Behind the Scenes: The Private Life of an Artist
the end.
I won’t attempt to write beautifully of 5 months of absence. It was hell. This winter has been ugly, and the ugly begs to be written.
The Red Sea, the Potomac, in the wastelands of my mind, the musty room with red carpet, the old studio I had emptied with certainty last year and returned to this month, humiliated, exhausted…I lived without movement, without thoughts. No life. I want to tell you how torturous it was, how terrible an ending it has been. For those who have known me, who have witnessed that brief but promising attempt I made to rebel against my past, to draw a radically different life I’d dared claim as my own, I stand before you, ashamed, with bare hands, my free bird that I loved in her cage, my mind, with all its dreams and impulse for flight, in another cage.
I can tell you in me lives an artist. But what life? Like Buwkoski’s blue bird, I peek inside from time to time to make sure she is in there, that I haven’t lost her. And she is there, and I have lost her. She’s the child I’ve punished for drawing on the walls, and when I go to check on her, she is where I’ve set her to be punished, but it is not the same child I found, singing, lost in a mess of crayons and colors, unaware, young, innocent in her pursuit of beauty. She is an artist I’ve punished for her play, and she will sit obediently where I’ve told her too, but nothing is the same. She will never color on the wall without fear again, if she dares at all (and I hope despite my punishments, she dares). I hope she rebels against me in every way, because I am the hurt adult and she is the free child that knows better, and hates me for what she knows: that I resent her for her freedom, that I punish her out of envy.
It takes very little, I think to change our lives, and yet that little feels enormous to someone with a body filled with black liquid sadness. But it is little. Imagine, for instance, that instead of dragging my child artist off to a room, I knelt beside her on the ground and began coloring the walls with her? How different, how enormous.
As more time passes, more happens, the more overwhelming it feels to return to writing, as if I’ve been assigned an impossible burden of committing every event in my life on time, and the loss of time means the accumulation of what could no longer be remembered, and if remembered, too much to write. But when I think of it, truly, the time I was recording my life, day by day, week by week, there was less loss of time, more attention (good and bad) given to each day, each moment — I was recording them all. Without a record, not only do I risk forgetting what’s happened, but I risk time passing without anything happening at all. The loss of a day, a week, a month, is a loss easier to bare when it can slip past you unwritten, ungrieved.
And now that I’ve begun writing, I grieve. And to sit with loss is a frightening enough reason to never want to write.
And I stay where I am. Never mind that I moved from Beirut to Alexandria to Dahab to Nuweiba. To DC. I’ve been knee deep in the same ground of madness. Sure, I move places and offer convincing illusions of movement. But it’s the same dirty river, north or south, by the banks or in the deepest part, calm or rough in its currents.
I’ve played an obsessive game in my mind for the past few months, where each day I try to pinpoint the exact day where all changed for me. Was it the day I got that awful haircut and lost those long curls I used to hide behind? Or was it that night when a dying woman looked to me for the truth and I couldn’t hide it? Was it those lonely days in Alexandria with the rainstorms and the sea and those long, ghostly hours by the esplanade? Was it somewhere between the desert and the sea in Sinai, those cold nights in the bamboo huts, the swing by the shore, the sky with its colors and its eye, watching me hiding? Was it that evening before the start of the new year, when I stood outside and said my final goodbyes to the bird I loved more than anything in my life (she’d run away a few weeks before), or was it her return few days later, on the edge of death, a shadow of herself just as I’d returned a shadow of myself too. It’s strange, the time of our departures, the time of our return, how our lives align together in unsettling ways…
I see so much of me in her. That rooted stubbornness, that cry for freedom, her will to live, her sadness, her desire to be left alone. She is my shapeless soul committed to form. It scares me, the amount of times I realized I was doing to her what I was doing to me, and that the behaviors I punished in her were the same behaviors and tendencies I punished in me too.
And when I laugh, she comes. She stays far when I am not good. It is too much for her. It is too much for the artist in me too. They hide together in the closet, leaving me alone in a room with dark thoughts. I am happy writing now. Something of the hell in me lives here now. For you to read, for me to remember. My bird sits on my arm as I write. She wants to be with me now. She can bare the smaller hell in me, not the one that grows and grows when I’ve got too long without art, without writing .
Little Beauties
I’ve lived through it through it plenty of times before, the white, heavy sadness, the streams of rage that flood without rain, without reason. But life had never lost its feeling, however painful that feeling was. It’s the numbness that terrifies me this time. The void where sentiment once lived. The desire to disappear where the desire to be seen once stood, stubborn and strong against my solitude. The quiet request for life to end where a desire for live once consumed each hour.
And why? When I’d always felt too much, tried so hard. Why the sudden surrender, the embarrassing plea to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep forever?
But even here, in the lowest of depression, there have been little beauties. Those long hours in the car, with him, in the coldest days of winters. The way he looks at me, gives his love, asks for love… Those quiet evenings in my bedroom, those sleepless hours… a herd of deer passing us outside in the middle of the night while I stood in his arms. Those rented rooms, all his effort, all my attempts to make it stop, to fight it. Then finally, the nothing in me slowly giving way to love… his decision to leave. And it’s too late; we love. Everything he has worked for, all those months of wanting it, and finally, it happens, but his mind is set, and I’m too tired and confused to fight it. I let him leave, the way I let him come. And when he came, he brought with him a storm. And when he’ll leave, he’ll take with him the last of me that could have tried to love again.
And still, he has gifted me some of my only beautiful moments this winter back home. I remember those nights in the Palestinian cafe, Washington Square on a warm April day, working beside him in the country on a project that failed, the way his presence gave me courage and comfort… that Georgian cafe in Brighton, how the first time we went with promise, and the second time we came with tears and heavy regret…those evenings in the cafe I’d later start working in, those evenings in his room in Brooklyn, the shadows of the tires against the ceiling, the people walking to the metro down the street, the private lives of the people in the building across from us. I wanted more, but time with him was always so fleeting, so much like a bird you want to hold who has in her mind something else she’d rather do. Our time together is one long passionate embrace with the fluid body of time. We can never rest peacefully in each other’s arm. That peace was never ours to try. We drink strong doses of the other’s presence, then stumble for far longer periods in their absence. We’ve come to know the other’s absence well, better than we know each other.
All the things I’ve quite
When we decide, when we choose to walk away, or stay, or try, or refuse, how can we ever know the weight each decision carries? How does a woman, who has never been given the freedom to decide anything for herself in her childhood, learn to speak with her heart so late in her life? How can she hear what’s been left unanswered for so long?
With time, regret either pays me a visit or it does not and I know, then, whether it was right or wrong to act. But is there any other way than to guess and improvise, then wait with dread for the sound of that hated visitor? It’s a question that tortures me often. How does one decide? And how important, how damaging, how right is this decision? Little ones scare me more than the bigger ones. It’s the little yes and nos, I will do and I won’t do that torment me. Each day is a long series of each, and I have this nagging feeling that I am always answering wrongly.
Somewhere an author suggests that we “trace the times [we] have quite an art form and why.” I’ve quite more than I've continued projects. I blame it on my impulse to try everything, but the more honest answer is that I throw myself into something and don’t have the patience to see it through. I am stunned by the amount of work it takes, work that was hidden to me from the outside of whatever art form attracted me at the time. I am easily hurt to hear nothing in response, when it often takes artist years of trials and errors before people begin looking their way. I have romantic ideas of various art forms, but once I enter, I am disappointed by all the steps that are very unromantic to me. I read once in Cunningham’s novels about a man who was “forced to deny the world because it was inconsistent with his dreams.”I knew, years ago, that in that line lived the answer to why I’d fail every project, every trial with love. In the end, I’d rather hold onto the idea of love and art than lose those ideas to the realities of each.
“Misery don’t suit me anymore.”