I don't have my mom here to ask how it was for her as she pushed her last starling out the door. She was 64 by then. This astonishes me. She didn't need to work and she didn't have the internet to just go ahead and publish her masterpiece, Random House be damned. I'm wondering if her blue moods took hold on this desperate hydroplane toward revealed beauty.
The coupling of work to public attention to measure worth is a theory many an artist ponders to her dying day. My mother, if she did let it go superficially, may have harbored its sails and anchors deep in the underbelly that plagued her unremitting as she pulled into the dank unknown.
A writer, by nature and culture, is one who stands outside the mortal beast and with her stylus pokes its hide to let contagion in. It would make sense for her to give no credence to rumors of praise or neglect from the world she visits with her scepticism.
But sense is rational and common. Consciousness intuitive and rare.
Some will tell you all of us are born to be artists. If this is true, where do some find the grit to claim their inheritance while the rest make things that challenge nothing and no one? Could I lay down my stylus filled with ink, invisible to many, indelible to me?
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