Guston, Goya, Beckett

Nothing ever troubles me. And yet I am troubled.

Samuel Beckett, "The Unnamable"

There's a thoughtful piece in the April issue of The Atlantic by Sarah Boxer, a writer and cartoonist, "Drawing Donald" with the subtitle, 'The 45th president should be a big fat target for political cartoonists. So why is it so hard to come up with an image that sticks?' In the first of 20 examples--Is Anyone Out There Motivated Enough?--Ms. Boxer invokes the painter Philip Guston whose drawings of the Nixon era, perhaps a slightly less odious political moment than the present but only slightly, were so powerful. As Guston explained, "The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything--and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?"

Did I really see on CNN the other night a roundtable of seven woman from the Dallas, TX. area, all fairly well-spoken, several of them self-professed evangelicals who believe that Donald Trump, in the words of one, "was ordained to become President," express their continuing admiration and support for Trump, all of them indicating they're happy with the job he's doing and would vote for him again? I did. Did I really hear all of them say, in one way or another, that Trump's alleged sexual misconduct was a matter to be left between him, the Lord and his wife, and that it was merely a matter of privacy between two people? I did. Did I hear one of them really say, "he had to change as a person in order to become President"? I did. (When I told Lea Ann about what I'd seen and heard on CNN she said, without hesitation, "Trump's a seducer, that's what he does, what he's best at").

No. 43 in Goya's "Los Caprichos", the series of 80 etched prints made by the Spanish artist between 1797 and 1799, is titled, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters". Goya wrote of the series that he was trying to "depict the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual." 

I'm reading Samuel Beckett again, he seems to understand, pre-understand, the position many of us find ourselves in: that there really are stink-bugs among us, and that there always will be. Beckett's a man who hid out in a remote part of France during the Nazi invasion, eating dandelions and week old bread, working with his long-time companion Suzanne for The Resistence as a courier, then storing armaments for the Resistence in the backyard of the little house where he lived in the village of Roussillon, beginning to write Watt, the book that would become the first of the work we now think of when we think of Samuel Beckett. (To think of Beckett now as a writer of the absurd is absurd.)

There's such a beautiful cross-pollination in Beckett's two sentences--Nothing ever troubles me. And yet I am troubled--between equanimity and action, surrender and engagement. I now find myself becoming more and more grateful to this time for causing me to consider the making of art as a kind of salvation, sans the religious overcoat, as something only I can do. I'm beginning to understand in a way I hadn't before the distances between the rational and the irrational, reality and delusion, truth and lies. All I can do is to do what I think I need to do, that much, no less or more. First of all, to create a honest, forthright space from which to consider my plight and put it in my art, even if I chose to keep it to myself until it becomes art. 

Nothing should ever trouble me, yet I am troubled.