The Art I've Made of My Life

Don't give it to me if it doesn't sound alive

For the past week, I’ve been glued to my phone despite it being steeped in terror. Witnessing others is an art and art is witnessing others. I don’t want to turn inwards, away from the world. As I write this letter, I am hoping for it to extend outwards to meet you wherever you may be.

“Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you.” — Colette

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The Sunday Letter #34

There was this boy in high school, a boy who seemed to like my personality but not much else. We both wanted to be filmmakers. We used to smoke along the riverbank downtown then walk to a movie at the theatre, where I would try to hold his limp, clammy hand.

He was my date to graduation, and he arrived at my house to pick me up with his best friend in the passenger seat holding my corsage. My dad took a photo of us together and then I climbed into his backseat. We had to park far away at the event, and he walked so far ahead of his best friend and I that when I tripped and fell on the grass in my enormous heels he simply kept walking, leaving his best friend to lift me up instead.

The graduation party took place the next night on someone’s farm while their parents were out of town. The hosts had set up a line of tents, which the boy I’d arrived with kept sneaking into with different girls. Tearfully, I took it to be a sign that we would not be continuing with our limp hand dalliance. Pissed and inebriated, I stepped on a nail through my flip-flops but didn’t even notice until someone pointed out the blood on the grass. The next day, my dad called the health line for me to ask if I would need a tetanus shot.

My dad posted a picture of me with my date in his Facebook family photo album, and it’s still there ten years later, floating in the ether of his memories even though he’s no longer alive to have them.

A few weeks after graduation, I stalked the boy’s SoundCloud account and found a rap song he’d made that referenced pissing off an angry ex. It was exhilarating.

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A few months ago, my husband bought a Peloton. I have the constitution of a poor Victorian child so I refuse to use it, but he loves it. Sometimes it sounds like he’s having a heart attack while he’s on it à la Mr. Big, but then he comes upstairs and informs me he’s beaten his “PB” (Peloton-speak for personal best). One of the starkest differences between us is that he can instill a new habit in himself through the force of his competitive spirit alone (he’s on day 1,268 of his Duolingo streak).

Today, he informed me that Peloton has a new feature that involves a tracker comparing your personal best with your real-time status. He says, “You can’t fall behind, because you’re literally racing the ghost of your former self.”

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I had a crush on another tortured artist type in high school. He happened to be my best friend, and I languished in my unrequited love for a year before cutting him off. I didn’t know if anyone would ever understand me like he did. He liked when I talked about how deeply I connect periods of my life to the music I was listening to at the time. He felt the same way about his sense of smell, but I couldn’t relate, because I don’t have one. A sense of smell, that is. He felt bad about that.

We circled each other for a few more years but stopped talking when I went to university because he didn’t believe in institutional learning. He was the most mysterious boy I’d ever known, but he was also often sexist and morally ascetic. I felt blessed by his attention.

One of the last times we hung out, he used me as a model for a painting. He had me lay in the grass like Ophelia, hair spread out like a halo, a bouquet of dead flowers in my hands.

Years later, I still Google him once in a while to see if he ever made a painting out of me. Instead, I learn that he’s created a new exhibit based entirely around smelling fragrances displayed with his art. I laugh; he was always keeping me out.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the anatomy of the self, where it is derived from. What makes me? Is it the art I make about others? The art others make about me? The art I’ve made of my life?

My dad had a section of wall in his studio devoted to photos of my mom. Taken when she was younger than I am now, she is pregnant and eyes the camera with a knowing glance of a woman far beyond her years. Years after his death, his studio remains intact in the loft of my mother’s home, serving as a portal into another time. There are baby photos of me. Art theory books. Sketches and unfinished drafts and scattered scabs of dried paint.

He would use old yogurt container lids as paint palettes, layering the paint over itself for weeks and weeks until it had dried into a small mountain of colour, and finally peeling it off into small sections to use as flowers in his still life art. He got paint on absolutely everything, even his new jeans, which was his favourite mark of pride. No matter what the value of his art appreciated to in his lifetime, he always had paint on his jeans. It was how he signalled himself to the world around him, a measure of control he could maintain.

A few months ago I went through his book collection and borrowed a few for my own. I bought a stamp with his name so that I could mark the books that had been his. As I leafed through his copy of Camus’ The Outsider, a small piece of paper fell out. It was an old receipt that had been adorned with a pencil crayon sketch of a house. I recognized it immediately as a childhood sketch by my younger sister. Suddenly I was transported through another portal, this time into the eyes of my father, reading a philosophy book and reaching for a piece of his daughter’s art to hold his space. I had a small tinge of jealousy that it wasn’t one of mine, but it was replaced by fondness almost immediately. To be seen, to leave a mark, to be witnessed and felt in our lifetime.

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As I think about those who come in and out of our lives, the faces we remember and the ones we forget, I think about the relationships needed to sustain art. Opening ourselves to the world, to its joys and its pains, is the only way forward that I can conceive. I’m still trying to figure out what that means, but thank you for joining me in the meantime.

This week’s recommendations

Killers of the Flower Moon was gutting. Every detail in the film was immaculate, from the muted palettes to the subtly revelatory performance by Lily Gladstone. Circling the question of complicity, and how oppressors will claim to love the oppressed.

Nicolaia Rips goes to The Eras Tour film and meets the Swifties: “Somebody records the screen like she’s at the concert. As we danced, my cynicism melted. Anything that makes teenage girls this happy can’t be bad, right?”

In Esquire, Karen Russell asks: what if things get better?

We can offer our kids different stories about what living is for—a vaster conception of “success” than what money can tally. There are better yardsticks: the health of our air and our water, the number of people in our communities who have housing, education, health care, spacious time with their loved ones. Organic matter in our soils and the ubiquity of birdsong. We can rebuild, along with the literal soils, the anchoring root systems that shelter value.

Jada Pinkett Smith has no regrets—nor should she!

Louise Glück on her prolonged periods of writer’s block: “you don’t know in those periods that the silence will end, that you will ever recover speech.” See also: this eulogy for Glück, written by a former student in Yale Review, was very moving. “Don’t give it to me if it doesn’t sound alive.” What a mantra.

Anne Helen Petersen

on the portals of womanhood—a moving piece about noticing the creative swells that accompany life transitions, which inspired me to write about portals in today’s intro. Also: Petersen’s interview with Amanda Montei about feeling “touched out,” and the paradox of sexual agency for new moms.

Finally,

Amanda Montei

watches The Golden Bachelor and asks, where are the crones?