"God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light."
"God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light."
I said, "I can kind of picture this red spiral against a background of yellows and greys." But it hasn't quite gotten made yet.
I went to bed last night reading Bobby Markels' wonderful Mendocino Malady. And I spent much of this rainy, sneezy day reading an exciting unpublished novel of revolution in Spain by Jay Frankston. Mid-afternoon Mickey came down that terrifying loft-ladder of his from his computer and delivered his latest "rain haiku," five haiku, actually, which I read aloud, as I always do. I've been reminding myself that I have to change an appointment with Harriet, but I can't call her right now, because she and Larry are off at Tango camp. My artistic friends!
I've always been a bit crafty (not in the sense of the fox -- in the way of the kid who entertains herself on a rainy day by making clothes for her trolls.) And I like to write stories. It is an amazing feeling to start with a blank page (or screen) or a stack of fabric scraps or a bag of vegetables, to play around and end up with something that has never existed before. I remember that feeling with the trolls -- oh my gosh, I have caused my troll to be a knight in armor, a frog prince, a career-troll with a briefcase! Just by wanting it to be that way! Not that my dolls or my stories have ever turned out to be quite how I want them to be. Materials are obstreperous. Even though making things has a solitary aspect, I find it to be an interactive sport: I get in there with the stuff, with my ideas, with my skills (and lack of skills,) with the ideas and capacities of the materials I'm using. It all rustles around, and out comes that something -- part my vision, part the vision of the stuff. Creativity. Creation. A tiny bit like God. An intoxicating possibility.
I guess I'm thinking about making things because it's gotten colder and rainy. (Yes! The beating of the willows and the rain prayers have worked!) And I find these days that little quilt-y ideas are floating behind my eyes, and little germs of writing ideas. I'm remembering way back to when I first moved up here, in a rainy and freezing January. I went to see a play one night at what was then MPAC. The next day I bought gas at Schlafers -- this was back when human beings still pumped your gas -- and the pump jockey had starred in the play the night before. That became kind of an emblem to me of living in a community of artists. A couple of years later, I was having fun writing a mystery novel. One day I heard that a local sheriff was going to speak at the library to aspiring mystery-writers, answering questions about dead bodies and such that we're lucky to not already know. I went and found forty other writers in the room! Since then I've kind of assumed that everybody around here is home creating things. I find this very inspiring.
uu But then, as I've ambled forward with my own writing and quilting life, I've also thought about all the stuff that I don't create -- because other things take priority, because I don't have space, because, even though I like to think of creating as all-fun, it actually is full of challenges and frustrations too, and sometimes I just can't surmount them. I think I don't make a lot of things because I'm intimidated by people who actually know what they're doing -- by all the great novels I've read, especially, and all the really beautiful and perfect quilts I see people make. I also tend to feel like serious things are more important than fooling around with colors or make-believe characters. I could be doing mitzvahs, after all…
u But there is something uniquely satisfying about the human capacity to create -- yes, even my own capacity to create -- to make something, not from nothing, as God may have (this is the great dispute of the beginning of the bible -- did God, too have raw materials to work with???) but from this-and-that, unformed and void.
In fact, when I do get it together to 'play quilt' or write stories, I find myself seeing a lot of life in artistic terms. I start to see a party as a work of art wrought by the hosts. I can see a conversation that way, or a meal, or a business. I can look at a house, of course, as an artwork, but also at the life of the household as a unique thing that they create together. I can see how a marriage or long-term relationship is a kind of artwork, with all the joys and problems of artistic collaboration. And actually, I can and often do look at life itself as an artistic endeavor. I used to think of a life starting out like a blank canvas which you are free to paint however you want. But I'm not a painter, and I don't think the metaphor is quite right. We don't really start out with a blank canvas. In some ways a life is more like one of those challenges that guilds of weavers or quilters sometimes do: you're given a little bag of materials that you have to use. You can add whatever you can find, put it together however you want, as long as it holds together. Sometimes you get some ugly colors in the challenge bag or some prints that you can't quite imagine how to incorporate. But you hang out with the stuff until you can imagine it into something you can build. And you go to work.
(By the way, this is why I love to read obituaries. What did that person end up making of his or her life? There it often is, in a couple of lines: "He loved his dogs." "She was proud of her children." "He will be missed by family and friends." "A devoted Giants fan." Thumbnail reviews of the art of life…)
u I'm free-associating here for a minute. I'm remembering the only drawing class I ever took, back in college. We started on the first day with one sheet of paper and a box of pencils. There were three still-lives (still-lifes?) to choose from: a shoe, a backpack, and a cotton dress hanging on a peg. We each worked on the same drawing for ten weeks, just trying to draw our object as accurately as we could. At the end of it all, we looked at each other's work. I remember that one person's dress flowed off the corners of the page, light and loose, while mine had a tight boundary of white paper on all sides, dark, heavy lines, high contrast. We were all looking at the same dress -- but we were different people doing the looking. Our canvas is not blank. We have our natures, our personalities, our unique souls that we bring to whatever in life we create. Which is a reason not only to make art but to look at art (or listen to art or feel or taste it.) There is some way that art exposes the soul of the artist -- even a troll dress, even a dinner party. If we want to know each other, we could do worse than to look at each other's creations.
One of today's projects, when I wasn't lying around reading novels and poems, was to write a lesson plan for kids for anti-torture week. Quite a creative challenge! I planned an activity around being created in the divine image. I suggested that teachers pose the question: 'Where is the divine image located in you?' And tonight, writing these notes, I see a series of thoughts here on the screen which have existed in some inchoate form inside me for years, now verbalized, strung together, formed into words and paragraphs -- some interaction of my experiences and leanings, my thoughts of our Jewish community and our Megillah, the rain outside and my friends who write. A little, tiny something created out of raw materials, exercising a capacity we all have -- a way in which we all resemble the Divine.
I wish us all a wintertime of artistic endeavor, whether in paint and thread or in love, self-exploration and community service. And I look forward to seeing what we all create.
© 2007 Rabbi Margaret Holub
(home) (calendar) (info) (articles) (sponsors) (links) (bios) (reviews) (travel) (recipes) (projects) (photos) (art)
Updated 10/28/2007 (rge)