Art Doesn't Ask if You're Alright First

On the folks at Creedmoor, Earl's whispering garden, and what gets made when the mind stops apologizing for itself

Now, I don't know what you picture when somebody says "psychiatric hospital art museum," but if your first thought was a room full of finger paintings done under supervision, you can go ahead and correct yourself. The folks up at Creedmoor have been running their gallery long enough that the work has earned its own reputation, separate from the building, separate from whatever labels got attached to the people who made it. That's how you know something has weight. It stops needing the story of where it came from just to stay standing.

I've lived long enough to know that a tidy mind and a worthwhile mind are not the same thing, and anyone who's confused the two hasn't spent much time paying attention. I've known people in Harrow Corners who could balance a ledger to the penny and couldn't have told you something true about their own life at gunpoint. And I've known old Mrs. Calloway, who could hold a conversation with the woods when the woods were in a talking mood, and who made quilts so particular in their geometry that you'd stare at them and feel, for no reason you could name, that something had just been said directly to you. She wasn't what you'd call tidy. She was something more useful.

That's what Creedmoor is getting at. The chaos doesn't disqualify a person from making something that holds. Sometimes it's exactly what makes the thing hold. Art isn't a reward for getting your situation sorted out. It's what some people do instead of that, and occasionally it lasts longer than the sorting would have.

My neighbor Earl would understand this, I think. Earl planted something this past season that the seed catalog does not carry. A red flower, petals that made a sound when the wind got curious. The whole town walked over to look. Nobody asked too many questions about the provenance. Earl said the dirt wanted it that way, and that was a satisfying enough answer for anyone who's ever watched a garden decide it's not interested in your plans for it. Some things arrive on their own terms. You can receive them or you can stand in the driveway arguing, and either way the flower's already there.

What I'd say to the people at Creedmoor, the artists, not the administrators, is this: don't fold it up and put it somewhere safe. Art locked in a drawer is just a symptom. The whole point is that it gets out, that somebody who doesn't know you picks it up and finds something in it that belongs to them now. That's not a small thing. That's about the furthest one person can reach without leaving the room.

And to the people walking through that gallery, I'd say handle it right. You are looking at the inside of somebody's particular experience, translated into the only form it could take to get out into the daylight. That deserves the same consideration you'd give a fresh egg. You hold it like it has weight, because it does.

I think about the year the county fair ran nine days longer than it was scheduled and nobody could leave. The art exhibits that year were something. When people cannot go anywhere and have no idea when that changes, they make things. They make things the way water makes a path, because it needs somewhere to go. By the ninth day, the quilting booth alone had produced enough work to paper every wall in Harrow Corners and then start on the outbuildings.

Then there's the fruitcake, baked in 1954, still making its rounds every Christmas. It is not eaten. It is passed. That fruitcake has outlasted every person who has held it and several who've tried to throw it out. What I know is this: some things, made with care, do not ask your permission to continue.

The moral, and I'll say it plain: the minds other people call torn are frequently the ones making the things that last. The world is not worse off for them. It is, most days, considerably better. You'd do well to remember that when you're standing in front of something you don't quite understand.

Handle it like it matters. Because somebody's hands are still on it, even if they're not in the room.

Mind your ears and keep your porch open. , Aunt Dot
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