risk, art

I talked to my mom last night about taking creative risks and life risks, and it was thoroughly depressing.

I explained to her about the deep, awful jealousy I harbor for this certain breed of artistic people, people who follow their art and live with their heads in the clouds and seem not to require money in the same ways that normal people do. These people seem to succeed, magically, and don’t seem to have to worry about student loan payments or rent money. I’ve met people like this in person, but the clearest example I know of is from the internet – a woman who lives in a cabin in Wyoming with a dog, a cat, and a coyote. She has a blog of photos of the coyote, which she tamed, but I’m not going to link to it in case she reads this and is angry at me for being deeply resentful and jealous of her. This woman came to live in her cabin in Wyoming as a result of a journey across the country she took on a Vespa. She fell in love with Wyoming during the trip and just decided, on a whim, to go back there to live. I am baffled and envious about this; what the hell does she live on? Her websites say she’s a photographer, but how can she possibly be making enough income that she doesn’t have to worry about the normal money stuff that we all have to worry about?

I told Mom about her, and Mom did the phone version of shrugging her shoulders. “Some people have trust funds,” she said, “and some people don’t have cars, and some people don’t mind living on almost nothing.” She went on to tell me about the artistic former life of her boyfriend (she’s been with him for about 4 years now, I think), who was a playwright in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York over a period of twenty years. Critically he was incredibly successful, and he had many plays produced. But still he lived on nothing. Mom said that he has told her that he would never encourage someone to pursue the artistic lifestyle that he did, that it just absolutely wasn’t worth it. Too much worry and fear about where the next meal was coming from.

She also told me a terribly sad story about her college friend JR, who was, she said, the most talented person she ever met. JR decided to pursue a career as a musician, playing piano and singing. She was fairly successful, and she had a few breaks, but she got hooked on heroin and OD’d. I’ll spare you more sad details, but Mom told me this story to illustrate, more so than her boyfriend’s story, that people who pursue the artistic life do not always get to cross the country on a Vespa without incident. Sometimes they wind up dead at 22.

I’m not sure what it is that I’m considering, or what it was that I was floating to my mother, but all the stuff about ditching safety and embracing risk that I’m reading, and the memoir that I finished last night (more on that later), are encouraging me to throw aside the ho-hum worker-bee life that I’ve settled into, that has gotten me out of a terrible life and into a darn good one, and reach for something bigger, crazier, more colorful and fulfilling. A creative life. An anomalous life. Yet even the tiny steps that I talked about taking, to BF and to Mom, were rebuffed with what-ifs and have-you-thought-ofs. I feel like I’m just getting my courage back, I’m daring to dream, and I’m being told to stop again and keep being safe. Maybe what the universe is telling me is that I’m not supposed to be taking risks right now, but that I should hang tight to the restless desire for it, and try cliff-diving at a later date.

Or maybe this is a test of what I’m thinking inside vs. what I’m being told. The idealistic, sappy part of me says that great men and women were always told to stop, but they believed so strongly in what was in them that they kept going, and they achieved. The more realistic part of me says that well, fine, but I know I’m not meant for greatness, just pretty-specialness. (I hope.) I can’t place enough faith in myself to pull a Henry Miller (although he was dependent on others to a disgusting degree before Tropic of Cancer hit) and believe in my talent so utterly that I risk my livelihood, and therefore my life, on it. I’m not that talented and I know it.

But it’s not my only option, cliff-diving. There are plenty of people who succeed in carving out lives for themselves that they love without plunging themselves wholly into a non-traditional way of living – who succeed in creating these lives over time, on the side, in the space between the rest of their lives.

This is what Mom was trying to convince me of. She explained how you have to get secure first, and then move into uncharted territory. She explained this in terms of having tenure. Now that she has tenure, she said, she sometimes says what she thinks at faculty meetings. She’s free to show how smart she really is at MLA. I suppressed laughter. These are not risks; these are things that she should have been doing anyway, that she didn’t do because she’s a person composed mostly of masks. I’m talking about quitting my job for a month and writing full-time. I’m talking about taking bimonthly trips for yoga workshops that I’m not sure I can really afford. I’m talking about saving up to go to film school full-time for two years in Rochester. Crazygonuts stuff! And she’s talking about slightly more truthfulness at faculty meetings.

When I talked about all this to BF, I told him that part of what was inspiring me was Anodea telling me to give up being safe – which was a word that Mom used over and over without me ever mentioning what I blogged about earlier this week – and another part was what happened when I decided to get a paralegal certificate. I have another friend who lives the art life who somehow managed to get admitted to grad school in Hawaii; before that he was living in New York, writing moody poetry, breeding some rare weird kind of cat, and surviving somehow. (The bastard.) He just decided to go ahead and go to grad school, without saving for a couple of years or being prepared for it or anything. When I decided in fall 2007 that I wanted to get the paralegal cert, I thought I would probably save up and mentally prepare myself and start school in fall 2008. But when I found out what this friend was doing (who is less motivated than me and a pothead to boot), I investigated whether or not I could start in the spring. The FAFSA deadline was still a couple of weeks away, and registration for the spring was open, so I thought why not? I was also thinking of my mom’s excellent advice when I was in college about whether you decide to do something now or later, the time will pass anyway, and you can either have spent that time doing something or not doing something. Why wait?

So instead of starting my first semester next week, I am starting my third, and am halfway done with the program, credits-wise. That to me is a lesson that despite all I’ve been taught and told by my incredibly cautious mother, you should go ahead and reach out and grab life by the mane, and ride it as well as you can until you really find your seat.

BF countered by saying that the lesson about starting the certificate now rather than later was not necessarily applicable to crazygonuts stuff, because the risk to me in starting now was relatively low. I was worried at the time about being mentally unprepared and flunking out, or of being unprepared to juggle all the responsibilities and losing my job, or of something unpredictable happening like my mom dying and not being able to finish what I’d started. (I was also afraid I couldn’t afford it, but getting loans was ridiculously easy.) None of these things happened, largely because community college is far less challenging than I could possibly have imagined, and so I have an easy success story as my example for taking a risk.

Am I maybe thinking about risks and safety the wrong way? Is Anodea maybe talking about smaller, more personal risks, like me striking up more conversations with strangers and going on more vacations? Yet I keep thinking over and over about visualization of the life that I want, and thinking that ever since I started visualizing it every day and knowing that it’s a life I WILL live one day, I’ve been calmer and steadier about the tiny steps I have to take every day towards it. It almost makes me feel…safer.

After my talk with Mom, and my sub-talk with BF, I went upstairs and reopened Drugs Are Nice. I finished it later in the evening, but I read pretty much the entire second half in this one sitting last night, and I was amazed at the full picture of the book; it evolved mightily from a wacky tale of underground life and bizarre experiences into a thoughtful, moving portrait of a woman learning how to see herself in the context of the rest of the world (as opposed to out of the context of the rest of the world, which was how she lived for most of her teenage years into early adulthood). Carver is a marvelous writer, dynamic and intelligent and full of fun, and I was so absorbed in the life that she painted with words that when I went downstairs for a beverage, my own house looked strange to me, like I hadn’t seen it in a few weeks. The first thing that I opened the book to was a couple of pages about risk-taking and living a crazygonuts kind of life, how much she wanted to be free of convention, how defiantly pleased she was about peeing into a litterbox on stage and marrying an insane middle-aged Frenchman at 19. Carver embraced her unique life, utterly, and she writes near the very end of the book what everyone wants to know: a couple of paragraphs about whether she enjoyed it, whether it was worth it, whether she would do it again. She said she regretted nothing, but that she would not want to dive back into that lifestyle now, older and wiser.

Her former lifestyle is not one I would ever want, but she parlayed it into a career as a writer and thinker that has been successful and enduring. Could she have succeeded without throwing it all in and doing crazy shit for ten years? If she had just been a worker-bee, writing on the weekends and trying to live safe and live out loud at the same time? That, my friends, is the question I’m trying to pry beneath.

And by the way, in case you’re wondering what this artist lived on during her years in the underground – as near as I can tell, the answer is almost nothing.