Touchstone: What Do You Love When No One Is Watching?

Our garage flooded a couple of weeks ago in the heavy rains our county so desperately needed (and still needs). This is a new house to us, so we did not know that a river would seep under the side door and swiftly cross the garage. The garage has been the secret weapon of our move, which is to say, every time someone says, “you just moved in?” with surprise because there aren’t boxes everywhere, we say, “You should see the garage.”

It held boxes of books that did not yet have shelf space, boxes of kids’ toys, old family letters and photographs and diplomas, and my father’s art collection, such as it is, which I have not dealt with since he died except to haul it around with me.

The call from Angie came as I was returning home Saturday morning from a meeting. Flood. The dread of hauling everything out and getting it out of its frames and properly dried, of what would be ruined, of the enormous amount of sheer work, not to mention loss, that had just been added to my brief weekend overwhelmed me. We ended up with stacks of paintings in our living room and art pieces on the counters, piano, floor, pressed below blotting paper to draw out the moisture, with household items stacked on top to weight it down.

In this process, I hung a few more unsoggy pieces of my father’s collection on our walls. At one spot in the kitchen, I tried several different heavily-framed paintings until at last I hung up a 1913 pencil drawing I do not remember from my childhood. And I discovered something: I love this drawing. It is finely done, pleasing to my eye, alive on the page.

But what interested me the most was the ease and purity of my love of this work of art. Many people in my family are artists with their own strong aesthetics. I have steered clear of having my own out of a kind of fear of getting it wrong. In other words, I’ve approached a lot of art from the outside in. I see it in museums, I get educated about it, I am brought to understand that a lot of people have valued it or value it now even if during the artist’s lifetime none of it sold.

Sure, I’ve had my breath taken away by art, but I’ve never confidently fallen in love without an awareness of all those other matters. It’s been a Jane-Austen-type of love—social strings attached. This was a different love. I was happy to have this in my kitchen and I really didn’t care if it was worth a great deal or nothing. (I have not had it appraised, so I have no idea.) If other people loved it, too, or reviled it or worse, held it in only a mild, dismissive contempt, it mattered not to me. I hung it for myself and kept it there because it pleased me.

And it became clear to me that it is time to live this way in relation to all art and literature. It has become a touchstone for how I want to feel about my own work and everything with which I surround myself. I want to love it in some selfish, bodily way that disregards the feverish, measuring world around me.