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Artist’s Voice

Welcome to our Artist’s Voices feature. This feature spotlights the thoughts and experiences of creative and performing artists from around the world. Enjoy! If you’d like to contribute a piece, we’d welcome your contribution.

Death by Collaboration

By Janis Lull

A lit­tle while ago, my three-year-old grand­daugh­ter woke up in the mid­dle of the night, sob­bing, “I don’t want to die.” This was a hard moment for her par­ents, but death wor­ries us all, often at incon­ve­nient times. For me, liv­ing the artist’s life means not only deal­ing with my fears of aging and death when they pop up, but also choos­ing these as cre­ative sub­jects. I choose to con­cen­trate on death and dying more than other peo­ple might, and that feels to me like a writerly choice, a duty to the writ­ing life.

Of course, I’m not alone in think­ing artists needs to con­front death. It’s one of the Big Sub­jects. In Philip Larkin’s great death poem, “Aubade”: “It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, / Have always known, know that we can’t escape, / Yet can’t accept.” Other con­tem­po­rary poets have approached it more obliquely. “There’s a thread you fol­low,” writes William Stafford in “The Way It Is”:

Tragedies hap­pen; peo­ple get hurt
or die; and you suf­fer and get old.
Noth­ing you can do can stop time’s unfold­ing.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

For Larkin, death — one’s own per­sonal death — is “plain as a wardrobe.” No con­so­la­tion in sight. For Stafford, there’s a “thread” to hang on to, some­thing very slight, but com­fort­ing, some­how. I doubt that either poet could have adopted the other one’s point of view for more than a few sec­onds. Larkin saw death as a hor­ror; Stafford, a mystery.

I admit I some­times look at how other poets attack this sub­ject to post­pone attack­ing it on my own. Writ­ing about death is a choice and a duty, but it’s also some­thing I want to put off. Don’t you? Look­ing at the work of other poets lets me see whose ideas most resem­ble mine. But I can’t just select the Larkin approach or the Stafford approach. Imi­ta­tion will take me only so far, and I need all the help I can get.

Lately, I’ve turned to the visual arts, and in par­tic­u­lar, to a cer­tain kind of “col­lab­o­ra­tion” with visual artists on the sub­ject of death, among oth­ers. I’m not sure I really “col­lab­o­rate” with any­one; I couldn’t write a poem with another per­son, for exam­ple. My work with painter Sidne Teske has just begun, and it involves my adding text to pic­tures that are already fin­ished. If we do pro­duce the series of “works” we have in mind, what kind of works will they be, any­way? I’ve seen works where the artist is both the visual cre­ator and the writer. In those cases, the text is clearly one pos­si­ble “voice” of the pic­ture or the pic­ture one pos­si­ble “vision” of the text. A mar­ried cou­ple I know pro­duces exhibits like that. On the other hand, I don’t want to be the voice of Sidne’s paint­ings; some­times I feel antag­o­nis­tic toward them, or rather toward what I take to be their atti­tude. But the kind of writ­ing I have in mind isn’t quite ekphra­sis, either, in which a writer com­ments on a work of visual art, per­haps one from the dis­tant past, as in Keats’s “Ode on a Gre­cian Urn.” Sidne and I are con­tem­po­raries, and we talk about our project. “Col­lab­o­ra­tion” will have to do.

“I Once Had a Life of My Own” © Sidne Teske. Used by permission.

One of the works we plan to col­lab­o­rate on is Sidne’s paint­ing, “I Once Had a Life of My Own.” It’s hard for me to guess right now how my voice, my text, will sound, jux­ta­posed to this paint­ing. I sus­pect when that voice comes, it won’t sound like accep­tance, because the pic­ture doesn’t rep­re­sent accep­tance to me. The fig­ure in the fore­ground seems defeated, look­ing back nos­tal­gi­cally over what she once had, or was, or could do. Like Larkin, she “can’t escape / Yet can’t accept,” and her visions of her younger life don’t make the accep­tance any eas­ier. This is the dan­ger of nos­tal­gia, and the rea­son the poet D.H. Lawrence felt betrayed when he found him­self giv­ing in to it. Nos­tal­gia made him angry, in fact. (See his poem, “Piano.”)

There are some beau­ti­ful images in this pic­ture, yet I may find myself mak­ing an angry response, not because I don’t ever feel nos­tal­gic for my younger self, but pre­cisely because I do.

“Womb” © Sidne Teske. Used by permission.

Here is another of Sidne’s paint­ings that she clas­si­fies as being “about death.” At first glance, how­ever, it would appear to be more about birth. One sees a head, con­fined, the way the head of a fetus is con­fined when it is ready to be born. The fin­gers clutch­ing the head seem to indi­cate that the poor fetus has a headache about it all. Yet I find that, for me, this image does evoke dying, and in a way that opens more pos­si­bil­i­ties than I see in the other pic­ture. “Womb” (right) sug­gests that dying might mean another sort of birth, or per­haps that death brings a release from a life that has grown too con­fin­ing. As a writer, I find myself inclined to oppose or argue with the ideas in Sidne’s first pic­ture, but to explain, or even to become a sym­pa­thetic “voice” for this one.

As I men­tioned, Sidne and I have just begun our work together, and I really have no idea what the results will look like. I imag­ine a paint­ing on a page or on a wall and a lit­tle poem on a card hung next to the paint­ing. Will we use more text, try­ing to explain our pur­poses in col­lab­o­rat­ing? Will Sidne paint some­thing new after she sees how I have reacted to her cur­rent work? I do know is that so far it feels good to be explor­ing this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject with another artist work­ing in another medium. Death is always soli­tary, I sup­pose, but it is also always shared.

Janis Lull can be reached at janislull@gmail.com. Sidne Teske can be reached at  www.sidneteske.com and rampchik@yahoo.com.