coldhearted scientist وداد

…At the end of the novel, Lev creates his masterpiece. He paints his mother as crucified between himself, her son, the artist and his father, her husband, the activist. The entire novel has been about his own struggle, being torn between his love for his parents and community and his love and need for art. At the end, however, he begins to understand how his mother has been torn between her love and duty toward her husband and her son. The image of the crucifix is not a static image of suffering, but an active image of being torn between two opposing forces. Of course, for Jew, using a crucifix too express this concept was heretical and a betrayal of his own heritage, and he must leave his family and community.

That masterpiece that he created gave me a powerful image. Not so much the painting, but that Lev stepped away from his own pain to create an image of profound sympathy for his mother and profound understanding of the dynamic in his family. He stepped outside of that dynamic to describe the whole, and he took the risk of using images that ultimately undermined his parents’ understanding of the sympathy. He portrayed a truth, and he accepted the consequences for telling that truth, which was the knowledge that he had hurt his parents just as profoundly as he had shown sympathy and that he must live exiled from his community.

The power of that ending for me came with Lev’s acceptance of this fundamental struggle between himself and the people who loved him most, but who also caused him the most pain through their rejection of something central to his being; and his acceptance of the struggle between his love for those same people and the ways that he wounded them. There was no resolution, no way to reconcile the two. All he could do was create this masterpiece of sympathy and understanding. His creation was an act of love, even if the people for whom he was expressing it could in no way accept it.

This is to say, that point of crucifixion, or perhaps more accurately that point of being drawn and quartered, of being pulled in opposite directions, of having to hold the point of tension in your own being, that is not only the human condition, but the source of creativity. If you can express that point honestly, it may also be the point of great art. It is not the point of peace. [Emphasis added.]

My name is Professor Zero.

Axé.