[photo by Zanthia]
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My earliest memory is of visiting my great-grandmother Herdegen. She lived in a trailer on my grandfather’s farm in Cheboygan, Michigan. It sat behind his house where the grass grew waist high until the stalks bent under their own weight, their dark green length bowing in apparent deference to a silver egg-like throne. Her home was a remnant of a travel trailer which she shared with a long-haired white lap dog who had a hard time keeping her hair.
The air inside was stale and pungent, the unventilated accumulation of lost dreams and sorrow. Though it was the middle of the day she was lying in her bed at the rear of her home.
“Come here,” she said. Her voice raspy and quavering.
While only in her eighties a hard life had taken its toll and she was pale, wrinkled, and frail. She spent all of her time in the trailer with the shades drawn. Inside it was cluttered and hadn’t been cleaned in years. My great-grandmother was not a messy person but her dog was, and evidence its rude nature was abundant.
"My mind ran toward it, not pulled by what was in front of me but propelled by what was behind."
She held out a hand to me. Not a soft and welcoming hand, not the smooth feminine hand one would appreciate being touched by, but a gnarled and bony hand, its knuckles swollen, its fingers curled in a prolonged muscle spasm. As I appraised the shaky appendage thrust toward me in the dim light, I saw she had feces smeared between her fingers. Whether hers or the dog's I didn't know but I recoiled at the thought of her grasping me in a warm embrace of human or canine excrement.
She was our oldest living relative at the time, the familial doyenne, and though her physical presence had long ago deteriorated the force of her influence was ever present. I looked at her hand and the crap between her bony fingers, I smelled the foulness of it rising over the accumulated stench of her filthy trailer and my mind froze. I could neither advance nor retreat. My legs, stiff as charcoal sticks, were immovable as I clung to my father’s pants. Looking away I hoped she would disappear, that I would wake up and realize I had simply wet my bed again.
“Come here,” I heard again in the back of my mind.
I stared at the carpet and didn’t move. I stared at the crumpled balls of tissue held rigid and tightly packed together with dried snot. I stared at the accumulation of generations of bread crumbs and the frayed edges of her old wool sweater draped over the arm of a chair she never used. And I stared at the white dog hairs that clung to everything like a light dusting of slender, straw-like snow. My mind ran toward it, not pulled by what was in front of me but propelled by what was behind.
My dad said something apologetic and leaned down to kiss her.
Child prodigy
I was never what I wanted to be. Never the object of my own adoration. Art was a refuge from my life and I poured my frustrations out on thick paper. When I was ten my mother convinced an art instructor at Kent State University to allow me to attend his class.
“I know every mother thinks their child is brilliant,” she told him. “But look at some of his work. You’ll see he has…” a gift, she wanted to say but dared not be so presumptuous. “You’ll see he has potential.”
At first I was thrilled to be among adults as an equal, our brooding teacher circling the minefield of easels, his floppy beret cocked just so. His path weaved in and between his students who were intent on a bowl of oranges and a draped sheet, gently cascading to the floor. He stopped to consider my rendition and admired my shading technique.
“Your fabric, it's so light, like a dust,” he gushed. “Very nice.” My cheeks flushed as I imagined my classmates’ jealous stares.
I reveled in my celebrity status as a child prodigy but the college scene proved too much for me. My fellow artists tried too hard to pull off an affected look of arrogance in shabby, second hand clothes, intentionally stained with the feckless evidence of our passion. One classmate’s threadbare jeans were marked just above the right knee with excess paint from the brushes she cleaned there; her slender arm, as she sketched and gazed, absentmindedly placed her pencil against her thigh as though to wipe it clean as well.
"No one is going to encourage you to develop your artistic abilities after the third grade."
The rebellion, the angst, the false gravitas and rhetorical posturing of my fellow students wore on me. And then there was the constant pressure to produce.
“Stop pestering me for my sketches,” I barked at my poor mother one evening. “How am I supposed to find time to sketch when I have to learn how to reduce an improper fraction?”
When my schoolwork began to suffer, art had to take a backseat to academics for a while. I dropped out of my college art class midway through the first semester.
It’s interesting to reflect on the fact so many companies are searching for creative talent these days, when so much emphasis is put on math in schools at the expense of creative pursuits. It's all well and good to occupy yourself with crayons and washable markers while you’re young, but no one is going to encourage you to develop your artistic abilities after the third grade.
Yet regardless of how distasteful it is, or how bad you are at it, every American will be forced to study math until they graduate from high school. This may have been what America needed in the 1950s--mathematicians and engineers--not now. Now computers are taking over math-intensive fields and we’re realizing the mistake of smothering generations of creative development.
Disillusionment
There’s always been a mystique surrounding the creative process. It seems the real masterpieces are produced by tortured individuals holed up in austere solitude, wracked by their own personal torment. They must be either pitied or revered, these creative geniuses. We read their thoughts, their manifest expressions of turmoil, with slack-jawed amazement and shed admiring tears at the product of their disturbed minds. We revel in our fortune at experiencing such artistic perfection and curse a fate which left us with such club-like hands and feeble minds.
My left brain constantly berates my right for its banality. Is it possible you could have an original thought you pathetic imposter? My portraits look like cartoon characters and my landscapes akin to a pitched roof house with four-paned windows framing a door, the sun shining brightly from the upper right corner in straight rays. I wish I’d never had a creative thought than these urges without hope of release.
"This may be one reason so many brilliant artists are frequently despondent."
Where is the originality, the spark? Who can see the world like Amedeo Modigliani or Paul Manship? If only I could paint like that or sculpt. Perhaps if my life were more miserable it would happen. But in the end I take the hint and pack up my childish tools—the charcoal sticks and gum erasers, the sketchbooks and canvases. I put them in boxes marked “Siddhartha’s art stuff” and move them from house to house unopened.
A 2008 study by Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes examined the relationship between depression and artistic expression. Their paper The Dark Side of Creativity reveals a link between negative emotions and increased creative output. "Historical and empirical data have linked artistic creativity to depression and other affective disorders" they write, but there is also evidence for "strong situational factors influencing creativity."
Essentially, they found social rejection increased artistic creativity and this effect was strongest in those with a biological propensity toward depression. This may be one reason so many brilliant artists are frequently despondent. Luminaries such as Henri Matisse and Francisco de Goya battled depression and, from what I understand, Hemingway and Dostoyevsky would occasionally feel blue as well.
Resurgence
In my mid-teens I again pursued collegiate art education, this time in Washington, D.C. Closer now to my classmates in age but no better able to relate to them. I had few friends. My social retardation however gave me plenty of time to work and my persistent social rejection fueled my creative drive. Yet for all my forward momentum I was rudderless and still uncertain whether I was more inclined to overthrow the government or paint a masterpiece.
On a class trip to the Corcoran Art Gallery I found what had been missing from my art education: conceptual art. The gallery was displaying a collection of works by Jonathan Borofsky and I was thrust into heaven. Staring at his giant, two-dimensional signature piece, Hammering Man, repetitively hammering without constructing anything, I saw my life. Counting, the three foot tall stack of lined notebook paper containing the meticulously handwritten numbers from 1 to 2,346,502, spoke to my soul.
But I was enthralled by another piece in one of the Corcoran's back rooms. It was a closed door from behind which emanated the muted sounds of intermittent hammering. I stood there for several minutes marveling at the subtle message of workmen laboring in anonymity and then smiled thinking how embarrassed I'd be if it turned out not to be a work of art at all but actual workmen constructing another display on the other side of the wall.
But that's also the beauty of conceptual art. It's not about the artist, it’s about the viewer. It’s about an emotional revelation, a reaction to the observation. It's conveying an idea that naturally wells up from within the observer, not imposed by the artist but facilitated by him. The true art is not in the presentation but in the conceptualization of the experience.
"Beauty does not have to be created, it exists for us to find."
When I left home at sixteen I thought, now is my chance to live an artist’s life. I took a bus to Chicago and lived on the street then traveled south and rented a small house in Augusta, Georgia. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. Not a chair or a table. I slept on a piece of cardboard on the bedroom floor. The nights were interminable, relentlessly hot and unbearably humid. I cultivated an artistic scowl and didn’t wash my hair.
I lived on a pittance reading by the light of a bare bulb and eating raw potatoes. In this artistic atmosphere I was determined to really break out. My intention was to produce a series of paintings, bold canvases in the primary colors, but after Blue I became disillusioned and cynical. I let my mind wander and began noticing art all around me. I saw the beauty in the mildew growing around the edges of the bathroom tile. I marveled at the rigidity of cracked linoleum and the ants which ate dead cockroaches off the floor.
Just as there is beauty in nature, conceptual art can occur organically and unintentionally. I began to see beauty in everything. Rusted air conditioners sitting in forlorn windows, the siding beneath them stained by the rusty discharge. Even bags of garbage whose contents provided the unconstructed but perfect composition of humanity’s discarded byproducts caught my eye. These were as random and enjoyable as the natural world, as fulfilling as a sunset or a mountain skyline. Beauty does not have to be created, it exists for us to find.
Finding art all around us
It was a catharsis of sorts, this realization of art’s omnipresence. My need to create, and to punish myself for my lack of ability to create, withdrew. I left art behind and became a missionary and after a couple years joined the Navy eventually finding myself in Pensacola, Florida as a flight instructor.
An acquaintance was moving and asked for my help which I was happy to provide. When I arrived at his house however I was overwhelmed by the scene. The small depression era house he and his wife were renting was barely 800 square feet. They don’t even make houses that small anymore. The owner, probably realizing the property’s only value was in the land, had let it deteriorate over the years and was renting it for just $300/mo.
It wasn’t the dilapidated condition of the house which amazed me however, it was the amount of detritus inside. Piles upon piles of old newspapers and fast food wrappers. A half used tube of chapstick whose contents had melted out onto the floor collected dog hair and dust balls. A lost sock and a Happy Meal toy sat next to a dusty jar of home canned peaches and I wanted to sit down and just take it all in.
"The earth spins on, I thought, wasting both the trivial and the rare."
I thought taking a break from helping them pack to stare at their cluttered house might make them uncomfortable so I came back later that evening and broke in when I knew they'd be gone. I stood alone in their abandoned refuse and studied it carefully. I thought of the one time I had seen my great-grandmother and remembered her immured in her lonely trailer. I pictured a frightened great-grandson refusing a tender embrace. I imagined the pain of such a moment in the twilight of one’s life.
I thought about that moment and then I imagined leaving her trailer and saw myself looking back over my shoulder to see an old woman with her hand outstretched. I presumed she would be in pain but instead I saw her mouth bent in a gentle smile and in her eyes understanding and contentment. I never saw her after that visit but I like to pretend she understood.
In the Pensacola evening I lay down upon the filthy floor of a squalid house and in the long light of evening’s protracted departure I looked at the lopsided ceiling fan coated in dust and the grease from a hundred smoky dinners and my eyes grew bleary at the beauty of it all. The earth spins on, I thought, wasting both the trivial and the rare.
“Time is the school in which we learn,” wrote Delmore Schwartz. “Time is the fire in which we burn.”* And so it is. All things will pass away, both the common and the divine; but we'll never know the beauty we don’t find.
*From “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge.
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