The Particular Sadness of Art

I baked and I cooked and I prepared all day yesterday for book club, and I thought, yes, this is what I will write about. But I waited until after book club met because book club always leaves me ready to extol the virtues of books and art and how art is communal.

So, inspired by Jeanne Damoff, I copied down quotes about my particularly sad lemon cake (we had read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender) and sandwiches of joy and spaghetti sauce filled with "sadness, rage, tanks, holes, hope, guilt, tantrums. Nostalgia, like rotting flowers. A factory, cold" (p. 222). For good measure I set out Laughing Cow cheese and veggies picked by farmers discouraged by the Texas drought and I giggled like Keegan when he finagles my keys from me.

Maybe it was the dreary weather, or maybe because some adored the book and some disliked it (though this has happened before), or maybe it was the spaghetti sauce, which was too heavy, too strident, too much, but the evening felt off, disconnected, like the characters in the book empty and disappearing and longing for something more. Nostalgia, like rotting flowers, I thought.

Afterwards, as we cleaned dishes and wrapped up the particularly sad lemon cake, my friend and I wondered how you can talk about something so personal without it being personal, without it hurting when you disagree on something that reaches so deeply inside of you, winding into the labyrinth of your hopes and fears and weirdness.

And this, too, is how art is communal, because community in this fallen world doesn't always come easy and doesn't always leave us full of laughter and warmth like handknit socks wrapped around our feet. Sometimes it scratches and pushes and pulls, and I think of the mother and son relationship in Particular Sadness, how he, Joseph, worked to extract himself and she would drag her hands over raw wood if it meant sharing a moment, a relationship with him. I think of the pain and the splinters and the work of it all.

Because it came to me, for a moment, that perhaps this book club had run its course; perhaps we had become too familiar and the art didn't function as it should.

But art functions this way, sometimes pulling us together, but sometimes making us uncomfortable as we work out these differences, why we react in various ways to a character or a painting or a song. So I pull out my tweezers, not to extract myself splinter by splinter as Joseph did, but to dig out the splinters of disunity, the hurt that sometimes happens when we talk about things so personal.

Heather A. Goodman likes the idea of art making us uncomfortable, but she doesn't like to be uncomfortable, if you must know the truth. Also, she loved The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.

Comments

[Jeanne Damoff]

Well, now, this is lovely. Not in a sappy "a good time was had by all" way, but in a "sometimes life imitates art" way. Because, shouldn't art -- even "sad" art -- speak to the deep places of real life? So, I guess I'm happy that you had to deal with splinters, and I know I'm happy that I inspired you in a creative way, and I'm also wondering (happily) if there might not be a book club in our future . . .

I'll be in the market soon. And I love lemon cake.

xo

[Glynn]

Art can evoke a wide range or feelings and responses. At the same time, it can create community by providing a oneness of shared understanding. I can't think of anything else that's human that can do that.