I’ve been writing lately about layers as I try to learn to paint—here and here for instance. But I want to give the last word, or at least the next, to Stanley Kunitz; his poem The Layers is below. And though I imagine Kunitz to have written this late in his life, I think it has applications for me, and for you, travelers and changers always.
Above: Another of my own attempts, in Flora’s workshop at Squam, to live in the layers. They are no match for Kunitz’s words but they struggle, I think, toward a similar understanding.
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the snow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
—Stanley Kunitz
Trees. I love them in every season. In spring, they’re in the process of becoming. Everyone’s sprouting buds and looking like they have an equal shot at a decent set of leaves. Such burgeoning energy and so much potential. In summer, they’re all busting out—green and lush and profuse—but it’s hard to tell one from the next. In autumn, however, some real differentiation starts to happen. The golden yellows, the mordant reds, the soul-lifting combination that turns to amaranth pink. Autumn is the time to see each glorious tree in all its individuality.
I am in my autumn. It is middle age, yes. But I am also at my most differentiated. My most ‘me’ to-date. I know autumn can’t last. Winter will come. And it will bring its own stark beauty. In winter, the finery is gone. We see what each tree is made of – its unique architecture, its bones. There is no more hiding. But if you’ve ever gazed at the black lattice-work of branches against a backdrop of snow and cloud, you know this: There is something sacred in that nakedness, something worth loving.
Painting in layers, à la Flora Bowley, is both easy and hard. It’s nice to know you can always paint over something that doesn’t please you. Those decisions are easy. What’s hard is to cover something you sort of like, or like well enough, in the hopes that you are creating something you like better, and maybe even love. Because you’ll never get back that specific painting you liked well enough. You lift the brush, you change the painting. There’s no going back. This is life.
My current dilemma is above: How to proceed without jeopardizing the yellow bird. And his tall blue friend.
I took a painting workshop with Flora Bowley at Squam Art Workshops in September. Titled Bloom True, this workshop was as much about freedom, experimentation, and non-judgment as composition and color palette—more so, even. Flora encouraged using lots of paint and a variety of expressive techniques to build layer upon layer on the canvas.
The first few layers were a lot of fun. But, soon, this writer was at sea. At a certain point—about three hours into Day 1—I found I didn’t know how to make a decision about what to do next on the canvas. I had neither the experience nor the technical skill to determine next steps, or even to be aware of my options. It was excruciating. Without words to guide me, I was lost. And, with a painting method meant to be intuitive and feeling-based, thinking my way through just wasn’t possible.
For the next day and a half, I had to grope my way in the dark; carry on through feelings of hopelessness, paralysis, and bitter self-doubt; make choices I was unhappy with; and throw down some radical, last-ditch efforts to change my paintings. All while swearing like a sailor.
It was exactly what I needed. I wanted to travel in new territory. I wanted to be out of my usual headspace. I wanted to tap into unfamiliar parts of my creative self. I wanted to try being expressive in a way that doesn’t involve words.
I got that. And I came away with some paintings that are unlike anything I’ve ever made, and a new creative practice that’s unlike anything else I do.
At left, you can see five stages in the life of a single painting. I have mixed feelings about what now stands as the final version. And to tell the truth, I don’t think it’s the final. But I do love unequivocally what that canvas represents to me: a bold swing out into the darkness, where many moons light my way.
A theory in the robotics world holds that our empathy for robots grows as they become more human-looking, but there is a point when robots begin to look human enough that the good feelings turn to revulsion.
Something is off, not quite right, and we feel disturbed. It’s instinctual. As the human quality of the robot increases again, so too does the empathy. But that dip in the graph where we feel completely creeped out – that is the uncanny valley.
Her subject is not robots but, in my opinion, Jane totally nailed the uncanny valley in her latest series of art photos, a sample of which is above. (Past work has been documented here.) It’s an unsettling blend of Sally Mann and the American Girl Doll catalog, but it highlights Jane’s singular eye. And I am intrigued to see what she trains it on next.
At right: the artist, fully committed to keeping it arty.
© Marzanna Syncerz | Dreamstime.com
For a long time, I considered ‘being’ to be a quiet, still state. It felt good for a while. Safe. But the life I constructed around this belief—limited in friends and connections, stripped of ornament and extras, home-based, adventure-averse—eventually became unsatisfying. Painful even. It enabled me to learn my inner terrain really well. But there is a big world out there, and it can add texture and detail and dimension to the inner one. The interplay is key, and the balance.
There is more to being than I thought: There is becoming. It is the dynamic part of being, and I have begun to embrace it. This means talking, painting, walking, running, trying, stretching, daring—starting impromptu dance parties in the kitchen; eating alone at a roadside clam shack on a rainy October evening; jumping into the lake in the moonlight. This means claiming it—this life of mine—seizing it, squeezing it. It means no more retreat into the cramped cubby of safety, no more stowing my deepest wishes in the front hall closet with the rain boots and shoe polish. No more passive longing and hoping for change.
I am in motion now. Like a dog springing from an open car door after a long road trip and racing through a meadow—gleeful, renewed, and open to possibility.
Sometimes the Work gets done sitting at a bar with a glass of Bordeaux, solving rebuses and letting friends drink Narragansett and Clamato without judgment. Sometimes it’s the tiniest things—the figs in the couscous or the creamy cheese embedded in the bread—that make it perfectly evident that the most powerful love and magic are in the details. Sometimes you dare to tell the truth because someone simply asks it of you. Sometimes you are seen, really seen, after the kitchen has closed and the night is winding down. And in that moment of not being mysterious at all, you realize that you already are the things you wish to be—loose, unselfconscious, and soulful—and that life is more mysterious than you ever imagined.
Like most three-year-olds, Jack has many funny turns-of-phrase and made-up words. One of my favorites is “lasterday,” which covers any time in his recent past. But he has this other semantic mix-up that I’m thinking of incorporating into my own speech. He has managed to confuse “I wish” and “Sure I.” The result is that he will say things like “Sure I can have a cupcake for breakfast.” Or “Sure I could fly up to the top of that tree.” He delivers these thoughts kind of wistfully, in the manner of wishing. And yet, as statements, they are pretty damn affirmative.
From now on, I plan to make the same mistake. Deliberately. Sure I can be deeply engaged in every ordinary day. Sure I can reconcile a need for home and a longing for adventure. Sure I can create a healthy balance between solitude and connection. Sure I can find a way to integrate the intellectual and the sensuous in my life. And sure I can see how these wishes all came to pass lasterday, and wait only to be claimed.
That guilty conscience you’ve carried forever, even though your whole life you’ve tried to be good. “I must’ve been a bad person in a past life,” you joke. But maybe it’s because you’re meant to be something great in this one. And that knowledge has been hard to square with what you saw around you. You wanted more but learned quickly that wasn’t okay. You internalized the admonishments: selfish, spoiled.
But now, light is shining on that mistake, that untruth. And you can see — clear and bright — your bigness, your uniqueness, your expansive and expressive nature, and that feeling of wanting and yearning for and — once upon a time — expecting more was not false or selfish but simply what you sought, what you felt, what bubbled up from your deepest source and so cannot be wrong. Need not be judged. It is bubbling streamwater flowing in early spring. Who would call that selfish? How could it be?
So it is with your deepest dreams and desires. They are as clean and pure as the stream you dipped your fingers in today. They emanate from as holy a place. Guilt doesn’t exist on the same plane as those dancing ripples. They are the essence and expression of you: sacred, sun-lit, true.
Today I have to do something that feels hard to me. It involves public speaking.
I am also deep into the Roxana Robinson novel Cost. These two things are, in fact, related though the connection lies in my psyche alone.
Cost is an extremely intense story about Julia Lambert, a mother—an artist and art professor—who learns that her younger son, now 22 years old, is a heroin addict. It is excruciating at times, especially when she tries to reconcile the small, soft-skinned boy she held in her arms with the vacant-eyed junkie he has become. Her son is named Jack, same as mine, and I can’t help thinking, when my Jack curls himself into me at bedtime, if he could ever drift so far from my love to become a hostile stranger. It doesn’t seem possible. So too for Julia.
I hope with every cell in my body that I am never in Julia’s shoes. But I regard novels like Cost—as well as non-fiction books like The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s account of her husband’s sudden death and her daughter’s grave illness, which befell Joan simultaneously—as preparation for living. This is the power of story and art: I can see, close-up, life at its most horrific. In a small way, the tragic can be felt and known. The range of possible responses to catastrophic personal events can be considered and explored. It’s a sort of training in empathy and practice in not turning away.
Cost has taught me a lot, but one lesson in particular is relevant today. This: There are things to fear and dread in this world, but speaking to a group of engaged college seniors about grant-writing is not one of them.
