It's not easy being an artist!I tried so hard not to be. But the Demon Art pursued. It finally grabbed me by the collar, threw me up against the wall and said, “Listen, bitch!” An overwrought, operatic, and melodramatic artistic crisis at the age of 23, showed me...quite clearly...the political, philosophical novel I was meant to write. Oh no! Not that! Anything but that! (I'd been reading a lot of Blake and Dostoevsky!) I sobbed and wailed but admitted defeat. I would do it. I quickly realized, however, I was too young and dumb to write it, so I turned to something easier. Painting. I knew it would be one, among many stepping stones back to my book.
I hung out with Jazz musicians and studied the classics of literature, music and art, using all to inform my painting. I studied anatomy, using clay to sculpt every single bone in the human body, first individually, then articulated on an armature...to understand three dimensionality and physics. I kept all my journals in mirror-writing to strengthen the non-dominant side of my brain. I filled stacks of sketch pads with nothing but ambidextrous drawings of my hands, and other stacks with life drawings. I moved through “periods” in my painting ridiculously fast.
I learned to be a piano tuner. The fine discernment of learning to hear harmonics opened my mind's ear, but when the excitement devolved into a mere job? Couldn't do it. Too finite for an eternal beginner. It was the learning I needed, not the life-style.
Working in the sex industry was a painfully visceral education in the profound misogyny of this society...as was being an activist in the Home Birth and Anti-Circumcision Movements. Although the latter two enabled the resolution of and recovery from the deep pain of the former. A willingness to actively engage with suffering creates an understanding of the very nature of evil. More learning.
Reading stuff like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle while driving a cab in Chicago...along with the futility of trying to organize this exploited foreign work force...further crystallized my views of social injustice. Getting kind of sick of learning!
Being the single mother of a slightly autistic, very literal child who was obsessed with maps and who refused to believe anything existed outside Chicago...because we'd never been anywhere else his whole life...I decided to create a win-win situation. I bought an old school bus, converted it into an RV so we could travel. We spent three years exploring both geography and alternative life-styles, visiting many communes, collectives and organic farms. This not only broadened his horizons, breaking him out of autistic ruts, but helped me with my book. Since this kind of travel was part of my protagonist's story, I had to live it, too. We had a lot of adventures, some wonderful, some not-so-wonderful, some downright scary.
I am incapable of going quietly!
At the age of 35, I felt I knew enough to begin writing. I had the definite sense of my previous life experiences coming together...that they weren't as scattered and disparate as they seemed at the time. But it still took ten years to sort it out. My voice was at last emerging, but there was Oh-so-much blather to get past! I was constantly honing, re-visioning and re-working, constantly adding and subtracting...endlessly, it seemed. Then it became mostly subtracting. I had created an enormous boulder of words. All that was left was carving out everything that wasn't the fabulous sculpture hidden inside! And now it's finished. Whew! I finally found my way back to my original vision!
This column is, of course, the natural result of that work. But I cannot tell a lie. As much as these short pieces are easy and enjoyable to write...they practically write themselves...they are part of a larger plan. It's a brazen campaign to get the right agent/publisher for my book to come to me! Obviously, that's gonna take a while! I'm gonna have to really saturate the market-place! But I'm happy that, after putting myself through my self-inflicted paces, I can finally settle down to what I always wanted: Writing.
PS-Considering that, at this writing, I've only had my own computer for about a month, and have to hitch hike into town with it, to get on-line, I've gotten a lot done! Got my whole book typed, many agents researched & written to, an e-bay store opened, and this column started. I'm very motivated. This column has been part of my plan for several years...also gonna break into doing book reviews down the road a ways.
