Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“That’s where Rushkin’s got it all wrong,” Jilly argued. “There’s no one way to approach art; there’s no right way. So long as you apply yourself with honesty and create from the heart, the end result is truthful. It might not be good, per se, but it still has worth. And I think that goes for any creative endeavor.”

“Amen,” Kathy said.

“But without the proper technique, you don’t have the tools to work with.”

Jilly nodded. “Sure. I agree with that. You can teach technique; just as you can teach art history and theory. But you can’t teach the use to which a person puts their technique and theory. You can’t tell someone what to have in their heart, what they need to express.”

“You mean their passion,” Izzy said.

“Exactly. You can nurture it in somebody, but you can’t teach it.”

Over the course of the past nine months, Izzy had begun to approach the heart of Rushkin’s alchemical secret in her own work; she could feel something opening up inside her, the way a window seemed to open in a canvas sometimes and the painting almost appeared to create itself. But she’d also come to accept the truth of what Rushkin had meant about a new language being required to explain it.

She wanted to share what she was learning with her friends, especially with Jilly since it so specifically applied to the visual arts, but as they sat here talking she realized that they really didn’t have access to the same lexicon she had come to acquire studying under Rushkin. And without it, she was helpless to do more than fumble for words that simply didn’t exist.

“But what if you could teach passion?” she asked. “What if there was a way to take a piece of yourself and put it into the canvas?”

“But isn’t that what art’s all about?” Jilly said.

“The same goes for writing,” Kathy added.

“Yes, I know,” Izzy said. “But what if that process could be taught?”

Dilly topped off their glasses from the draft-beer pitcher and took a sip from her own. “If Rushkin’s been telling you that, he’s pulling a scam. I’ll grant you that working with an artist of his caliber, you couldn’t help but feel you were privy to secret techniques, but when it comes down to the crunch, everything worth anything still has to originate from inside yourself.”

But it does, Izzy wanted to tell her. It’s just with what I’m learning, that process is so much more intense, and the end result so much closer to the original vision. But she knew it was pointless. They’d been having variations on this conversation for a couple of months now, but their disparate vocabularies remained an insurmountable barrier.

“All language was one, once,” Rushkin had explained to her when he was in one of his conversational moods. “Then we tried to not only touch God, but to think of ourselves as gods as well, and our tower was brought tumbling down about our ears. It wasn’t just language that splintered on that day, but all the arts. We lost our ability to communicate in every medium—not just with words—and that original language has all but vanished from the world.

“What we’re doing here in this studio is trying to reclaim a portion of the original language, an echo of it. We are desperate voices, trapped in Babylon, seeking what we lost and coming close—so very close; that and no more. Imagine what we could do if we could actually learn to speak that ancient tongue.”

It made so much sense when Rushkin spoke to her of it, but Izzy couldn’t seem to translate it when she tried to repeat what she was learning to her friends.

“You should attend more of Dapple’s lectures next year,” filly said. “Just before the finals he got us all into this really interesting dialogue about what we were doing with our art, where we wanted to go with it and why.”

Izzy gave up trying, as she invariably did, and went with the new turn their conversation had taken.

“You really like Professor Dapple, don’t you?”

“He’s been great to me,” filly said. “He’s even going to let me use one of his spare rooms as a studio over the summer. Someone else was using it last year and they left behind all kinds of supplies. He said I could use whatever I wanted for myself.”

Kathy laughed. “Sounds like he’s got the hots for you.”

“Oh please.”

“Well, really.”

Jilly shook her head. “What about you, Izzy?” she asked. “Are you going to work at Rushkin’s studio full-time until school starts up next year?”

“Actually, I don’t know if I’m going back to school next year.”

“That’s the first I’ve heard of this,” Kathy said. “What’s going on?”

Izzy sighed. “My scholarship’s dependent on my keeping up my grades and I was stretched so thin this year that all I managed was a C-minus average. That’s not enough, so the scholarship’s been cut off.

I won’t be able to afford to go back in the fall.”

“What about your parents?” filly asked.

“They don’t have any money, or if they do, they’re not telling me about it. They think I’m wasting my time anyway.”

“But your work’s so good. Did you tell them about Rushkin choosing you and how he’s never taken on a student before? Well,” she added, “at least none that anybody I know has ever heard of. I’ve learned more about him from you than I think any of our art history profs know.”

“I told them,” Izzy said, “but my father’s really down on the whole idea of my becoming an artist. My mother’s not so bad, but he’s basically written me off as a lost cause. We don’t talk about it anymore.

Actually, we don’t talk anymore, period.”

“You should have told me,” Kathy said.

“I didn’t know how to,” Izzy said. “It means I have to leave residence, and I’m going to miss you so much, that I just ...” She shrugged helplessly.

“We’ll get a place together,” Kathy said. “Off campus. Alan says there’s all these really cheap bachelors and lofts available on Waterhouse Street. He’s planning to move into one himself on the fifteenth.”

“I’m living in a rooming house just a couple of blocks north,” Jilly said. “It’s a great area, cheap but still pretty. There’s all sorts of artists and musicians living around there. You’d love it, Izzy.”

Kathy nodded. “We’ll be a real community. And you could get a student loan.”

“I don’t know.”

“And you could sell some of your paintings,” Jilly said. “You must have a ton of them by now. I know a gallery you could show them to. I can’t guarantee they’d take them, but you could try.”

“Or sell them down by the Pier to the tourists,” Kathy said.

Jilly nodded. “Sophie sells pen-and-ink sketches of Newford landmarks there on the weekends and she says sometimes she makes a real killing.”

Izzy regarded her friends through a film of tears that blurred her gaze. She’d been so depressed, trying to figure out how to break the news to Kathy, trying to figure out what she was going to do for money. She wanted to stay in the city, to be close to her friends and keep studying under Rushkin. She wanted to finish her B.A. at Butler. But mostly she refused to crawl back to the farm, dragging her tail between her legs and proving her father right.

“You guys are so great,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Kathy took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “That’s what friends are for, ma belle Izzy. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to work out fine.”

III

Jilly’s got this friend at a gallery who’ll look at my work, you see,” Izzy said.

She eyed Rushkin nervously, but he merely nodded a “yes, go on” in response. His features gave away nothing of what he was thinking, which only made Izzy feel more jittery. Although he hadn’t hit her again since that last time just before Christmas, some things hadn’t changed. He was still dictatorial and bad-tempered, needing very little provocation to launch into a scathing tirade of verbal abuse. She’d tried to be supportive about his therapy, but he simply wouldn’t discuss it, and though it was true that he hadn’t laid a hand on her again, there were many times she went home in tears. She would sit up, unable to sleep, trying to understand why she put up with all she did from him, vowing that she’d have it out with him, once and for all. Except invariably, once she arrived at the studio the next day, he’d be warm and supportive, and all her good intentions would drain away, if not her confusion.