Vicarious Living

So, today I started thinking about empathy; the whole idea of walking in someone else's shoes for a while just to know their perspective. And then I started thinking about envy, and wishing I could walk in someone else's shoes for just a little while for the glamour and excitement. If I could live vicariously through anyone, either dead or alive, for just one day, who would it be?

My first thought was Janis Joplin, because of her (in?)famous rendezvous with Leonard Cohen in the Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan. She is completely immortalized in his words. Then I started thinking of writers in general....how the marking of print on paper (or now text on screen) creates a coveted immortality. Who doesn't want to be known as the passionate lover, or the one that got away, the one that romantically tormented, or the one that changed a life? I posed that question to a friend of mine, who happens to be a writer and musician. I wanted to know whether he considered the person's perspective when her wrote a song about a former lover or whether the song was just a form of his own emotional healing. She afterall, is the one that will be hearing the aftermath of this release, as he goes through his cathartic process of healing through the writing and singing of his music. She is left with beautiful words and sounds and knowing what her responsibility was in the creation of that. I have yet to be given a reply, but it certainly makes me curious, and also makes me consider the same for myself as a visual artist. Am I considering the perspective of others if I'm including them in my art? Is it important that I ask permission when in my mind, I'm just trying to heal or move forward through my art?  And when that art is viewed by others, will they wish that they too had the opportunity to live vicariously through the subject being "exposed"? Hmmmmm...........

Then I started thinking about artists, such as Van Gogh...would I really want to walk in the shoes of Van Gogh, considering he was so manic, and depressive, and self depreciating? I certainly would on the day that he painted Starry Night, alone at Saint Remy asylum, painting from memory, painting his torment. How else to understand the dizzying spirals of a wild man except to try and crawl into his head?

Or to be Klimt's model when he painted "The Kiss".
To be Kandinsky the day he decided that it really does suck to just paint haystacks.
To be Ultraviolet or Lou Reed at one of Warhol's Factory parties? (Not that you would remember that party the next day.)

But then I started thinking of the people directly involved in my life, and the journeys they have had, and I decided, that if I were to live vicariously through my mother for one day, I would want to be my mother the day after her father died. I will remember this story vividly, for as long as I live. Because they lived on a farm, and it was the 50's, my grandfather's body was prepared and layed to rest in the family kitchen. My mother was 12 years old, and had a wonderful bond and closeness with her father, Andrew. She says that she kept on leaving her room in the middle of the night, and sneaking into the room where his body lay, hoping to catch him breathing, hoping for just one last breath. Why would I chose that moment  to live vicariously through another person? It does seem macabre in a way, but I think that if I could only be in my mother's position for that one moment, then I could understand her pain at that time. Pain molds a person. Grief creates change, and adaptation, and for all of the stories that my mother and I have shared together, nothing can re-create that sense of loss and longing. And because my mother has been telling me stories of my grandfather since I was a child, I too feel like I have lost him, even though I have never met him, and I miss him as well. I think that loss would allow me to understand a side of my mother that I don't really know and will never have to opportunity to.

We have a tendency to glamourize the thought of living vicariously through somebody out of own greed and desires. But as an artist, and one that teaches the Arts, it has really come to my attention lately that we are better off living in our own shoes, and when the desire arises to live vicariously through another, we should stop and consider what we are really wishing for. And that consideration should extend to the receiver of the Arts. By viewing/listening/reading/touching what has been artistically given to them, the receivers are forever seeded with the emotional state of the artist at that time, either consciously or unconsciously, and we need to consider whether they want to be put in that vicarious position.