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.

3,672 Stitches

Three years and 3,672 stitches later, the needlepoint pillow I started from an Ehrman kit is finally finished.  I didn't actually count the stitches.  I just multiplied the number of stitches per inch (12) by the size of the design (18"x17").  Math is so useful sometimes.

When I told a friend--an exceptionally creative woman who is always elbow-deep in some project she has just invented--what I was working on, she opened her eyes wide.  "You are working from a kit?" she said, appalled.  "But that's just like painting by numbers!"

Well, yes, it is--except slower.  And that is precisely why I do it.

After hours of squeezing words out of my brain and onto the screen, or notes out of my mouth and into my recorder, nothing restores my soul like threading a needle with bright-red wool and filling in a poppy petal.  When you do needlepoint from a kit, the goal is to reproduce exactly the design stamped on the canvas.  In a way, it's not unlike playing music composed by someone else, except that the player has a lot more room for interpretation.  With needlepoint, you color outside the lines at your own risk.

When I sit at my embroidery frame, it doesn't take me long to enter into a semi-hypnotic state, lulled by the "thwack"of the needle piercing the canvas and the "swish" of the wool pulling through.  It's a rhythmic activity, not unlike walking, and like walking it frees my mind to saunter at leisure, and even to wander off its usual well-worn paths.  Sometimes, between one row of stitches and the next, an idea comes to me, seemingly out of nowhere, or the solution to a problem appears as I anchor the end of a length of wool.  But the main virtue of needlepoint, as I suspect is true of most varieties of handiwork, is that it is almost impossible to remain tense while doing it.

As petals, leaves, and stems begin to emerge I take pleasure in their colors and shapes, and feel grateful to the artist who created them, just as I send thanks to Georg Philipp Telemann for taking the trouble to write, back in the troubled 1700s, the lovely duo recorder sonatas that I am struggling to learn.  There is so much beauty in this world, and I give thanks to the artists, musicians and writers who make it their own and then offer it for me to delight in.
A while ago, I briefly considered making my own needlepoint designs, but this would negate all the therapeutic effects of needlepoint.  With every stitch I would anxiously question my choice of colors, the curve of a leaf, the shape of the negative space.  It would be like endlessly rereading my own writing, word by dispiriting word.

No, for me, the virtue of needlepoint lies in its very absence of creativity, an absence which, happily but unpredictably, sometimes triggers my own.

Frida Y Yo

On bad days I think of Frida, nailed to her bed by pain, staring up at the ceiling, wondering when her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, a man as round and fat as the sun, would come home, and if he was finished making love to her sister. 

She dressed in Mexican folk costumes, partly because the long skirts hid her polio-withered leg, and decorated herself with chunky necklaces made from broken Aztec beads.  She braided her hair with colored wools and piled it on top or her head and put big bows and flowers in it until it looked like an altar to some garish god.  She wore all this while she lay in bed, recovering from one or another of 30 operations to repair her spine and pelvis, which were broken in a streetcar accident when she was a girl. 

She had a mirror attached to the underside of the bed canopy so she could paint while lying down with her canvas propped up against her knees.  Over and over, she painted herself against backgrounds of glossy leaves and fruits, embraced by monkeys and surrounded by butterflies and parrots, hummingbirds and a little hairless, gray-skinned Xoloitzcuintle dog. 

Critics say that she lacks universality, that her art is only about herself.    Prolonged illness turns you inward, and what else can you do while everybody else is out going about their business but ruminate about yourself?  "I paint myself because I am so often alone," she said.

She didn't make it to 50.  She died of a clot in her lungs, having recently undergone the amputation of a gangrenous leg, and of the alcohol and pain killers to which she was addicted--though for the latter, who can blame her?


I lie in bed with Bisou asleep on my stomach and wonder, how did Frida keep from getting oil paint all over herself when she painted lying on her back?  Were her monkeys and her dog allowed on the bed? With her appalling pain, how did she manage that impressive string of love affairs with men and women, cabaret dancers, movie stars and intellectuals, and were they just a way to get back at Diego? 

Most of all I wonder, what kept her going?  What reservoir of grit and rage drove this tiny hirsute woman to paint 140 pictures that, even if you don't like them, you will never forget?

She was not a nice person, as she was the first to admit.  Yet to me she is a saint of sorts, the patron saint of those whose bodies have betrayed them but who struggle to make their stories be about something more than just that.

What Mozart Saw

"Though ... [Mozart] lived through the French Revolution you search his letters in vain for anything other than the most oblique references to this continental cataclysm.  He had no feeling for nature and no interest in the visual arts.   In his letters home during his wide-ranging travels he describes everything he heard and nothing he saw."

I found this quote by Anthony Tomassini here--one more confirmation of my belief that we each perceive the world in radically different terms.

Years ago we lived next door to the retired director of the National Arboretum.  He was an affable gentleman who asked my permission to prune our tree--the sight of our unkempt ornamental pear was distressing to him.  One day I was in the car with him, and he kept a running commentary on all the sidewalk trees we passed.  For me, at that time, a tree was an indistinct mass of green atop a brown pole, but on that drive I realized that when our neighbor looked at the world, he saw trees.

A gardener friend looks at the world and sees bushes (which for me are an indistinct mass, etc.).  She doesn't just keep track of her own bushes, but of those in neighboring villages as well.  We'll drive past some stranger's yard and she'll say "That lilac suffered a lot last winter.  But it seems to be recovering nicely now."

My zoology professor saw birds everywhere.  He'd be driving us to a field trip and out of the corner of his eye point out little brown fluttering forms that I could barely see, much less identify.

My husband perceives the world in terms of fulcrums and levers, forces and currents.

I drive down the road and see dogs, and here in Vermont--lucky me--also chickens and cows and horses and goats.  

And I notice sounds (so like Mozart, no?), which is both a blessing and a curse.  The sound of birds is the essence of spring for me, and their silence in the fall depresses me as much or more as the fading light.
I am acutely attuned to people's voices, their volume and pitch, the rhythms of their speech.  When certain announcers come on the radio, I have to turn it off, or leave the room.  I know several people with the habit of letting out a sudden explosive laugh, and when I talk with them I find myself flinching in anticipation.  I cannot read if there is music playing.  I can barely make myself enter a store during the Xmas season.

Not only do we all perceive different worlds, we are different worlds.  And this reminds me of a magnificent quote by Proust about the function of art:

"...style for the writer, just as color for the painter, is a matter not of technique  but of vision.  It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct and conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the way in which the world appears to us.  This difference, if it weren't for art, would remain the eternal secret of each of us.  Only through art can we come out of ourselves and know what another sees of that universe which is not the same as ours, and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those of the moon.  Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we watch it multiply, and we have as many worlds at our disposal as there are original artists."  (My translation.)

Drawing The Ectomorph

This morning in our drawing session we had an angular young woman as model.  I liked the contrast between the long, spare lines of her body and her curly, curvy hair.  While we were drawing, the outside temperature went from 9F to 40F.

 

Artsy Afternoon

Went to an opening at the local arts center this afternoon.  It was a big show--two whole floors of a largish building--because every member of the arts center was guaranteed to have at least one piece accepted.  Alas, almost everyone at the reception was an artist, and I saw no more than three red dots (indicating sales) while I wandered around.  This was the first time I showed one of my new clay pieces, and the setting hen, which had seemed so robust and substantial while I was working on her, looked pale and wan on her shelf in the show.

Afterwards we met several artist friends at a Chinese restaurant.  While I ate my eggplant in garlic sauce--it was actually eggplant in syrupy glop--there was a discussion about whether the work of certain accomplished but conservative local artists had "soul."

Things got intense, and I kept fighting the urge to shout, "Hold it for a minute!  Would you please define your terms?"  But I held my peace--every "definition" would have sparked another discussion--and concentrated on the sticky eggplant.

The old questions about art that used to set me on fire--what gives it soul, what makes it honest, what makes it good or bad--now leave me tepid.  Art, I have decided, should be looked at in silence--reverent or irreverent depending on the looker.  And it should be enjoyed, if it is to be enjoyed at all, in solitude.  Talk just gets in the way.

Back home I was glad, when I went to shut the chickens in for the night, to see that my real hens are as robust and substantial as I could wish.