Yesterday was really rough. I feel like I made it home just in time before everything fell apart. Recovering today. This morning I read a little bit more of Necessary Sins by Lynn Darling. Again, I am amazed that I randomly felt the need to read this book, something that would never have appealed to me on the face of it.
At that point I hadn’t found a way to reconcile the young woman I had been, with her delight in courting chance, and the mother I’d become, with her urge to preserve, to connect. More and more the past was something that embarrassed me, as if I had to disown the girl I’d been to ensure the reality of the woman I had become. There had been so many masquerades. Was this just another, the middle-aged mother: earthbound, rooted, the one who found heaven in her daughter’s face? Which one was real?
The answer, as the painter Joan Mitchell knew well, was both.
Mitchell was a painter who thrived in the New York art scene of the fifties, one of the few women to hold her own among the crazy, wild, and brilliant men who dominated the world of Abstract Expressionism. She herself was a hell-raiser, a loud and argumentative woman, a scene maker, a passionate lover, a mean drunk. And yet her paintings are deeply meditative, thoughtful conversations between a questing soul and the mysteries of shape and color. About a year before she died, she was asked about her brash public persona and how it related to her work. “There are always two of me,” she said. “There was big Joan and little Joan.” Big Joan, she said, was the one who went out to knock down the doors and put up a fight. Little Joan was quiet and shy and liked to stay at home. “Big Joan took care of Little Joan. She made it safe for Little Joan to stay home and paint.”
Joan Mitchell was sixty when she said this. It takes a long time to understand that the girl you once were, the one guaranteed to fuck up your life, was also the one who saved it.
Maybe she did know what she was doing. Last night I became convinced that the persona I have built up over the years has actually been the cause of my entire distress, and the losses I have suffered. I still have my doubts, but in the light of morning I can quote Joan Armatrading, “I am open to persuasion.”
As Lynn Darling wrote in Necessary Sins:
He offered me the chance to connect the dots between my public and private selves, maybe even to find bedrock.
The thought is almost unthinkable for me. It’s so foreign. Connect the dots? Sorry, I don’t speak that language. In my life, men have fallen in love with either one persona or the other … Big Sheila or Little Sheila, never both. Well, except for Michael, but boy’s ego is big enough, don’t you think? It may be too late to integrate the two, and maybe integration ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. And so I, too, need a man who can help me connect the dots. So perhaps Lynn Darling and Joan Mitchell had it right all along. That there will be side-by-side selves … always … hopefully not doing battle with one another, one side shaming the other, or one side trying to dominate the other … but working together.
I’m working on it.
Brave girl.