Family.
Willa Cather, in her Pulitzer Prize winner, One of Ours, describes the harmonic dissonance accompanying the sense of home and family:
"He both loved and hated to come home. He was always disappointed, and yet
he always felt the rightness of returning....even when it broke his spirit and humbled
his pride, he felt it was right that he should be thus humbled" (65).
The closer one comes to the core of us, the stronger our tolerance for that which is contrary to our best expectations in human relations. Our boundary lines blur. It's the price we pay, I suppose, for the comfort of commitment or more accurately, a sense of belonging.
The essence of family is a state of belonging. With the knowledge of where one comes from, and one's place in the world despite requisite wanderings, it seems anything is possible. Strength of character and self-effacing vulnerability are not obstacles in the world of family; they scream from the pores of the skin and from the paint on the walls. The exact pitch of the screams may differ from household to household, yet they are there in each family. Tension and release in every breath.
To be so close is to risk belonging. To risk becoming entangled, enriched, enloved, and enslaved to this sense of family where anything is possible and nothing is spared. Real life. No formalities and no masks. It is exhilarating and frightening to have such a sense of belonging.
Art is like family. The boundaries between the acceptable and the truth blur in the arenas of music, paint and prose. Art cannot lie, if the artist belongs to the art.
And, there is the question. Where do I belong? To the art or to the family?
