ART AS LIVING

By April Hirschman

 “The self is also a creation, the principle work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.” Rebecca Solnit

         America can turn art into another sport with sides. The teams are the artists and non artists. But as Solnit brilliantly points out no one escapes the fate of the artist so we might as well call it a boon. How is your life a work of art? Is it your compassion, generosity, sly humor, beautiful home, homemade meals, the way you care for children? The list is endless.  Of the arts I’ve lived inside my artful living is the one about which I am most critical and self-praising. I have rarely done work I didn’t love only for meager monetary rewards. Sure, in my misspent youth, I smiled as I wrote down orders and cleared up the messy plates of other people’s fun, I ran around after small children at play though they are not my natural companions.

          I have mostly spent time doing what feels in rhythm for an artist to do. As I child I drew for hours, then as I grew I painted, until I painted myself into the body of a dancer who wore coin belts and scarves and whose dancing was a fire that others came to warm themselves at. And the warmth we shared became dancers companies and troupes though we were actually colorful tribes and our finger cymbals and circling hips brought us into the landscape of tribes across Egypt, Spain, India, into the passageways of the Romany trail that can be traversed through music and movement as much as through trains and boats and birds. The kind of birds you can sit inside-the kinds that will take you flying both far and away.

         Then I danced into pen and paper which others were crazy enough to peer at with me until the words climbed into directions for actors and camera eyes and films were made until I wasn’t the passive viewer as in childhood but the one painter on the cave walls bringing stories to flickering light, raised high up on screens because screens are the frames that once were theatres which once were coliseums which once were whispers and small bonfires when fire and whispering was enough to call culture.

         The writing continued as the other arts dimmed or they disguised themselves in the writing itself. So that my days as an artist are lit by candles only I can see and sometimes I am at a loss for the way. I stand pondering in my living room looking for clues of what to do next. I used to run on instinct and now battle the new distractions of looking at screens: the small phone one and the bigger computer ones as if they are any kind of candle illuminating my days path. I stand wondering what to do next, a quandary the parents of the world only dream of, a distant pleasure. How do you live an artist life I ask myself? Or I should. But instead I am confused for a bit, I day dream, I struggle about whether to dance it out or write it down or do the work that actually allows for this artist life. Everything is measured according to some recipe I can’t find but I dutifully follow and only years later do I see the patterns that create a whole bakery of a life.

         It’s only in the comparisons to others that we shrink ourselves. It’s only in wondering, “How do I live a life?” and looking at the maps of lives that are not our own. Though there are clues to follow or avoid in every person’s life. The alarm does not ring for me. I don’t start my day in a state of alarm.  They are not waiting for me at the office.

         I always regretted that I didn’t know who I was supposed to be when I grew up thinking it needed to be something you find in a kids book where people are appointed as fire fighters, doctors, lawyers, and mail carriers. In all this I ignored my own constancy, which has been the constant call and response of the artist. In belly dance the drummer calls and the dancer responds, and sometimes the drummer tries to throw her off her course, so they can laugh and reunite. The music is always just ahead of the dancer but when its live she can influence its course.

         If you choose one art you often refine it to the point where you will be noticed. We aloud for the Renaissance woman, but only in the time of the Renaissance. She was rare or invisible and it was Da Vinci and other men we all had our eyes upon. Or it is the men that survived the sieves of his/story. Now she is mistrusted as an unfaithful woman. I am this faithless woman even though faith is my middle name.

         My faithfulness has been in following the directions even when they are whispered. Ani DiFranco says: “Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don’t think its fair that I am living for something that I can’t even define.”

         The artist of many mediums is always accused of mediocrity because the veins of gold pulsing through the living beast or landscape or artist or life are not obvious. We seem to thrive these days, a culture of hungry ghosts, fed and pacified by the obvious. My sisters and I were invited to have a reality show about us. The LA producers said they wanted something edgy. We said we are three bisexual belly dancing sisters. They said not that edgy! They chose instead sisters who were famous for being famous and shallow and beautiful and all this was something to keep up with.

         So I keep pace with veins of gold, calls in the night that are sometimes siren songs of destruction or flutes of the piper or the call of Goddess Brigid the call to come home. The quilted life keeps you warm at night and I imagine it must be cold when someone has no art to speak. Or doesn’t have the time to see the art of their own life.

         If its distraction you seek you can find it every where. The artist must cultivate which distractions to remove and which volumes to turn up in order to be at work and at play at once. Anyone short of martyred exposes themselves to the accusation of selfishness. The ultimate creator is the mother and selfishness is a label ever snapping at her feet. It’s always a near escape.

         I live an unscripted life. My greatest art is my art of living wherein I have time to explore the countries of the globe, to taste and smell her flavors, to show something of my lens through the images I create. I have the time to daydream and nap to sleep in and stay up late, to stop and smell climbing jasmine, and to lift up my face to the long rays of summer’s sun. I also have time to wonder about what if and what might have been. No one escapes the human longing for a map to follow. We long for parents who aren’t human but perfect guides to our own becoming. In the dampest, darkest, starless night we all wonder if we could possibly be getting it right. To be created was the first thing any of us ever did. Or the first thing anyone ever did for us. Creation is in our blueprints; our fingerprints the footsteps we wonder about just ahead of us in the sand.