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| "Guarded Opening"* |
So already, last weekend, when I learned that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had been elected President and Vice President, I, like so many other Americans, sensed a guarded opening, a possible way out of the pressing darkness and despair that have dominated our national psyche for months.
The paintings of my husband Scott Ketcham were relatively fresh in my mind as I first reacted to the news of the election results. Recently, I'd been looking at Scott's updated web site because I was thinking of writing about his most recent work, even though it will not be on display the weekend before Thanksgiving: because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 4th Floor Artists Association's annual open studios will not be happening this year.
So now that you know about all those heads, it's time to get back to those election results. As I contemplated them with Scott's recent paintings in mind, I found myself identifying with the central figure in "Guarded Opening" above. How did I know her subtle, tentatively optimistic smile suited me? Maybe it was because for the first time in months, my facial muscles had relaxed enough to hold my forehead's worry lines just a little less deeply and firmly in place. Maybe it was because I suddenly felt myself breathe deeply and exhale fully.
That nest-like ring of faces surrounding the central figure in Scott's painting got me thinking about another potential symbol for myself: the bird who labored "carefully but hopelessly" in Louise Glück's "Nest."** In that first rush of post-election relief, I could easily imagine myself as Glück's poet/bird whose "mind grew sharper" as she "peered out" of the nest she'd finally managed to construct late but not never.
And frankly, in the early innings of digesting that election news, all I could manage to do was peer out from that fearful, anxious inner place that was so familiar to me. I spent Saturday afternoon sitting at my dining room table cutting out pictures of birds for a project I might do someday, and listening more than looking at the television screen as it streamed images of euphoric Americans celebrating the Biden-Harris victory in various cities. Eventually, I experienced those first glimmers of feeling that the news was good, not just understanding that the news was good. But I still stayed at the table.
So many people have already written eloquently about their and others' post-election emotions that I'm not fully sure why I'm bothering to add my own voice right now. In the last few days, multiple opinion pieces in The Boston Globe have featured the sober language of lightness and darkness (highlighted in blue in the adjacent photo), which has certainly resonated with me. The final sentence of Adrian Walker's November 9 column especially resonated with me: "We're lighter. For now, that's more than enough."
And
we are lighter. So given that others' words have already resonated with me, what can I add? I guess I'm grappling with some of the questions raised by these pieces. I'm wondering if and when "lighter" will become "light." I'm wondering for how long "lighter" will be light "enough." I'm wondering about the things that continue to keep us concealed in the darkness or weighted down--how similar and different they are for all of us, and to what degree they will continue to shape our outlooks and energy levels. After all, we're still in the midst of a pandemic.
I'm also wondering what Scott's paintings might have to say about those questions. After all, light and dark, heaviness and lightness often manifest in comparison to each other. And those many heads--each perhaps thinking something different, or perhaps not thinking at all--might be telling us something about how we we navigate the demands of tough, discouraging times, and even how we create them.
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| "Embrace Your Ancestry"*** |
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| "Circle of Selves"**** |
This year, though, I'm seeing these multi-headed paintings differently because of some the titles Scott's given to them--not that he's particularly invested in the titles he assigns. This week, I'm inclined to understand them as representing the many selves that compose each of us. In the adjacent painting "Circle of Selves," the three heads/figures seem restfully, fluidly content and successfully co-existent; subtle greens and reds wrest them from the skeletal possibilities of the heads in "Embrace Your Ancestry."
So with that idea in mind, I begin to imagine my own various selves/heads, all of which think, strive, and speak up: there's the daughter head, the wife head, the friend head, the good-citizen consumer of news head, . . . I could go on. Given my propensity to think a lot--often too much--and to say what's on my mind, my head is full of verbal heads who often contend for space and dominance.
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| "Cable Stitch"***** |
My favorite of all of Scott's multi-headed paintings, though, is "Cable Stitch." Perhaps Scott called it that because the most basic cable design requires six stitches, and there are six heads in this painting.
This, of course, got me thinking about Skylla, the six-headed monster that ate six of Odysseus' men in The Odyssey. It's good to remember that multi-headed creatures do not always embody beneficence.
"Cable Stitch" suggests to me another interpretation of all those heads. Maybe rather than representing selves, they represent the consuming problems that fill our heads. Here I am this morning balancing the demands of several "heads"--the head that's angry and worried about Donald Trump's attempts to stay in office, the head that's worrying about taking my dad to a doctor's appointment on what will be his first outing beyond the walls of his senior living community since the pandemic began, the head that promised to draft a fundraising appeal by tomorrow morning--and that's lacking any ideas for how to begin it. Some of these problems are more important than others; some of these are more in my control than others. But they all are taking up headspace.
As
I look at the relatively monochromatic group tethered to a central point in "Cable Stitch," I'm reminded of a bunch
of unusual balloons or a bouquet of strange flowers. These associations allow me
to think of the space, the opening, that would be created if one of these weighty
balloons or flowers were to separate or lift away from the others. Those remaining would all have more space, more breathing room; it would ease something, even if it didn't completely
change the tensions and dynamics among the group--just like last
weekend's election results didn't flick a switch and, with one dose of
light, transform the tensions and dynamics that characterize our
country.
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| A Head from Scott's Collection, in Nature |
It wasn't that I'd been divested of the worries that are always in the room for me --I still was concerned about the emotional and physical welfare of my elderly parents, whom COVID-19 is preventing me from seeing very often; I still was worrying about several friends who are grieving over the recent deaths of loved ones; I still was concerned about the the direction the national pandemic numbers are heading--and worried that pandemic fatigue might cause all of us to forget to do what we need to do to keep ourselves and one another safe.
But still, something was better.
Actually, the first encouraging development had been on election day
itself: there had been no violence, confrontation, and death at the polls. The second was on Saturday afternoon: no one had driven a car into a crowd of
revelers.
There's so much that's wrong right now that needs our energy and attention. That's why it's really good news that Biden and Harris won, even if the fact of their election can't create a completely heady feeling (yes, that pun was intended). But like Adrian Walker said, "We're lighter. For now, that's more than enough." And anything that gives us hope and energy is good: we'll need a lot of both in the weeks and years ahead, not to mention plenty of headspace.
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