I am attached to a mystical tangle of ribbons–other people’s dreams and desires. A flirtation. A wedding. Children. A funeral. And all over again. With blue eyes running along one thread, alcoholism another. Love is tangled in there too.
This is my 3x great grandfather’s house. I want to burrow into the collapse to find fragments of ribbons and broken dishes. I want to sleep in the overrun garden where narcissus mix with wild roses to listen for family spirits. I want to buy this property for no reason but the ancestral memories I half remember.
This grandfather was tied to a tree by his thumbs and whipped by the cruel man his father had hired him out to when he was six. He’d not been quick enough coming back from an errand. He stayed tied all day shoeless in the November cold. The man lashed him every time he passed while harvesting potatoes.
Grandfather spent his youth being “bound out” job to job and then to the Shakers. He ran away when they wouldn’t let him flirt with the girls.
The house he built, and the flowers Grandmother planted may go away, but I carry the threads and ribbons in my soul. I keep one of the bricks from the wreckage on my writing desk. There has never been a question in my mind, since embracing the call to write, that I would one day write a novel about my grandparents.
“None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when — like the artists of every age — captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colours and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.” Letter of John Paul II to Artists
Isn’t there something thrilling about the idea that God, through some mysterious inspiration, may tap our shoulder and ask us to birth beauty? Creatives are graced with a sense that we are given something from nothing. A blank page is miraculously filled with words or images. We take an idea, only just now occurring to us, and bring it into this dimension of reality. When we have taken our inspiration seriously enough, we sense the importance of it (or the goodness within it) even in its embryonic stages. Though our limited talents may always disappoint us, there is a sense that this idea, this vision was given as a gift — even if the gift appears humbler than others receive. Is any gift small if it is meant especially for us?
When we keep our eyes on the gift before us, we feel that expansive breath and excited heartbeat. It transports us to the heavens — if only for moments of time. I don’t know if everyone is gifted with such moments or if it is really only given to artists. I do know that we have a choice to accept the grace or not.
For twenty years I ran from God’s call on my life, like Jonah, and I too was swallowed by a whale. I had caused many storms and needed to be thrown overboard. I turned back to God and the creative call only after everything else that seemed more practical had failed.
But it doesn’t matter anymore. Saying yes to the art that God asks us to make puts us in a special mood — one that makes life very simple even when it’s difficult. Listen and obey.
Yet are artists selfish?
I don’t know. I’ve often wondered about people who say they have a calling. I’ve seen this “call” be sometimes weaponized, sometimes used as an excuse for neglecting those closest in the name of God.
“How good life is when one does something right and just!”
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
I read somewhere that Dostoevsky originally intended for The Brothers Karamazov to be three times as long as it actually turned out to be. If it had been, I definitely would have followed his characters to the end. Despite being a huge book with questions worth pondering for a lifetime, I was left aching to know how each of the brothers fared after the decisive events following the murder of their dissipated and malicious father. Boy, it must have taken a lot of alone time to write!
As a novelist I have to force myself to be alone to write. It’s not that I hate the idea of being alone. I love it. But … as artists we have to say no a lot. No to the people who love us and wish we’d call more. No to the husbands who wish we’d acknowledge them first thing in the morning instead of rushing past them to get in some writing before the kids and dogs wake.
If we’re not making a handsome living at our artistic vocation it can appear to be a fool’s errand. Isn’t it saintlier to serve others with our presence and maybe some fresh cooked pancakes? I used to hate the idea of serving God above all else — as if God were a selfish and egotistical slave master.
Making art is a strange thing. It can feel self-indulgent at times. It seems to serve only the artist, especially when the calling takes the artist into a private world for hours and days. Years go by and the artist may be preoccupied with the call, the words, the ideas, the images that God is pressing into his soul.
But saying yes to the creative call is like entering a sort of priesthood of beauty and truth. All vocations are like this.
“The particular vocation of individual artists decides the arena in which they serve and points as well to the tasks they must assume, the hard work they must endure and the responsibility they must accept. Artists who are conscious of all this know too that they must labor without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves. There is therefore an ethic, even a ‘spirituality’ of artistic service, which contributes in its way to the life and renewal of a people. It is precisely this to which Cyprian Norwid seems to allude in declaring that ‘beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up.’”
Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II
Alyosha Karamazov takes his calling literally and seriously. It is not enough for him to “give two roubles instead of ‘all,’ and only go to Mass instead of ‘following Him.’”
In Alyosha, Dostoevsky gives us the beautiful and ideal. He tells us that Alyosha is for him the hero of the story. He is the fulfillment of everything good that his mentor Father Zossima talks about. All of the other more troubled characters are drawn to him.
The artist’s most important job is to document beauty, not only the easy beauty of a sunrise, but also the beauty that so often arises after great suffering. Alyosha is the sunrise and sunset. His brothers are all of those in-between moments of recklessness and inner spiritual turmoil we experience in life.
Some people simply accept the gentle nudges of the Savior, some resist all the way to their graves, but those in-between people are the ones it’s so interesting to read and write about. Dimitri Karamazov lets his sensuous desires run amok in search of love and happiness, while Ivan, the intellectual middle brother, avoids intimacy and despairs at the suffering of innocent children under a “just” God. Both men suffer, but their suffering offers enlightenment and beauty if they will only accept it (as Alyosha does). Smerdyakov, the illegitimate half-brother, refuses God’s grace evidenced by his suicide.
The beauty of the story is not that we are given the answers to all mysteries, but that we are given the ‘beauty to enthuse us for work, and work to raise us up.’
There are some people who say being a Christian is as simple as doing what Jesus says. The What Would Jesus Do? crowd. As artists we are given the task of peeling the onion, of suffering dark nights and loneliness of the soul. Sure, we are also given sunrises and sunsets and these need to be captured enthusiastically as salves for humanity’s suffering. Jesus is all-knowing, all-loving goodness, truth and beauty — we mortals struggle.
I like to think that most people love children and puppies and sunsets. But some people go afar off track following an idea — a lesser idea that puts God in the passenger seat (or the trunk). I understand the impulse. Human theories are applauded and celebrated for being progressive paths to happiness and enlightenment, yet they so often fall flat. Many lead to great evil. I struggle to think of a single human achievement that has not come with an entire host of unintended consequences.
The celebration of something beyond us, bigger than us, more beautiful than us has brought us cathedrals. The celebration of us has brought us Walmart box stores. The Brothers Karamazov brings us before God with big human questions while so many other books talk about self-help and the sensual pleasures of this life and this life only.
True artists are not selfish for locking themselves away for hours (there is a time and place for family gatherings and playing with puppies of course). We need art like we need God—to help us remember our mission as humans to seek out truth, beauty and goodness in the midst of suffering.
And so, I come back to the beginning with my grandfather’s old house. I’m so grateful to the ancestors who tapped my shoulder in some mystical way and asked me to tell their story. A story of one small rural community deprived of many of their young men when Lincoln talked about a thanksgiving. I’m grateful to my family in the present for giving me the freedom and encouragement to explore the old ways alone and in reverent silence. And I’m grateful to the Catholic faith and John Paul II’s words in particular. Beauty in all its many forms is to be celebrated, not denied or feared.
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence.
Henry David Thoreau
As every creative knows, the first light your work sees in the real world brings on the jitters. After all, we do want people to like our babies. Today I’m grateful for my first Amazon review. Forgive my self-indulgence for sharing it here. I’m not pretending it’s a humble brag. I’m thrilled with it. :)
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliantly told, beautifully written, epically researched
Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2023
An epic tale of family, heartache, love and redemption that is exquisitely researched by a absolutely fine author. Any fan of historical fiction should put this award-winning book at the top of their gift giving list!
A Journey from Boyhood Innocence to War-Weary Self-Understanding and Hope
An epic tale of heroism, sacrifice, and family devotion
Farm boy Waldo Potter strives to save his father's impoverished upstate New York acreage as drums of war beat. When his Uncle Charles takes him under his wing, Waldo must navigate family resentments and tragic twists of fate at home and at the seat of war. By the Shores of Solon Pond captures the joys and hardships of rural life and is a tribute to America's rural small-town heritage, but, most of all, it is a tribute to one young man's sacrificial love for his family.
From the outset, Waldo suffers, under the yoke of his sad family, a kind of entrapment in a life of struggle and impossible challenges, caused mainly by the sloth of Waldo's father. Of all the farms in the vicinity, his is the saddest and least productive even though he has three sons and a devoted wife.
After many failures and humiliations, Waldo is quick to join the military to fight in the Civil War, getting a shocking view of the wider world and a new perspective on his family and their situation in this poignant coming-of-age story.
Oh Adrienne, this is just achingly beautiful and apt and timely. I struggle with those feelings of self-indulgence, even though my husband is so supportive of my art and my parents always were (I feel incredibly fortunate) - but I still wrestle with that tendency to go into the art-place in my mind, or the research-space or wherever it is that my curiosity is leading me. Thank you for all these reminders...what an incredible testament your work is to the heritage of your family. And to carry all the beauty on amidst the sorrow! This is our work, and it's so, so hard.