Art Is Real Work
Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room
Confronting my father’s recent death has brought up a lot of questions like what the hell am I actually doing? So, I thought I would share an essay I wrote about six years ago right before I turned 50, using Virginia Woolf’s novella Jacob’s Room to think about doing the work of art.
Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black—it was just that note which brought the rest together. “Ah, one may learn to paint at fifty! There’s Titian…” and so, having found the right tint, up he looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay (Jacob’s Room, 9).
One may learn to paint at fifty. One may even, according to Mr. Steele in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, become very, very good at it, find that perfect unifying note. Of course, Titian began painting when he was a teenager, had his first real successes in his twenties. What Steele is referring to is that Titian continued to work, to paint, his whole long life. He lived somewhere into his late eighties or late nineties. There are at least forty more years, Steele is thinking, for mastery.
Just this morning, on our daily summer walk, my husband said to me that he can’t believe he is about to turn fifty, that he has a hard time conceiving that we may live another forty years, such a long time, he said, and in what state? He meant what physical state—what aches, what pains, what deterioration of energy and verve? I too have been wondering, have been worrying. The last two years have brought me mostly manageable but still significant pain, yanked me up short from my limitless activities. I have begun asking, what must I do while I still can? What if, as is certainly likely, pain gets worse rather than better?
And like Steele, I find myself drawn toward art, toward making. This is a dance of ambivalence, because like Steele, I must constantly tell myself it is not too late, but even more than that, I must tell myself it is worthwhile. It is something more than play, but it must also be playful to be art. I’m not very good at playing, having not done much of it when young.
The last vivid memory I have of childhood play was one afternoon when I was eight. A group of us walked home after school—that already was unusual. Most often, outside of school, I was on my own. We cut down a driveway next to a house to a creek that flowed behind the property. My mother had told me she had a job interview, would not be there when I got home. So I had time. We splashed in the creek, shoes on the bank and our feet bare, squatted to watch frogs, minnows, gazed at moss on rocks. The trees shaded us, dappled the cool water with sunlight. There wasn’t a game, there wasn’t much interaction, but there was peace and a sense of wonder shared with others.
I stayed too long because I stayed at all. When I got home, my mother was there, in the dark with her drink and cigarette. She was very, very angry. She had decided not to go to the interview after all, had gotten drunk instead. I know now—even knew then—that her anger had its roots in fear. She had not known where I was, what I was doing, if I was safe. She had drunk. It was my fault. And it was then that I understood that my joy incurred a cost, not to me, but to others. And then to me.
Art takes, as well as gives. It takes time, it takes attention, it takes emotion and dedication. These things are worth it to the artist for what the artist gets—though not always, not consistently, not automatically. The grace of flow, of inspiration, is not a given, but sometimes it appears. Pure absorption, like in the creek. But these costs are often not worth it to other people who also have to pay them: the sacrifice of the artist’s time, attention, dedication, emotion. What do I give? What do I take? Is what I’ve given enough? Is what I’ve taken too much?
Art is play; art is also work. What is the work of art? In Jacob’s Room, Betty Flanders, widow and mother of three young boys, receives a love letter from the younger Mr. Floyd, who wishes to offer marriage. She sets about a response: “‘Dr. Mr. Floyd,’ she wrote.—‘Did I forget about the cheese?’ she wondered, laying down her pen. No, she had told Rebecca that the cheese was in the hall. ‘I am much surprised…’ she wrote” (Jacob’s Room, 21). This seems to me the perfect exemplum of artistic pursuit. One sits down, sits down to write, to make. Whatever it is, a letter, a poem, an essay, a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, a photograph, it is meant to communicate something; it is meant to change something in some way—the artist, the audience, the relationship between them. And suddenly one is thinking about cheese, about mulch or laundry or cat food, the ordinary everyday task. Hopefully one reassures oneself, comes back to the real work. But not always. Immediately after I wrote that last sentence, for instance, I pushed my chair back from my desk, determined to put away the dry cleaning, right now, a completely unconscious movement in order to distract from discomfort. Have I something to say? Is it good enough? And even still, I can feel the pull, the restlessness within my body that demands satisfaction of the small task, the dopamine hit that accompanies it. My atoms are tipped toward the bedroom, down the hallway from my study.
Mary Oliver, in her essay “Of Power and Time,” comments that the most problematic interruption for an artist is never the external one, the phone call, the knock on the study door, but the internal distraction—the one that is ourselves, pulling ourselves away from ourselves. It is hard to stay with the self, as obsessed as we are with it.
Then there is the problem that art is not seen as legitimate work in our culture, not unless one manages to monetize it in some way. Otherwise, it is frivolous, expendable. About a plan to spend a couple of hours every other week with a friend to do art projects, my husband, quite reasonably, suggests “just don’t overcommit yourself so that you are overwhelmed, even though it would be fun.” He knows this about me: I overcommit myself all the time, let other people commit me to things. I can become frantic, working sixty hours a week, trying to meet my obligations. Last spring I worked five solid weeks with not a single day off. But no one ever suggests I give up responsibilities, and no one ever suggests that the fun, the art, might be more important than those responsibilities. No, in Protestant-work-ethic-America, one gives up what is fun. And art is nearly always seen as equivalent to fun. It is not necessarily productive in a society that equates worth with productivity. It doesn’t go somewhere or do something. If one was working on a cure for cancer or a new software app that could revolutionize communications or organizing an effort to feed the hungry and provide water to the thirsty in one’s spare time, without the idea of monetization, well, that’s worthy. The contribution is clear.
But what does art do? Makes one see in a new way, perhaps. If it’s any good. Let’s be frank: it isn’t always good. And people generally do not want to see things in a new way. They like what they think they know. They like the familiar. Can good art confirm what we already know? I believe so, yes. It doesn’t always have to be disruptive to be good. But disruption can be positive, can be energizing, can be what we need to move forward, individually and collectively.
And yet, I feel like that kind of thinking about art is a trap. I just want to write some small poems about ants, I think to myself. About lilies. About the light of the blue hour. I just want to take pictures of people I care about doing the things they care about. I want to do these things because I want to do them, not because they will have some grand effect on the people who read the poems or see the photographs. I want the freedom to be bad at art but still take satisfaction in its process and then maybe get a little better. I just want to do the thing. And yet the tangle of obligation demands justification, legitimization, meaning for others as well as for the self, especially if art is to be anything other than a “hobby,” fit in around the edges of the “real work.”
But why, in midlife, this turn toward art? Is it art, itself, that draws, like a magnet, or is it just the prospect of change?
Jacob’s Room is about Jacob, a young boy who becomes a young man. Strangely, it is also filled with peripheral characters in middle life, a projection of where Jacob may end up, and they are at an inflection point just like he is, one that tempts them to do something different, which very many of them do. Mr. Steele takes up painting. Mrs. Flanders rejects a marriage proposal that would fold her back into the socially normative role of wife in addition to that of mother. Mrs. Sandra Wentworth Williams begins what is at the very least an emotional and quite possibly a physical extra-marital affair with Jacob; she wears pants under her skirts as she clambers around Greece, suggests that she and Jacob could climb over closed gates to the Acropolis. She justifies her liaison to herself by saying of leaving her husband alone with his newspapers “Well, it is better that people should have what they want…” (158), those telling ellipses indicating that she is also speaking of herself, whatever vague guilt or regret she might feel. Sarah Williams is the agent of both Jacob’s entry into love and his disillusionment. Apparently, these “seeds of extreme disillusionment…would come to him from women in middle life” (159), as if that is their sole role, but of course, they have their own lives, they are not just props in the lives of others, even if that is how those others see them. Jacob’s disillusionment might best be characterized as a case of emotional contagion—it is what these women experience after having fulfilled society’s prescribed roles for them for forty-odd years.
There is, at the core of each of these characters, a search, a search for meaning, a search for what they want, what they desire, as if they have realized that time could run out, that “ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour—that was all the time before her” (158), and somehow middle-life authorizes one to pursue it. When one finally is forced to acknowledge mortality, what does one choose to do with one’s time, where does one find the life-spark that shines against the darkness, that allows one to say, “ah, but at least I have had this”? And whatever this is, it must be something taken, not given, active, not passive.
Art’s demands require a seismic shift: from other to self, for instance, in my case. I have lived my life in service of others, as I was conditioned, as I was taught, from a very young age. Although why I insist on conflating art and self, as if they are one in the same, as if art is ipso facto only selfish, only part of the self, and nothing outside of the self that has the power to compel, I don’t know. Habituation, I suppose. Cultural definitions indicate art is self-expression, the deepest part of the self. And we all know the stereotypes about self-absorbed artists who annoyingly claim that the rules don’t apply to them; I even know some artists exactly like that.
But really, art feels more like the Santa Ana winds. One day as I was moving furniture across the San Bernardino Mountains, a ping pong table flew from the back of the pickup. Luckily, no one was behind. We pulled over and I stood on the table to anchor it until we could raise it back up, tie it back down, to the pickup truck’s bed. The winds lifted it, and me, completely off the ground and pushed us about five feet before I sat down atop the table. Surfing wind. Art knocks you off balance, knocks you first into the air and then onto the ground, knocks the breath out of you.
References:
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1960.
Mary Oliver, “Of Power and Time,” Upstream: Selected Essays, Penguin Books, 2019.