THAT BURNING FIRE

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

-Oscar Wilde

     We’re moving.  You’d think I was moving to Outer Mongolia the way I’ve been stressing about it. Is this really a good idea? What about the animals? Will they freak out? Will the cat fall off the balcony or jump out one of the upper story French windows and break her neck? Come on, I’m being ridiculous. We are just moving down the street, not to some foreign country where I can’t speak the language. It’s another apartment, not the farm with goats I’ve always wanted, or the crumbling manor on the wild coast of Galway I’ve always dreamed of. Still, for us, it’s a move up from our small hobbit hole to a second floor with a wood-burning fireplace, a balcony with a view of the hills, and light—so much glorious light. Even a garret, a real little room with two windows where I can write. I’ve started packing but I keep getting distracted.

Look at this little porcelain cup.

It belonged to my great-grandmother when she was a baby. I can’t imagine she actually drank anything from it, it’s not only fragile, but has little shark-toothed ridges around the rim, cruel for a baby’s mouth. Still, my grandmother loved and treasured it and she admonished me to always take care of it. Damn, I’ve managed to break or lose so many of these little things that meant so much to the people who gave them to me, who trusted me with their memories. But despite all odds it’s survived. My Grandmother King kept little treasures like this in a sun-lit window where they would glow like jewels. She had a long, and in many ways, a disappointed life. She graduated from college in 1921 and spent the next 66 years being too smart to live in a small Indiana town where her love for classical music as well as the writings of obscure eighteenth century poets, earned her a reputation as a snob. This was more of a village than anything–the biggest event of the year was the annual Lion’s Club Parade. She was the town librarian and spent evenings listening to opera in the living room. My grandfather spent those evenings on the other side of the living room wall in his little smoking room reading. Although I didn’t know it until after she died, not many people liked her. She never suffered fools and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.  She told me she was excommunicated from the local DAR chapter for saying that Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite for owning slaves and that the chapter president was an idiot. My grandfather and grandmother, although outwardly civil, barely spoke to one another. You see, she never forgave him for an illicit affair that he refused to apologize for.

I loved her and she loved me. She took me to my first opera (Falstaff), taught me to sit still and listen to Brahms, read poetry to me. She said one day I’d do the things she’d never done, like go to Europe, hear music at Carnegie Hall, but mostly, live somewhere a woman’s brain was appreciated.

The way she gently held this little cup by its handle, as if it was precious as a Fabergé egg. I can see her standing in the light of the window that displayed her little glass treasures. She’d been struck with rheumatoid arthritis in her thirties and by the time I came to be, she was hunched over like a question mark. She was never pretty, but had the most amazing crystalline blue eyes. She gave me the cup before she went to live in a nursing home and I cry to think of her right now as I hold this last remnant of her treasure window. The last two years of her life in that nursing home, her hands became so curled and crippled by arthritis she couldn’t even hold a book. Her last great pleasure, her solace, reading, was denied her.

But here’s the cup. Here’s me. And, Grandmother, I have done all those things you couldn’t do. I have the cup. You’re alive in me.

Now, this sad little wooden dog waits to be packed away. Spaniel? Basset Hound?

It belonged to Grandmother’s husband. That would be Grandpa King, and this is his pipe holder. This sat in that room where he was exiled for his infidelity, while my Grandmother blasted Puccini. He loved English detective novels and short stories by writers like Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce. I was only twelve when he died, but I loved nothing more than to tag along when he went to the donut shop in the mornings to meet fellow members of the Masonic Lodge and the VFW. They sat around a table with opened newspapers, smoking Pall Malls and cigars, discussing local politics and the history of things like Copperheads (Southern sympathizers in Indiana during the Civil War), or how young long haired men who listen to rock music are ruining America, and whether The Women’s League would allow a sideshow with hoochie koochie dancers at the annual Lion’s Club Fair.

“Want chocolate or glazed?” Grandpa King would always ask. The donuts were made fresh each morning, they smelled of heaven. I always chose glazed, they melted like butter in your mouth. “What’s the news, girlie?” one of the old guys would invariably ask me. “She can do cartwheels,” my grandfather announced once. I remember that day. It was a summer morning. I was ten. I had finally mastered the art of spinning on my hands. I was showing off in the front yard until I banged into a garbage can and nearly knocked myself out. Grandpa told me they were the best cartwheels he’d ever seen. “Maybe you should join the circus.” He loved to laugh, this Irish Grandfather. And, he invented things. For instance, he invented a device called  the “Kingle Light,” which bankrupted my grandparents and forced them to move to a little cottage next door to the huge house where my grandmother had been born. Unfortunately, he couldn’t invent a good enough story to keep my grandmother from learning about his love affair. The years they spent side by side, separated by a wall. Grandpa reading and smoking, Grandmother trying to drown herself in an aria.

I just sniffed the wooden dog, that little bowl in the back where his pipe would rest.  The dog still smells of dark black cherries and peat moss, still smells of Grandpa’s tobacco, those resins are embedded in the wood.  It still smells of him.

And, god, look at this. Look what else I’ve found. It’s my mother’s full-length black velvet opera coat.  I’ve managed to hang onto this all these years too. The hem is shredded from the hooks on the combat boots I used to wear with it back in the old days in New York. I even wore it to high school with high-top tennis shoes (yes, I was one of those weirdos-no surprise there).  The last shoes I wore with it were black patent leather pumps with four inch heels. That was to a Halloween party a few years ago.  Where did my mother wear it? It’s from Lord & Taylor. Did she dance the night away at the Coconut Grove or the Villa Capri in Beverly Hills? I’ll never know. I rub the velvet and imagine her wearing it. She must have looked like a movie star, which is what she wanted to be. When I wear this coat, it’s like somehow touching my long-ago mother and my mother giving me a velvet kiss.

And here’s an empty envelope.

I don’t know where the card is. Was it a birthday? Maybe an anniversary. “My One True Love.” He always writes this on my envelopes. I am lucky. Finally.

Books and books. I try to weed them out, I do, but certain ones I just can’t break up with.

These books I always carry with me from place to place—ones I can’t bear to give away. Someday I can say to my grandchildren, Look. Now smell it. Touch it. Feel that?  It’s a real book. No, like this—you actually really turn the pages!

I begin to clean the bathroom shelves, there’s my panda. He’s traveled with me across the United States, from Indiana to New York, New York to California. I don’t remember who gave him to me, I’ve always had him, I think. Maybe he just appeared one day when I was small. The panda peeks out at me everywhere I move.

Outside the window is the petrified man. That’s what I call this mostly dead tree. Do you see his face? He peers into the dining room at us who are able to still move about, walk and talk. He is frozen, my poor friend out the window. He can’t move with me. He’s forever rooted.

If I sound a bit mournful today, I am. This little place is imprinted with me, with us, with books I’ve written, stories, laughter, songs and tears. We’ve had parties in this little place, it’s been filled to bursting with friends and good food and good wine. But it’s time to move on. I am always moving on. Maybe, probably, always will be, but, hey, that’s what creates a new spark. Change. And, all my ghosts will travel with me. They’ll whisper new stories. I’ll write them down.

  In February of 1963, Sylva Plath laid her head on an opened oven door and turned on the gas. Her two children were sleeping in the other room, but she had painstakingly sealed the kitchen with towels to prevent the fumes from reaching her baby son and daughter.  An astonishing poet. Dead at 30.

My mother also had an infant son. I was just shy of five. No towels sealed off what had happened in the bedroom, she left the door open. My mother took a handful of barbiturates and washed them down with alcohol. She had wanted to be an actress, but she left behind her beginning career and got married. She was dead at 32. Sylvia Plath loved her children and my mother loved us, but both had fallen out of love with life.

So much promise.  So very dead.

I have never written directly about my mother’s death. I didn’t mean to today. I started writing another blog post entirely. But my memory has been leaking lately, little drops of another time, other scents, different light, creating pools where I find myself reflected. It has to do with the memoir I’m writing, of course. Still, there’s not one day that goes by that my mother’s influence, or lack of influence, on my life doesn’t in some way float in. Her death has shaped and informed all my days and my every creative endeavor.

For the longest time, I never wanted to write about my mother’s suicide. I was afraid of spilling the beans–that baring my soul would steal my mystery, give readers too much to speculate about, poke at what might be autobiographical, what might be pure fiction. I don’t feel that way any longer. I know now that seeing the blankness of death at an early age gave me the gift of realizing the full color of life. I am more empathic, I hear, smell, taste, and exist differently as a result.  Would I appreciate light if I hadn’t known darkness? Would I love darkness if I didn’t know that light was coming? I would not love permanent darkness. That I know.

If my mother hadn’t killed herself, maybe I would have become an astrophysicist, or married that New York lawyer who said he loved me, have three kids now, and drive a new Lexis. One thing I’m pretty certain about, I probably wouldn’t have made all the self-destructive bad decisions that shaped my earlier life.  But I did and those bad decisions have also informed my creative life.

This little essay is not about the devastation of suicide. My memoir is about that—and other things. It’s not about turning that frown upside down, glass half-full, half-empty kind of crap either. It’s about the first source of creativity. Creativity is often born of tragedy, yet it is also born from joy. All of us have had those maybe I should put my head in the oven moments. Sometimes it seems it might be better to get the hell out of Dodge, not have to deal with disappointment, with regret, with sorrow or despair. Those days when you think, will I ever? Can I? Good god, I’ve tried so long and so hard. I’m so damn tired.  Does anyone care what I write, sing, paint, create or even think? Nothing is working and it feels like our spirit is breaking too.

I had a friend in New York back in my Goth period. We were actors, constantly penniless and pale as meal worms. Neither of us was making much headway in either the acting world or life in general. But we were a tag team—I was up when he was down and vice versa. The up part of the team had the responsibility of making the other see how absolutely retarded they were when they felt like giving up. The inevitable result was we would both end up laughing, the down one through tears, wiping a runny nose with the back of a hand, but cracking up with laughter. Look, if you can still laugh you simply cannot kill yourself. You see that it’s just too ridiculous. And, you realize, if you’re dead you can’t create—anything at all.

My mother gave me this burning fire, this invaluable gift of learning early that life is so very precious. She inspired me to work out a way to share this. We all have something that lit the creative flame inside us—maybe not a dead mother, maybe something far more tragic, far more devastating, or, perhaps, something so seemingly insignificant that no one but you recognized it. It doesn’t matter what it was, you remember that moment when the spark was lit inside you.

The way I see it, the way I feel it, is I have a responsibility to fight those Head-In-the-Oven-days. I have been given the gift of the value of life, no matter how hard, no matter what, no matter if no one else cares. How could anyone give up sun on your face, having chapped lips, the smell of wet dog, the sound of thunder, the icy saltiness of cold beer when sweat sticks your shirt to your body? How could you give that up? I can’t. I have the fire. It’s in all of us and just awaits ignition–not from an oven but from our souls.

Believe in your fire, from wherever it is inspired. I’m going to create for better or worse until I climb behind that bony man on his big black horse. That’s what the living have the opportunity to do. Be alive.

Here’s what Paul Simon has to say: SO BEAUTIFUL OR SO WHAT

Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.

-Toni Morrison, Beloved      

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire, and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

-Auguste Rodin

     When I was seven I believed if I tried hard enough I could fly. When I was nine, I thought if I laid out on the ground in the shape of a cross, God would speak to me. Around twelve I was convinced I could sing, at seventeen that I would become a champion motocross rider (I had a dirt bike). By twenty I was certain I was destined to become an astonishing actor. None of these things came true. Not one.

As a sort-of adult, I moved to New York. Years smashed together. Acting classes, waiting tables, the regular drill for that sort of choice in life. My twenties became one long night in downtown clubs and daytime auditions. I refused to notice that other people were beginning to have real lives while mine was slipping by on summer beaches in Montauk, an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, bleary nights to a pulsating bass beat on dance floors you wouldn’t want to see in daylight. By then, after almost being cast time and again in notable roles on revered New York stages, and instead cast in obscure plays on stages that might be considered real if you took that to mean some sort of raised platform the size of a sandbox, I realized I would never be accepting an Academy Award in a green velvet gown. By then I’d started writing, seriously writing. By that, I mean, it flowed out of me like vomit–not a good thing. Vomit is messy. My life was messy too, but I kept writing, or, vomiting.

I started submitting short stories to absurd places like The New Yorker and Harpers, not realizing that I had a snowball’s chance in Hell of being published. I’d always thought it might happen, that Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery was selected from the slush pile. It was only later I learned that her husband wrote for The New Yorker and was a well-known literary critic to boot. And, of course, The Lottery is one of the greatest short stories of all time. Even if I had a husband who owned  the damned New Yorker, my work was not good enough. Wait, let me make that clearer, not even remotely good enough. But, like a hopeless idiot, I also sent a story to The Paris Review. By then I expected nothing much. These were the days of sending a story, one at time, to a literary magazine and waiting months just for your standard form rejection (you were lucky if a human signed it). So I was shocked when I received an actual letter from the editor, George Plimpton, passing on the story, but praising it and saying he’d like to see more. Reading this made me throw up for real. My hands were shaking.  I’d sent my best story. My most realized story. I didn’t have another story good enough.

So what did I do? I ignored Mr. Plimpton. Why? Because I was a dumbass. I was scared. I didn’t have the bona fides, no Iowa Writers Workshop, no famous mentors on my resume. Hell. I didn’t have a resume. I was sure once Mr. Plimpton realized what I was, just a learn-by-the-seat-of- the-pants writer, he’d realize his mistake and we’d both be embarrassed. So I gave up on writing another good-enough story. I told myself I needed to write a novel. So I started. But what was emerging was a piece of shit. It wouldn’t stop being crap no matter how hard I beat it. It just stood in the corner and farted at me. And, rather than cringe, or behave like a good Pavlovian dog when I tried bells and whistles, it became dull witted. At last I realized I was going to have to put it down. But it felt that somehow I would also be shooting myself. The novel was in me. It floated inside me like some malformed baby demanding to be born, no matter if it had two heads.

At around this time my boyfriend announced that I was too crazy to live with and if I didn’t straighten up he was going to leave. I didn’t straighten up. As a result he almost dropped a television set on top of my head from our fourth floor apartment window when he saw me down below drunkenly making out with another writer. Another writer because I thought I might somehow be able to breathe life into my own retarded concept of writing by hanging around other writers. I deserved a Sony on the skull. But my boyfriend said as he was walking out the door, that he still possessed enough of his brain that hadn’t been driven insane to realize I wasn’t worth twenty-five to life.

Holy shit. I was a mess. Even my therapist thought I should start coming twice a week instead of once. By now I was temping in soul-sucking law firms and I’d just walked out on a writing class at NYU, convinced that everyone there was even dumber than I was. Now what? I wasn’t going to be a great actress, I still couldn’t sing, I certainly couldn’t fly, and God had never said one damn word to me. But even though I sometimes wished I lived on a higher floor (I wasn’t sure four flights up was a guarantee that I wouldn’t just turn out a mangled vegetable), something started happening with my writing. I stopped trying to write and started just to let the story tell itself. The result was my first novel and it went on to be published. It was finally good. It was finally honest. It did sort of well (not real well, but was noticed and well reviewed). I wrote a second novel. It was also published. This is dragging on too long, so I’ll just cut out all this play-by-play of my writerly life and move ahead.

I moved to Los Angeles based on the reception and film option of my first novel and I fell into screenwriting—did it for ten years and I learned a lot. One thing I learned is I missed writing fiction. So I quit. Not that Hollywood even noticed. Not that anyone missed me, but for me it was enough to say I quit, good riddance, goodbye. I’m writing fiction again. Something is stirring inside me that I can’t ignore.

So it’s now. My last paying writing related job was three years ago. I haven’t sold another novel since my second. In the past four years I have written three other novels-one fairly awful, one good but needs work, and finally a new one this past year which is now making the rounds through my agent in New York. Of course I hope to all hell it sells. I pray to rocks, I implore trees and beg passing crows to talk to the gods in my favor. But I swear to you that even if it doesn’t, I will never stop writing. Even if my fingers fall off I’ll use prosthetics or I’ll dictate to some invisible creature that lives inside a computer. Is it because I think I’m such a fantastic fucking writer that the world needs me? No. It’s because I have to do it. I have a tribe of malformed infants in my belly and they all want to live. I must feed the beast and give it birth. It’s what lifts me to closer to whatever heaven might be. Or maybe hell. Still, it’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to hearing from God.

   Let me tell you about the time my brother and I were trapped on top of a tombstone by a herd of Hampshire hogs. My most impressionable and formative years were spent on my grandparents’ farm in southern Indiana. We lived in a 150-year-old farmhouse on 700 acres of gently swelling hills, surrounded by woods filled with hickory, maple, and elm trees. If it wasn’t really a magical place, then I’ll never know what magic is. It was a world of enchantment to us, but like all enchanted places, it was haunted.

On a small hill stood a graveyard filled with the remains of the people who had lived and died on the farm before my grandparents bought the property. It wasn’t a large graveyard, maybe twenty or so tombstones, all over one hundred years old. Many had fallen over and were nearly indecipherable. The grave markers were gray and weathered, most carved from Indiana limestone. After it rained, water seeped through the rock, almost as if these markers of the dead were weeping. There was a little faded and chipped lamb, the grave of a child who died before she had turned one, and another tall imposing marker with a finger pointing to heaven which read, “Gone Home.” My brother and I loved the graveyard. It also terrified the hell out of us. We were certain that the house was haunted by the spirits on the hill. In order to appease these ghosts, Tom and I took offerings to the graveyard. We took flowers from my grandmother’s prize garden, dead mice or birds in cigar boxes, cicada shells and unexploded ammo from my cap gun.

Tom was around six at this time, I was about nine. My little brother was pretty much my vassal, mine to command. If we played “war,” I was always the captain, he was just a foot soldier. I was insufferably bossy. I was also bigger, fast and wiry as a squirrel, while Tom was slower and prone to tears. But I was also fiercely protective of my brother. Our mother had died when we were younger and left us hurting. He was a shy kid, hated confrontation. Me? I tried to punch the world out of the way and I refused to cry–though inside there was always a waiting howl. To keep our sadness at bay, I made up adventures for us. Often this led to trouble.

We were allowed to be nearly feral children, not because our grandparents didn’t love us, but because they believed children should be allowed to explore. There were few rules, but the few that existed were to be obeyed unquestionably. One summer afternoon, the air syrupy with humidity, the kind that draws mosquitoes to bare arms like bees to blossoms, my grandfather told us that under no circumstances were we to go out to the pasture behind the barn. The hogs were out foraging for acorns. They were dangerous.

After lunch I commanded Tom to accompany me to the graveyard. There had been a lot of spooky activity (or, what I felt was spooky activity) in the house lately and I decided we had to make an offering. I can’t remember what we took that day, maybe a box of dead beetles, but we set off for the graveyard right through the pasture behind the barn.

When we got to the graveyard, we paid our respects, consisting of chanting, “Please don’t haunt us, please don’t haunt us, please don’t haunt us.” I was in the middle of this ritual when Tom said, “Look, Kaff!” (My brother had a lisp at the time). I turned around. There were twenty or so hogs snortling their way toward us up the hill. These hogs were gigantic, most weighed over 500 pounds, but you’d be surprised how fast a giant hog can move. “Quick,” I screamed. “Climb up here!” I hoisted Tom onto the flat top of the tallest tombstone with me. The one that read, “Gone Home.”

The hogs surrounded us. If they weren’t so fat, they could have raised up on hind legs and knocked us from our perch. Luckily, they couldn’t do that, but they began shouldering the marker and the old stone trembled. Tom and I clutched each other to keep from falling off. “We’re gonna die!” he yelled. I don’t know what came over me. Maybe the spirits in the graveyard had been pleased by that day’s offering, because suddenly a voice whispered, “Sing!”

We’d just seen West Side Story on TV. I began singing Officer Krupke. Miraculously, the hogs stopped shoving and stared up at me, spellbound–certainly not transfixed by my vocal ability, I sang like a drowning cat–but as long as I kept singing, they stood frozen. I launched into Maria, followed by everything I remembered hearing from the old plastic radio that Grandpa listened to while he made fishing flies; The Girl from Ipanema, then a song about trailers for sale or rent, and somebody out of cigarettes. I belted Moon River three times in a row, and bellowed: “there’s a hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.” (I had no idea this was Robert Johnson).

Finally, after I’d worked my way through The Wizard of Oz, I’d run dry. But the minute I stopped, the hogs began shouldering the tombstone.  “Start over!” hollered Tom. “Dear kindly Sargent Krupke, you gotta understand, it’s just our bringing upke…” I was hoarse and we were a true mosquito bonanza. Now the sun was going down. Soon, I knew, we were going to fall off and be eaten by pigs. I hugged Tom tighter, but he pulled loose, pointing.  Our grandfather’s red truck was bouncing through the rough field toward us.

Waving a big club this way and that, Grandpa drove the hogs away, grabbed us down off the tombstone and threw us into the truck. Tom got sent to bed and I had the privilege of selecting the switch from the elm tree in the yard to tan my hide with.

The next day I wrote my first short story, Siege on Hog Hill.  I don’t know if those old spirits in that Indiana graveyard stayed with me.  I’d like to think so. But something got into me and I began to write. Maybe I was possessed. Maybe I still am. Because something drives me. Something keeps that passion alight. Where does that first inspiration spring from? Who knows. Maybe its spirits. Or, maybe it’s the spirit already inside of us. Whatever it is; a memory, melody, a joy, or a pain like a switch on a bare behind, it keeps us going. Keeps that fire burning bright.

“We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.The rest is the madness of art.” Henry James

“It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill- it’s a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I’m all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I’ll always remain half crazy.” Vincent Van Gogh

When I was in my early 20’s in New York, a roommate said to me, “You’ll be dead before 35. You’re too intense, too obsessed.”Around the same time, my father told me that if I didn’t stop wasting time acting and writing, I’d end up pushing a shopping cart under an overpass. “I’m not a rich man, so you better learn how to do something.”

Well, I survived that New York roommate’s dire prediction. But I never really learned to do much of anything. I just write and learning to do that well is an on-going, never-ending process. Why do I feel compelled to write? Is it ego? Some of it, absolutely. I want to be read. But I’ve written for the past five years for no financial recompense and scarcely any readers. Yet I keep writing. I’ve lost hours, days, weeks. I’ve lost friends and lovers over the years, because when I’m writing, everything else disappears. This obsession that I have to write never stops, but I’m fairly certain if I didn’t, I would go truly insane. We have to put it somewhere, all the anger, pain, terror, and joy.

Actually, my father wanted to be a painter when he was young. He told me this one day while we stood in the garage watching a torrential rainstorm. By that time, he’d become president of a regional insurance company and had made it successful enough to be bought out by a huge corporation. But he told me it never made him happy. We talked about art and he said, “When I was in the Navy, I spent months doing nothing but digging ditches and I learned that digging a good ditch is an art. Maybe if I’d focused on digging beautiful ditches, I could’ve said I was an artist.” He popped open a Pabst Blue Ribbon and we watched it rain together. It was the only time I saw my father cry. But for his sake, I pretended not to notice.

Does writing make me happy? When I’m writing I am pretty much out of the world that exists around me. I hear voices and perhaps the craziest part, is I answer them. I have conversations with people that exist only in my mind. This might be diagnosed as a mild form of schizophrenia. But if I don’t listen, if I don’t respond, what would happen to these invisible characters, these spirits, these unborn tellers of tales that refuse to shut the hell up? Wouldn’t that be irresponsible? Wouldn’t I be in some sense an abortionist? A murderer? Ah, crazy talk, my girl.

If you can’t help creating a painting, a story, a song, a garden, a mosaic all in blue tile, a beautiful ditch, then you’re crazy too. You’re on the crazy train of obsessed dreamers, linked together from engine to caboose by the need to create. I say: be crazy. It’s the only way that window opens for a brief second giving us a glimpse of the soul and what lies beyond. You know some say, that it isn’t the mad in the institution that are truly nuts, it’s the ones who aren’t capable of seeing true reality.

When my father died, in a box was a drawing of a house that he’d done as a boy. It’s in pencil and dated, so he was about eight. It is beautifully rendered, but the most beautiful thing about it is the oddness of it, the way he depicted this two story brick house as if it was alive, as if it was capable of getting up and just walking away. It seems to me there’s something about it that lifts it out of most pre-adolescent artwork. There’s a strange magic to it, a glimpse through the opened window. Yes. My father was really an artist at heart. He was just afraid of the being crazy part. But I’m more afraid of the not-crazy part. It’s what keeps me going, my obsession. It keeps me writing and I’ve already told you what would probably happen if I were to stop.

I chose BURDEN OF DREAMS for this post’s video. A story about an illogical obsession and the director who had to make the film. Because he’s crazy.

    A few days ago after leaving a matinee of Wim Wender’s PINA, someone said, “It was amazing, but you could see how it could kind of easily slide into parody.”

What?!! That was beautiful, haunting, incredible…wait a minute. Suddenly I see a Saturday Night Live version of Café Müller in my head — pretty easy to parody people who are so earnestly expressing things like “the moon,” and “pure joy,” especially when they continually seem to be falling over like logs or twisting their arms into braided ropes, or beating themselves on the breastbone. They take it all so seriously. But damn. Such sincerity. Such honest commitment.

What the hell is art anyway? I remember going to see some band in San Francisco when I was 21. A guy who with us asked me what I did. I replied that I was an artist. He laughed at me. What right did I have, he asked, to call myself an artist? I don’t know, I replied, I think it’s what I am, like a fish is a fish, or a broom is a broom. But it haunted me ever after. What right did I have? I might as well admit that I was the kind of dork who used to spill my guts out in a bloody splatter before I learned that maybe I might want to keep my viscera under my skin for safety’s sake. It’s risky to reveal who you are, what you are really thinking. That kind of vulnerability leaves you open to dissection, possible ridicule. But seeing PINA made me feel like a weasel. I’ve been a chicken lately. Pina Bausch had to express what she felt. What makes an artist an artist? Is it vulnerability? The sheer act of opening oneself to potential ridicule, possibly even contempt, but doing it anyway?

Why are some people driven to create? Is there a point where many of us begin to doubt ourselves and turn our passions off like a light? Remember being fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, when no one could tell you that you would never be that writer, dancer, filmmaker, painter, canoe maker, botanist, NFL wide receiver, nun, actor, or DJ? Do we start to examine what was a passion, a driving force, and replace it with a safe drive in the slow lane on the way to the end of our lives?  I mean, what’s the ultimate destination? That’s what watching PINA made me think about when I got home. Maybe the reason we sometimes feel naked expressions of the self are so easy to parody is because we find such honesty slightly embarrassing–we see our own vulnerability right out there in the open. Like that kid singing his heart out completely off key, or catching your 65-year-old mother in her underwear flushed from lovemaking. Maybe it’s like coming face-to-face with our own inner nerds — or, maybe our bravest selves.

“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” E. M. Forster