To art and its creators
May we know them, be them, raise them
It's the fifth grade, and I'm writing a persuasive essay on why women should be allowed to participate in female sports. I've just turned in my first draft, and frankly, it's an indignant rebuke of sexist bigotry more than any logical, coherent argument. My teacher grows frustrated at my progress; you can't use vague ideas about equality to support your thesis, she sighs. I don't understand. Who am I trying to convince, when my teacher agrees with me? Why would I write, when the truth is so obvious?
Later that week, I find a PubMed indexed research paper discussing how female bone density and cardiovascular structure makes us better endurance athletes, more capable of running long distances and elite sports. Science, I think triumphantly. Hasn't let me down yet. I litter statistics from the article into my essay, and a week later, a red 98 adorns the top of my paper.
It is here that I become a writer.
Ten years later, as I reflect on the stories I told myself as a child, I realize that I was always a writer, and that I have spent too long believing I was defined by what I was not. I was not an athlete, not with my two left feet and lungs that burned every time I sprinted. I was not a painter, as evidenced by my shaky hands and poor understanding of color theory. I wanted to be a singer, but no amount of lyrics scrawled on a pad of sticky notes could make me one. I was late to talking then too shy to do anything but mumble, and so I was a poor poet, too. There was a fundamental lack of elegance and artistry to who I was, and as a result, most days I clung to math with the gratitude of a refugee that at least something would befit me.
The humor in all of this, of course, is that every single one of these things is a lie. Making good art is hard for me, but this proclivity of mine -- to "imagine that there are '[art] people' to whom it is all transparent, and, if it doesn't come to [me] immediately, [I] must not be one of them," to quote Living Proof -- is silly. It seems obvious to me now that there are no such people. I'm only unathletic because I've never trained my body with the vigor and diligence I've trained my mind over the last twenty years. I'm a bad chef because my mother's sole act of radical micro-feminism was refusing to teach her daughters to cook. Everyone is a singer, me included; just ask the girls who have heard me karaoke to Chappell Roan's Good Luck Babe!. Everyone is a poet, too, and with practice and pain, I've become one whose work is her deliverance. Somewhere, somehow, when I wasn't watching, the words I've written on this very blog are some of my greatest achievements, even though nobody else reads them anymore. I debated whether or not this post should be a memoir chapter, since it seems so unlike any of the other excerpts I've written, but the truth is that there is no better way of understanding who I am than through the art I've created and consumed. This isn't about the wider world, at all, but about me. Just me. Before I was anything else, before I knew anything else, I was a fangirl -- of Taylor Swift and One Direction, of frivolous movies about romance and coming of age, of dystopian fantasy sagas and every word Suzanne Collins will ever write, of paintings I will never understand and of the people who made it all.
Rob Sheffield, a music journalist, wrote what he hopes is the canonical history of Taylor Swift, entitled Heartbreak is the National Anthem. Unfortunately, he seemed more preoccupied with name-dropping A Listers than getting to the heart of what it means to be a fan of great art, which of course is that it is a mirror and a chisel all in one. These are the tools we use to understand that which we have not experienced, then the tools we return to when we finally experience it. I'm reminded, fondly, of Hurricane from Hamilton: we write our way through and out, whichever comes first. In the wake of the second Trump presidency, as I find myself debating ideals of tolerance and inclusion with the very people who taught them to me, I'm learning that the truth is literally never as obvious as it might seem. And so I press Play on Season 4 of Gilmore Girls, returning with comfort to a sanctuary and a time where the world wasn't aflame, and the truth wasn't subjective. Artificial intelligence is threatening to destroy my humanity, and I worry that journalism may be the first pillar in this Parthenon of language to fall. And so I write, knowing that I cannot slow or halt this inevitable chaos, but hoping that I can, at the very least, survive it.
There's a story in Hindu mythology of this great ancient warrior raised in the woods. When found, an elder statesman asks him, Son, how did you learn this all by yourself? He responds that he had nineteen teachers -- the wind, the trees, the deer, and the butterflies, amongst others. Well, I don't live in the woods. My teachers are, for the most part, real humans. But the vast expanse of universe I will never breach alone is accessible through the undeniable power of fandom. Pop culture may seem frivolous and dumb, even with all the contrived meaning I've attempted to paint over it on this very blog. Perhaps it is. But my nineteen teachers are creators of art, nonetheless. It is a gift I can only hope to pay forward some day.
Comments
Post a Comment