When the narrative collapses...

This New Years, we had the pleasure of spending a couple nights with my cousins. Their home is set in the beautiful countryside of Pennsylvania’s rolling hills just north of Lancaster, PA. Their tiny town, Mt. Gretna has its roots in the Chautauqua movement, a living, learning, arts community. Needless to say, there are lots of interesting things going on.

In describing their community, my cousins brought up their recent Socrates Club meeting. The topic for discussion was in the form of a question:

“How do you live when the narrative collapses?”

What a question, I thought. As the four of us threw it around, it was so interesting to see how it gets to the heart of so many life scenarios, including the one to follow.

I sculpted this over-sized yo-yo in my early 50’s, about seven years after selling my company and concurrently retiring from my career. Seven years later, I was still searching for a new professional narrative I could proudly and passionately live into with my art.

So, there I was in the privacy of my studio making this goofy and seemingly useless two-headed yo-yo. I was making art on the outside but stuck on the inside. Metaphorically coming from my one head, I was driven to create fine art and liked the recognition that came from it. Conflicted from my other head, I lacked that fire-in-the-belly passion to monetize my work and build a new business and profession. As a result, my art seemed to be merely an indulgence.

Simply put, I was looking for meaning and purpose in what I was doing. So parallel with my art, I embarked on multiple paths of learning from the ancient spiritual traditions of the world. I spun in one spiritual quest cul-de-sac after another until I found a way out. This lead me back to myself - who I am; what I am; and why. The crazy thing — this was my inheritance all along, my Jewish identity.

This yo-yo was an expression of my state of discombobulation during this period. I was gradually experiencing a collapse in my ill-conceived life narratives and certitudes touching my core. You can see my two life-size self-portrait heads on this yo-yo; i.e., two antithetical mindsets; connected in opposition to each other; draped in an ambiguous color white — my visual vocabulary for being uncomfortably lost; yet, with unimaginable possibility emerging from a state of unknowing. This yo-yo was exhausted, my conflicted head(s) on break from spinning; whirling and twirling — all while being tethered to a string, metaphorically tied on the other end, to a burning desire within the essence of my being, for meaning and purpose.

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