My Name is Clio Bluestocking

I need to write. I need to grade, too; but I need to write more.

The grading somehow seems to suck the creative energy out of me. I know everyone hates to grade, yet I think I have a greater aversion to it than most people. Maybe that's just my myopic perspective. I don't mind "editing" student's papers, showing them how to do better, even correcting grammar, even when I want to just tell the student that they need to retake basic English. That part is not directly creative, but it helps the students make something better, which is part of the creativity of editing. Assigning a value, however, feels destructive and makes the whole process simply dreadful. The grade itself becomes the main reason I procrastinate on grading, then become depressed by my procrastination, then procrastinate more, and on and on and on.

The two big posts, the ones about my dad, that drew in more readers than have read both of my books put together, or even who have read my blog in the past two years, also took quite a bit out of me. I wasn't lying on the sofa fetal or sitting exhausted at the computer or anything of that sort. I just didn't want to venture into my head, into that place, even to respond to the wonderful comments.

That's not true, I did want to venture into my head and to respond to comments; but I couldn't quite work up the strength to do so. It was like this: when I was a kid, I would try to swim down to the bottom of the deep end of the pool, or see how far I could swim under water. I would hold my breath for as long as I could, and swim as fast as I could. When I finally came up, my lungs on fire and my ears bursting, I would have to sit on the side of the pool for a minute to catch my breath. I'd have to sit a little longer, too, because my body and my mind needed a few minutes longer to rebuild the energy plus a little more, to psyche myself up, for the next attempt. That was what I was feeling this week. So, I couldn't dive back into that deep end just yet.

In the comments on the "Guilty Daddy-Issues" post, two ideas kept coming up that have been very useful. The first was that this is the human condition to hold two opposing emotions about a person. The second was the impossibility of being whole. While I was writing that post, or when I was at the end of writing that post, I kept thinking about what I had learned in my medieval literature class back as an undergraduate about the Mallory Arthurian tales. That was in 1988 or maybe 1989 -- a long time ago -- and I think some of my memories are also mixed up with the film Excalibur and with other things that I've picked up along the way. In any case, I remember this concept of "wholeness" that ran through the parts of the stories that we read, and that the crisis in Camelot had to do with the "unwholesomeness" of kingdom. The quest for the grail was an effort to restore the wholeness of the kingdom, and many knights died in the process.

The other story that I thought of while reading the comments was Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. I had that novel for years on my shelf during and after high school, and I never got around to reading it. It disappeared somewhere along the line, then my analyst suggested that I read it. Would you believe that the next day I was in the library and on their "books for sale" shelf I found a copy of that book for $1? So, I bought it and read it.

There was no reason for me to like the book. First of all, it was written by a man and the main character is a man. I'm a bit prejudiced in my choice of recreational reading, and I tend to be prejudiced toward female authors with female characters. Of course, I get quite frustrated at times because, in browsing books, I begin to wonder if anyone can imagine a life for a woman that doesn't center around taking care of someone, marrying someone, or un-marrying someone. "Don't women have adventures?" I demand of the bookshelves. I end up reading a lot of detective fiction because female detectives tend to have lives more like the one I imagine myself having, minus the guns and the life of danger and the bad guy going to jail in the end.

Back to Lev. This is a book by a man, about a man. Not just any man, either, but a religious man. Not just religious, but an Orthodox Jew. Not just an Orthodox Jew, but an Orthodox Jew who has no desire to go outside of his own community. Lev and I had nothing in common. Yet, by the end of the book I was in tears because his story sliced right into the very place that I wrote about in the "Guilty" post.

For those of you who don't know, the story is about a young boy with an intense drive for drawing and painting. He cannot stop himself from portraying the world as he sees it. While he loves and respects his parents, and they love him, they do not understand his need to be an artist. They have devoted their lives to humanitarian work, and find his art frivolous, a waste of time, and borderline blasphemous. Through the intercession of the leader of their community, Lev is permitted to take lessons from a professional artist. In his education, he learns a visual language that helps him to express his passion with greater precision; yet, much of that language is antithetical to his own upbringing and people.

At the end of the novel, Lev creates his masterpiece. He paints his mother as crucified between himself, her son, the artist and his father, her husband, the activist. The entire novel has been about his own struggle, being torn between his love for his parents and community and his love and need for art. At the end, however, he begins to understand how his mother has been torn between her love and duty toward her husband and the same toward her son. The image of the crucifix is not a static image of suffering, but an active image of being torn between two opposing forces. Of course, for a Jew, using a crucifix to express this concept was heretical and a betrayal of his own heritage, and he must leave his family and community.

That masterpiece that he created gave me a powerful image. Not so much the painting, but that Lev stepped away from his own pain to create an image of profound sympathy for his mother and profound understanding of the dynamic in his family. He stepped outside of that dynamic to describe the whole, and he took the risk of using images that ultimately undermined his parents' understanding of the sympathy. He portrayed a truth, and he accepted the consequences for telling that truth, which was the knowledge that he had hurt his parents just as profoundly as he had shown sympathy and that he must live exiled from his community.

The power of that ending for me came with Lev's acceptance of this fundamental struggle between himself and the people who loved him most, but who also caused him the most pain through their rejection of something central to his being; and his acceptance of the struggle between his love for those same people and the ways that he wounded them. There was no resolution, no way to reconcile the two. All he could do was create this masterpiece of sympathy and understanding. His creation was an act of love, even if the people for whom he was expressing it could in no way accept it.

This is to say, that point of crucifixion, or perhaps more accurately that point of being drawn and quartered, of being pulled in opposite directions, of having to hold the point of tension in your own being, that is not only the human condition, but the source of creativity. If you can express that point honestly, it may also be the point of great art. It is not the point of peace.