DISTURBANCES IN THE FIELD, a novel by Lynn Sharon Scwartz was well worth the difficult read. I was up to my chin in attempting to keep from drowning. I was impatient in a "field" disturbed by vocabulary that I do not often use and by references to forgotten Greek philosophy. I did finally listened to Schubert's "Trout" which played a central part to the plot. I felt I had to look everything up along the way but found for all of my toil, it was not necessary to understand the book. Every seemingly disparate part of the book did come to an uplifting conclusion for me as an artist. It is a love story that confirms my belief that art is healing.
Disturbances in the Field, acclaimed when it first appeared in 1983, has
just been reissued in paperback by Counterpoint.
The plot: "When she was a girl,
Lydia Rowe spent an idyllic month with her family in a house on Cape Cod. As
with Proust and Combray, Lydia’s memories of the brown house by the sea became
her talisman of the harmonious life. At college, she comes to feel the same way
about studying Greek philosophy with her close friends—precise Nina,
aristocratic Gaby, earthy Esther, and her first lover, George. The young women
form a circle of intimacy and unity, a quasi family that will endure over the
next twenty years.
Lydia becomes the pianist in a chamber music group,
another kind of family. She marries Victor, an artist, and though their early
years together are turbulent, they have four children and finally achieve
something of the order and balance of the classical trios she loves to play, the
coherence amid diversity that has been her goal since reading the pre-Socratic
philosophers in college. Then a tragic event turns Lydia’s life into a field of
dissonance and pain.
The stoic Epictetus wrote, "everything has two
handles, one by which is may be borne, the other by which it may not." Lydia
grasps the wrong handle and grows numb to herself and those she loves. Though
she feels stripped and vacant, her inner voice remains, doing its implacable
work of observing, remembering, connecting, persistently limning the shape of
her sorrow. What is the right handle by which her loss and her broken faith may
be borne? How can Lydia reach a place where "ordinary things... resume their
rightful proportions and places in a university of ordinary things?"
I highly recommend the book and especially my friends who write, know music, literature, philosophy, psychology or like love stories with substance.
The theme: Last night June 4, the theme that art is healing was aired on Public Broadcasting News hour's Canvas segment. Mothers of homicide victims went to the prison where they shared their story with the murders of their love one. The prisoners were moved and wanted to do something to express their remorse. The prisoners got together and decided to make paintings or drawings which were sold so the money could go to families of victims to pay for the expenses of the grieving families to pay for example the head stones. The act of doing something that expressed true remorse gave them a good feeling they would pursue doing more good. Likewise the families of the victims were on the road to forgiveness and healing.
In my experience when I had oral surgery, I was able to ease the pain without medication by painting very small tight illustrations for a story book.
What are other examples of how art heals?
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