The Suffering of Art

Publisher: Dorothy Parker’s Ashes | Author: Nadia Ghent | Genre: Non-Fiction | Publication Date: April 23, 2024 | Publication Type: Online Journal | Content Type: Essay

Listen to this essay read by the author

There is a certain place on the left side of the neck that marks a person as a violinist, a pressure sore from holding the instrument against tender skin. It’s where the hard spruce of the violin ribs contacts flesh, a lumpy red chafe mark the size of a quarter that comes from the effort of keeping the instrument from falling to the ground. Sometimes, the pressure sore bleeds, and then it hurts too much to hold the violin. It’s a self-inflicted wound that turns you into an artist. When I look at myself in the mirror, I can barely see the redness anymore. It is only a dim outline, flat and smooth, with the barest contours to its edges. 

I’ve had this mark since I was seven and began to play the violin so that I could be just like my mother, a concert violinist who’d been a child prodigy. When she was seven, she was on TV, on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour. She was not an amateur. She performed The Flight of the Bumblebee ferociously, the red bow in her hair bobbing as fast as her fingers were flying. Even though my own violin was tiny, and its tone was no better than rubber bands strung across an empty box, I clung to my instrument with all the force of a bulldog’s jaws. Seeing what’s left of the redness reminds me how happy I was to be in pain, to have a mark on my body that connected me to my mother.

From my father, I inherited large hands with long, tapering fingers, but his were more graceful than mine. Pain hid behind his quiet demeanor. He was a classical guitarist, and his hands knew how to dance around the fingerboard without hitting the frets in that metallic twang of rebuke. When he was done practicing for the day, he tended to his fingernails as if they were another instrument. A manicurist couldn’t have done a better job. He was always polishing and filing down his nails into perfect crescents, little half-moons that could coax Bach or Rodrigo or Charlie Parker from the guitar strings. 

Sometimes, families are held together only with stories that are burnished and cared for and repeated again and again as if they were magic incantations. I like to think of the times my mother would tell me the story of when she brought me home from the hospital, how I was so tiny that I had to sleep in my father’s guitar case, cocooned in baby blankets and plush velour. How the first music I heard was the weeping tremolo from Tárrega’s Memories of the Alhambra, my father playing the guitar for his baby daughter. Nothing bad could possibly ever happen. This was the image of our fragile little family my mother conjured up for me when minds were falling apart: a baby in a guitar case and the parents who would always love her.

How deftly she kept the truth from me.

For years, I used to keep the only two photographs I had of my family tucked into my violin case behind the spare bows, images meant to be protective against the wounds of memory. I gaze at the snapshots of my youthful mother and father when I should be practicing and wonder, did they have any idea what was going to happen? I tune my violin and begin warming up, the slow crawl of four-octave scales taking me from the bottom of the fingerboard to the very top of the silvery E string. The pressure sore throbs, begins to bleed. I am haunted by these photographs. Here they are at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, that first and only year of our family. I am their baby, just learning to walk. Like many of the Kodak generation, my parents want to document their happiness. Their cheap camera lets in too much light and suffuses our faces with an otherworldly glow. We have picnicked in the sunshine, and it will always be the soft afternoon of early summer.

My father is a handsome man in a white button-down shirt and dark glasses, hair neatly trimmed. He could be anybody’s father crouching on the grass, holding up his baby for the world to see, but here, in this photograph, he belongs only to me. There’s a fleeting expression of fragility on his face captured in the closing of the camera shutter, the slow aperture that records a sense of confidence he might never be able to master. He is beatified, lit up like a saint, a chiaroscuro half in darkness, the other half of the photo a field of bleached-out light as his white shirt bleeds into the background. 

Next, my intense, dark-haired mother takes her turn with me. I must have been a handful, springing impatiently from her lap as if I wanted to launch myself into space. I’d been born with knees that curved outward in perfect semicircles, and a pediatrician wants to have my bandy legs broken and reset. A girl with such a defect, such a terrible wound to her feminine self-esteem, the doctor argues, will never be beautiful enough to find a wealthy husband. My parents refuse to listen, the only time they agree about my care. Later, there will be many other defects that wound our broken family. Some will erupt like weeds in a summer garden, and others will lie dormant for decades.

Despite this dire prognosis, I have mastered standing, and in the photograph, you can see the forcefulness in my stubby legs. I’ve learned to test my parents with my baby independence. We call this game bye-bye. My imperfect legs will urge me to wander far across the grassy fields. Turning at the edge of the meadow before the path begins, I wave to my parents, and they wave back, the tiny specks of my mother and father. They will always be there, I am sure of it, arms open, waiting for my return.

Because one person has to hold the camera, work the jiggly light meter that’s hard to read in the bright sunshine, the f-stops that slide the picture in and out of focus, the three of us cannot pose together. No passers-by stop to offer help. There will be no proof of the threeness of our family. Only a child with a single parent, enclosed in the silence of separate images. In the end, there will be too much exposure, and minds, like bleached-out photographs, that won’t be fixable. Chemicals and therapy might never do the trick. Together and apart, my parents turn away from this moment and toward their madness. I will be their only child, the embodiment of their union. Hands are holding the camera, but are not in control of the picture. 

When the Soviets were blasting off into outer space with the launch of Sputnik 1 the year that I was born, not much was known about the inner space of psychic agony. There were no antidepressants or mood stabilizers like Prozac, or psychiatric treatments that didn’t involve heavy-duty barbiturates, high-voltage electroshock, insulin coma therapy, or lobotomy. Treatments as extreme as breaking a baby’s legs. Thorazine had been around since 1950, but nobody really knew how it worked. 

But the 1960s were the golden years of psychiatry. There was such promise for a cure. A psychiatrist even became my mother’s second husband. After President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963, deinstitutionalizing all the mentally ill, patients flooded back into the community. This would be the last piece of legislation JFK ever signed. A month later, on that warm November afternoon in Dallas, he and Jackie were in the car, crowds screaming on all sides of them as Lee Harvey Oswald took aim and fired. This was a grievous wound to the country, but also to the idea of compassion for minds that were broken enough to assassinate a president, or hold a knife against the throat of a daughter (the way my mother would), or shove a child down a flight of stairs (as my father did). In the aftermath of the violence, violence itself became a mental illness. People didn’t notice how this legislation would change the history and practice of psychiatric treatment in America. The streets became the new asylum. 

Talents and afflictions run in certain families. Neurons can take wrong turns. In our family, madness was a repeating theme, like music coming back in a different key. It seemed too cruel to think that madness could be contagious, or that to be an artist, you also had to be crazy. That somehow art elevated suffering, instead of making it only tragic. I thought by practicing seven hours a day until my fingers bled and the pressure sore became so painful I could barely hold the violin, I would start to understand what it was that mesmerized my mother and father when they cradled an instrument in their arms. There was something about music that held them together with spit and baling wire and the beauty of harmonic progressions when their minds began to spark and splinter and fall apart. 

What I didn’t realize was that love could be another kind of wounding. I’d never know what it was that tore their minds apart. Perhaps it didn’t matter. But I couldn’t love them enough until I could learn forgiveness. Because their genetic code was part of me, I was doubly endowed with disaster. Music was how I forgave them. I learned to hold the violin even when the pressure sore was swollen and inflamed and bleeding all over my shirt, as if the violin were a squalling and needy child that could only injure me with its love.