the sleeping artist
At Home at the End of the World
“who bumped against the limits of his own talents”
“I’d expected to feel more like one single person”
“like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he’d planned it that way.”
“Cleveland was just a place where things failed to happen.”
“Working in a bakery, you get to know the local unhappiness.”
“I tended to move like a long apology”
“This city is just a dream you’re having”
“She was like New York made into a woman. She changed and changed.”
“We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and cancelled each other out.”
“If we didn’t learn to train our desires in one direction or another, we were likely to end up with nothing.”
“I’d thought I’d be able to say, if somebody asked me, just exactly what I was doing in the world.”
“Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.”
“People’s cheerful determination to live in ways that are mainly beside the point.”
*** “People who have been well cared for can’t imagine the freedom there is in being bad.”
“It would be a shame to let your father’s lack of imagination curb your own life.”
“Our only chance of happiness, a small enough chance, lay in welcoming change.”
“He still hadn’t developed the habit of loss.”
“Dad I got this far. This was the best I could do. “
“Surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine ad what we in fact create.”
“I had lived until then for the future, in a state of continuing expectation.”
The Sleeping Artist
An old friend ran into me the other day and said, “You were an amazing designer. What are you working on nowadays?”
I answered, “Nothing.” And she asked, “What do you do?” And I told her I don’t do anything. I watch TV.
She smiles to me from where she’s sitting on the couch, the one she sits on every evening to numb herself while her husband of 60 years sits on the firmer chair with his eyes closed. I take what she gives me, which has never been more than the ghost of her, because even this deep in the territory of my hatred, I love her. It’s not the kind of forgiving love a grown woman gives to the one who has raised her without compassion, tenderness, and all that a girl needs in the absence of her mother. Neither is it a forced love stemmed from guilt or a fear of solitude. I can be alone, and I no longer believe in the guilt of the child with no love to give. Instead, this love forces itself on me, even in the strongest surge of hatred, when I could burn her whole house down, I look at her, and I can feel something sharp in the left side of my chest. It hurts not to hate her, because she will never be as I want her to be. To love someone who is stubborn in their killing of themselves, and in the killing of you with them, to love someone so immutable, so stubborn in their numbing ways, it can be endless war that drains all of you. But this love feels vengeful, not at all forgiving, and mean, not kind. I could hide behind the thick fabric of indifference for the rest of my life, or I can admit to my weakness for her. The dead artist. The sleeping artist. My grandmother. My mother. The one who has ruined us and still tried, in her own way, to save us.
This is more than the story of a woman who’s retired from her art. As Rob would say, it’s a lot more interesting than that.
What scares me when I see her on the couch like that, too tired for life, too worn out to yell, to cry, to tell us the truth, to hear the truth from us, is that there is a part of me that has settled into the same place in life. Half of me rises too late in the morning, exhausted but genuine in my effort to make something of another day, the other half spills the hours into a screen that gives me nothing and takes everything from me.
Part of me wants to do it — to bare myself and the life I’ve led without bitter regret. When I sit down on the couch, at her age, I want to sit with what I’ve done , and not with what I had wanted to. But why is it so much easier not to, not to write, to edit, to submit, to learn, to film, to plan. I’ve gone far back enough into nothing to make that wanting something appear impossible and unreachable. There but not mine. It belongs to someone with more courage, a kinder childhood that has left them with energy. Sometimes work to me feels like trying to fill a bottle with holes in it. All my efforts spill through the holes in me. I try and I pour and I hold up my body that just wants to lie in sleep forever and in the end, it all spills. My body holds nothing. It migrates, it tries, it holds an obsessions for a few months at a time, but releases it all with time. Love, work, dreams, desire.
I want to watch TV too. Do nothing. There’s something so hurtful about trying. And trying and not being really sure whether the work exhausting you is even useful, and if it is, if it’s any good at all. My solitude makes it all even more confusing. There’s no door I can knock on with something finished or half-finished. To not know, to not be able to ask and be answered makes me lose all sense of the real world. It destroys my belief that there’s still a possibility I can play a role in it, that I can leave the ephermal and enter the real. But the real is tiring. I can’t work with others without the need to be liked. And I can’t make anything honest or good trying to be liked. So I withdraw and I allow myself to hate myself and in my hatred sometimes I produce something honest and worthwhile. But more often I end up with unfinished drafts and fantasy projects that I throw myself into with a great sense of importance, only to put it away, unseen, before I jump to the other unfinishable, secret project.
***
I had intended to write about her. My grandma was the “sleeping artist” I had in mind when I first started writing. I hadn’t intended to write about myself. It was supposed to be a story about an older woman with immense talent who now sits on the couch and does nothing, how it kills me because I think there’s an overwhelming storm of creativity and talent in her still that may never find release. I felt it was on me to rescue that art inside her, to make sure she doesn’t leave us with something unfinished and uncommitted to form outside of her. I hadn’t thought before about what I needed to rescue in me, what was raging inside and banging against locked hands. Someone once spoke to me about the timing of mirrors, how when you are ready, or in need of it, you are sent a reflection of yourself in someone else. Since traveling back to Virginia two summers ago, she has been a hard mirror to look into. Through her I learned what had gone wrong with the man I loved, and now, through her, I am learning what it looks like when you kill the artist in you and say no to the voice ordering you to create. I understand now. To go numb is necessary, how else can you bare it? The regret…the talent poured into you from God and lost through the holes in you.
But what really is easier? To carry the weight of guilt through easy, empty days, or to carry the weight of responsibility through long, fulfilling days?
The White Horse - A Dream
I had fallen asleep again after 8. I had just just arrived in New York. It looked a little like Edinburgh. I walked to the main street and was trying to figure out what direction to walk in when across the street in an open stable, I saw a large white horse trying to climb a stone wall. He was trying to escape. I was so shocked I crossed the street and walked closer to him. The horse behind in the barn had its head out and was trying to say something in surprise or encouragement. Then the horse collapsed on the ground either because he was exhausted or despaired. The boy who works there turned around just as the horse had fallen and saw only that- the falling of his horse. He rushed to his father and started anxiously telling his father what had just happened. His father came over in a hurry and lifted the horse. He started to pull apart its mouth until the horse bled and screamed. I was crying, screaming, telling him to stop. I wanted someone to hear me over the chaos but no one did. When he was finished, he turned to me and said, “You have to do that so they know who’s in control.” He had wild, angry eyes. The horse had its head pressed against the wall in shame. Blood poured down the white hair near its mouth. It’s neck had been tied to a rope this whole time, making his escape impossible.
Last Night
I began writing yesterday late at night. I had gone to my grandma’s earlier that day, and there was something I needed to get down quickly in writing. For half an hour, I wrote some of my most honest writing. I rarely write about my grandmother, and when I do, it’s usually safe enough in the distance. But last night, for the first time, I was seeing her as a woman, not as someone who’d raised me, not as a bourgeoisie Arab with stifling high class standards, not as the mother of the father I hated. I was happy to be writing, after so long of putting it off. I was thinking, this is the only thing that matters today. But suddenly, all that writing was lost. The screen went white, and I was crazy with anger. In the past, I’ve been careful to save writing that was far less important. How could I have been so stupid? Never had I come this close to her, and now, there’s nothing of that encounter left. I can try to remember what I’d written, but it won’t be the same. I’ve lost something special I’ve written. Has any other writer experienced the same rage of loss? It was more than the loss of a few paragraphs. It was the loss of something you know deep down you’ll only come across a handful of times of in your life. But then again, how many rare chances have I willingly passed up before?
