When the Created Speaks

a glimmer from the darkness and a call to make something

Art by Michael Linog

I’m sure many of you can relate to the experience of connecting with a book or some other arrangement of words, pictures, or colors in a sunset sky or the perfect thick stitch on that suede coat you’ve always wanted. Regardless of the medium, the object of observation, something created speaks to you, and you’re met with a feeling of a building being constructed inside you in which errant pieces, thoughts, and experiences are being moved into a kind of self-revelation. It’s a eureka moment. The lightbulb above your head clicks on. You’re seen and known and knowing more. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with this feeling altogether, (that’s OK!) or your eurekas feel small and insubstantial. This is a story about two books, two acts of creation, read accidentally in tandem, that solidified a novel idea and my conviction to create it.

Jerry Saltz’s How to be an Artist is a little book that reads like a manifesto. He’s asking his readers – artists and partakers of the art world – to turn from their boxed-in lives and instead take on the unwieldy and radical reins of the creative life. This is a life of endless learning and discovery. Saltz proposes radical vulnerability, in which an artist opens themself up to the prospect of having their greatest fears and insecurities become the object of judgment and criticism. Follow your convictions, however counterintuitive, foolish or against the grain they seem.

I was relishing this very readable book that managed to put into perspective some difficult things demanded of the creative life in a practical and even light-hearted way when Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch bit me in the ass. I mean this in a positive sense of course. Yoder’s book is the boldly told tale of a new mom who leaves her full-time gallery job when the pull to be home with the baby overwhelms her. But she doesn’t anticipate and can’t prepare for the wide-open world of stay-at-home motherhood. Her identity as an artist is completely subsumed by the daily grind and bore of the entertaining, the putting to bed, the waking up, and the feeding of a toddler. She loathes her life, the freedom of her husband’s weekly business trips, her working-mom friends, her stay-at-home mom cohort, and a lot of the time, her son. She is confronting her rage when she begins to believe she’s transforming into the mythical beast, Nightbitch.

Saltz touches on parenthood in his book, which I appreciated given his not having any kids. He writes to dispel the notion that having a family is bad for a career and cites the artist Laurel Nakadate who says that “being a parent is already very much like being an artist.”

“It means always lugging things around, living in chaos, doing things that are mysterious or impossible or scary. As with art, children can drive you crazy all day, make you yearn for some peace and quiet. Then in a single second, at any point, you are redeemed with a moment of intense, transformative love.”

Nightbitch is learning this. She’s beginning to understand a creative force waiting to be grasped. The extreme tension and pressure that parenting adds to life stops being a black hole for all the energy she used to have to create. Instead, she discovers a new depth to creating, which seems to encompass more livelihood, a taste of eternity, and perhaps more death as well.

As this greater identity begins to take shape, she finds an ethnography, The Field Guide to Magical Women and begins emailing the author little journal entries. The reader understands that something is unfolding, but that something is shocking, so violently revealing of the creative force behind mother-nature it’s hard to make sense of. And then there’s the kid, at every whim of such a drastic transformation. There’s no saying whether he’s the greatest victim or the most powerful inspiration behind her breathtaking renewal.

“Art,” Saltz says, “gives up its secrets very slowly.” Nightbitch is a book that considers itself a canvas disclosing, layer after layer, the truth behind its creation. You know where it’s going but you can’t believe how or even that it gets there. All of her confronting and revealing the bitter anger of motherhood, the emotional and mental exhaustion, the fear of failure, and the often-tenuous thread of marriage, culminates in a toe dipped into the perfect spell and suddenly a disaster headed for the asylum becomes a masterpiece.

Here is her last email to the unresponsive author of The Field Guide to Magical Women:

WW—

I am interested in longing, in the longing so deep it threatens to splinter a person apart. I am interested in a profound longing for an unknown existence, or for a better life, without any idea of what the specifics of that life would look like. I’m not getting this right—I’m interested in knowing about the longing that unites all women, all mothers. What is that longing? How could we possibly long for something beyond our offspring?

It's almost as if having a child allows a woman to see how much infinite potential there is, allows her to see infinity itself. (Am I making any sense?)

It’s almost as if having a child does not sate a deep yearning but instead compounds it.

Look, the mother says, look at what I am capable of. I make life. I am life.

But how can I become a god?

Yours,

MM

Nightbitch is finding revelation through this obscure text, this created object she seeks out in a fever of despair at the public library. She dodges the Book Babies program to find it because the other mommies are insufferable. While her judgments against her fellow mommies feel harsh, I can relate, and I think it’s because of the constant yearning caused by a longing to create. The need to break a mold, dodge a box and be free. We’re led in many ways to find the premade shape that suits us best. Well fuck that. If my box is three fallen branches propped up like a teepee and zip tied together and wrapped with an old sheet then all I’ve got to say is, I like it that way. And I hope you enjoy the show.

I don’t believe the throughlines of Nightbitch and How to be an Artist are unique to the artist’s or the mother’s life. Maybe the urge to be creating is more naturally overwhelming to some, and maybe we can all take a note from the overarching message to resist the forces working to box us into a certain lull in life. No one has ever called me an optimist, and yet devoting myself to creative paths has helped me see that every challenge is an opportunity to recalibrate, shed some layers and add new ones.

You don’t need a canvas or a blank page to embrace the performance of breaking out or to create something beautiful, you need a new set of eyes. And these eyes develop slowly over time, adjusting, focusing, with every little risk you’re scared to take but press on in anyways. Every time you miss the boat. And every time you nail it. Find the message of your life then go live the damn thing. Nobody wants the life of the nameless mother with days that bleed into months, into years. Into obscurity.

I want sharp edges. I want teeth. I want sweat and dirt. I want silk. But also wool. I want beauty that’s unrefined and raw. I want blood. I want wrinkles and gray hair. I want to make love forever. I want grandchildren. I want gold and silver and hardwood. I want noise. And to be silent with my thoughts. I’m not afraid of these contradictions. I want the friction. Because today I want to feel a little more alive than yesterday, than last month, and last year. I’ve done my time as a spiraling depressive with no confidence to make something worth lasting, without the self-assurance that once it’s made it’s no longer mine and that’s good. If you have something to create and share – a muffin recipe, say, or a flower arrangement, or the perfect solution to at-home oil changes – put your hands to that work. We probably need it. It’ll make you better. It’ll impact the people around you. One little choice can set a course for decades.

So, something I’m choosing today, in this month that has felt like a dark and endless night, is to draft this essay once again, searching for a form or shape that will stick, and sharing it with people. Something I’m choosing today is to reveal my big secret, that there’s a novel unraveling in my head with a hint of magic to it. It’s laying around in piecemeal notes scattered on surfaces and devices. Here I am. Maybe I’ll fail again, and maybe my failures will become something beautiful.