Shortly after a friend read my last post, he asked,  ‘Are you lonely, Susan?’  This quote at the end of my post had prompted the question:

'...it was just a few years ago that I finally realized that friendship is not a remedy for loneliness. Loneliness is a part of our experience and if we are looking for relief from loneliness in friendship, we are only going to frustrate the friendship. Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things, and loneliness live together in the same experience.'
Rich Mullins

My answer was this:

I suspect we are all lonely until we accept the fact that we are alone, that it's part of the human condition.  I suspect this order of things because it would explain a lot about human behavior.  Why so many seek importance, significance, fortune, fame or endless distraction.  Why we hope people will maybe even like us for our accomplishments, flock to our sundry stages and keep us company.  In the end, none of that assuages our sense of loneliness, the sense that we are disconnected from each other, even the ones we love.  But when we realize we’ve been groping at remedies for loneliness, we can get down to the business of living.

Desiring a soul mate, something I pondered yesterday, is just another urge to be loved completely.  Which is impossible, because each of us has to also have self love or we cannot love.  They stand side by side.  I don't see how there can be selfless love on a human scale.  Generous love, kind love, gracious love, sacrificial love - yes.  But if love were to be completely selfless, the lover (devoid of self interest or nurture) would cease to exist.  What good is it to be loved by a ghost of a person?

Loneliness is a vast canyon of desire that can only produce art of magnitude when the artist is willing to live there fully, no props, no misdirected yearnings.  This is why we need true friends.  For their kindness, their well meaning, their forgiveness.  Friendship has nothing to do with souls mating and everything to do with humans relinquishing control and being present at the same time, to ourselves and each other. I don't shy away from loneliness when I’m alone.  I'm only unhappy with my human condition when I tragically believe the world's sad promises.

Whereas her otherwise quiet daughter took to banging on stratocasters and the like in her advancing years, Mom practiced her silent arts to the end.  Photos I’ve sent up to Flickr find her quilting, painting, cultivating, decorating, writing, refurbishing and making gravy with a silent hand.

Just off a stretch of travel, I’ve been looking through blue shades at my next steps, wondering.  Today - a day with no one to meet, greet, plan with or consult - I decided to move into the muddy lake, accept the inertia of this place, rather than push at the blues with logic or chin ups.  I thought I’d occupy my hands with these old photos of the multi talented artist, my mom.

What struck me (very softly) was the way the day turned into a peaceful class room, my mama the head mistress.  Look at this, she said.  This is a life, too.  Where you write, but never publish.  You paint canvasses, doll houses, furniture and landscapes, without review.  Make dresses for daughters, blankets for sons and slowly grow wealthy on art.

David Halberstam tells a funny story about two Los Angeles Times titans of the last century, Dorothy (Buff) and Norman Chandler.  Among other honors, wife and husband each had a pavilion in their name.  The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  The Norman Chandler Pavilion.

A few months after that ceremony Jack Benny was at a function and saw Norman and Buff walking toward him and turned to a friend and said, ‘Here they come, Mr. and Mrs. Pavilion.’
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Mom loved Jack Benny and she would have loved that story.  Because neither she nor my father have garnered a dedicated pavilion.  But most of the shots of Mom doing art were taken by Dad (whose name is Art) doing Art. He carried her easel and brushes to the field where her artist friends gathered to paint yet another Ohio barn.  He lugged her framed canvasses to art shows and engineered the various rug braiding and quilt basting logistics.  He was the artist’s husband and nary was heard a discouraging word from him.

I once felt overlooked when Dad sent around an email of his favorite memories; most had to do with far flung place like Israel, where my sister’s family lives.  I was the nearby daughter who shared holidays and modest outings with the folks.  But today my mother reminds me of another side of things.  She has me weeping over my own small sight.  Bent over quilts and paints and cooking pots she’s fed us all on the simple act of creation that prospers for the sake of doing, nothing more.  She focused on the present unparalleled moment with a mind and will that nobody, save her true fans, will care to brag about.  No press releases.  No headlines.  No buzz no razzle dazzle.

Just Jane, doing Jane.  And Art, doing Art.

My latest contribution to the family lineage, as my sister lustily mines genealogy finds online (such as The Saint Paul, a ship that brought our Swiss forbears to these shores), is to scan old photos of my mother and send them up to Flickr.

The process asks more of me than techno-cunning (the scanner’s on its last gasp) - I feel a worried fondness for the girl who grew to be my mom.  So much life, these pictures only hint at! 

Jane Hewes was beautiful and talented, not to mention sharp.  She explored modern dance, painting, writing, life in New York City - then, thunk, she got married and had four kids. Us.

So the New Yorker piece about a show in DC that features Dutch painter Judith Leyster, whose path to artist-motherhood mirrored my mother’s and - is this so? - my own, gets my attention.  In the entire 17th century, only two women were granted membership in the painter’s guild of Haarlem.  Judith Leyster was one of them.  And yet,

...at the age of twenty six, Leyster married Jan Miense Molenaer, a successful but starkly inferior artist, and plunged into childbearing and family affairs.  The little that remains of what she created thereafter lacks her previous, blazing originality.  I knew Leyster was good, but the Washington show surprised me with its suggestions of the formation of a great artist.  It left me indignant on her behalf...

Dutch genius of the seventeenth century found successive, disparate balance points in an engulfing tumult of worldly change.  Leyster verged on one of her own.  But the life it would have required, that of an independent woman, was unsustainable.  In our last glimpse of her, she plays a dainty cittern in her husband’s ‘The Duet.’  He, with a huge lute, is proudly ebullient.  Her face is a mask of banal contentment.  The boldly creative young artist, ripe with promise, has disappeared.
Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker