Breaking the Stained-Glass Ceiling

Two pieces of writing about art

Artwork by Yurie Kim

I.

Just because this object existing delighted me so very much, I wanted to share it with you. 

I stumbled upon this image a few days ago — one of my patrons, the poet Angel Rosen, posted it to the patron Facebook group — and I found myself dazzle-eyed by the not-understanding of the scale; I thought the piano was life-size until I saw the photo with the hand for scale. I liked thinking maybe it was a real piano. Maybe it is a real piano, still, even though it isn’t making sounds (right now). 

Then I went further down the rabbit hole and read the story that Yurika Glass wrote about creating this piece. She is open about her PTSD, her relationship with her own trauma, her social anxiety, her meds. She wrote about how she’d been forced to take piano lessons as a child, and how the torture of expectation and fear drained her desire to continue playing. 

And I looked at this box of light and color with a newer, darker pair of eyes.

So much pleasure gets beaten out of the pure joy of art-making. I had — less so, now, but my god it still aches — a very difficult relationship with this instrument. The piano. The pressure. The failure. The expectations. The yearning to be Good. The strain to be the best. The knowledge that I never would be. The never wanting to practice but always wanting to Play. All the piano teachers who tried to sleep with me (and some of them did). 

Just an instrument. 

Not ever just an instrument.

Instrumental: necessary. 

The sound of life-size breaking glass. That old agony of never feeling that I was the “right” person sitting behind the keyboard. Just not justified enough, just not good enough, just not real enough. Even after years of inventing my own kind of subversive mastery, even with hundreds of thousands of admirers. Even then.

Even now. I pass the untouched piano in the hall, I see it surrounded by piles of puzzle books and dinosaur water bottles with missing lids and dirty laundry, and I breathe slowly and patiently. I’ve played the piano for fewer than 100 hours over the past three years because of the situation I have found myself in — motherhood, mostly, not to mention the world’s own bursting viral load — and it is agonizing. 

In this moment, oh god, I want to create, I want to write, I want to play for everybody, I want to show you and tell you and make you know. 

I need it like oxygen. When I touch the piano, Ash comes and slams down my hands, screaming STOP.

Non-instrumental.

Right now it is not necessary. Right now it is not the time, not the moment. 

The piano will wait. It waits. It’s just a tool. The piano is still a piano when it is not making sounds. The light shines through it when I am not watching. The tree in the forest still falls, soundlessly or not.

Right now, I am doing other things, with other tools. 

Right now, all I want to do is write short poems for my patrons, explore this new, beautiful body with my tired and lazy fingers, lie on my back in the dark while everybody sleeps and type with my thumbs — as I am now — these held-breath messages-in-a-bottle, these scrap-snatches of prose into a little tiny screen as my child sleeps near me. 

My heart has just enough teaspoons of gas to get me to the end of this sentence, and maybe around the corner to the next day.

That’s what’s emerging; that is my spectrum, my bandwidth. That is the art right now. Just a small word dance with a stained-glass box shaped like a piano that I saw on a tiny screen on the internet because Angel posted it to the Facebook group. That is the only dance my feet can dance. I’m in my own little ballerina box, glued to the rotating disc, spinning in place. For now. 

For all of you artists out there — past, present, and future — do not worry if you feel crazy because you hate your instrument as much as you want to passionately love it for what it can do. 

Some of the most fearful and angry people I know are those who wanted to be artists and told themselves — and others — the immutable story of their own failure and their own powerlessness because the world somehow stripped them of their chance. 

That bitterness can turn so sharp, so ugly. It has fueled some of the darkest cruelties I’ve yet seen. Hell hath no fury like a poet who feels she’s had her pen stolen by some gang of dickheads, or some other hurricane or Act of God. And there is nothing more tragic than to see her argue till she is blue in the face to reserve her right to never create again, You Took My Pen, Universe You Dick, So There. 

And then there is Yurika and her magical box. She made the light. She melted and bent the story into beauty. 

Everything can be art.

Playing the piano. Playing the kazoo. Drumming your fingers against the bus seat. Staining glass stories and bringing people joy through a tiny screen. Making a sandwich for a child.

There is a time. 

There is a time. 

Do not become bitter.

Promise me. Let go. 

There is a time. 

Do not become bitter.

…….

II.

Dear Broken-winged,

Sometimes things wound and confound me so strangely and deeply that I have to just bring it back to the crowd. 

Yesterday I posted a random beautiful piece of stained-glass piano art and talked about how Art is Art is Art and how some things just take time and how there is stop and start, and inhale and exhale, and sometimes you have a really frustrated or frustrating relationship with your instrument. 

Which I do. Which many artists and makers do. 

I mentioned in the post yesterday that I’ve probably played fewer than 100 hours on the piano over the past few years. This is true. I’m not ashamed. 

I’ve been mothering, and surviving a pandemic, and surviving life upheavals, and surviving deaths, and attacks of all sorts, and international moves and just … surviving. Period. Like a lot of folks lately. 

I can tell you this, broken-winged person who posted this comment, in case you read it: 

Art does not work the way you think it works.

I need to say it for myself even if you are not reading anymore, because you have unfollowed your flawed hero.

I have not lost my power because I have been making sandwiches for a kid instead of playing the piano. 

I have not lost my power because I have been cleaning dishes and picking up Legos and reading What the Ladybird Heard for the 45th time instead of playing the piano. 

I have not lost my power because I have spent hundreds of hours on the telephone with my closest friends — most of them mothers — trying to keep one another from despairing in the face of a shuddering planet instead of spending those hundreds of hours playing the piano. 

I play a lot of instruments. Sometimes I play the piano. Sometimes I play the ukulele (badly). 

And sometimes I play the chords of life, and nothing else. 

I have not lost my power. I have found my power in the crushed Cheerios that I have tweezed out of every crevice, the stinking vomit-covered little overalls that I have washed by the side of the road using a bottle of water; I have found my power in the running of the bath and the lighting of candles at 4 a.m. to calm my shivering and moaning body because another anxiety attack has brought me to my knees, as I try to accept and embrace my own thin skin in the face of yet another catastrophic blast to my psyche, trying to hang onto the mast of my own ship as I withstand another set of lies about my history uncovered with no regard to whether the timing or the weather conditions are convenient. I have found my power in shutting up; I have found my power in the piano with no insides. 

I have found my power in the dark and fierce shine of my child’s eyes when he tells me, as he is falling asleep, that he is working on telling his nightmares what to do. 

My power is only just beginning to emerge. 

When I have time and am ready to play again, I am going to make a noise so inflammatory, so holy, so broken, so deafening, so honest, and so earth-shatteringly powerful that you will question what music even means. 

You will not know what hit you. You will have to avert your ears. 

Your wings are broken?

If your wings are broken because I haven’t had time to play the piano, dude … imagine me. Broken-winged, fully disintegrated, self-digested, dead, gone, existentially melted like a rotting caterpillar in a coffin-dark soup of her own raw imaginum, ready to goddamn explode into the nextness. 

When I am done making all these almond-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for camp 

and packing them in reusable wax wraps

I will rise from my mundane ashes 

with the force of a hundred flaming phoenixes with a voice ten thousand times louder than every chorus of every shrieking harpy, moaning asylum-dweller, hellbent siren, and dying soldier lost to myth and time. 

And don’t forget: I’ll have a drummer.

P.S. “Your” heroes, not “you’re.” Also, he was an OK piano player, but Jerry Lee Lewis also married his 12-year-old cousin and abused his power to get sex. I don’t wanna be Jerry Lee Lewis. I’ll take Tori, Nina, or Diamanda.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Copy editor: Rina Bander

You can find Yuriki Glass, the artist, here on Instagram and here on Etsy.

Special thanks to my patron Angel Rosen for inspiring all of this. Please support her by buying/reading her poetry. It’s excellent stuff.

Here’s a link to the Official AFP Patron Facebook Group.

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This piece originated in two drafts to social media (Instagram and Facebook: Parts One and Two on IG, Parts One and Two on FB). The comments there are really quite beautiful, if you’d like to go read them — and I thank all of my followers there for commenting, reflecting, resonating, and inspiring me to create and publish this longer, better-edited piece.

This piece of writing (and all of my hard-to-classify artistic output) was funded through my Patreon and published here to Substack, because it’s a nicer place to read and comment. If you want to access a video of me reading this piece, sign up for the Patreon (the video lives HERE) or become a sustaining subscriber here on Substack. Why Patreon and Substack, instead of just one? Easy: The patrons get a massive amount of content and information; the Substack is a nice channel for people who only want to be bothered with finished, polished writing content. The internet’s weird, but we’re makin’ it work.

I’ll be back with more Ask Amanda advice columns in the near future, and you can still submit questions to askamanda@gmail.com. For now, I’m barely keeping my head above water and just need to write what I need to write. Thanks for reading, and supporting. I love you. I’m reading all the comments, drop me a line.