The little girl since grown now practices art of survival

TO the young just beginning the journey of their independence, life is the magical, mystical mystery tour of which the Beatles once wrote.

It is a time of fresh air and high winds that only beginners know, the breathless wonder of newness, the lure of a distant horizon.

They seek the unknown by both instinct and desire, simultaneously anxious and reticent, like a nestling sparrow hesitating on the limb of a tree.

Our Twentygirl, once our Teengirl, has emerged from adolescence and from her cocoon of security, walking away from a boyfriend and from Chicago to set up housekeeping alone in the Bay Area.

If doubt troubles her decision to go it alone, she displays little of it, rather taking for granted that parents and grandparents will be there to catch her if the limb should break or the wings not spread properly.

Her growing up is occurring where I grew up, in Oakland, and its glittery big city across the bay, a BART-ride separation from her apartment to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was almost instantly accepted not on grades or credits but on the quality of her paintings.

Artists and art dealers alike have viewed in wonder the maturity of her work, a fact that she seems to look upon without a lot of response, pleased for the moment but then unimpressed with their praise.

Like so many artists, she does what she wants to do, an attitude that frustrated teachers in her high school art and photography classes and that ultimately caused her to abandon the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“They didn’t like my work,” she said in explanation for wanting to leave the Windy City behind. To shape the work of our Twentygirl into someone else’s idea of what an assignment ought to be is like standing on a rooftop and demanding that the wind change directions.

In addition to being a beginning artist, she is the stuff of her genes, the tough little girl who is stirred by visions and not by patterns, to carry on the work she was born to do. I wrote my own way in college, interpreting assignments to fit my muse, and was told that I would never be a writer or a journalist. So much for all that.

I’M not sure that Twentygirl has a tight grip on the realities that accompany the arts. While a romantic vision of the starving artist in a Paris garret, scrounging for paints, crusts of bread and a little red wine, have a distant appeal, the music of dreams can turn sour upon awakening.

There is an aura of mystery that surrounds the young, an impenetrable veil of secrecy that shields their generation from ours, like fairies peeking through the forest. I don’t know what makes Twentygirl sad, what makes her angry or what makes her dream.

When she was here, tucked back in her room, the door closed, muted cellphone conversations seemed to last for hours and computer connections into cyberspace continued far into the night. Too bright and aware to be used by the monsters who haunt the websites of the young, she nevertheless kept to herself. It was only by accident that I learned the phone conversations were last efforts to heal a rift with her boyfriend, and the hours online were spent downloading music and images she would use for her art.

Years ago, when our son set off on his own to live in a northern corner of California, where the surf pounds on a rocky shore and the air rings with the clarity of wind chimes, I thought of all kinds of advice to give him and finally boiled it all down to one word: care. And he does. Deeply.

But it’s a different world today, a harder world in so many ways, where the young are assaulted by evil intentions, by dealmakers seeking moral compromises and by the lure of money nibbling at the edges of talent. I kept thinking when Twentygirl packed her suitcase that just telling her to care wasn’t enough.

Then I remembered that when I set out on the magical tour of my own, I received no advice, for my parents had none to give. It was just as well. Like our Twentygirl, I had to poke my way alone through the darkness to emerge hardened by all the pain one endures on youth’s journey, eventually assisted by a partner at my side, the enduring and loyal Cinelli. She saved me.

So what should I say to Twentygirl now as she scrambles about up there, looking for work to support herself while she goes to school? To care, of course, is still good, but inadequate. Be wary? Obey your instincts? Be true to your art? Follow your conscience? All of those, but mostly this from the poet Keats: “In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.”

Take the dive, Twentygirl. Avoid the silly pipes.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.