I am taking a break from work, which I had intended to use marking up the score of Werther, but which I also now would like to use to write a blog post on this article , which really moved me.
So much of what the author says is true. Why is is it, as he says, that "We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity"?
Children are encouraged to be creative. Certainly I was. But I soon learned that having and fostering an imagination was "childish" (and this by about age 11). I went to school with two types of girls: those who talked about boys and clothes all the time and those who did nothing but study. There were a handful of kids I grew up with who really excelled at playing a musical instrument, or at art or writing, for example, but "really excel" meant just that. If you were not Juilliard or Pratt material, it was like, "enough already". Be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. (I don't think anyone was encouraged to go into banking - the author of the cited article mentions working in "the City", London's equivalent of Wall Street. That, at least, was too crass.)
And women were not encouraged, really, to do anything at all. Yes, we were supposed to be educated, because educated women are interesting. But jobs were something you did until you married, or after you got divorced, or, like my mother, widowed. It's sort of hard to imagine, as I was encouraged to be brainy, not decorative, but I never thought about having a "career", and just ended up doing what most of the "bookish" women I knew did: get a secretarial job in publishing and then become an editor.
And if you were female, even a Lesbian like me, the most important thing was "the relationship". Don't pursue activities that will take time away from "the relationship". That, and the fact that I was told that Lesbians shouldn't be involved in a "patriarchal art form" like opera, put a premature end to my hope of a singing life, if not a singing career.
So what do you do if you've found what you love but are too old to do it in any way that other people care about? Not because you don't have talent and ability, but because too many people in too close proximity to where you live, have more talent and ability. My problem with singing isn't that different from the general problem with the middle class. It isn't really that people have gotten poorer, but rather that the rich have gotten so much richer and so much more numerous that everyone else is poor or might as well be.
Being older, the issue isn't just ageism or lost time, it's that what I'm competing with now are at least three generations (is a generation a decade, I wonder?) of people, most specifically women, who have been encouraged to pursue dreams of some kind. And are doing interesting things. When I was only looking at my own generation, very few women had high powered careers that they enjoyed and the ones who did were considered odd (many never married or found a satisfactory life with a significant other), and there were only a tiny handful of highly trained professional singers, so as I've said 100 times if I've said it once, the community opera groups, such as there were, were for amateurs with day jobs whose singing was less than perfect but who loved doing it. Now almost every school in the country seems to offer a degree in vocal performance and they vomit out their graduates in the five boroughs of the Big Apple (not to mention the three conservatories that are right here).
I think however sad it is that there is so much lost creativity, there is less than there used to be. An awful lot of people, particularly women, are doing interesting creative things, if not successfully in a monetary sense, successfully enough that their picture is in the newspaper or they get a spot talking on tv.
So I've found something I love and it's killing me, to paraphrase the author of this article. But it hasn't killed me yet, and I am going to go down fighting.
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