Making and Giving
More on Love and Art
While I was giving that little concert recently, a neighborhood girl about seven or eight years old came to watch and listen with that look of wide-eyed fascination which you see only in children. It struck me that this might have been the first time she had ever witnessed someone making live music, so I gave her a big wink. ;-)
I like the fact that we talk of giving a concert and making music. Music is indeed a gift, as are all the arts. Certain people are drawn to these forms of making and giving, seemingly out of a superabundance of aliveness, creative energy, or imagination. Here again I perceive similarities to the freehearted giving of love in all its forms: parenting, romance, friendship, neighborliness, brotherhood, etc.
José Ortega y Gasset touches on these matters in his book On Love, although he couches them in an old-fashioned (to my mind) psychology of the sexes. Consider the following two quotes:
A man feels love primarily as a violent desire to be loved, whereas for a woman the primary experience is to feel love itself, the warm flow which radiates from her being toward her beloved and the impulse toward him. The need to be loved is felt by her only consequently and secondarily.
And:
Every woman appears to be a little saint, if we think that saintliness consists in sliding over life without letting oneself be compromised by it. And, yet, the truth is exactly the opposite: that almost unreal figure is merely awaiting the opportunity to throw herself - with such impetus, decisiveness, courage, and unconcern for painful consequences - into an impassioned whirlwind, that she outdoes the most resolute man, who sheepishly discovers himself to be of a practical, calculating, and vacillating temperament.
The traits that Ortega uncovers here are, I think, more widely distributed than he lets on: they are not a matter of sexuality but of personality. I, for one, seem to be the kind of passionately giving person he describes. In my youth I worked hard to hide these aspects of myself because certain early experiences made me well acquainted with some of the painful consequences Ortega alludes to. Furthermore, I agree with Ortega that there’s a certain sort of courage and fearlessness wrapped up with throwing oneself into the impassioned whirlwind of personal relationships and creative activities. It’s not for everyone, and it wasn’t for me either until I slowly came to see that this is what life is all about.
I’ll let Ortega have the last word: “Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.”
Very insightful...
In my case, I found out at an early age, maybe five years old, that one of my relatives, Miriam Waddington, a cousin my mom's age, was a famous Canadian poet - she had a verse appear on a Canadian hundred dollar bill a few years ago.
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/waddington-miriam-dworkin
Something "snapped" when my mom told me about Miriam, and suddenly I wanted to write poetry. And writing became a borderline compulsion in all forms. I morphed into a performance poet in college, in part to support my efforts to publish and sell books. Also wrote short stories and a reader's theater play, which was produced to full houses.
Then, when I was about 30 years old, I mostly stopped writing my creative works, so I could devote myself to our family business. Also, did not want to devolve into a mediocre poet and plateau, when I could become better. I stopped for 35 years. To be clear, I still wrote for work: technical manuals, radio broadcasts, magazine columns, curriculum, feature articles, strategic plans, and editorials, essays, and a couple of books–whatever the market required.
When I woke up and started writing stories and poems again, it was like, according to my husband, as if I had been missing a vitamin and suddenly found it again.
When it came time for me to retire, I had been planning to open a bookstore and/or start a nonprofit foundation. I realized that I wanted to return to my roots and my first love. So I write every day. Often it feels like channeling. I am pleased to have this gift, but I can't take credit for it. Like I can't take credit for hazel eyes or curly hair.
Sometimes people will ask me for advice on "becoming" a writer. It feels like they are asking me for advice on how to become someone who loves chocolate.