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Rachel reporting, lethargic and emotionally floating. It's amazing that a week has passed so fast. So, this week has included a lot of personal meltdowns, which sort of surprises me because I thought I had used up my full quota already. But between sorting through my relationships and my place i them, losing my wallet (having it stolen?) in Siena, being a complete spaz and forgetting real ly obvious important stuff, and traveling to Venezia for the weekend, I feel kind of like I have just stepped out of a blender, amazed that I am still whole. But it's strange, I feel sort of mellow right now because all that is over. Like maybe at least there isn't much in front of me anymore. That and I am kind of ridiculously tired, considering that I got 8 hours of sleep last night.
So, my art? I was struggling a lot with the masterwork project for drawing because most of what I like to make art about is personal. I had trouble coming up with an idea I could really connect to and devote myself to. I scrapped my original idea and chose a new masterwork which I love: Michelangelo's Pieta in Rome. Many masterworks, Italian ones especially, tend to have a lot of Catholic religious content that tends to make me feel either uncomfortable or disconnected. The Pieta, though, seems to me to have a meaning outside its religious context. There's little of the atmosphere of horror contrasting with adoration that is what I usually read from Catholic religious works. Instead, I read this intimate, empty moment between a mother and her dead child. It relys grief, that feeling of emptiness, and somehow the all-consuming nature of such an event in one's life. That whole scenario is something I relate strongly with a certain aspect of myself; my parents lost my twin brother Joshua about a week or so after his birth. So for my version of the piece, the Madonna will reflect my mother and the figure in her arms will be a transparent shadow of who Joshua might have been, and within that figure will be a more solid figure of the reality of his life, as short as it was: the figure of a baby, of him. Both Regan and Jana asked me where I was in this, and that absolutely threw me at first. I think I have always so carefully removed myself mentally from the whole scenario as a homage to the fact that I was too young to grieve for him, that I am unable to greive for him even now because of my distance from the whole thing. But I am tentatively pushing myself to see that it isn't that simple, that Joshua has sort of followed me through my whole life: in the form of a story I have since childhood instinctively labelled as inappropriate to share; as a tree planted in front of the old house in his honor that I see once every couple years, suddenly taller and stronger; as a missing counterpart to myself that I can never retrieve, and that inability causes me to find myself insufficient somehow. And I think really all of these things allude to my parents' grief and the effects it has had on my life. So in order to express this I tried to incorporate myself in the concept for my piece. Regan suggested making some small detail into a self-portrait, for example, drawing my hands instead of the Madonna's or my mother's. But that feels wrong because the whole concept and conflict in my mind is based on my feeling of distance and simultaneous proximity to the event of Joshua's death. To be part on the figure holding him would make our contact too real and too close. I thought of drawing myself beside my mother, holding her hand, with my own figure faded like Joshua's, though to a lesser degree. But Cat said that could easily read as some part of myself having died with my brother. I have always found that whole concept odd and unrealistic, romantic and overly simple without any real conception of what the loss might feel like. So then I changed the idea to my figure reaching out in apparent longing toward my mother or my mother's hands, toward where her contact with my brother would be. The parts of me closest to her would be the most transparent. This is supposed to express how my parents' grief, whenever it surfaced and took hold of them, caused me to no longer exist in the same sense. That grief made me suddenly and irrevocably not enough to make things right, permanently un-whole no matter what I tried.
I was afraid of this idea. I guess that is just another good reason to grasp it and use it. But I don't want to upset my parents, either with this morbid idea or the last one I decided to use (drano). I don't want them to think that they have failed or hurt me somehow. They and their happiness and their opinions are so important to me I often feel I am ridiculous. But this idea is what I care about, and for now I will pretend that it's that simple, that that is all that matters.
On another note, Venice was fun when it wasn't really frustrating or depressing (I've been arguing with Cat too much for me to be okay with lately; what we fail to do for one another is upsetting). But I had fun shopping, eating, buying gifts for my family, taking pictures of costumes, just watching all the amazing stuff around me, enjoying the water and its calming presence everywhere.
But yeah, I think that is way more than enough for now. Thanks for reading my über-long post, and ciao for now.