The Art of Letting Go

For the last few months my writer’s group and I have been using an insightful little kit entitled, Inner Outings, Adventures in Journal Writing, by Charlene Geiss and Claudia Jessup. This is a boxed package that includes 33 beautifully illustrated cards, each with a single word or phrase such as, “Doorways,” or “Just for Fun" along with a companion book loaded with creative ideas on how to use each card for the maximum journaling benefits.

Because there is no “right” way to use the cards, I decided to shuffle the entire deck and then keep the cards upside down in their box. Every two weeks I draw a fresh card from the top and that becomes my “theme” until the next time. I keep my selected card beside my computer so I can use it to journal, write poetry, or maybe use it in a scene to fit my current WIP. Sometimes I even follow the suggestions in the book!

This week I got the card: “Letting go.” I thought it would be interesting to pair the idea with a famous work of art. My choice was a painting titled, "The Saltonstall Family," and my method was once again freewriting. This is what I shared with my group:

I first came across this painting in 1979, my first visit to the Tate Gallery in London. I was enchanted by it from the start: so much red and white. It never made me think of “death.” Instead, I saw a woman newly delivered of her last child, saying to her husband, “I’ll be fine,” while her mother has private thoughts about this whole upwardly-mobile family.

For years after I told myself the story of these people: the wife was concerned the children weren’t eating right and were getting into mischief while she was in bed recovering from the birth. Her mother was her best friend and lived with the family. The mother thought the husband a little too demanding: All those children! Leave my daughter alone for heaven’s sake! But the wife loved the husband, loved the children, was touchingly grateful for the life they all led.

Now it turns out I had it all wrong. According to new research, this is a portrait of death. New theories insist the woman is dead, and the child and woman to the right of the painting are recent additions to the family. Sir Richard Saltonstall is holding the hand of his deceased wife, while Wife Number Two gloats and displays her rather surprised and perplexed infant.

Saltonstall can’t let go. His children from the dead woman cling to their father and each other. The dead woman looks up at them with longing and what I can only describe as patience. To me she looks exceptionally worn out; perhaps she did die in childbirth, hence the way she will not acknowledge the usurper and her healthy baby.

The records say Saltonstall eventually was one of the early American colonizers along with John Winthrop. There is no mention of the first wife accompanying him, because by that time she was dead. In reality I suppose he had to let go of everything dear to him: his lands, his country, his comfort, his sense of the tried and true. I couldn’t follow the story of where this picture was discovered or even the “truth” of its perceived meaning and history. Something tells me these theories are wrong. I don’t believe the strong woman on the right in her Madonna-like pose is his wife at all. She is too stern, too separate. She would never have allowed such an unflattering or divisive portrait to hang on the manor walls, forever proclaiming her an outsider.

And yet, whoever she is, she is to me in conspiracy with the white-faced woman on the bed. She too, has agreed to wear white and to pass the red vitality of life onto the next generation. The children, the bed hangings, the baby’s bunting are steeped in red. The women wear white for purity, for mourning, for sacrifice; red dye was expensive, it cost a large fortune for all those millions upon millions of cochineal beetles crushed for a single drop of colorant. Only Sir Saltonstall defies the convention of red and white, and like any male bird in full plumage, sports the human equivalent of feathers in his elegant blue stockings and a gilt-embroidered coat. In his pyramid of a black hat, he is the top of the hierarchy; if he opens his hands, he lets go of the whole charade.

What has always fascinated me most about this picture is the modern and honest complexity of the caught expressions: the children are bright but resigned. “Parents,” they seem to say. The wife on the bed is perhaps saying, “Don’t let Johnnie eat too much jam and he has a geography lesson at four.” And Saltonstall simply seems annoyed that his wife isn’t up and about running the household like clockwork. Of all the faces, the one I love best is the baby. “See?” he seems to say. “We’re all crazy here! How’d I get born into this family?” His little face seems wise beyond his few brief days or minutes on earth. “We’re all the same, me and you,” he says to me. “We may be four hundred years apart, but nothing ever changes.”

Which is why I have decided to not let go of my private interpretation of this painting. Whether new research in the future will prove me right or even further from the “truth” of its origins and meaning, I need the mythology I have created from this group. I need to think there were families that had thoughts and emotions and routines and changes of fortune no different from those of today. There is a security in this picture I crave and admire and I do not want to let it go. After nearly thirty years, I cannot change the story because the story found its way into my sense of self and did its alchemical work to change me. One year after I saw it, I decided to become a writer.

All that from a single card! Inner Outings is a great package—highly recommended!

Tip of the Day: Pair a writing prompt with your favorite work of art. Freewrite and see what happens.

Freewriting: Requires No Lessons

Last Sunday my writer’s group tried something we hadn’t done for a long time: freewrite together. Because I keep files of “word prompts” and pictures for freewriting at home, it was easy for me to bring both to the group. Just before I left home I chose two at random: the phrase: “Requires no lessons” that I paired with a photograph of a hand holding up to the sunlight a honeycomb shaped like a Grecian urn.

We gave ourselves exactly thirty minutes to write in silence. Afterwards we read our writing aloud and as always when we try this, I was stunned by what we accomplished in such a short time.

Other than with group members, I don’t usually share my unedited, unpolished, and very repetitive writing, but today I want to take a risk and include you in the group. The following is what I wrote raw, ignoring my ice coffee and using my favorite fountain pen:

This much I know about bees: The bees require no lessons on honey-making. It’s just something they do like breathing or swallowing. They are raised from the larvae stage by grown, adult worker bees who buzz and hum over the bee nursery, feeding them pollen, fanning them with their wings, singing them bee lullabies for all I know. The tiny bees mature in their wax cells, growing in golden light, their entire world a place the color of honey; their early lives are bathed in sweetness. They dream unaware of the harsh battles their queen endured to bring them to life. The queen is their mother and she is aeons apart from them in her uniqueness, her special status as royalty. When they emerge full-grown, they are made of honey, it is in their bee blood, it is in every cell of their bodies. The first thing they do upon seeing daylight is to fly outward, away from the hive to collect the ingredients to make more honey. Freed from the responsibilities and trauma of queen-hood, they simply fly out of the hive and return to the hive, making honey, raising more young in their own turn and time. There is no question of “how” or “why.” They live the ultimate bee-ingness of bee-ness. The only thing that is ever asked of them is a willingness to defend the hive, to sting an intruder and to mysteriously accept that to attack and defend is to die. The stinger, once used, pulls from their bodies and leaves an irreparable, incurable wound.

Once, and only once, I was stung as a child by a bee. I was about eleven and I was in the backyard of our house in the California San Fernando valley. My parents had purchased the house because it was the only one on the street with mature trees still on the property. The housing development had been carved from farmland, the old farmer and his wife still lived in the original farm house that backed onto our yard. Perhaps that’s why the elms and mulberries, the figs and apricots had been left intact. In a shift from open plowed fields they had been the survivors of a sale that may have made the farmers a small fortune but was also the beginning of why the San Fernando valley today is an expensive, over-crowded and uncomfortable place to live. The last trees were however in our yard alone, and their blossoms, I am sure, attracted the bees. I was never afraid of them, never was one to go , “Oh, bee—help!” and I would never dream of hurting one. Yet the day I stepped on a bee and it stung my toe, I can still remember the excruciating pain and the horrible sight of the bee separating from its stinger; the bee dying slowly, the stinger lodged in my toe, the bee throbbing and finally quieting, the bee dying and my terrible guilt and my terrible pain. I don’t know how long it lasted. I pulled the stinger from my foot; my mother made a paste of baking soda, her cure for everything. When it was over she went back to her book and I hopped one-legged to the darkened living room where the drapes were gold silk and the entire room was the same color as the honey I imagined the bee producing and the same color as the pollen I remembered coating its furry legs. The entire episode seemed yellow to me. The sting was not as severe as I would have thought it could be. I suppose I quickly forgot it, read a book of my own, was forever more careful walking through summer grass in bare feet. What did I learn that day except that life was arranged strangely, that bees could die simply for drawing their swords in self-defense?

It required no lessons to observe that life went on in my house no different from the day before: my one-year-old brother crawled and chewed his way through the house; my mother hid in her room and read library books; my father demanded ironed socks; and the gold drapes gave the impression the house was bathed in honey. If only that had been true. If only we were born without stingers, and if only we had the kind that could only be used once.

Pain requires no lessons; kindness rarely comes naturally. The bees manufacture honey and we manufacture problems more complicated than the multiple cells of the hive. For a long time I have wondered what is the difference between humans and animals, humans and insects, humans and anything else at all. And this I think is the difference: we require lessons, we cannot make honey on our own. We are too smart, too dumb, too helpless to do anything but learn, again and again and again until we come up with honey and still we ask: “Where the hell did that come from?”

Thought for the day: What in your writing “requires no lessons”?