The Heart of the Matter

I’m deeply grateful I’m allowed to contribute among this community. But I have very, very, shamefully infrequently availed myself of this opportunity I haven’t written much in the past year; not just blog posts, but much of anything. Plays, prose, shopping lists. I’m not fully sure why. But I’ve tentatively started again. So I hope I’ll be forgiven for just popping in with a quick hello. It was my birthday yesterday, which I only mention not simply for the cheap dopamine hit of having you wish me a belated birthday, but also because I try to take stock of how things are working out.

One of the things I’ve begun to lean into in my declining years is feeling less embarrassed about unvarnished sentiment. This, in my quirky head, is different from sentimentality, which I define as the evocation of emotion without the actual work and sincerity that going through real emotion necessitates. It’s plastic, disposable, and more than a little sticky-feeling. It’s often a fine line, and one I realize I have unintentionally blown past on occasion. However, I’ve also decided to be a little less concerned with that aesthetic differentiation. I’m a writer – or try to be – and I very much shy away from calling myself an artist, because, well, I think words are a bit like rubber bands – if you stretch them too far, they’ll likely snap, or at the very least, lose their elasticity and value. The quality of this metaphor, conveniently, also serves as a handy example of why I don’t call myself an artist.

Anyway, I was reading a book on artists and poets offering thoughts on what art is/isn’t and should/shouldn’t do. And I was struck with this thought, which may very well gatecrash the border between sentiment and sentimentality, but I feel old enough to care a little less than that than, say, two days ago, when I was filled with typical wide-eyed wonder most 54-year-olds carry great the world with. So here it is:

I hope one of the things good writing, or Art, can show is the depth of beauty of a parent waking in the stark cold, walking on the unsparing cold floors of February, moving, quiet and thin-socked so her child, still safe in sleep, will have warm clothes and breakfast waiting for her when she wakes. We conquer space, we map our genes, we paint cathedrals, we compose music that sounds like God whispering a lovely secret in our ears; we build and kill civilizations with astonishing ambition and ingenuity, but nothing we have done or ever do can transcend that nameless morning ritual for showing us what we are capable of.

Anyway, to me, the more specific a work is, if it’s done well, the more easily it’s translatable to the universal.

Maybe. I have some uneaten cake to attend to.