Who are we?

There is an old woman sitting crouched in the corner. Her wrinkled hands on her cheeks, she is close to death. Beside her are a young woman, and a strange bird, possibly a dove. Though she is at the end of her life, she sits on the left most edge of the canvass; she is the beginning of the story, the past and the future. In her, we are meant to see ourselves, our mortality.

The overcast morning is still and dark and everything around is silent, a kind of glorious moment for reflection, and all I want to do is curl up beneath heavy down blankets and sleep like ol’ Rip van Winkle himself.

I think about sleep a lot. I think about it in the mornings, climbing out of bed early to get the children ready for the day. I think about it in the evening as I slumber down the hallway, past the boxes of unfinished projects, unshelved toys, bits of paper and unswept dust bunnies that can wait till morning.

I woke up and hour early Friday and drove to school to take my final. Take seems like the wrong verb for an experience that is akin to a defendant sitting in the witness box being grilled by a group of seasoned prosecutors hell bent on sending you up the river.

“Well, you passed.” My professor said “but what was up with that piece of shit artist statement?”

I emailed the statement to no less than four of the seven faculty members the week before looking for feedback and didn’t receive a single response. Well, that is unless you count the email from one faculty member the night before explaining that he wasn’t going to look at the statement sent a week before because he was far to busy today.

Still, criticism aside, I passed, which makes me wonder why I am picking the experience apart in my mind. I begin to wonder if I am only happy when I am complaining. That and the surreal response I had to the whole damn affair.

I spent Saturday with D. at a swim meet as an official timing the competitors. The chlorine air made my eyes burn and my head throb. The stopwatch in my hand, the pool beneath my feel, the mechanical pulse of the start gun, watch, wait, listen. Later, in the evening J. and I went to the church Christmas social at another couples home. J. left to pick up the children and I stayed behind for another hour chatting and having fun. The feeling of exhaustion swept over me all at once and I began to make my goodbyes.

“Where are you going? If you wait a while we can give you a ride.”
“I think I will walk. It’s only seven blocks. I think I’ll manage.”
“Are you sure?”

The cold air was like a tonic.

The next day at church there seemed to be sentiment of general amusement at my decision.
“It was only seven blocks. You would think I was walking home in a blizzard.”
“Nobody walks in the city” said J.
I tried to picture myself, as I thought they might have, lying passed out in someone’s lawn, or huddled over a hot air grate trying to fend off the chill in the air.

The Chair said his piece and walked out of the studio. I was left there standing like I had been gut punched with my mouth gaping open in disbelief. I fumbled for the edge of the door and pushed it shut just as the first spasm of tears began to well up out of me. The feeling was one of confusion, panic and fear and I pushed them down again determined to make myself feel happy, but instead felt only the dry stale air in my lungs as I heaved a great sigh. I put my hand on the door knob and imagined for a moment that I would cross the threshold in jubilation, but as the door swung wide I had a kind of panicky feeling like I had been inside for hours and that people had begun to wonder where I had gone.

I think of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

There are many interpretations of this work, as there are of life. Many eyes seem poised to make an accounting for our behavior, some favorably, other with a bemused indifference.

"I believe that this canvas not only surpasses all my preceding ones, but that I shall never do anything better—or even like it.”

Standing in front of my installation the night before the final I felt an indescribable feeling of accomplishment. Everything we have in life goes into these moments. There is a kind of clarity that comes from these experiences, from intense focus brought about be repetition, the cold air on your face, and by the feeling of having done the best you can and given all you have. How can someone saying "Well, you passed" compare? I think about Gauguin's painintg full of women, full of vitality, of potential, all is creation, birth. The end is but a beginning.