Artistic Abandonment

The more I write, the more I find I identify with Leonardo da Vinci: "Art is never finished, only abandoned." I make no claim about whether any of my writing qualifies as "art," but I can attest that everything I write never gets finished. It gets abandoned. I've written about this recently--how, when it comes to my writing, I am a bad mother. The sort of mother who throws her paper-children out into the world--sometimes without thinking about whether she has corrected their most egregious errors, about whether she has given them the proper vocabulary to express their ideas. The sort of mother, in short, who tosses her words out into the word and often leaves them to fend for themselves.

Inevitably, of course, my professors return the "children" I write for their classes--sometimes covered with pen in a good way (positive commentary, pleasant surprise) and sometimes covered with pen in a bad way (commentary about their utter confusion about what, exactly, I may be arguing, unpleasant surprise). And I am discovering that a part of graduate school involves revisiting some of these "children." In rereading them, I discover some of them didn't fare so badly when they were sent into the world. And others fared badly indeed.

The ones that do not fare badly have one characteristic in common: I enjoyed creating them. And it showed. The others? Well, the opposite. Obviously. Despite being a week shy of successful completion of a whole year of my grad program, I have not yet discovered how to invest myself in topics I don't care about. Perhaps the coming two semesters will teach me something in that regard.

Because apparently, when I care, I don't abandon my unfinished works too soon.

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This post is part of the Blue-Beta Blog Coordination, a continuing series of content coordinated by theme or motif with posts from Confuzzled of I Keep Wondering, Gromit of The Dancing Newt, Redoubt of Redoubt Redux, Third Mango of Funkadelic Freestylings of Another Sort, Yarjka of Sour Mayonnaise, and Xanthippe of Let’s Save Our Hallmark Moment. This week's theme: 'Finished'.