Picasso, now he’s an artist.
While I was waiting for my daughter to finish softball practice the other night, I ran into two dear friends strolling around the ball park. I was driving barefoot. They were walking three small, wild-haired dogs, one of them nearly entirely blind. All in all, we raised the eccentricity quotient of the softball field by a factor of at least five. Maybe ten. After chatting for a while about our kids and our various personal neuroses, the talk turned to how and why we became artists. Phil, who is an incredible visual artist and teacher, said he became an artist in reaction to debilitating perfectionism in his youth. Joan, who is a phenomenal dancer and musician and painter, said she did the most unlikely thing she could think of. As she put it, “if you would have asked me if it was more likely that I would marry an alien and move to Mars or become a dancer, I would have picked the Martian. Hands down.”
I laughed and hugged them both and mumbled some version of my own assent, but the conversation has lingered around the edges of my mind. While I loved hearing their stories, I realize I can barely even think the word artist in relation to myself. Now, of course, I am surrounded by artists – by poets and painters and novelists and musicians—and I don’t have any trouble calling any of them artists. I think of them as artists, I talk about them as artists, in fact I love calling them artists.
But, come to think about it, I am not sure I have ever called myself an artist out loud. Or even in my own head. In fact, it makes me cringe to even write about it here. I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t have any trouble calling myself a lawyer. Or an executive director. Or a mother. Or a cook or a knitter or a gardener. And, I love to call myself a daughter, a sister, a grand-daughter, a friend.
But, really, I could not call myself an artist in conversation with two dear friends. Some of it is probably that deep down I fear that I am a fraud. I know I am lawyer –the state of Oregon says so—but I have some doubts about my credentials as a poet.
That’s not all of it, though. And, it’s not that I think that poets aren’t artists. Or that poetry isn’t one of the world’s great arts. In fact, maybe it is because I revere poetry so completely and because I know that it keeps body and soul together like nothing else that I cannot claim it—the art of poetry—so directly for myself. I can’t say the name of G-d. I can’t look directly into the flame. I am too humbled by the enormity of the art to apply it to a creature as flawed and broken and downright ridiculous as I am.
And that’s fine. I want to tremble in the presence of Whitman and Dickinson and Dante and Sappho. I want to be stunned into silence and humility by Wallace Stevens and H.D.
But, I also want poetry to be my bread and water. I want it to be as ordinary and reliable as lunch. I want it to be my solace on the Bus and in the bathtub. So, what’s a girl to do then? For now, I think I will try to whisper it to myself in the same way that I murmur prayers and blessings over my girls as they sleep—not really even words, just love translated into utterance. I’ll breathe it amongst the names of the archangels – Michael . . . Gabriel . . . artist . . . artist. . .artist. I’ll try it on in the darkest hours of the night. But even then, even with such practice, I doubt I’ll take it out to the softball field.
