Oooooh, really dreading this one, for some reason.
On an objective level, today was perfectly fine. So why I'm feeling so crappy is something of a mystery. Or... not.
John wanted to take the train to New Brunswick this morning, so I drove him into Newark, taking the back route I discovered when I had my residency of Market St. last year. I usually get testy quite quickly, because no one else on the road realizes that their main concern should getting out of my way. It's really for everyone's benefit. But this morning, there was an almost eerie absence of traffic -- was this a holiday I don't know about? We zipped right to the train station, with only a minor delay as a mother dropped her children off at school. By stopping without warning, without blinkers, right in the middle of the road. Thank goodness her kids were agile, and there were only two of them. But I felt so mellow, I didn't even honk. Well, not right away. Sometimes my Teutonic heritage does takes over, don't you know?
With John safely on his way, I got home in record time -- where was everyone? I did errands, again with little or no difficulty. I went to Pet Smart for kitty litter, and when I'm there, I always ask the employees which creatures they like best, in the store's menagerie. Today, a young woman preferred the lizards, while the guy at the register expressed fondness for the cockatoos, and thought the chinchillas were really soft. I find these exchanges both amusing and touching.
I bought balloons at the Dollar Store, in a strip malls on Irvington Avenue. I plan (if that's the right word) to use these balloons as armatures for some masks I'm thinking of making. I drew some screaming faces last month -- during my pre-pacemaker drama, and while waiting for a doctor, I'm pretty sure. And even though the exercise seems useless -- masks? Don't I feel artistically irrelevant enough already? -- I'm actually dragging myself toward an investment of time and effort. And it would give me a reason to use all those sticks in the back yard...
Back at home, I was unusually productive -- changed bot litter pans; pulled the dead flowers from the bunch I keep on the kitchen table, and rearranged the white lilies that, miraculously, keep opening. I went down to the basement studio, to make repairs on a hanging figure I may use in the 'Sacred Music, Sacred Art' concert John is staging at Christ Church later in the month. Repairs meaning the spattering of aromatic shellac on fabric and plastic again. It felt good.
So I was surprised when, sitting here at the table and scrolling through Facebook, I went into a steep emotional tailspin. I had been listening to the classical music as usual, yet another eighteenth-century orchestral work, and without really thinking about it, I was transported an imagined royal court in Europe. I was thinking of the colors I would see, the visual textures, the courtly formalities. And as the music continued, I began seeing bits of favorite paintings. And before I knew it, I tripped once again, over one of those treacherous hidden dreams, the ones I tend to forget, but which still hold substantial power.
I was supposed to be a painter, you see. Art (capital A, please...) was going to be my equivalent of basketball for an underprivileged inner-city kid, or football for a burly, farm-fresh kid from the Midwest. This dream persisted, in spite of the open hostility and obstruction that my family put in my way, at every opportunity. And they really did a thorough job of strangling this particular avenue of expression for me. I am able to buy no end of brushes, paints, fine papers and lengths of unprimed canvas. But when it comes to the painting itself... well, that will have to wait... for... I have never discovered what.
Making sculpture is a different matter. I was never specifically told I couldn't do it. And so it happened, for me, almost by accident, with my exposure to the fascination that is glass blowing -- and even then, I took up sculpture in spite of warnings to avoid the enterprise. Warnings which, I think, were spot on, with regard to space needed, and the expense of keeping the materials I need to make the work people say they're impressed with, but which I always end up bringing home, to squeeze into the garage.
But... there was that music, poignant with what people then had to sense was the ending of an entire way of life. There were the inward recollections of a Breugel, a Fragonard, a Courbet, a Corot... And then it was as if a little illuminated billboard popped up in my head: You Were Supposed To Be That Good.
And of course, there followed the familiar avalanche of late-life regret -- unrealized ambitions, curiosities unexamined, languages unlearned... Does it sound ridiculous and trivial? But there is real grief involved. Real, and tedious, and seemingly inescapable grief.
Is this is a normal transitional phase? I'd like to know how long to expect this falling into what I think of as emotional tiger traps. Because, aside from the sad realization that I have no one to blame but myself for my unrealized dreams, I find that when I'm down in one of those deep places, I forget completely about anything I've accomplished. The pit is treacherous. No amount of peppy self-talk dispels the certainty that I've squandered my life. No deep breathing and recitation of affirmations can convince me that it's not now far too late for remedial repair.
Of course, once I've managed to haul myself back to something like emotional normality, I try to distract myself. I try to make what I think are really concrete plans this time, hoping to sidestep my personal booby-traps. I've toyed with simply getting rid of everything -- art supplies, fabrics, blown glass, everything. But even while I'm trying to convince myself that this purging would be for the best (to say nothing of emptying out the garage), I secretly hold out hope that, next week or next month, or next year at the latest, my creative career will finally get off the ground. Which dream is just the same thing as: digging myself a deep, steep-sided hole, and lining it with sharpened bamboo stakes, and covering it all over with palm fronds and banana leaves, and then waiting in the bushes, for myself to come walking along, and fall right in. Again.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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