Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach

Author:Doris Grumbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497676640
Publisher: Open Road Media

‘There is no pain greater than being bitten by one’s own dog.’ I remember this astute sentence but cannot for the life of me remember who said it. Mark Twain, it may be.

I am back at work culling material for this memoir from my notebook of last summer. At Peggy Danielson’s house in East Blue Hill, where I tried to bury all thoughts of my seventieth birthday, I found a prayer the sculptor Lenore Straus had used to conclude her book on the process of creating a stone statue, now standing in Norway:

O God,

hold my hand

that

holds the tool.

Without using those precise words, I often find myself praying similarly before I sit down with my clipboard. Substitute ‘pen’ for ‘tool.’

Peggy told me that in the last few days of Lenore’s life, when she was dying of cancer, she worked on tiny wax sculptures. Much reduced in size from her customary larger-than-life heads, these little figures contrasted significantly with her heroic stones, signifying not just the diminution in her energies but her sense of how little was left to her life. Never once, having been compelled almost to give up her hold on life, did she abandon her art.

Louise Nevelson (in a book on her work by Arnold Glimcher): ‘In the end, as you grow older, your life is your art, and you are alone with it.’

In a book on Zen Peggy gave me, I found Lenore’s AA card: ‘Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our teaching, ever reminding us to place principle before personalities.’ Useful admonition, not only to the alcoholic but also to the book reviewer.

Reading Nevelson I come upon another statement by the sculptor: ‘You have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity.’ I expected she would add that the artist proceeds to pollute or pervert or degrade it by painting on it, but no. ‘And then,’ she writes, ‘you put your imprint on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.’

And then she says: ‘My work is delicate; it may look strong, but it is delicate. True. Strength is delicate.’

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