do: to curate my own shows.  I don’t think I even realized it was happening until it was too late.  I was busy.  I was doing stuff.  A lot of it.  I was even accomplishing things.  But looking back I don’t have the portfolio I could have had if I’d been more strategic, and even, dare I say, wise.  But, hey, I was 25.  Who’s wise at 25?  Anyway, that experience in the School of Life inspired this tongue-in-cheek guide to “making it” in the big city.

1. Go To London or New York

It didn’t look so good on Facebook, but your hometown was OK.  It wasn’t glamorous.  It wasn’t even sophisticated.  It was middle-of-the-road, and you are not.  You shine beside your peers; you are hungry for the big city.  You are 21, and unlike your fellow graduates, you will realize your potential.  Fast forward four years.  You’re 25.  You’ve just finished graduate school and you move to London.  The flat is small, the price of everything astronomical (i.e. you’ve got to work harder at the day job) but you’re no fool.  You know this is where people “make it”.  This is how you will find yourself at the V & A Museum sitting around a table with 10 men and women with MAs and PhDs.  The interviewees have been picked from a pool of 300 applicants.  The position?  Invigilator.  One step above a janitor.

2. Be Part of A Scene

Authors pop into town.  Gallery shows open.  New theatre productions get made and reviewed.  You go to all of them.  You circle listings in TimeOut.  This is good because it makes you feel “hip”; no longer a hopeful newbie, but an “insider”.  Take this work more seriously than your craft.  Find it stressful.  To take the edge off, post it on Facebook.  Find links to more events on your friends’ walls.  Watch the “likes” come in.  You feel hip again, but it’s laced with uncertainty.  Your friends make it look easy.  You’re not sure you’re seeing the right shows and meeting the right people.  Repeat cycle.

3. Don’t Get A Job

If you’re in the arts 95% of your time is spent getting money.  You could get an ordinary job.  With discipline, you could make your work alongside it.  You could even, for a few hours a day, step outside the art world, see new places, and meet new people.  Don’t do it.  Even if it pays the rent.  Believe this is “selling out” and continue to struggle.

4. Think About Your CV

Look at your CV and worry.  It doesn’t look fancy.  It’s got gaps.  The big, professional awards and achievements are not there.  Focus on this.  Accrue these talismans of success, and notice you are now specialized in something “important”.  Persuade yourself this is your dream.

5.Believe There Is A “Secret” To Success

Now you’ve got more education, you can easily find affirmation of the idea that there is a “secret” to be discovered about your craft or how to get your work “out there”.  Keep looking for the secret.  Never find it.

6. Do Not Use Your Voice

You have something to say but you don’t want to upset people.  Look instead to the popular culture of your field.  You can easily find out what’s fashionable by perusing listings for grants, internships, calls for artists, and so on.  (Luckily, this ticks two boxes since many of these “calls” will be unpaid, and will use your time for someone else’s project.)  If you do use your voice, make sure it’s heavily curated.  Take out anything controversial.  Where possible, reference others’ opinion before stating your own.

7. Work on Someone Else’s Dreams

Don’t make your own work.  Find people who are already doing it.  Commit your time to making their vision come true.  That way, you will be busy, without running the risk of being controversial.  In the end, you will not have your own work to show, but you will be, in the eyes of others, “accomplished”.

8. Be Unspecific In Your Goals

You are “changing the world” and “being creative”.  Don’t take on any tasks that might transform an idea into reality.  This will be easy because you will always need more experience education, money, and networks.  Your environment and circumstance will never be perfect.  Make perfecting these criteria a vocation.  This will prevent you from making your work until the opportunity passes.

9. If You Do Make Work, Keep It Private

If you ignore points one and two, and find yourself making your work, do not share it.  Make yourself into an “undiscovered talent” by privately feeding your ego.  The best way to do this is never to succumb to the temptation to test your vision in the world.

10. Educate Yourself

If you find yourself making work as described in point three and it is scary (since your fears love privacy), you can persuade yourself that to do it right you need more education.  This buys you more time before you show your work.

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Photo: My daughter and friend at Halloween

Masks and Shadows in the Artistic Life: 5 Musings

Dreams. Emotion. Muses. Shadow. Fairy tale monsters and heroes. Somehow, with the festivities of Halloween fresh on my mind, these are all very much alive to me now and it makes me wonder what the role of all these subterranean things is in the creative life. Dorothea Brande writes that the artistic self has to have a conduit to emotional life, and that there is a split between that self, and the editor who puts these creations into the world. Who is the person writing these words? Or rather what is pulsing beneath them? I may have all kinds of ideas about what I want to say, but am I the dance or the dancer? I believe the work of artists is to keep open the channel between this world and the world of myth. That may sound grandiose or weird, but I’m not the first to say it. Look at Dennis Dutton’s The Art Instinct or Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.

1. Dream Life and Writing

Dreams are weird. I don’t understand them. I don’t pretend to be a psychotherapist or even a keeper of dream journals. But sometimes a dream comes and leaves a mark on me. I had one such dream the other night, and sparing you the boring details, I will just say, it amazed me with the power of my imagination. Whereas I normally dream of mundane mash-ups of the day, this time, it was wonderous. It is because I’ve taken Phillipe Petit’s advice on going to sleep holding the instrument of one’s craft, so even in sleep, the conversation continues.

2. Artistic Life is Uncomfortable

Artistic life is uncomfortable because it makes us tap into subterranean areas. In ordinary life – say, doing the dishes – one doesn’t have to probe the depths. But any art that is worth its salt, uses the odd and wild places of the subterranean – the world of emotions, dreams, memories. White heat as Anais Nin called it. If we cannot feel our own feelings – and as mothers, orbiting children and spouse, it can be maddeningly hard to find one’s own emotional “home” – we cannot make art.

3. Ideas Come From the Ether

They visit us, come calling in the night, beckon for a pen to write down the contours of its features. But not all ideas can be captured. Tom Waits recalls when he was driving along and an idea for a song came and he couldn’t stop to write it down. Then he realized he didn’t have to honor each inconvenient visit from the Muse. Written like that, it seems obvious. But if you’re an artist, it’s not. Each movement of ideas feels vital, like a responsibility to the Gods.

4. Artistic Discomfort is Shadow

Shadow. Deepak Chopra, in The Book of Secrets, says shadow is what the Universe plays with when, as it always is, it’s creating. He says, to the Universe, unlike to us mere mortals, it doesn’t matter if it’s shadow or light, so long as it is creating, it is alive. So if we give the Universe light to play with it will. If we give it shadow to play with, it will. I don’t really understand The Shadow, or maybe it’s more accurate to say I shy away from it. It’s inconvenient. But the last thing I want my life to be about is letting the nuts-and-bolts of life define me.

5. Shadow is What Children Resonate With In Fairy Tales

I’ve been reading fairy tales to my daughter. She has taken to playing pirates, princesses, and princes. There are wolves, witches, deaths, poison. She’s only three. Life my dreams, from which I normally feel somewhat alienated – who has time for a dream journal in the cut-and-thrust of every day life – already fairy tales have re-connected me to that primitive territory we are hard-wired with as children. Last night was Halloween, and I saw my daughter still as a statue, taking in the wonder of being transformed, for $2.50 with the magic of face paint, into a night fairie. What masks do we wear as adults that could spark our imagination, instead of – as is usually the case – narrow our possibilities and the limitless scope of the artistic self?

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6 Tips to Improve Your Practice as a Parent-Artist

“You make a path boldly and follow it fearfully.  You go where the path leads.  At the end of the path, you find a box canyon.  You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins” -Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

KEEP A NOTEBOOK: Actually, a notebook and a box.  An inspiration box came to me from Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit.  She keeps boxes for each dance project and puts in objects, pictures, ideas, etc.  I add to this Ann Lamott’s suggestion in Bird by Bird of keeping notecards with you at all times to record dialogue overheard, an idea etc.  I keep notecards in my diaper bag, or put notes into my iPhone.  I do keep an ordinary notebook that I keep open in the kitchen/living room while I’m with the kids, but I also jot down ideas on notecards and put them in my box.  Sometimes these are quotes, sometimes ideas I’ve connected in my mind while I’m doing other things.  Sometimes it’s just something my kids said or did that I want to remember.  I give myself permission to write anything that inspires me.

WRITE 10 MINS A DAY: “All the daily ministrations of motherhood aren’t, as I originally felt them, distractions; they have more fully connected me to this complicated world.” -On Mothering and Writing” by Rachel Hall in “Mamaphonic”  This can be ideas jotted down hastily while cooking lunch, etc.  Elizabeth Gilbert recently posted about how she uses a kitchen timer for this practice.  For me, it’s a way of keeping a dialogue with my practice and having a thread to refer back to, especially when I feel “unproductive”.  In general, it’s a beautiful way of honoring your observations of the world, and being in the habit of reflecting these observations in writing, but if you’re an artist, a sketch might do the same for you.  (The photo, by the way, is of my actual notebook at an actual lunchtime with the kids.)

ATTEND "ART CHURCH":  This idea came to me when I realized - surprise, surprise! - I also need to sleep, shower, solitude, yoga, hot meals, etc. to keep myself open to ideas instead of hammering away ambitiously on half-formed content.  For me, this means my husband takes the kids Sat./Sun. morning, and I allow myself whatever I need — anything is allowed except housework, to-do lists, and kid-related stuff like updating their winter wardrobe etc.  I find with the intention of doing these restorative practices from my Artistic Self, even if I sleep, I wake up with a fresh idea I would never have arrived at if I was slogging away.

CHANGE YOUR PRACTICE: The most difficult of all for me is patience.  When I had my daughter, I worked on a dissertation, but found this linear empire-building to be too strenuous.  Now, I’ve changed from large canvas to small and find it more rewarding, but I do long for uninterrupted stretches of time.  So faith and patience are at my edge, but I encourage you to foster these qualities. From talking to artists with older children, this time comes, but it takes an article of faith.  There's a website with great practical tips on this called Studio Mothers

HONOR TIME: “I felt a sense of loss at not having done more writing before having Rio.  Not because I wished I had waited to have him, but because had I used and appreciated my time as well before having a son as after, I would have a pile of completed (perhaps even published) manuscripts to my name.” -“A Fire Well Kept” by Katie Kaput in “Mamaphonic".  I feel my use of time is so much more precise now I’m a mother, and I’ve heard this echoed countless times, as in the above quote.  I also feel the practices I mentioned, keep ideas flowing and growing, while my body is in motion cooking, cleaning, dressing kids, etc.  In this sense, the whole of my life is now taken into account in my writing life, so that, while my life is no longer singular as it was before motherhood, it’s more elegantly composed, each part plays a purpose and feeds into my practice.  This elegance of purpose is important to me, and finding this sweet spot was possibly the most important growing I had to do as a mother and writer in equal measure.

LISTEN TO PODCASTS: It’s simple - mothers are at home a lot, and always in motion, so listening to interesting conversations, and especially ones that resonate with your practice help with the intellectual isolation one can sometimes feel.  A few good ones I love: Onbeing, Good Life Project, Design Matters, The Longest Shortest Time, Sounds True: Insights at the Edge, and The Greenlight Bookstore Radio Hour.

If you want to read more I highly recommend the Cultural ReProducers website Resource list.  I’ve ordered many books by mothers with arts practices from their list and they are all excellent.

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Photo Credit: Elinor Carucci, "Why Can't You Be Nicer To Your Brother?", 2012

With Thanksgiving coming up on the family calendar, I've been thinking, maybe paradoxically, about failure, and maybe less paradoxically, why I'm grateful for it.  As a mother and a writer, failure is ever-present in my life, and if you're a maker with a family, I expect it is in yours too.  I've been thinking about all of this as I'm working on an essay I'm calling "Letter to Failure".  Like all of family life and creative life alike, my "Letter to Failure" is a work-in-progress, but, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I'd like to share with you some rough sketches I'm working on:

5 Ways of Looking at Failure:

1. Failure, you look like screaming children with a plate of microwaved spaghetti before them.  Today, I couldn't do any better.

2. Failure, you're like the Samoan coral bleached white and sitting on top of an unfilled "Inspiration Box" on my bookshelf.  Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary at the UN, with whom my husband works on getting a global agreement on climate change in Paris 2015, brought it home and said, "The people of Samoa are relying on you."

3. Failure, you are like a rest notation in a piece of music.  I grew up a violinist, and a teacher once told me, the rest is where the music is really made.  In these pauses, the musician inhales, and on the exhale, she pours into song again.  The rest is easy to rush over, to cut short.  We do it because there's a breathlessness to make and in this anxious moment, we want to shake off the pause, and feel the comfort of fingers moving again, of the body in motion, but - Isn't there always a "but"? - if we honor the silences between the music, thereby allowing the floods of fear to, if not burst in, trickle in, then, failure, somehow you are satiated, at least for a quarter beat.

4. Failure, you are a flame.  You are so delicate, a small dancing waif at the top of a wick, but you are also, by definition the heat of life, and our greatest technology.

5. Failure, you are like an unread book, one that is too long or too literary or too academic, so you languish on the shelf, and every time our eyes pass over you, we bristle, feeling both guilt and relief that another day has passed and we've not had to delve into your complexity.

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The Personal Is Political

As a mother at home with her kids, sometimes the disparity between the political and the personal seems vast.  But what if we came to see the political and the personal not as a dichotomy, but as a spectrum, each articulation a point on a continuum?  I believe a political message is not diluted, but deepened by infusing it with real personal meaning.  When the personal and the political come together, in the language of Paulo Coelho, it's alchemy.  Don't believe me?

Watch this video of a Marshallese poet, Kathy Jetnil-Kijner, speaking to the disruption to her culture but also to her family.  Here's a taster photo with her baby, a beautiful presence in the sea of negotiators

Also see Paulo Coelho in conversation with Krista Tippett on the amazing podcast On Being.  Here's Krista Tippett talking about that magic synthesis, in this case, she calls it the personal and the universal

MS. TIPPETT: ...So, you know, something that has intrigued me in my life of conversation — and I think it seems like a paradox — that when someone is able to be most particular, articulate about their life that in those moments, what they say can be most universally heard and felt. And it seems to me that this paradox is very central to your life of writing, and even your, you know, your success as a writer — the reach of your writing. You’ve said that the driving question behind all of your writing is “who am I? Who is Paulo Coelho?” 

[artoflifelifeofart]

The answer to the underrepresentation of women’s stories in the literary world is not to give prizes for women’s writing or to introduce quotas for literary magazines. That’s putting the money in at the wrong end of the process, and will probably just end up rewarding women who have greater amounts of leisure time anyway, while producing writing that is bit shit and/or relentlessly middle class. As a solution, it seems more like giving grants for women so they can have time off their actually-very-important work of looking after children and houses and other people’s egos. Such work shouldn’t and can’t be abandoned: to value the life of the artist over the traditionally feminised work of caring is dumb patriarchal romanticism. Of course we need more stories about women’s lives, written by the people who actually live them, so that women’s work can be allowed to be a viable site for artistic practice and aesthetic reflection. In other words, we need to make it possible for women to be a little more selfish, just for a while.

Helen Addison-Smith in Overland

[artoflifelifeofart]

You want your journals written by hand in a book, because someday, if you have daughters — I don’t have daughters, but I have fairy goddaughters, thousands of them — all of these books are gonna go to them, and they’re gonna sit around just like we are now, and they’re gonna read them out loud, and they’re going to be able to know what my life was.” Then, pointedly, to Este: “And they’re not gonna find it in your phone.

Stevie Nicks via Austin Kleon's awesome newsletter

[artoflifelifeofart]

There are good artists who have children. They are called men.

Tracey Emin in The Independent