Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés remembers the late Tammy Faye Messner. (The Moderate Voice)…

Leslene della-Madre
http://www.midwifingdeath.com

And I have said nothing that’s in disagreement with your claim, if you read what I wrote, not what you think.

A child’s efforts with crayons may not be worthy of exhibition in a museum, but the product represents the child’s interaction with the concepts of form and color. The child’s esthetic sense has grown in the process. Likewise, as the doting parent gazes at even the most elementary stick figures, he can grow in his understanding of how the child experiences the world. Everyone benefits; no one loses.

Nature creates art forms without benefit of judge or jury. We can either appreciate rock formations for the interesting shapes they are, or shut our eyes because there is something not quite right about the third rock from the left.

Between the lushness of excellence and the barrenness of nothing, there is a lot of potential for growth of the human spirit.
To dismiss potential is to throw opportunity in the garbage.

Her makeup and persona were expressions of ego, not artistry, and if she liked that, so be it. I just tire of hearing every old person being called an artist when even so few of those who even practice the arts are worthy of that title.

If only you had avoided the ‘all of us are artists’ cliche.

Look, Tammy was a con artist who repented. That’s it. I kind of liked her, but she was an older Anna Nicole with a Bible.

Even as much as I despised the closedmindedness and bigotry of JP2, he at least was a writer and poet- not particularly good- at the level of Mao Tse-Tung, both of whose Collected Poems I own.

But to call Tammy an artist is to trivialize and cheapen the efforts and endeavors of real artists, great artists, who devote their lives to audiences yet born, and those who are few and far between, so that they may be a little wiser and possess an iota more joy.

Scam artists are not artists, and let her rest in peace.

But, if you are irresistibly compelled to label her an artist, please, append the word ‘scam’ ahead of it.

It is telling how we usually hide away those visibly dying from the rest of us, those dying less obviously Perhaps the dying of others is too uncomfortable a reminder that we will be joining their ranks one day.

Ironically, one way to lessen fears about our own deaths would be to make death and the dying a normal part of life – to not hide the dying away and to not turn our eyes from the sight of death.

Come to that, we hide away great chunks of oher parts of life. I still can’t get over the national horror over the exposure of a performer’s brest on TV, as if the disovery of what a breast looks like were an earth shattering, life changing experience.

It is only quite recently that giving birth has stopped beitng a hidden away event and has gained acceptance as a normal part of life.

We still hide away the less than perfect examples of physical beauty as much as we can. Not too many members of sitcom families and friends have oversized noses or problems with exzema. When there is a fat person on board, the role is touted for its ‘specialness’ which is just another way of hiding overweight from normal life.

We run to plastic surgeons to erase our differences and thus narrow the field of what is part of normal appearance jistt like we narrow the field of what is part of normal life by hiding away the dying.

There is another side to frailty, illness and dying, though, because a great deal of private autonomy is lost. The body is poked and probed and violated and attended to in so many ways by others.that the effect can be quite dehumanizing. Some react by a wish to be left alone, so they can try to recover a sense of dignity in whatever privacy they can find.

This aspect makes me marvel at Tammy Faye’s voluntary public exposure even more..