House Cleaning, Part 2: Good Enough

The good fairy at my cradle gave me a couple of gifts for which I’m grateful. But the bad fairy did me a terrible turn: she instilled in me the conviction that whatever skill I tried to develop, especially the domestic arts, the result was never quite good enough.

Apparently, I am not alone. If the messages from readers of my post about house cleaning are any indication, swarms of bad fairies hover above the cradles of baby girls, and a few baby boys, raining domestic performance anxieties on their innocent heads.

Fortunately, one of you reminded me of the brilliant concept of “good enough.” The term originated with Donald Winnicott, a child psychologist who worried about parents (mostly mothers) tormented by the anxiety that they were falling short of the parenting ideal. Children, Winnicott reminded them, did not evolve to require perfect parents. What they need in order to thrive is mostly reasonable, well-intentioned, usually kind, generally stable, “good enough” mothers and fathers. What they don’t need is parents driven to neurosis by the compulsion to be perfect.

In light of Winnicott, Saint Benedict’s instruction to treat all utensils as if they were the vessels of the altar can seem neurosis-provoking. I may be able to wipe one glass as if it were a consecrated chalice, but a whole sinkful of dishes? Also in light of Winnicott, my compulsion to dust every single book and the shelf behind it was in fact counterproductive, since it led not to my having feelings of reverence towards those yellowing tomes, but to my wanting to throw them into the flames.

If you’re like me, the problem with never thinking that what you do is good enough is that, aside from making you crazy, it paralyzes you. Weary of aiming for, but never achieving, Martha Stewart-levels of domesticity, you may give up cleaning altogether and live in squalor.

The danger is especially critical for those of us who regularly take off our clothes in public—by which I mean paint, write, dance, play the tuba, or engage in any of those vulnerable-making practices known as THE ARTS. The road to the unwritten novel, the unpainted canvas, and the undanced dance is paved with visions of perfection. On the other hand, the road to any accomplishment is paved with that hard to achieve combination of humility and self acceptance that allows the artist, the would-be domestic goddess, and the parent to get something done.

As with everything else, it’s a matter of balance (and alas, balance is so not my style). “Good enough” doesn’t mean perfect, but it doesn’t mean sloppy, either. To me it means “good enough for me,” for who I am, for the moderate gifts that the good fairy bestowed on me at birth. And, as I oscillate on that endless tightrope between perfection and slovenliness, “good enough” also means forgiving myself when I occasionally (frequently) fall off.

Be a Balm

Often, when I write, a feeling of futility washes over me. What is the use, I think, of sitting here day after day, sifting through adjectives and tweaking clauses and worrying about semicolons. Does the world really need yet another paragraph from me?

Wouldn't it be better, instead, to volunteer at the food bank or join demonstrations for worthy causes? I could be feeding dogs and cleaning cat cages at the Humane Society, or interpreting for the workers from Latin America who milk the cows of Vermont farmers. Instead, I fiddle with words while the world around me burns and/or floods and generally careens toward Armageddon.

I imagine that it's not just writers who agonize about this. Musicians probably worry about the relevance of spending hours to perfect a single trill, and painters accuse themselves of triviality for obsessing about different shades of ochre. And even people who don't work in the arts--housewives/husbands, accountants, or taxi drivers, anyone not directly involved with saving children or animals or the planet--probably ask themselves the same question.

I recently got some consolation from writer and photographer Teju Cole. In an interview in On Being he said: "Even if I'm writing about something very dark, to take it through eight drafts, to take it through ten drafts is an act of hope, because you're saying, even in this moment, a well-shaped sentence matters [...] Somebody could say, 'We're facing the apocalypse. Who gives a shit how well it's written?' And my hope is that if it's written well, it might catch somebody's attention and be a balm for something that they're going through. [...]And so I try to write well."

There you have it: be a balm. We may not know when or whether the balm is working, but we have to keep on striving, just in case. You can never tell when the passage with that elegant trill will lift a hearer out of despondency, even if only for a moment. The same goes for a well-swept room, or a smooth drive to the airport. The kids home from school may not notice the clean floor, and the passenger texting in the back seat may not comment on the driving, but you don't know that they haven't been affected in some subtle but positive way.

One thing we know for sure: the well-executed picture, the musical passage, and the sentence are each balm for the painter, the musician, and the writer herself. In times of stress and distress, we can take comfort in the knowledge that we have done our task as well as possible, and that in ways that may never be apparent we have applied some balm to the wounds of this suffering world.

Why I Dread Open Studio Weekend

Back in February, when I committed to participate in it, Open Studio Weekend was just a wisp of a cloud in my otherwise sunny horizon.  As winter melted slowly into spring, the cloud grew larger and greyer.  This week it has ballooned to major thunderstorm dimensions.  It may even be a tornado.

Every year, on Memorial Day weekend, artists and craftspeople throughout Vermont open their studios to curious neighbors, to husbands dragged away from the golf course by their wives, and to devoted friends who don't mind sacrificing a spring weekend to encourage their artist pals.  I have participated in Open Studio in the past, and I remember rejoicing in the number of sales the last time I did it a couple of years ago.  It's not even that much work.  I take my stuff to my friend Dona's (she's an oil painter--click on http://www.artistseyestudio.com/) and we hang out together and walk through the beautiful gardens that she spruces up for the occasion.

But still, I dread it--and not just Open Studio, but craft shows and gallery openings as well.  I'd rather testify before Congress than stand before my work and make conversation with (let alone sell something to) the people who come to look at it.  I can speak before groups large or small, about things I know much or little about, with barely a tremor.  But let some hapless passerby wander over to my sculpture display, and it's all I can do to keep from diving under the tablecloth.

I'm not the only one to feel this way.  I know an artist of advanced years who has been supporting himself with his work for a long time, and who still refuses to be present at the openings of his own shows.  Van Gogh was probably this way too, which would explain why he didn't sell a single painting during his life.  Picasso, on the other hand, was not.

But those two are too far up in the stratosphere to be relevant to most of us.  Alongside the shy, reclusive artists, I have known seemingly ordinary souls who hang their stuff on a wall, hand you a glass of wine, and before you know it you've bought something, without the idea of "pressure" ever entering your mind.  How do they do it?

I'm aware that where talent (I'm talking about the sales, not the artistic, kind) is lacking, practice can fill the gap.  God knows I was nervous the first time that, as an English-challenged 11th grader, I entered an oratorical contest.  But that occasion was followed by interviews survived, courses taught and graduation speeches delivered, until speaking in front of people became as comfortable as chatting with a friend.

The answer, then, lies in aversion therapy--you know, where if you are afraid of spiders you are helped to get closer and closer to one until eventually you find yourself petting its eight hairy legs.  Not only should I be doing Open Studio, but I should join every arts organization that shows members' work, sign up for every crafts fair (and there are a lot of those around here), and enter my pieces in every competition for which they qualify.

My fantasy is that, if I follow this program faithfully, someday before I die I will be able to look the public in the eye, deliver a persuasive spiel, and then allow it to buy something I've made.  In the meantime, because the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single s., I'm girding my loins for Open Studio.  Wish me well.

Art, In This Economy

This is Open Studio weekend around here, when painters, sculptors, glass workers, furniture makers and other servants of Art and Beauty clean their brushes, sweep out the stone chips, mow their lawns, and bake cookies so that accountants, engineers, farmers and school teachers can get to see The Artist At Home.

Ah, la vie boheme! Gauguin in the tropics, Toulouse-Lautrec on the Left Bank, Picasso in his castle, with his women--the art is fabulous, but the life is almost as fabulous as the art. Who hasn't, when buying a piece of art, also hoped to take home, along with the object, a whiff of the artist's life?

There is the notion, born of the Romantic era, that the artist marches to a different drummer. Therefore--and this conclusion must have come along with the Industrial Revolution--the artist's life must be somehow freer, more exciting than the life of regular folk. If the industrial age created this myth, however, the economic upheavals of the postmodern era are in the process of debunking it.

As I wandered from studio to studio to gallery opening today, I saw a lot of work, and a lot of courage. I heard some panic, and some sorrow too--one sculptor told me that he had just learned that a gallery that had been in business over thirty years and carried his work for sixteen had gone bankrupt. And I heard a lot of determination to keep going because...because you gotta paint, gotta sculpt, gotta make jewelry, furniture, whatever, because life wouldn't be the same without it.

In the end, the picture that I came away with from my Open Studio wanderings looked a lot less like Toulouse-Lautrec drinking absinthe on the Left Bank, and a lot more like the old Matisse, with a paintbrush taped to his arthritic hand because what else was there to do? Gotta paint....

Barbara Pym, Writer And Martyr

I found Barbara Pym's first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, in the used books section of the local bookstore, and am rereading it now, as I reread her books whenever I come across them. Pym has been called "a 20th century Jane Austen," and all kinds of praise has been heaped upon her.

Whenever I read her, though, I cannot help thinking about her life, which was marred by the worst tragedy a writer can experience. She published her first novel in 1950, and five more between then and 1961, all to critical acclaim. Then, in 1963, her publisher rejected her latest book, saying that it was out of keeping with the times. She sent the novel out nineteen more times--the way writers are supposed to--but it was rejected.

She kept writing. Two more novels were rejected in the early 70s, and, in the meantime, she developed breast cancer and had a mastectomy, then a stroke. In 1977, she was mentioned in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most underrated novelist of the century," and suddenly everything changed. Her unpublished novels were published; her published works were reprinted. All her books were published in America, translated into foreign languages, internationally acclaimed. But it was too late: her cancer returned, and she died in January, 1980.

It seems so unfair that she was such a great writer and then fell out of favor for sixteen years, then was rediscovered only to die in two years. The vagaries of Fortune! What was going through her mind through those dark years? How did she manage to keep writing? I guess she couldn't help herself.

Sure, there have been many great artists who went unacknowledged during their lives--Van Gogh, who didn't sell a single painting, the most famous. But at least Van Gogh never tasted success, and so didn't know what it was to lose it.

I suppose we writers should look on Barbara Pym as an example, the way the lives of the martyrs were held up to kids in Catholic school. But something in me recoils from Barbara Pym's life, the way it did from the accounts of limbs cut off and bodies burned in the martyrs' lives. Call me superstitious, but I don't want to imitate either her or them, for fear that I might meet their fate.

Who knows, maybe Barbara Pym was an innately happy person. Maybe she did not attach to outcomes. But I don't think so. "I get moments of gloom and pessimism when it seems as if nobody could ever like my kind of writing again" she confessed. She must have suffered deeply. And yet, it's hard to imagine that, writing as well as she wrote, she didn't derive intense pleasure from it, despite the rejections.

So I will hold on to the idea of Barbara immersed in her writing, satisfied despite the reversals of Fortune. And when Fortune reversed itself again for those last two years, I hope that Barbara enjoyed herself to the hilt.