musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Every offence is not a hate at first


What do you do with a gift from someone you once respected, a gift that seemed freely given at the time, but which turned out to be a mere façade? What do you do with a love turned sour? A love turned selfish? All love is selfish, you say, but it is your experience speaking -your age not your heart.

She said she composed the picture for me and only me; I was the one who inspired the scene for her in a dream -that’s what she said… How could I not accept it at the time? How could I know that she’d merely changed the name in her creation to make it fit? It described so clearly how she felt. It was so cleverly patterned, so colourfully woven that it could only have been composed with love; so unique, no one else could wear it but the one she adored.

And yet, the others had been fooled as well; the measurements had seemed to fit, and yet they, too, had been off-the-rack, not tailored. Inspiration, like all of Art, can be dedicated as the need requires, and as long as the provenance is obscured, can have a long list of owners thinking themselves the original motivation for its creation.

But I suppose what I’m asking is whether a composition suffers through its sieve of owners. Does the fact that the content is no longer referential alter the aesthetics of the message? Does it change the skill involved in a poem, the chosen words, or the metaphors? Or, because they merely happen to fit, like someone else’s sweater found hanging in the depths of the writer’s closet, can they deliver no special meaning, contain no beauty? Does that destroy its artistry?

Perhaps I am using too wide a brush, or find myself too inclined to ignore the artist despite the quality of her Art. But what is an appropriate response to art created by someone I find difficult to forgive? Is the art itself beyond redemption, or is it too bound up in the web of the artist to deserve separate consideration? Must it be similarly enmeshed: forever tarnished by its inexpiable creator, or should it stand on its own like a statue celebrating the good deeds of someone who also wore an unmentioned dark side? How does one weigh the pros and cons of what, considered on its own, may be a masterpiece?

I remember when she was first inspired to unveil her creation, an unknown in a largely indifferent world. But I was younger then, more vulnerable I think. Isn’t that always the way with youth, though: little experience and insufficient knowledge of how the world unfolds to naïve souls?

Sarah and I had met in our first year of university, each full of life and the expectation of what high school had never offered: freedom -or was it, rather, an unvarnished appraisal of who we really were; of who we became when the shackles were removed? With no one in authority supervising our every move, we were free to discover our inner adult, however nascent, however sluggishly it pupated deep within. Some of us waited anxiously for a sign of movement, while others, Sarah included, had already perfected the form that was nearing its completion inside.

One day, while walking hand in hand along a trail through a forested region near the university, she suddenly stared at me as if she had just made up her mind about something important.

“I’ve got a surprise for you back in the Residence, G,” she said and hugged me. “I’ve been working on it for a couple of days now…” She winked at me and then embarrassed me with a quick kiss on my lips.

In those days, the university residences were more gendered, and the rules were strictly enforced, but not, as Sarah was quick to explain, early in the afternoon.

“I wanted to capture just how much you’ve affected me, G,” she said as she pointed to the pencilled sketch she had pinned to the wall as we entered her room. “It appeared to me in a dream I had about you,” she added proudly.

I was overwhelmed, I have to admit. First of all that she was even  capable of producing such an intriguing work of art, but mainly that she would do it for me. I suppose I should explain that Sarah fancied herself an artist, but her mother had talked her out of enrolling in an arts school until she had at least earned a useable degree from university.

In my worshipping eyes, the sketch was fascinating. She had drawn a single apple sitting on a table. One side was shaded, but still revealed the differences on its surface that suggested it was not only ripe, but somehow begged the viewer to take a bite of it. And yet the most intriguing feature was an eye, cleverly hidden in its shadow looking straight at it. I don’t know how she managed it, but somehow the eye conveyed more than a glance: more a yearning, an affection for the apple. It was an amazing effect.

“Says it all, doesn’t it, G?” She hugged me tightly and buried her head in the shoulder of my sweater. “You’re the apple of my eye…”

Corny, perhaps, but sometimes Art can convey meaning; sometimes it can have agency… We were both young then; banality had yet to be defined, and even platitudes often require years of repetition before they lose their gravity. And anyway, Sarah was my first love, and I assumed I was similarly hers as well.

She gave me the sketch, promising that someday she’d do it in oils for me, so I had to keep it somewhere safe. I immediately took it to a little shop in town that framed such things, and hung it on the wall in my room. Sarah and I went out as a couple for three or four years, vowing we would never part. But our career paths were bound to interfere -she wanted to go to an art school in Vancouver, and I to do a post grad course in Ontario. Of course we assumed it would be difficult to be apart, and promised we’d phone each other every day…

But the exigencies of our demanding course work made such frequent contact difficult, and then less and less frequent. And then, not at all. Sarah began to exhibit some of her work when she graduated from her art courses, and one of my friends who knew of my attachment to Sarah showed me pictures of one such exhibition in a glossy magazine she’d borrowed from the doctor’s office where she worked.

“I thought I recognized this one,” she said pointing to the apple with its fawning eye. “Don’t you have a sketch of it on your wall?”

I nodded excitedly. I knew the sketch intimately, and as far as I could tell it was identical to the one she’d given to me. Janice pointed to the ‘Apple of my eye’ caption and smiled. “I didn’t tell you, but I used to go out with a guy from your university a few years ago -I think you were there around the same time, actually. Anyway, he had the same sketch on his wall. He was proud of his, too. ‘It was personal’, he used to say whenever I asked about it.”

I was curious, I have to admit. “Why personal?” I asked.

“She did it just for him, apparently. It had appeared to her in a dream…”

I couldn’t decide what to do with the picture after that, so I stored it in a drawer until I could decide. I still have it, and occasionally pull it out of the drawer, but the apple now seems over-ripe, and the eye stares unseeing, uncaring from the shadows. Has the picture changed, like the one in Oscar Wilde’s novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, or is it me?

Perhaps we both have…

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gozzter

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