Just Like A Goddess

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My close friend Amy, whom I’ve known for almost 30 years, sent an apologetic letter last week explaining why she hasn’t written. She reports that she is drowning in minutiae. Three pages describe a maelstrom of dusting, weeding, pruning, exhuming kitty litter, changing beds, ferrying junk from the girls’ rooms to the basement, an endless litany of tasks. She’s also had to collect water samples from phantom pools which have mysteriously appeared at the perimeter of her yard.

I read her letter with some dismay. My friend, who once admitted to being a painter and writer, now refers to her artistic aspirations as “pretensions” and claims she is glad not to have to actually produce anything. She sounds sad and utterly worn-out. “I don’t run my home. My home runs me,” she scrawled at the end of the page. I can’t help wondering if the phantom pools in the lawn are full of tears.

I want to tell her of a story I came across, a true one. Sixty years ago in France, a girl named Minou Drouet wrote a book of poems which sold over 14,000 copies in the two weeks after publication. No one, not even those who admired her writing, could believe the eight-year-old girl had written them herself. A test of her true ability was devised that year by the Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers: she would be required to sit alone in a room and write a poem from a list of topics she was given. The piece she wrote, which would later earn her membership in the Society, was “Paris Sky,” an exquisite poem which took her all of 25 minutes. When told she had passed the examination, she cried, “I’ve won!”

Art is, after all, a battle.

I have always pictured artists as divine weavers who separate wheat from chaff, spin straw into gold. Writers, singers, painters and potters are alchemists, stirring raw elements together in a cauldron, bringing to life mysterious and unpredictable new forms. Yet Minou’s lonely fight seems even closer to the day-to-day experience of creativity. The quest for expression may turn out to be not so much a delightful ambling along shady tree-lined paths, but outright war. If we dare to reclaim our gifts, it could be that we automatically engage in a bitter, unreasonable struggle against unseen opponents.