A neat woman I know asked about my artwork. She linked me to other neat women she knows who have developed slick businesses selling their artwork.

A song runs through my head. It’s the White Stripes I Just Don’t Know What to do With Myself.

I’m feeling discouraged, so I pull the song up on youtube. There’s Kate Moss, pole dancing to the song. It is very funny. That’s me. Squirming around with a vacant look in my eyes. But it’s not me, because I don’t know how to market my afflictions.

Distraction. 

I watch Kate Moss and begin to wonder about pole dancing. It looks so dumb. But, whatever. People do it. I watch it some more. Laugh, laugh, laugh. I lose patience with my own dumb self.

And then I think: why do people dance with a pole when there’s tango? Once, I went to Argentina. My niece, who was studying abroad in Buenos Aires, took us to a tango parlor in a shifty warehouse in a shifty part of the city—though just about every part of Buenos Aires is shifty. As we fell deeper and deeper into the night, and drank more and more of the house wine, musicians and dancers began to arrive. After midnight, guitar and harp players showed up and sat arranged in an arc near the generous dance floor. They filled the old, abandoned space with the music of lustful desire. Every note of passion hung in the air the way the sultry sweat of lovers, on a hot summer’s night, drips from every petal on every flower in a meadow where they sway, kissing and dancing to the sounds of insects seeking mates.

The real deal tango dancers emerged from the darkened perimeters of the warehouse as the night ran away from the world. They stood so still, until they could feel the music. And then, the musicians led the men, who led the women, who wrapped their bodies all around the men, to the beat of every life that ever wanted to live free.

So anyone who likes pole dancing, should go to Argentina and watch the people dance the tango. A pole is so dumb. But a man and a woman and a group of musicians, that’s the kind of public display, group sex that doesn’t leave anyone out. You can watch, or you can join in.

After watching Kate Moss ruin I Just Don’t Know What to do With Myself, (original by Burt Bacharach and Hal David; there’s a youtube video of Tommy Hunt singing it with the big-band, bluesy woosey sound that will smear a salve of solace over any artist’s distracted soul), I tried to find a video of the tango. I got distracted and found Ode to Tango instead, which includes pole dancing, with some mighty big poles. If you watch it to the end, you will see why pole dancing is dangerous. Being your most corny woman self, on the other hand, is really fun:

*****

Dancing around the pole of distraction has not ever earned me an audience. In fact, it often caused me to be sent from the classroom to stand out in the hall until I stopped dancing. The meanest teachers would send you out to the hall and make you stand, facing the wall. I can still smell the cinder block, commingling with my sighs, the heat of my shame boiling the condensation of my breath into a stench that—

Distracted me. What if my exhalations came out in colors? I dreamed of painting the hallways with my puffs of color and making them prettier.

*****

E.B. White wrote in Here is New York, “…creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.”

I’m cursed. I cannot forgo neither great nor—worst of all—small distractions. E.B. says, though, that creation is only in part the forgoing of distraction.

I will say that when the neat woman I know asked about my artwork, and suggested that I do something with it, I sent a reply that read: “I don’t know why I can’t figure out what to do with my art. It drives me so crazy, that sometimes I want to steal every bottle of Ritalin and Adderall out of every school backpack in America.”

This morning, I was standing up with my cup of tea staring out the window. I saw a delicate droop of last summer’s bloom, covered in dewdrops, on the smokebush:

It made me do this:

And then I did this:

I drank some more of my tea. And then I did this:

And then this:

*****

I don’t know how to balance the pole of distraction over the fulcrum of the heart. Our culture has developed an impressive selection of drugs to quell the spells of distraction, and it leaves all of us dancing around with vacant eyes, playing games of Russian roulette with corporate marketing, medical research, misguided expectations, and one unique human being’s chaotic destiny. Would drugs make me fit in with more successful human beings? Students? Money makers?

I am capable of paying attention and drawing, as exactly as possible, what God has created and the teacher wants me to see:

Even when I’m distracted by the beauty of a dried-up sunflower leaf, I can concentrate long enough to draw it:

But God gave us our own brains. If we are fortunate enough to live a long life, we become creators, too. It’s fun. I found the following, unfinished drawing from another class. It’s some kind of seed head:

Everyone else had completed their drawings. But, I had been distracted by a pattern I saw:

After I saw the pattern, I started to daydream and play around with the seed head, and stare at it, instead of just putting it down and starting to draw it. As a kid, this was the moment when the teacher zeroed in on me, and wanted to know what I was doing. “I don’t know.” I would say, which was a little bit of the truth.

Last weekend, my husband had some friends over for a music jam. I was upstairs in my studio painting. The keyboard player led the jam with a tune I’d never heard before and I was distracted by it. It made me paint this:

Before bed, I looked up the video of the song they played–Lonely Boy, by the Black Keys.

I think I’m a combination of the joyful spirit of the girl in Ode to Tango and the improvisational spirit of the lip-synching dude in the Lonely Boy video by the Black Keys. This video inspires me to keep dancing my lonely girl groove around the teeter totter pole of distraction—in the kitchen with my tea, in the studio, and out in the garden—wherever the spirit moves me and whenever I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Oh, oh oh—I got a love that keeps me waiting.

A love for art.

Rock out, pole dancers. Here’s a link to distract you: