Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  What happens with disappointment is the way it digs in like a splinter; the pain is small, precise, unavoidable; it wears on you. I had the soul of a painter and the heart of a musician and the spirit of an actress—“I will crawl with the shellfish through puffs of waterdust, sideways claw by claw,” I wrote, “I hang with one clutching hand above the black rabbit’s hole”—and so it felt as though I had been promised that life, promised the right to be in that world. The right to be better than I was. I secretly bought books on how to draw and tricks with acrylics and I played on a pottery wheel and bought another camera. I played Chopin—the simplest nocturnes—and Pachelbel’s Canon in D and, of course, the Gymnopédies. Again and again, I could almost feel the movement, trace the curve, the necessary line, but I could not; it was as though the drawing of the necessary line was trapped in my hand, locked away out of my reach. I couldn’t act, could barely play music, and worst, could not paint. Sometimes this felt like amputation or a birth defect, this is not. My lack was no matter of draftsmanship or tools, but something far deeper, existential, molecular. I made collages.

  By the age of eighteen I was jittery as an ant heap prodded by sticks. I’d already had two years of college, and I couldn’t wait through another—wait for what, I still don’t know. One mild spring day, I went to the college bookstore and sold my textbooks—I was moving on to something else, somewhere else, anywhere else. On to whatever I was expecting. That day I went to the remainder table as I always did and picked up a book called Michelangelo and His Art, mainly for the cover—a carved marble man’s head, small horns jutting out of his curly marble hair. The book cost me all I had just earned.

  I moved into a communal house a few hundred miles away. In time, a poster of the Delphic Sybil hung on one wall, a poster of Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy on another. I had a copy of Klee’s Fish Magic in the kitchen and a murky miniature of Water Lilies in the bathroom. I spent hours with Michelangelo, reading about the David and the tombs and the ceiling. I memorized entire sections of text, loose bits of context and criticism woven around dull photographs of rough captives and muscular women. I realized that I loved with passion works of art so common that they were sold as key chains and coasters. But I held these dissonant truths without concern: that I knew nothing of art or literature or culture or history, and understood them all with a discerning skill. Gradually I turned toward the church of politics and spent my time at co-ops and free clinics and in long, wordy committee meetings. One day, I sold my piano and bought a typewriter.

  The rent would be paid somehow—how? At nineteen, I went back east to interview at a couple of universities, trailing my fragments of education like a vestigial fin. I found myself in New York City for the first time. I had a few days, a few dollars, so I went to the Museum of Modern Art. What this meant, I did not really know; I had never been to an art museum before. I had never really thought to find the real paintings in the books I read until someone said to me, “Of course, you’re going to MoMA!” But of course. Suddenly I was dream-walking—right before me, Klee’s strange fishes and Weston’s Nude on Sand and Rousseau’s gypsy. I found a small room with two Seurat paintings and several of his small charcoal drawings. There was Guernica and Steichen’s portrait of Garbo and in its own big dim room, Water Lilies in all its quiet, outsized glory.

  I was alone and broke and at sea, and I spun through the rooms in a strange chaos of feeling. Giacometti. Miró. Brancusi. Brancusi! I sat for a while near Matisse’s Dance (I), with a punch-drunk global citizenry slumped together on the padded benches. I saw what faint clones I’d come to love—fraying posters and book covers speckled with cooking oil—and I saw that everything I’d thought about this art was wrong. There was nothing haphazard or easy here; all the chaos was deliberate. The casual curve I had traced was a meticulously planned and unrepeatable single stroke at once. These were objects, not pictures; I could trace layers of paint, note the bare edge of canvas, the scratch of a chisel, rough strokes so dismissively confident they left me fearful and breathless. Those points of color, those drops of paint were more than beyond me—what had seemed simple turned out to be instead transcendent, to be born of the true simplicity that has passed through complexity into knowledge, into knowing exactly which drop, where. What a wash of feelings broke over me, evoked by those drops. By the knowledge that I would never. Never. Never be able to do this.

  Later, almost too tired to go on, I turned a corner and saw Starry Night and started to cry. A guard watched me, concerned. I was crying in a strange mix of gratitude and envy and greed. Starry Night was real after all; it was raw, disturbing, confusing, and it was there in front of me. I could stand there as long as I wanted. For the first time, I knew why people steal art, knew what it means to love the image and its real insertion into the world so much that one wants to consume it like cake or heroin, like water slaking a long thirst.

  A few years later, I walked to the Metropolitan along Fifth Avenue through Central Park in the snow, and felt that I was in one of the novels my mother used to dream over in our little mountain town. Back to MoMA, where I discovered Boccioni’s The City Rises and its frenzy of men and horses so fraught with life and fantastic optimism and power. I found Picasso’s fine Woman in a Flowered Hat and Klimt’s enthralling Park. I discovered more than one indigo city, more than one dark river. I went to the Tate Gallery and then the National Gallery in London, walking through each with the kind of private thrill one feels upon hearing important news for the first time. You know you will remember and you know you will soon enough ask someone where they were when they heard, if only so you can say where you were when you heard. Eventually I read Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New—a great opening of doors; I was shocked by it all and everything was new. Once I had stepped irrevocably down another path, I could see the almost infinite size of this world where many people live their entire lives. How much more there was, always so much more: Vermeer, Daubigny, Holbein the Younger, Courbet, Daumier. The annoyance of Pissarro, the challenge of Kandinsky, the frustration of David Hockney. Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, stopping me in midstep. Looking at great art was, for years, an extended single moment of waking up from a dream in which I’d thought I was already awake.

  So much more. Millet. Rembrandt. Willem Kalf. The Masters, what a shock of the new. The portraits of Amsterdam smell of supper breath and faint sweat. Heda’s Still Life with a Gilt Goblet brought me to a standstill, an intensely tactile scene. (I heard an Englishman behind me say, “Can’t see the point, quite.”) The extraordinary Kitchen Maid—rather small, vibrant, glowing—leaped across the room with its light. If something left me cold—Pop Art stymied me for years—I returned to it a few years later with fresh eyes. I was promiscuous, hungry, indiscriminate, as infatuated by genres and periods and artists as I’d been with Lisa or Keith. (And really, hasn’t that been true all along, this dilemma of the generalist, the appetitive, drawn to so much breadth that depth is sacrificed?) Alone, I finally found the Frick—how did I not know? I went to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, the Whitney, the de Young. I watched a woman in line at the Rijksmuseum suddenly start pushing people out of her way, shoving to the front; people stared at her in bemusement as the guard smoothly stepped in and cut her off before she reached the doors. “I don’t understand what he is saying!” she complained loudly to the rest of us, when the guard pointed her back. “I have a plane to catch and I have to see The Night Watch!” Tokyo. Miami. Pittsburgh! How much more. How much I didn’t know.

  I got to Florence, at last, on someone else’s dime because I did not have enough dimes of my own. In my years poring over the graying plates of the Pietá and the sibyls and Moses, I had imagined Florence as a medieval gallery. How strange the real Florence looked, peopled and busy, but I warmed to it: brocade and origami, marbled paper and tiny glass candies, the casual arrogance in all things Florentine. I went after Michelangelo until I had seen everything of his in that whole bustling town—his house and the
tombs and the crucifixes and every sculpture and painting. One always struggles to know the difference between love and need; love is so often acquisitive and demanding. To see the desired, to be allowed only to see—this is not enough. One wants to consume it, to make the thing part of oneself. The sculpture or the painting that is so undeniably and enduringly there is as elusive as water because it can’t be saved; the object itself is a memory, ephemeral, disappearing in the irreplaceable moment of sight.

  I stood in the tomb, surrounded by marble in every shade, by Night and Day and Dawn and Dusk, and felt a capacious, almost infinite joy, eternal and brief and pure. More than once I walked down the long hall lined with the unfinished slaves to warmth and daylight and David. I watched for hours as people slowly paced down that dim hall, as though they were afraid they would die before they got to the end; I watched people emerge under the skylight, break into laughter and sometimes tears, take photographs, chatter to each other, and reach up toward the cool calves without a word. I left knowing that all the key chains and coasters in the world can’t take away the thing itself.

  Melancholy seeped in. Ambition is, if not actively corrupting, corroding. To simply be happy is not enough; to bake a really good pie or play Monopoly with the kids, go out for a game of tennis with a friend—not enough. The wanting corrodes. I thought I was a prodigy until I met a few. I reached for the brush, the light, eventually for the words, and perfection evaded me—even a shadow of what I could see in my mind evaded me until something simply broke, or rather grew: a membrane that sealed me to the past, away from the glassy world. I suppose genius is no picnic, but to be moderately talented is a chronic wound. “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” How do we adjust to that, what kind of answer is there to such disappointment? To not being able to make what seems so possible to make, play what seems so easy for others to play? To knowing that Flaubert, who occupies another planet from me, felt himself to be a dullard? To be stuck with kettles. Sometimes I teach writing workshops. Sometimes midway through a workshop, I want to take one of my earnest students aside, the woman who quit her accountancy job to write travel books, the retired plumber who has the outline of a novel in his hand, and say, “Save your money.” I know you like it here. I know you are trying. But. You know.

  Thirty-some years after I saw Starry Night for the first time, I tiptoed into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He took no classes, began painting in service to God—later, with more of an eye to profit. His magnificent triptych of orchards in bloom was meant to sell—“motifs which everyone enjoys”—but he couldn’t help himself, he always went too far. So much work, such hurried work—such a frenzied eye. Those wild strokes like the scuffing of thoughtless heels in the dirt, those slaps and smears of paint tossed off almost in irritation, skidding off the edge—blossoms and twigs hanging in space without anchor. Somehow in a few flowering sprigs of almond van Gogh trapped the instant of change—beauty fading even in its beauty; the death to come in all bright gay life. He got genius, and that’s all he got. Art is about being broken, I think; I suspect that great artists are reaching out of a totally shattered place, and it is nothing to envy. (But I envy it still.) He believed he’d done nothing new, nothing truly good; he shot himself.

  I found my way to Rome—to one of the dark cities on a river, to the rest of Michelangelo. On a fine morning, I was one of the first people into the Vatican Museums, and while everyone else lined up to get headphones for the audio tour, I walked quickly through a series of galleries opening one into the next like Russian nesting dolls, lined with tapestries and murals and maps and Etruscan bowls and vestments and medals, the ceilings wrought with trompe l’oeil and the floor a turmoil of pietra dura. The rooms were splendid and deranged, and as I walked they piled layer upon layer until I floated just above the floor in a fever dream. I got lost and finally went backward down an up staircase past warning signs, past If you wish to avoid the embarrassment of alarm signals, refrain entirely from touching any work of art signs and finally pushed open a door that I think was not supposed to be open and found myself in the Sistine Chapel. The empty, silent Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo left years of his life in here, most of them spent lying on his back in lamplight with flakes of plaster watering his eyes until he couldn’t see what he painted. Toward the back, behind the choir screen, straight up, I found the Delphic Sibyl. Serious, extraordinarily strong, she turned from her concentrated study, turned completely. She had endured the long thin line of time that brought me to her at last. I wonder if this love I feel, tainted always by hunger, by infinite shades of hunger, is in fact what love always is. If wishing is a necessary part of love.

  I find my way up a back street near the Coliseum to the little San Pietro di Vincoli church, the ancient church of St. Peter in Chains, the old links kept as relics in a bronze tabernacle under the altar. To the right in the small dim room is a large white statue; it costs fifty cents to turn on the lights, and I don’t have the change. I beg without shame until a gracious Frenchwoman near me puts in the coins and the lights click on. Moses is just beginning to turn his head. His face is angry and severe; he thrusts out a leg as though about to rise. How sad he is (I see this at last), what a piercing sadness, fierce and disillusioned. I am grateful to be free of my younger obsessions, I think. But I wonder at times what happened. Once I thought all of life was lifting me toward something like a great wave. When did the wave break and slide along the shore and drop me in the foam?

  Stevens again: “I wonder, have I lived a skeleton’s life?”

  Conjunctions, August 12, 2014

  I’ve been writing this essay for more than twenty years. I never forgot that moment when I turned a corner in MoMA and saw Starry Night. Right then I learned lessons about intimacy and beauty and hunger that I have never forgotten. What was acutely painful for years is now simply wistful, but the hunger never seems to completely disappear. Frank O’Hara wrote a wonderful poem called “Oranges” about how we are driven to create in particular ways, whether we like it or not. Go read it.

  So Long As I Am With Others

  ONE YEAR WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES, THE WORLD came to weigh upon me without reason. I was often afraid or crying for the want of something nameless and large. I went to see a woman, a beautiful woman with thick honey hair, who looked at the palms of my hands and asked me several odd questions: Did I dream of robbers? Did I sweat when I ate? Were there times when one foot was cold and the other was hot? She gently took my wrist and felt my pulse for a long time. Then she prescribed: herbs, a homeopathic remedy, and herself. I was to spend a few hours each week looking into her eyes. They were terrifying, those hours, but so was everything else and I had nothing more to lose. I shivered with embarrassment, the simple weirdness of it: the two of us in a sunny room, knees touching, hands together, looking at each other without a word. I don’t know if it was the medicine or her amber gaze, but I got better. The world lost an ounce at a time and one day I could hold it by myself.

  Socrates said that one should simply be as one wishes to appear. But one self implies another, makes another; without two, how can there be one? “Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others,” wrote Hannah Arendt, who knew a thing or two about choices. “Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage.” In hundreds of photographs, Arendt stares at the camera, ironic or solemn; she doesn’t smile. She is alert to self-display, its possibilities. Its sorrows. Be as one wishes to appear—an absurd idea. I don’t know what I wish for, and I don’t seem able to control the being part, either. I am alive and so I present myself to others. I align with Arendt—up to a point, I choose. Trouble is I am often past that point; by existing, I have crossed it.

  Light falls across objects like oil, spilling everywhere. It sticks to things, beading up, bouncing back—reflection. I realized somewhere in the nineties that everyone was recording everything, the jam of came
ras and camcorders spreading; now the smallest event doesn’t happen until its capture. A passing fad, I thought, these big, expensive toys—and then it was smaller cameras and tablets and cheaper everything and more of them so that now even the click is an application. Click. Click. Everything. Pictures of everything. The world, if it cared, can see photos of my street, my house, my lawn, the broken lawn chair on my faded deck, the weeds beneath my chimney. But why would the world care?

  At some point I just stopped taking photographs, even when I know I’ll wish for one later—vacations, weddings—I forget to record what I’m doing in the midst of doing it. Another of my modern failures. I have a lot of photographs of my first child, the earliest when he was crowning, damp black hair emerging from my strained vagina into the shadowed dimness of my bedroom. At first I took a lot of photographs of my second child and my third child, too. But as they grew, I took fewer pictures, for lack of time and because more than half the time they seemed to scowl; they didn’t care to be seen—not by me. Their friends, that was a different story and still is; the peer group reflects; this is where they emerge. With me, once the source of everything, they turn aside.