Last fall, in the spirit of the Medici family and a handful of Renaissance popes, we built an art shed, a pretty little 13 by 13 building with an open nature and north light. The idea was to draw itinerant artists, artists without studios, to the back yard by creating a kind of diurnal flophouse. Not being a painter or sculptor myself, I imagined men and women and people of unknown gender flapping about the yard in feather boas and fishnet stockings, smoking cigarettes and sampling leaves of kale from the nearby vegetable garden. Why I felt the need to squeeze more eccentric human beings onto this urban lot is unclear to me now, but at the time it struck me with the force of a peregrine falcon diving for a duck. The word soirée loomed large in my mind, which led to the vision of a string quartet, four folding chairs set out in the snow—an outdoor concert in February, why not? And the unruly artists in their berets and open-toed sandals, drinking rough red wine from the bottle and hurling insults at one another. The scene I created in my mind was the opposite of cultured. It was raucous and unmanageable and flew out of hand in no time at all. There was something appealing in the raw ambition and competition and preening and braggartly nature of the artists in my mind, and the fact that they so readily disturbed the peace was essential to my vision. It provided me with an example of life on the loose, a freedom of expressing and being that I often felt missing in my own artistic form. They brought a combination of deep love and deep play to their work, the very thing I had lost in that old writing habit of mine.
The truth is, since its completion in November, the art shed lies empty much of the time. One of the artists I live with put it this way: “When the space I had been waiting for opened up and became a reality, I froze.” No more no. Just a great big yes. Terrifying. I used to feel I had to approach my own creativity with the utmost care, like offering a piece of meat to a wolf. I admired the poets, the ones I knew who stayed up all night and worked all day and squeezed out language because they couldn’t not write, they couldn’t stop the flow, and they didn’t hold on tightly to what they produced. They laughed and went to another party and wrote some more.
My friend Bruce arrives with a freshly stretched canvas every now and then and this particular snowy morning, before he starts working, I come into the art shed to say hello and end up staying for a while—a precious while to me because we talk about art, paintings, Rome and the artists we love. Both of us have spent time in Italy and know the joy of entering a dark, out-of-the-way church, smoky with incense, a few candles burning, and finding on the wall one of Raphael’s finest paintings or Caravaggio’s unmistakable chiaroscuro—masterpieces viewed on the big screen in my History of Art classes but now alive in this unnamed house of worship, like Julia Child doing a home delivery of chicken cordon bleu. We talk about Rembrandt’s brushstrokes and Vermeer’s dust-speckled light. Why does my heart rise to this occasion, this connection through art to art? Funny how our passions are constructed. Bruce tells the story of Michelangelo’s visits to the stone quarries to find the male subjects of his paintings and sculptures—men of muscle and vigor whose interest in art was perhaps less than their interest in the artist. And the magnificent Prisoners, the “unfinished” sculptures depicting these powerful men struggling to free themselves, all their effort given to breaking forth from the stone. But they fail, these men do. And in their failure lies the power of the sculptures. In the struggle lies the tension of these great works of art. What holds us back? What frees us? What completes us? How do we give shape and voice to the unseen, the unknown? The Prisoners are that question rendered in stone. And because Michelangelo doesn’t provide an easy answer, these sculptures, his most intimate works, are considered unfinished, incomplete.
Unfinished. Emerging. Only partially expressed. My writing prayer was always: Don’t let me die with those descriptors attached to my name. Apparently, Tony Hoagland agreed. He writes in a poem called “Doing This”: When you die,/ I know they turn you/ inside out, to see what portion/ of your god-allotted guts/ you failed to spend on earth./ The ones who arrive in heaven/ without a kopek of their fortune left/ are welcomed, cheered, embraced./ The rest are chastised and reborn/ as salesmen and librarians.
But here’s a story. I saw Michelangelo’s Pietá once when I was a kid, stood on a conveyor belt at the New York World’s Fair and traveled past that mysterious expression of passion and marble at roughly two miles an hour—enough time to realize I wasn’t breathing. I understood very little of the emotion that sculpture caused in me. It wasn’t a religious emotion, it was a human one. Mary’s compassion. The Catholic Quan-yin. And her son’s still pliable mortal body: a fresh loss. The figures were frighteningly real, pallid in death and shock, a finished work of art, a masterpiece if ever there was one. Yet with none of the hidden power of the Prisoners, none of the tension, none of the disturbance. A strangely relaxed piece. A picture of resignation and grief. A snapshot of the end instead of the living, striving middle where we claw our way toward something, often unknown, call it fate or fame or offspring, the human urge to live forever. That vortex of energy that lives us, that we are lived by and are asked as artists only to channel. Listen, it says. Write this down while you have breath to do so. Don’t ever get there. Never finish. Always have more inside to offer to the waiting world.
