How Was It, For you?
I read Anne Enright’s article in The Irish Times and can’t stop thinking about it. “The world did not actually stop, back in March. It just felt that way,” is the title and in it she asks, “Apart from apocalypse, disaster and ruin, how was it, for you?” She says, “I don’t want to brag but, in our house, 2020 was the year we taught the dog how to sing. The year I put on perfume for Zoom. The year the radiator leaked, and no one came, and it stopped leaking all by itself, while the world ended, elsewhere.”
I didn’t teach the dog to sing this year, though I did contemplate and decide we would not get another dog, because we still want to travel, and one day there will be travelling again.I did love that a lot of people adopted dogs, or cats. We didn’t do a lot of things, like go to Rome in November as planned, and Rob did not go to Pouch Cove in September for the residency he’d been invited to. Another year for both of those things, though it may not even be 2021. I didn’t learn Italian, either which was near the top of my list of things I wanted to do last year at this time. The furnace broke down three times this year but I hesitate to say that the appliances are all humming along.
In 2020 I didn’t have a word or a phrase per se that I kept coming back to, but I did find it interesting that lines of poetry or prose that I found helpful were ones written long before this particular pandemic. So that says something. “You are here,” says Elizabeth Smart in The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. In context:
“Isn’t there some statement you’d like to make? Anything noted while alive? Anything felt, seen, heard, done? You are here. You’re having your turn. Isn’t there something you know and nobody else does?”
When the world locked down in March, I was temporarily laid off from my job at the library, on EI for the first time in my life, and the gallery Rob was represented by in Edmonton shut down. Things weren’t feeling too great at all. Maybe the library would be closed for a very long time. (It did re-open a few months later and I was lucky to be among the first called back thanks to my seniority). We reckoned that one possibility would be that no one would be buying art, paintings, for the foreseeable future. I remember talking about the fact that paintings aren’t like bread, you could make them, and they’ll keep for some unknown future, at least that. We decided that even if nothing ever sold again, if no one wanted to publish books, or buy paintings, we wanted to make them. And so for some reason we were both able to continue working, even if it was weird and hard and exhausting and futile, a little thin on the ground. The futility was in its way a release. We could do what we liked. We persisted.
Meanwhile, our daughter seemed So. Far. Away. But we video called almost every day and I think our family comedy routines improved. I think we had as a common goal making each other laugh a little every day, and we did. She remained mentally sturdy and kept her sense of humour, in spite of being very isolated and cautious about going anywhere. Her college went remote and she finished her spring term online. She had plans to go to Ottawa for her internship for school in the summer, but that ended up going remote, too. And thank goodness for that. So she had meaningful work, and her school went really well. The place she interned with hired her on for the fall and she both worked and resumed classes in the fall. Honestly, I think just watching her work as hard as she did and for as many hours as she did helped centre me.
We didn’t go anywhere, though eventually our daughter came home in October and is staying until the new year. We refer to her these days, her presence, as one of the gifts of the pandemic.
We are here, I say to myself, what can we do with what we have? In what ways can I be useful? What can I learn? Or, to quote Hafiz (Ladinsky translation) “What kind of work / Can I do in this world?”
Instead of getting low about not being able to write as much, I pursued various photo projects. I didn’t go at with any grand scheme or specificity, honestly. I just did what I could when the forces and spirits aligned.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we stayed at home and saw no one really. But one thing we were allowed to do was to go out for walks and see people outside, socially distanced. I started a portrait photography project without it really being a project but I had the idea of trying things out, and kind of working on my “photo bucket list” which is something most photographers have running in the back of their mind, or at least I do. I think we already knew in March that travel would largely be off the list for the year. No wandering around Rome taking photos every day for a month. Do what you can with what you have, I told myself. I wanted to take photos of people and my first subject was my work mate, Neil. I’d always wanted to take a photo something like this one of Prince.
I had in the back of my mind something that Annie Leibovitz has said.
“I’ve said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don’t know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess that what I’m really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you.”
I got out of my comfort zone and started taking photos of people. (If you scroll through my IG you’ll see a sampling). I loved doing this and I think I learned something new with every session. I also took some pretty okay photos of Edmonton architecture, and these were some of my favourite photos of last year. My still life project (though it’s ongoing) culminated in the visit from a neighbourhood cat, which must be a good omen. And then there were the self-portraits, which were in some strange (or totally obvious) way the place I learned the most about myself.
I really just decided to “follow the lights in [my] own skull,” as suggest by C.D. Wright in Cooling Time, the book that has likely been for me the one most often perused and underlined and quoted from this last year. She goes from quoting Dylan, “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours,” to Glenn Gould, “The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but a gradual lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” She talks about poetics and parenting in the same short piece, the struggle of wanting “that clearing where I am alone” and “the anticipation of working without interruption” but also admitting, “I require the struggle though it brings me to my knees when I most long to be standing free.” She talks about how “every portrait could be titled “you.”” She talks about John Keats’s “low-grade funk.” She quotes Prince and his “joy of repetition” song in the context of Gertrude Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose.” This kind of riffing is my jam. Maybe it’s yours, too.
At the beginning of the pandemic I was filled with worry. Who wasn’t? I’ve also had my moments with the low-grade funk. When I talk about the last year, I tend to leave out the flaming emails, the inappropriate behaviour, the losses, the unwelcome surprises, the too-muchness of certain moments, the bizarre shocks, and little and big disappointments. But sure, those happened, too. I don’t think I know anyone who didn’t suffer a loss, and weren’t funerals a strange thing in 2020?
At a certain point, I stopped worrying. Things weren’t wonderful but they weren’t all terrible. Not at all. In fact, some of the terrible things really highlighted the beauty of other things. A number of people that I know who I always thought were pretty great, I now know are beyond amazing. That’s something pretty fun and fabulous gotta say.
I took the words of Hafiz seriously: “now that all your worry has proved such an unlucrative business why not find a better job.”
So I found another better job. I photographed. I honed my novel on angels. I submitted it to my publisher and she accepted it. I began about six essays for my next book and abandoned them, but I know I’ll get back to them soon. The thing is, I started them! Rob sold enough flower paintings to keep us afloat and in another year ahead where people can’t travel and go to museums, maybe they will continue to want art for their homes. Flowers to Zoom by. I don’t know, maybe they won’t. One thing we know is that we must be ready for any contingency. I’m hopeful about next year, but only in the same small ways that I was hopeful for this past one.
I blogged less this past year, feeling that maybe less was more. But I’m still grateful for this space, and grateful for those who visit me here. So thank you for being here. And do let me know, on your own blog or in the comments, how was it, for you?
