Betrayal

I awoke this morning consumed with thoughts on betrayal.

I do feel betrayed. Right now that consideration seems to best define the atmosphere through which I am slogging.

I know that betrayal is not a feeling, but an action; but I am feeling what one feels when one is betrayed: loss of affection, loss of opportunity, anger, sadness.

The two primary ingredients of betrayal as I see it are a secret agenda and an abrupt termination of kindness. The dictionary says : “to act in a way that is contrary to a promise made.” Well, okay, but the promise need not be proffered overtly. And I can’t help feeling that some secret intention is involved.

Today it seems that everywhere I turn I find myself betrayed. Certainly that cannot be true.

But I do feel betrayed by parents and teachers whose sacred duty, as I see it, was to deliver young people into the avenue of happiness and success. Genuine happiness first; success, as defined by the parents and teachers, second. A personal sense of success, which may differ from the intentions of the guardians, would fall under the heading of happiness, it seems to me.

The custodians of my future ignored the clear signals that my happiness lay in the direction of the visual arts:

at age four, when I first said so;

at age nine, when my Grandfather gave me my first set of pastels;

at age eleven, when I first took up oil painting;

at age fourteen, when I made pen and ink drawings that swept across the page;

at age sixteen, when I asked for art lessons and was told, “Before you get art lessons you have to develop a style;”

at age eighteen, when one of my paintings caused a friend of my parents to exclaim to me, “You missed your calling!”;

at age nineteen, when I dropped out of Princeton and began painting ferociously and said I wanted to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (and my father said, “You will go back to Princeton or I will find another young man who wants to go and send him”);

again at age nineteen when, during my year out of college, I was sent to work as a math trainee at Rowe AC Manufacturing but soon maneuvered myself into the Art Department;

at age twenty when, back at Princeton, I put up shows at the student center and organized drawing groups when I found that there was a very minimal official arts program;

at age twenty-two, when I declined to sign up for a second year teaching math at a private school, opting even to risk the draft, in order to open a shop that sold my handicrafts and paintings;

at age thirty when I begged my father’s estate for help to go to art school and was turned down. My stepmother was incensed that I had asked. Because I already had a BA from Princeton, I was ineligible for student aid.

Sometime during my young adulthood my stepmother said, “I never knew you were particularly interested in art.” She married my father when I was seven, and adopted me when I was twelve, so I don’t know how she missed it.

Now I am a retired math teacher. I don’t want art lessons anymore. My painting is very well received, though it does not enjoy the typical indications of success, namely sales and prominent display. Yet.

Bitter? Yeah, sometimes. Today, yes. You see, the day before yesterday I started a painting that just looks boring, and I think, if I knew more about what I was doing I would not have wasted half a day on this piece of crap. I would have known better. I would have known what works for me. And what makes all this especially difficult is that I don’t have all that much time to figure it out. And then, instead of painting, here I am writing. More about that in a paragraph or two. But if you are going to give me one of those platitudes—any platitude—keep it to yourself. I don’t want to hear it because it’s crap, whose intention is just to plaster over some real misery. I am quite correctly despondent right now.

I’ve actually been thinking pretty hard about my most recent failure, and believe I have learned a good lesson, which I will not spell out here yet because it is technical. And fortunately I have a few painting ideas floating in my head right now, and will begin them soon. I am unhappy not because my inability to paint has surfaced again, because I can get over that. I am unhappy because I have been granted so little time to work on it, by people who were supposed to care enough about me to steer me toward my chosen strengths. I should have painted that mess when I was nineteen.

I’ll write about writing another time.