INSPIRATION ENTRY #5

SCENE ONE from A Woman's Life in Pieces, Patrice's one-woman show

DEATH TRANSFORMS THE MOTHER

My first memory is of having a crayon in my hand. No, not one crayon, a whole fistful. The joy of striking paper! Then gliding color upon color across the page.

Art may not be one of life’s essentials, but it’s always been the thing I like best. Approaching the cusp of middle age, I want to turn and return to it. Making art is better than sleep. Better than good food. Better even than a long hilly ride on my bike.

Give me a pair of scissors, a stack of old magazines, a pot of glue, and I’ve got all I need. I can make something. My mind gets quiet—maybe the only time it does.

Not even a lack of critical acclaim, a failure to thus far succeed in the grand art world diminishes my joy in making pictures. It does bite at my heart though. My collages aren’t meant to get shoved into drawers to become mildewed, you know.

The imagination is supernatural. Sometimes pictures make themselves. I look away for a moment, look back again, and viola, an image that wasn’t there before.

If I try making a picture with my mind glued to me, the memory of my mother gets in: “Do something useful,” she says. “When did you last clean your oven? Dare I mention the bathroom?”

Useful? For god sake, is that the beginning-and-end-all to a woman’s life? Has my dead mother been looking in my dirty windows, seeing the truth of my life, that I’m more likely to make pictures than wipe down the stove after supper?

Last night, I had that dream again, the one that haunts me, the one I know by heart, the one I’ve given a name: “Death Transforms the Mother.” See, not too late for a happy childhood, now is it?

In the dream my mother doesn’t come home drunk and mean. She drifts in, sprinkling fairy dust, wearing a diaphanous gown—a bit over the top, nothing she’d have ever worn in real life.

Move from desk to sprinkle fairy dust, stand stage right

We sit on the sofa, eat Ritz crackers. She brushes my hair and calls me “Darling.”

Truth is, my mother loved me greatly and horribly, and dead as she may be, I am never entirely without her. Tired as I am of this story, it’s mine.

In my picture, the one I got up before dawn to work on, the Holy Mother, the dream mother, my transformed mother, is surrounded by light, but not some archaic light, no, not that story.

This light—the spinning light of a ferris wheel photographed at night. The light radiates out of a blue bowl. Trees behind, waves cresting. At the very center of the light is the holy mother. She might be tinier than your little finger but her love, that’s larger than the mind, larger than failure, larger than which ever war we’re waging at the moment.

I’m no longer asleep, but am I still dreaming? I hear a voice, reminiscent of my mother’s. Though it couldn’t be. “Don’t let fear of insignificance stop you.” What the hell? I’m awake and I’m hearing voices. “If you want her, you’d better go. Take whichever road you choose. They all end at her bare feet.”

If I take a collection of random pieces, fragments of life—cresting waves, an Egyptian bowl, questions thought but never asked—fragments— which is all we have till the end, and rearrange them, could I make a new story?

Enough of the old order of things. Maybe that’s the problem with my life, along with a sagging chin, too much fat around the middle and not enough power to end world hunger. Maybe that’s the problem with the world, one of them.

We keep telling the same story. I want a new story, one in which everybody listens to the holy mind—their own and each other’s. Then kisses the ground.