In Real Time, vol. 11

bohemian suburbanite

[Image: Still Life with Flowers & Fruit, c. 1728, Jan van Huysum, discovered by the fine folks at Ekstasis. Public domain; I figure. Look at that curly kale leaf in the lower corner: unobtrusive, holding its space, doing its job. I empathize with that kale.]

What a delight last week to have a feature in Ekstasis Magazine’s Weekend Edition; I’m over there speaking about the task of the Christian artist in a way that, I hope, will be resonant for the non-Christian artist and really also for the non-artist Christian:

We cannot keep mixing up the externals, the piece of performance art that is a career, with the sustained, focused, determined practice of a craft. We can, and will have to, rebuild bohemia in suburbia. We can seize the structured lines of the purely practical and insist on limning them with beauty. We can embrace the quirky and the unworldly while also cultivating the steady predictability that helps our lives bear fruit. We can accept, at the same time, both order and surprise. In these ways, we can and should reconcile these supposed antagonists. Along the way, we may need to let go of some unnecessary things.

The particular “unnecessary thing” explored in the piece is a desk I used to own: but really not so much the desk itself as the mental phantasm it represented, of a certain kind of writer working at a certain kind of desk. It was that phantasm, not the desk itself, that had to go. And losing it was what Chardin calls a passive diminishment: the kind of choice that you only partially make, but really circumstance makes it for you, rather than the kind of choice where you have full agency and full scope. Passive diminishment is probably a salutary dunking for the old aggrandized ego, though at the time we hate it. Because at the time we hate it.

Speaking of which, because of the brevity of the piece I didn’t so much get to explore the multivalence of the desk—the times when creative work did go well there, even triumphantly well; the other good things it helped me accomplish, like editing for my community or freelance work to help support my family; above all the significant self-sacrifice put into it by my brilliant husband, who uncomplainingly carried the desk (which, mercifully, came apart into two parts, top and base; which, all told, must have weighed well north of 200 pounds) anywhere I told him I wanted it to go, who stoically loaded it into the truck every single solitary one of the many times we moved, up until that last trek, when it simply would not fit the moving pod’s weight and space limits.

All that labor, all that love—for no purpose? No, but to less purpose than there should have been, maybe? Were we holding space for the future in a dry season—or was I, though in metaphor, merely asking my spouse to carry the weight of all the work I was as-yet hesitant to do? Certainly desk and myth had themselves tangled up together in me in a way that required a healing. I chose to see the loss of both as a kind of divine surgery. But surely this is excessive tenderness over a mere material thing? Possibly the person evincing a contemplative-realist disposition in this story is not me at all, with all my high-level handwringing and fretting, but rather my husband, “content to do humble tasks” until the greater purpose of things-as-they-are might be revealed.

Anyway, the essay also shows up in Ekstasis’s print Issue 10, “Tending the Garden of the Future,” which I hope you’ll want to check out.