{"id":6566,"date":"2016-01-17T23:23:59","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T23:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6566"},"modified":"2016-01-17T21:18:36","modified_gmt":"2016-01-17T21:18:36","slug":"walter-mitty-cest-moi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6566","title":{"rendered":"Walter Mitty, c’est moi"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"George<\/a>

George Steiner, by Alecos Papadatos<\/p><\/div>\n

I’m feeling a little\u00a0Vichy lately, as I\u00a0surrender to the forces that occupy my time and space. I’m openly collaborating with things that constrain me. My painting for now has become something I remember fondly. (I’m working a bit, but not nearly enough.) Mostly painting has become\u00a0one of Walter Mitty’s\u00a0heroic daydreams, something I can only crave to do,\u00a0while my actual daily life has been overtaken by helping others. (Those who teach art must feel this way constantly.)\u00a0And I’ve literally pushed myself into a corner. I’ve voluntarily moved my studio from the largest room on our first floor to an upper room, in a southern corner of the house, half the size of my studio for the past decade, but with much better light. I need that direct sun on a few days it appears; I can’t tolerate another gray Rochester winter with nothing but a northern exposure. I’ve fled to that room the way Van Gogh lit out for\u00a0the Midi.<\/p>\n

But all along, I feel as if I’m\u00a0shoving\u00a0myself<\/em> aside, making room for everyone else to live in the space\u00a0where I ought to be working. (My former studio, our new living room, has become our formal “parlor,” our living room. Which is what the space was designed to be. One of my wife’s friends asked her, “How did you get him to do that?” She said, “He did it all by\u00a0himself.” She refrained from adding with a smile, “Lucky me.”) As with everything in life, while I do what I know is the most meaningful of all my efforts–caring for my parents and brother (who broke his arm over the holiday and can’t drive), spending time with my children and grand-daughter for a week, reuniting with my little band of brothers from college earlier last year–I feel I’m neglecting my real work. Helping others is\u00a0easier, because my social life\u00a0actually requires so much less effort than making a picture. It feels as if I’m on a vacation,\u00a0being irresponsible. It’s frustrating only because it’s time consuming. While the actual meaning in my life is hidden there in\u00a0those tedious hours of helping out, whenever I sacrifice work time for\u00a0the people who matter to me, I’m discouraged because I can’t make\u00a0meaning by creating\u00a0a picture. Why worry about making\u00a0meaning? It’s already there\u00a0in everything I’m doing–but mostly what I feel in those activities is how imperfect life is, how incapable I am of having\u00a0a real impact on\u00a0the people I’m assisting. I can’t heal my father’s sores or clear a stent in his leg, or reverse his\u00a0aging. I’m little more than an Uber driver, delivering him to people who can attempt those things, but that doesn’t mean I’m adding much more to the process.\u00a0I’m pretty sure nearly anyone else\u00a0could pick him up and drop him off. What matters most, helping my family, feels like defeat, even though it’s just the opposite. That’s\u00a0the Buddhist dilemma isn’t it? Life is dukkha, <\/em>even when it can’t get any better.\u00a0When my daughter broke the growth plate in her hip\u00a0as a child, being an inadvertent asshole, I told her, a little girl in grade school, “Life is suffering.” Wrong thing to say, of course, but also\u00a0the wrong word. Life feels unsatisfying and defeating.\u00a0What means the most in life often\u00a0seems\u00a0to mean nothing at the time; that’s<\/em>\u00a0what hurts, that’s the paradox, the disease of being human, not being able to see the worth of what you’re doing while you do it. Poverty, obscurity, neglect, alienation, scorn, all the major food groups a painter is supposed to rely on for his daily bread aren’t really what\u00a0hurts: the real suffering is the same as the one in just being human. It’s the inability to make one’s actual life and imagined\u00a0life come together. I could always live in my art, but not in my life<\/em>, says Andre Gregory. He was living a ridiculously interesting life, but somehow he felt it wasn’t real enough.\u00a0It’s like the rich: they never have enough money.<\/p>\n

I’m continuing to read Knausgaard and the second book in My Struggle<\/em> feels much different than the first. It’s in a higher gear. Brighter, funnier, more contemporary, and direct. So far, anyway. It’s a genuine consolation right now to read him. This second volume\u00a0also includes a passage that is probably the axis\u00a0of the entire seven books, and it perfectly describes where I live right now (except that I do care about the others who seem to\u00a0have\u00a0taken over\u00a0my life). I wouldn’t sacrifice my own time if I didn’t love them, yet the way Karl Ove\u00a0feels when he’s alone and working is\u00a0perfectly put; emotionally, it’s only you and the work, and no one else exists, nothing<\/em> else exists but the work, the attempt to make something meaningful. That state of mind feels like a distant place where I once lived and worked, but in reality it’s only a few feet away from where I sit right now typing. Yesterday a\u00a0couple sofas and a coffee table invaded and now\u00a0control that\u00a0region. I myself led those forces to their new staging area. I hope\u00a0I’ll do some good work in my new space upstairs, but the only way to find out is to actually do something up there.<\/p>\n

You can really hear Proust in this passage from\u00a0Book 2 of My Struggle<\/em>:<\/p>\n

There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with . . . When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone, others meant nothing to me. It wasn\u2019t that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them, on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn\u2019t actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something that could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not. Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.<\/p>\n

I think this\u00a0apparent lack of meaning, the inability to see the inexhaustible<\/em>\u00a0meaning and mystery of ordinary\u00a0life, is dukkha<\/em>. There’s something of original sin in it, too. The inability to recognize the value of what you’re doing as you do it: the veil that keeps you from seeing what’s there. It’s at the heart\u00a0of Knausgaard’s struggle. It’s what art tries to heal, and sometimes it does, but in the attempt to cure it, art brings it all\u00a0to a halt. Does that mean, figuratively, that your life has to wither\u00a0so your\u00a0imagination can live? And yet what does Knausgaard cling to as\u00a0his subject? The life he is\u00a0so eager to\u00a0escape,\u00a0until he finally has\u00a0time to read and write. He writes mostly about the tedium he finds so confining and meaningless. The irony of art is that you have to pull away from life in order to pay enough attention to it. Perpetually late to the party, you’re teasing out the meaning you ought to have felt in the experience\u00a0you’re now trying to represent in words or pictures.<\/p>\n

I also\u00a0started reading George Steiner yesterday–my time away from painting has beaucoup longueurs:<\/em>\u00a0hours and hours of waiting for something to happen, while often\u00a0the only thing I look forward to on some recent days is crawling into bed at night. So\u00a0I’m getting a lot of reading done on my LG tablet. I’d always found Steiner rewarding in The New Yorker<\/em>, but never bought one of his books. I’m making my way through Real Presences<\/em>. You have to squint, the page gives\u00a0off so much light. (His thinking, I mean, not the tablet’s screen.) What he says about art will make its way here pretty soon at least as a quote or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m feeling a little\u00a0Vichy lately, as I\u00a0surrender to the forces that occupy my time and space. I’m openly collaborating with things that constrain me. My painting for now has become something I remember fondly. (I’m working a bit, but not nearly enough.) Mostly painting has become\u00a0one of Walter Mitty’s\u00a0heroic daydreams, something I can only crave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWalter Mitty, c'est moi - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6566\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Walter Mitty, c'est moi - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m feeling a little\u00a0Vichy lately, as I\u00a0surrender to the forces that occupy my time and space. 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