Does anyone love like a mother loves? Love isn’t limited when it’s real. It resists easy characterization. We draw distinctions between filial love, romantic love, platonic love, but what all love has in common is its boundlessness. No wall exists that true love won’t surmount to make sure that that love can do everything possible, be everything it has in it to be, for the person that we love.
Orson Welles remarked that the greatest art is always feminine. He might as well have said maternal. This doesn’t mean it needs to be created by women. Or about women. It means that it’s the epitome of realness. Vulnerable. Not done out of ego or for plaudits.
Ours is a world now in which so many people want nothing but attention. That which can come back to them, reflect on them, make them look a certain way that they have deemed is of the utmost importance. It’s far less important to them to be a given thing, than to be perceived as that thing.
With the rise of AI, people who are becoming less like people don’t care if they even created what bears their name at the top, as long as the glory, or what passes for such, goes to them.
A mother would never think this way, nor would the true artist. This doesn’t mean that credit shouldn’t be given where credit is due. I celebrate my mother because she’s an amazing person who has added color and depth to my life by helping me become the person who sees, knows, and experiences the color and depth that he does.
But that’s not why mothers mother. The same goes for artists. When we watch something like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s amazingly loving 1946 film “A Matter of Life and Death” — or just its opening, the greatest in cinema — we know that this is a work that cares about us. That wants us to be well. And, crucially, do what we can in our turn to help others be well.
It’s many things, but one of those things is maternal. This isn’t to suggest that the filmmakers wished to lose money on the venture, or the work not to find an audience and be successful in all the usually presumed manners. The Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band,” avuncular connotation aside, is likewise foremost a maternal song. “What I want to know,” the song declares to us, “is are you kind.”
Are you? Kindness isn’t just niceness. Kindness has depth. It’s the groundwater of the soul. Your mother could say this to you.
Maybe yours wasn’t the mother she might have been, because life is life and life happens. You can still love with the maternal inflection. And love yourself in that regard. We can love others who won’t return that love in kind. Or whom we can’t reach. But that’s how motherly love and motherly art works.
A mother never has to ask herself whether she should love. Is it worth it? What do I get out of this? The same as the true artist. She doesn’t create so that people can fawn at a book signing or to be “platformed” or “shortlisted.” Those things may happen, but they don’t enter into the equation of the “why” of the endeavor.
No, the “why” is about someone else’s wellness. That’s one of the amazing things about a mother’s love: it keeps going and going, in all these forms, places, and dynamics. It’s the best of us, just as mom wishes for us to be the best of her.
Fleming is a writer.