To Grieve An Artist

Long-told is the complicated affair between the artist and the muse, grotesquely entwined with longing, lust, power, and a myriad of discourses debating its significance to the human relationship. Therefore understood is the significance of creative expression to the human condition, our lives informing the art we produce and the adjunct sketches of the lives we pursue. It is through the creative mind that we connect ourselves to the world around us; it is how we carve our marks into the stones of humanity. But it is when we impose creativity upon another creator that our stories become entangled. It is when we extend our art beyond ourselves, and connect them with an artist alike, that we have scratched the marble of musing. It is then that the story of the artist and the muse becomes inescapable.

I am a writer; I bury my roots in the ground and extend them into the soil through the words I write. It is through story that I anchor myself to the world around me, and consequently how the world takes me on. I’ve written stories since before I even consciously knew what I was doing. I was a mere six years old when I drafted up my first short story about my black cat’s voyage to a fantastical world filled to the brim with witches and warlocks galore—and she’d saved the day before anyone marked her missing. Lisa Cron talks of the human’s innate understanding of story in Story Genius, the conceptions of climax and resolution etched into our minds before we could bend our lips to pronounce them. This much is clear to me, not only in my first-grade stories, but in the way that we, as people, take in our surroundings through others’ stories.

Story is my choice of art medium. For others, it is sculpting, calligraphy, baking, crocheting, or producing—but I capture my inspiration in words. That’s why it’s so easy for me to describe the first artist with whom I crossed paths, and why it was so easy to articulate how he made me feel with metaphors better suited for a Dahl novel. His name was Brandon, a year my senior, his face carved well by whoever studied him, colorful in his speak but more-so on the canvases he constructed, and ridiculously apt at bending lines on paper to make photorealistic pictures before himself. I prided myself in the fact that I was more educationally gifted than him—though, I was then robotically conditioned to outdo my competition by our educational structure. But I mentally maintained my position of intellectual superiority; it made me feel better about the drawings that he could, yet I could not, create. He further constructed his creative expressions through instrument, sweet melodies erupting from his delicate finger placements and the ways in which the notes molded to his wishes. Warm voices would croon late at night in Brandon’s half-bedroom half-studio, the sweetness of saxophones embracing the ears as his charcoals and pencils glided over the page without a lick of resistance. How could a storyteller not swoon for a boy so easy on the eyes and paper? He was the perfect character about whom to write a novel, the perfect model of whom to gaze upon with intrigue, lust, and wonder alike.

Naturally, an artist is all the more fascinating when they’re popular. We believe their paintings are more valuable, because why else would all these people be so enthralled? With Brandon, it was the same. His drawings made their rounds. His joy made its friends. His jokes were the magnet that drew people in, and his smile was the hook-line-sinker. Brandon was the artist whom everyone admired, not just for his art, but because he was more than what he made. If it were not for the boundless charisma with which he approached the world, his artwork would cease to breathe life into its viewers. With Brandon, his art became of him, and I, like everyone else, wanted more than just the artwork. I wanted the artist. No, I didn’t just want the artist. I didn’t envy everyone who loved Brandon, because he didn’t care for them either. No, it wasn’t just that. I envied his art. I wanted him to breathe life into me the way he did his drawings. I wanted to be delicately understood, thought, planned, sketched, and filled to the brim with his colorful palette, his well-trimmed charcoal-stained hands, and his most intimate brushstrokes. I, desperately, wanted to be the artist’s muse.

I didn’t make my first friend until fifth grade. It was preceding and up until then that my home life was predominated by alcohol-scented fits of rage, scraping the couch crevices for spare rent money, and much time spent befriending the cotton-stuffed animal collection lining my west bedroom wall.

In fifth grade, that fated year I made that first friend, there was one monumental day at recess. I’ll paint the picture: it was sunny, though a few clouds dotted the sky. There was nothing unordinary about the day from an observer’s perspective: most of the kids were playing, whether it was over the basketball courts, on the swings, or pacing the track. I sat alone at the bench, contemplating why making friends was so much easier for everyone else. The bench felt like a spectacle: I was the only one missing someone to play a game with, and my ever-lasting seat seemed to let everyone know of such a fact. It was humiliating, but where else was there to sit? So there I sat, mulling over what had brought me here. It seemed simple: if my life at home was so terrible, and my time at school was so lonely, then there must have necessarily been something I was doing wrong. Consequently, I changed my approach.

I lived in a home filled with conflict, so I learned to manage, and when I heard the term ‘conflict management’ for the first time in therapy, I rolled my eyes because I’d already learned how to manage conflict. You subdue your personality a little bit more each day, such that the screams around you aren’t as loud. You remain quiet just long enough to dodge the imminent rampage, and you stay out of the way when the next obstacle comes barreling down the hallway. If you stay out of sight, I’d learned, you don’t get hit by stray bullets.

I knew my approach to social dynamics had to change, too. If nobody felt so compelled to sit with me during lunchtime, I’d make myself more compelling. Crushing on boys was enough to make me different, especially in free-for-all social structures under the monstrous evangelical umbrella that the world is, so that was the first part of me that had to go. The next was any semblance of standing out: I needed to study the way everyone else looked, acted, talked, and I needed to mimic a happy medium of everyone else. When you become like everyone else, you become desirable.

By the time I fashioned the perfect façade of personhood, I found myself surrounded by an amalgamation of people whom I would now never seek to attract. Then, though, they felt like the consummate collection of showings for my efforts to construct the most personable of personalities. It quickly rang true for me that, with each step I took away from the life and circumstances I’d been dealt, the closer I became to other people. With each successive departure from those things that made me into myself, the easier it became to adopt what others enjoyed, instead, and my consequent friendships followed. Whether those friendships were genuine, or merely the work of my intentionally-accidental, ever-morphing front of person, is something I may still contest to this day, but that is neither here nor there. Those friendships, if they may be called that, were more evidently social experiments born of my personal misgivings. I suppose that, when it came down to it, there was nothing genuine, loving, nor artistic about them in nature, except for a particular one. Yes, of course—Brandon was one of such friendships.

“Don’t you think I should make the shadow a little darker here?” he asked me, pointing to the east side of his sketch. It was some cartoonish cyborg from a program I was unfamiliar with, but it looked rather excellent to me. I did think the shadow should be darker, though.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “If you think so, you should.”

“But I don’t know. That’s what I asked you.”

“I guess so. I mean, you thought about it enough to ask the question, so you probably think it should be darker anyways. So, yeah, you should.”

He sighed, clearly dissatisfied with my answer. “Why can’t you just say what you think?”

“I did. You should do it.”

“No, you assumed what I thought, and repeated it back to me.”

“You’re the artist, dude. Why does it matter what I think about it?”

“You don’t have to be an artist to know if the picture looks good, dude.” He never liked when I called him ‘dude.’ He said that’s what he and his friends called each other, which made me wonder what I was supposed to be. He hadn’t done much to make me think we were anything but.

At first, Brandon was like the rest of my friends. He was someone I studied the interests and thoughts and behaviors of, and I acted accordingly. But as I became closer to him, I found that it became more and more difficult to see him as a simple friend, something that was then so clear-cut to me. I knew he made me feel different than did my other friendships, but I’d never known anything but studying and reshaping myself accordingly. So I continued to employ my social strategies of camouflage, because what else was there to do? Brandon was an artist, which I understood, because I was a storyteller. Simple people are easier to write stories about. Therefore, simple people must be easier to draw pictures of. So I’d make myself simpler, and I would bend to his brushstrokes, so I’d be easier to paint. I’d be the perfect muse, because an easy muse makes a satisfied artist.

When I first dedicated myself to the art of musing, I became infatuated with the feelings it evoked. To be the object of study, by whatever means it is accomplished, is a deeply gratifying experience—I felt seen, I felt understood, I felt desirable. When he commanded me to pose with my legs more outstretched, I complied; when he asked me to adjust the angle of my head, I smiled and did so; when he reached up onto the podium and tweaked me himself, I felt honored to have been caressed by the touch of such an artist. Nothing from the outside could penetrate the trance of obsession I felt for him. I’d built the walls too high, too strong. There was nothing I could see but him—not even my own reflection.

When Brandon did finally leave, as he was karmically bound to, I didn’t realize until I held up a mirror that he’d chiseled me down to a brittle stone. He’d carved out every line of my body to his artistic vision, to his liking, to his fervor, and without his touch, I was no longer art. I looked at what he’d made of me, and I was ill with contempt for the featureless thing that stood before me. Devoid of personhood, pale with the agony that carving incites, threatening to come crumbling to pieces with so much as a gust of wind. I was not the pristine marble statue he’d promised to make of me. I was a rough draft, an artistic experiment, a sketch, even; I’d strived to be his masterpiece, but he had decided I was not the perfect muse. What was I without my artist? How would I find meaning in the atrocity before me—within me?

The more time I spent without Brandon, the more I longed for his eventual return. I thought that, once this charade was up, he would come waltzing back into my arms and re-imbue my life with all the meaning I convinced myself he’d brought to it. I pined for the artist I’d lost, begging for the sketch I was to be brought to fruition. After all the time I’d spent reshaping myself to others’ likings, all the dedication I’d put into learning others’ ways, whereby I’d mimic them without error, all the love I’d convinced myself was before me—it all turned to dust. Suddenly, I was the same child, sitting on the bench alone, all over again. My years hacking at the stone of social dynamics had finally led me to a dead end, and that lingering fear bloomed into my childhood terrors of social rejection. I sank into a deep well of desperation and longing, and the further I fell, the longer I spent wishing for Brandon’s answer to what about my musing I needed to fix. The more time moved away from me, the more his absence pained me; the more I lost the shape of my own body, the further from the marble I became. The shapes and lines of my body were no longer where my mind resided, but a broken home from which I fervently ran. I sprinted further and further away from my corporeal form, and soon I became so far removed from it that I became an artist. An artist looking upon a stone—one that had crumbled to pieces.