Craft Notes
Animal Instincts: Destroying the Cult of Reason
Wolf in a Cage by Josh Grigsby
“One major lesson I had to learn was to become empty and dumb and trusting enough to write every day. For this I needed, at times, blind patience, no theories about art.” –Larry Levis
Thinking about the intangibles of writing is like walking around, drunk, in a pitch-black room the size of an airplane hangar, with ghosts, with disembodied voices, with naked doppelgangers, choking on the fear of bumping into something much larger, much hairier than yourself.
I believe that’s why we talk about craft, the building blocks of a piece of art—light, shadow, line break, sentence. These are necessary to the physical architecture of the thing, certainly, and they’re quantifiable. Humans, we, desire formula and quantitative resources, names and registers. These are easier than dark, open spaces.
But what about the intangibles, the anti-craft, anti-move, anti-self-consciousness of making? What about the inexplicable creates lasting art, something more than pop culture referentiality, more than tricks-of-a-trade? What a friend of mine calls irreducibility?
Many poets and artists have tried to define the “it” factor. Many, to my eye, have succeeded in some way but never in a flesh-and-blood way. Never in a follow-these-eight-easy-steps way. For that, I’m glad.
Garcia Lorca had his duende, hovering at the lip of the wound; Ginsberg said, “the only poetic tradition is the voice out of the burning bush.” Keats sought the capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I could go on forever, maybe.
There’s an interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Believer. In it, Kominsky-Crumb describes a similar abstract quality to her comic-making:
“I’m so emotionally charged when I’m doing that, I can’t really control what comes out. It just comes out in a very direct form. In a way, I’m lucky that I can access that. In another way it’s horrible because I can’t refine it or improve it and make it look more, like, acceptable.”
Craft is a given, right? You love an art form so you study it; you dissect its structure. You practice, you imitate. You count syllables, maybe. You look at possible moves, maybe. Sometimes you go to school to understand and synthesize the great traditions in the company of other humans so you don’t have to read poems to your dog all the time. Sometimes you benefit from school. Sometimes you are ruined and reborn [see the Kominsky-Crumb interview for more on that].
But then what? Inevitably, you ask yourself, why does this poem make my heart sing? Why do I feel like I could jump off a building after I read this book? Or, like Dickinson, why does this thing make me feel physically like the top of my head has been taken off?
You don’t answer your question by saying, this thing I love is really acceptable.
Blackbird has posted an essay by the poet Larry Levis (1946-1996), originally published in FIELD called, “Some Notes on the Gazer Within.” In it, Levis grapples with this dilemma of reconciling craft to the strange magic of creation. Early on, Levis quotes Margaret Atwood as saying, “I don’t want to know how I write poetry. Poetry is dangerous: talking too much about it, like naming your gods, brings bad luck…you may improve your so-called technique, but only at the expense of your so-called soul.”
It’d be easy to stop there, you know? Bam. Fuck you and your technique. I’ll admit that I sometimes (most of the time; I’m a rebellious bastard) want to stop there. End of story: I do what I do. Fuck you and your lists. But that’s about as childish as thinking you can make art out of a series of rules or steps or tools or whatever you want to call them.
What Levis did in this essay is grand and mature and complex. He writes,
“What interests me here is a deeper poetics, one that tries to grasp what happens at the moment of writing itself—not a discussion that indulges in prolonging what Marvin Bell has called the pointless ‘dualisms’ of form versus content; nor a poetics that praises one kind of poem as organic while denouncing another as artificial. Ultimately, the trouble with such classroom determinations is that they do reduce poetry to technique, to something stripped of vision, something which gives the illusion of being soluble through either/or choices; they make poetry harmless. And in doing so, they lie….We know that a poem made to order from theory is slave labor, just as we also know that a poem, any poem, is artificial in one huge respect—if only because, as Eliot’s character so famously complained, ‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’.”
Levis’ solution to the problem of negotiating this weird territory is to get outside yourself. To be the observer, the gazer, in the world and then to reinvent yourself through this outside experience of landscape, of animal. He spends a significant portion of the essay talking about the poetry of animal life, looking at actual poems, thinking about how animals won’t be reasonable, how “poets thirst after what is pure and other and inhuman in the animals, in the poem animal, anyway.” Could it be that we are really so complex? That we’re not black-and-white creatures? That we want quantitative analysis and mystery? That we don’t always need to name our gods?
I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe. We seem to be creatures who need definite answers. But the best art doesn’t answer a damn thing, does it? Maybe that’s why we like animals: they show us our opposite, the creatures we wish we could be: “this honesty and taciturn otherness.” [If you watched Heather Christle’s streaming poetry reading on Thursday night, you might think back to the animals of her poems, the way she constructs an other world through them.]
To get past mere observation, to create oneself and one’s art through observation and imbibing and maybe even assimilation, to tap into folklore, animal, imagination—these aren’t quantifiable tricks.
I studied briefly with Peter Jay Shippy in grad school in a workshop that really pushed my boundaries as a poet. Shippy had us creating poems in ways I’d never imagined, from scraps of conversation and encyclopedia entires. A series of games, really, but the games meant something, meant stretching boundaries, meant asking myself questions I wouldn’t have asked otherwise. This is not a tirade against learning craft or practicing making. I know there exists a tinge of hypocrisy in a theory of anti-theory. That’s why the Levis essay is suddenly very important to me. Ways of making do exist. Practice must exist. But none of it is possible without the Other.
Toward the end of his essay, Levis writes,
“To write poems that come back out again, into society, to write poems that matter to me, I must become, paradoxically at the moment of writing, as other as a poet as any animal is in a poem. Then true craft, which is largely the ear’s training, can occur. Before this, my ear can hear nothing—or it plays back whatever rag of a tune it caught that day since its true desire and purpose is to thwart the world and hear nonsense, which it will do in the end. Unless this absorption into the other occurs, I am condemned to be immured within the daily ego, the ego that lives in the suburbs.”
Who wants to be jailed with the daily ego, suffering the constant, immovable boredom of that shallow Self? I can’t speak for you, but I surely want something deeper.
Tags: aline kominsky-crumb, blackbird, larry levis, poetry, poetry criticism, the believer
First off: Thank you, Alexis.
I’ve been thinking about this alot, lately, as I’ve been trapped in my cyclical think-too-much-about-art-while-minimally-making-art phase–it pops up every two months or so. Sometimes it leads to depression, sometimes to irrational/tactical behavior.
‘But the best art doesn’t answer a damn thing, does it?’
Yep. The best art reveals the sublime in the question. It affirms the voice asking the question.
I’m a big David Milch fan, and he talks about escaping/minimizing the ego via art alot… One of the most useful things he’s said is:
‘We do not think our way to right action. We act our way to right thinking.’
The answer, the salve, lies in action. So let’s move our spirits out, huh?
Also, I’m all for a support group that checks on members’s theory/craft intake.
First off: Thank you, Alexis.
I’ve been thinking about this alot, lately, as I’ve been trapped in my cyclical think-too-much-about-art-while-minimally-making-art phase–it pops up every two months or so. Sometimes it leads to depression, sometimes to irrational/tactical behavior.
‘But the best art doesn’t answer a damn thing, does it?’
Yep. The best art reveals the sublime in the question. It affirms the voice asking the question.
I’m a big David Milch fan, and he talks about escaping/minimizing the ego via art alot… One of the most useful things he’s said is:
‘We do not think our way to right action. We act our way to right thinking.’
The answer, the salve, lies in action. So let’s move our spirits out, huh?
Also, I’m all for a support group that checks on members’s theory/craft intake.
I really dig this post– thanks, man. I especially like what you’re saying about the struggle to be an “observer” and a “gazer,” to “get outside yourself.”
I’ve always hazily thought of craft as a way to make yourself aware, aware, aware of things in writing that you were not previously aware of. Sentencey things, syntactical things, shape, structure, etc. Things that maybe move you to the completion of a first draft.
And you’re practicing being “crafty” so that you can (paradoxically?) bring yourself to a heightened temporary state when you become magically UNAWARE of craft– you just do art. And when you’re doing it, you’re aware of it, but, as you say, as an observer.
Athletes talk about this sort of thing– being “in the zone.” Actors talk about this sort of thing, too– Stanislavski, maybe?
I really dig this post– thanks, man. I especially like what you’re saying about the struggle to be an “observer” and a “gazer,” to “get outside yourself.”
I’ve always hazily thought of craft as a way to make yourself aware, aware, aware of things in writing that you were not previously aware of. Sentencey things, syntactical things, shape, structure, etc. Things that maybe move you to the completion of a first draft.
And you’re practicing being “crafty” so that you can (paradoxically?) bring yourself to a heightened temporary state when you become magically UNAWARE of craft– you just do art. And when you’re doing it, you’re aware of it, but, as you say, as an observer.
Athletes talk about this sort of thing– being “in the zone.” Actors talk about this sort of thing, too– Stanislavski, maybe?
yes. poetry via the energy of the universe and human as filter, taking into account not just craft but the unexplained, that power we all feel when we write and we are charged. we’re dealing with magnetism, the earths, the suns, the galaxies, the universe… the metaphysics ie quantum physics of it all. argh, yes, i appreciate this post
yes. poetry via the energy of the universe and human as filter, taking into account not just craft but the unexplained, that power we all feel when we write and we are charged. we’re dealing with magnetism, the earths, the suns, the galaxies, the universe… the metaphysics ie quantum physics of it all. argh, yes, i appreciate this post
i like this very much. what were some or one of the games?
i like this very much. what were some or one of the games?
ken, we need to chat about “art”. maybe you can turn me on to some shit around LA.
i am not a fan of “art” thus far. please change my mind.
ken, we need to chat about “art”. maybe you can turn me on to some shit around LA.
i am not a fan of “art” thus far. please change my mind.
[…] “Animal Instincts: Destroying the Cult of Reason,” by Alexis Orgera now playing at HTML Giant. […]
Thanks, Alexis. This is wonderful. I’ve believed for a while that art really begins with the inhuman, with the void, the break, which situates sense–you’ve written a great essay here.
Thanks, Alexis. This is wonderful. I’ve believed for a while that art really begins with the inhuman, with the void, the break, which situates sense–you’ve written a great essay here.
I think our notions of craft should move with the uncanny, the sublime, the impossible. If you guys follow the Massumi posts (and naturally take up the book) then you’ll find this same question considered. What we should avoid, though, is the crippling dichotomy of structure versus essence, which makes us invoke “the spirit of the universe” or the “spirit of the lion” when we think about a work of art in comparison with craft and craftiness. Which is garbage, I think, or at least dangerously limited. As we’ll find in Massumi, structural analyses are of course useful, but they are not final. Structural perspective is ‘anti-event’ and only possible in retrospect, when we should be looking at methods of construction, inciting the event (or, better, allowing the space for the event).
I think our notions of craft should move with the uncanny, the sublime, the impossible. If you guys follow the Massumi posts (and naturally take up the book) then you’ll find this same question considered. What we should avoid, though, is the crippling dichotomy of structure versus essence, which makes us invoke “the spirit of the universe” or the “spirit of the lion” when we think about a work of art in comparison with craft and craftiness. Which is garbage, I think, or at least dangerously limited. As we’ll find in Massumi, structural analyses are of course useful, but they are not final. Structural perspective is ‘anti-event’ and only possible in retrospect, when we should be looking at methods of construction, inciting the event (or, better, allowing the space for the event).
Ken,
I’m right there with you. Thanks for those thoughts and the Milch quote. I’m guilty of overthinking maybe everything.
Ken,
I’m right there with you. Thanks for those thoughts and the Milch quote. I’m guilty of overthinking maybe everything.
in the zone is a good phrase, I think, though I think people think of it as new agey when taken out of the context of athletes…I think maybe that’s why I’m such a sports fan, basketball particularly. Those guys have to know fundamentals–there isn’t a choice (which is why I hate when people want to “get back to fundamentals), but they transcend fundamentals and create something magical. There’s no time to say, “Ok, this is how I should do a layup.”
in the zone is a good phrase, I think, though I think people think of it as new agey when taken out of the context of athletes…I think maybe that’s why I’m such a sports fan, basketball particularly. Those guys have to know fundamentals–there isn’t a choice (which is why I hate when people want to “get back to fundamentals), but they transcend fundamentals and create something magical. There’s no time to say, “Ok, this is how I should do a layup.”
maybe I’ll get to some of those games in another post, Blake ;)
maybe I’ll get to some of those games in another post, Blake ;)
“Structural perspective is ‘anti-event’ and only possible in retrospect, when we should be looking at methods of construction, inciting the event (or, better, allowing the space for the event).” I think you’re right, but we should also never forget the pure joy of just reading, too. That feeling that makes us want to delve into the thing. You know? I remember when I was really little, my mom would read me “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes, and I internalized the rhythm of “the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, the highwayman came riding up to the old door.” That was the pure joy of unconscious imbibing.
“Structural perspective is ‘anti-event’ and only possible in retrospect, when we should be looking at methods of construction, inciting the event (or, better, allowing the space for the event).” I think you’re right, but we should also never forget the pure joy of just reading, too. That feeling that makes us want to delve into the thing. You know? I remember when I was really little, my mom would read me “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes, and I internalized the rhythm of “the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, the highwayman came riding up to the old door.” That was the pure joy of unconscious imbibing.
fuck, it’s “up to the old inn door.” the rhythm doesn’t work without “inn.”
thanks, Alec. And I like the way you put it–art begins with the void. Nice.
fuck, it’s “up to the old inn door.” the rhythm doesn’t work without “inn.”
thanks, Alec. And I like the way you put it–art begins with the void. Nice.
I loved that Shippy class. Thanks for the reminder, and thanks for this luminous essay, Alexis.
I loved that Shippy class. Thanks for the reminder, and thanks for this luminous essay, Alexis.
Glad I could jog your memory Chad! Isn’t that the class we became friends in?? Remember when you put my thesis manuscript in order for me? I totally forgot that you did that! I still can’t put anything in order by myself!
Glad I could jog your memory Chad! Isn’t that the class we became friends in?? Remember when you put my thesis manuscript in order for me? I totally forgot that you did that! I still can’t put anything in order by myself!
This (and the Levis essay) are astonishing reads. Thank you for letting us in! I read them both yesterday and have since been cycling through many thoughts, resurrecting long-unread essays, and feeling all the while feathered with hope.
I wanted to add in some of my scattered reading connections with this. (This comment has, since I wrote this sentence, become VERY LONG. I’ve tried to keep the paragraphs on the small side. And I can’t figure out how to do block quotes, so I’ve just marked them with quotation marks. Sorry!)
1. The poet’s fascination with animals is reminiscent of the child’s. In ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES, Brian Boyd writes:
“Long before anything like narrative became possible, animals have had to be aware of other agents as volatile and potentially urgent threats or opportunities. Agency itself therefore catches attention. Although most of us now see far more cars than we do animals, and face more danger from them, and have been warned since childhood about the risks they pose, experiments show that we detect change of position far more quickly and accurately in animals than in cars. Long before narrative, too, animals have needed to distinguish one organism from another at first sign: by smell, sound, or especially, in the humans case, by sight. Hence human children have an innate fascination with identifying animals of all kinds, out of all proportion to the likelihood of their encountering alligators or zebras.”
In other words, it’s the animal in us that wires us to seek, recognize, and create the animal other. Boyd’s reasoning, I believe, both complicates and strengthens Levis’s argument that:
“Animals are objects of contemplation, but they are also, unlike us, without speech, without language, except in their own instinctual systems. When animals occur in poems, then, I believe they are often emblems for the muteness of the poet, for what he or she cannot express, for what is deepest and sometimes most antisocial in the poet’s nature.
[…]
In many poems, of course, the animal is not natural, because in a poem the beast may be wholly imagined, and therefore altered from the prison of nature, and paroled, briefly, by the poem itself, and by the poet. And sometimes a poet chooses an animal because the poet is mute, and also because…the poet is prophet.”
So there are, it would seem, layers to the animals’ attractiveness to poets. We’re wired to notice them first and foremost because they are the potentially dangerous change in an otherwise relatively static world. As we develop an understanding of language, we also develop a fascination in the otherness and muteness of the animal, and a simultaneous feeling of connection with them. They, like us, appear to have agency, and it’s not hard for us to ascribe all sorts of human narratives to their behaviors. In our imaginations they speak. (And take on the strangest looks! See this superb compendium of bestiaries http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastalpha.htm.)
I’m also pretty fascinated with poets’ use of the very word and category of “animal.” I like anything that uses a slightly wrong category (either a bit too vague or a bit too specific—usually the former) so that I prefer a tree to a pine, a building to a cottage or skyscraper, and certainly an animal to an otter. It creates a distracted kind of looking, allowing the brain to unfocus in a useful way. Anyway, Joe Wenderoth’s “Morning Fiction” (from DISFORTUNE) (look it up on Google Books!) makes superb use of “the animals.” Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Oldest Animal” (from TSIM TSUM) is another memorable instance.
2. John Ashbery is responsible for providing me with one of the best bits of thinking I’ve come across about poets’ discomfort with writing about how they make their poems. (He didn’t write it; David Schubert did, but Ashbery quotes it in OTHER TRADITIONS, his excellent and surprising collection of lectures from the Charles Eliot Norton series.) Having traveled through many minds to reach you, here is:
“A Short Essay On Poetry” by David Schubert
A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him. Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of vowel and consonant is the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself. Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gaiety by contrast with the burden it carries — for this exquisite lilt, this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry’s career, perhaps new awarenesses discovered, really new awarenesses and not verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to this Fragment of Life.
3. It does seem very important to empty oneself, to disappear. The strange thing is that in order to reach that point of disappearance, one has to travel through this immensely egotistical act of beginning to make something. There’s a wild single-mindedness to the process, which is mentioned in the lines Levis quotes from “Thrushes” by Ted Hughes:
Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.
People do love to think about Mozart’s brain. Me too! I am also people. I’ve written about this before, but if you have not read it, I highly recommend Daniel Dennett’s “Could there be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?” in which he quotes Mozart and the painter Philip Guston on their creative processes. Dennett writes that Mozart “is reputed to have said of his best musical ideas: ‘Whence and how do they come? I don’t know and I have nothing to do with it.’” Guston’s take on the matter feels just about perfect:
“When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.”
Here’s to disappearing! And thank you, Alexis, so much for these words.
This (and the Levis essay) are astonishing reads. Thank you for letting us in! I read them both yesterday and have since been cycling through many thoughts, resurrecting long-unread essays, and feeling all the while feathered with hope.
I wanted to add in some of my scattered reading connections with this. (This comment has, since I wrote this sentence, become VERY LONG. I’ve tried to keep the paragraphs on the small side. And I can’t figure out how to do block quotes, so I’ve just marked them with quotation marks. Sorry!)
1. The poet’s fascination with animals is reminiscent of the child’s. In ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES, Brian Boyd writes:
“Long before anything like narrative became possible, animals have had to be aware of other agents as volatile and potentially urgent threats or opportunities. Agency itself therefore catches attention. Although most of us now see far more cars than we do animals, and face more danger from them, and have been warned since childhood about the risks they pose, experiments show that we detect change of position far more quickly and accurately in animals than in cars. Long before narrative, too, animals have needed to distinguish one organism from another at first sign: by smell, sound, or especially, in the humans case, by sight. Hence human children have an innate fascination with identifying animals of all kinds, out of all proportion to the likelihood of their encountering alligators or zebras.”
In other words, it’s the animal in us that wires us to seek, recognize, and create the animal other. Boyd’s reasoning, I believe, both complicates and strengthens Levis’s argument that:
“Animals are objects of contemplation, but they are also, unlike us, without speech, without language, except in their own instinctual systems. When animals occur in poems, then, I believe they are often emblems for the muteness of the poet, for what he or she cannot express, for what is deepest and sometimes most antisocial in the poet’s nature.
[…]
In many poems, of course, the animal is not natural, because in a poem the beast may be wholly imagined, and therefore altered from the prison of nature, and paroled, briefly, by the poem itself, and by the poet. And sometimes a poet chooses an animal because the poet is mute, and also because…the poet is prophet.”
So there are, it would seem, layers to the animals’ attractiveness to poets. We’re wired to notice them first and foremost because they are the potentially dangerous change in an otherwise relatively static world. As we develop an understanding of language, we also develop a fascination in the otherness and muteness of the animal, and a simultaneous feeling of connection with them. They, like us, appear to have agency, and it’s not hard for us to ascribe all sorts of human narratives to their behaviors. In our imaginations they speak. (And take on the strangest looks! See this superb compendium of bestiaries http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastalpha.htm.)
I’m also pretty fascinated with poets’ use of the very word and category of “animal.” I like anything that uses a slightly wrong category (either a bit too vague or a bit too specific—usually the former) so that I prefer a tree to a pine, a building to a cottage or skyscraper, and certainly an animal to an otter. It creates a distracted kind of looking, allowing the brain to unfocus in a useful way. Anyway, Joe Wenderoth’s “Morning Fiction” (from DISFORTUNE) (look it up on Google Books!) makes superb use of “the animals.” Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Oldest Animal” (from TSIM TSUM) is another memorable instance.
2. John Ashbery is responsible for providing me with one of the best bits of thinking I’ve come across about poets’ discomfort with writing about how they make their poems. (He didn’t write it; David Schubert did, but Ashbery quotes it in OTHER TRADITIONS, his excellent and surprising collection of lectures from the Charles Eliot Norton series.) Having traveled through many minds to reach you, here is:
“A Short Essay On Poetry” by David Schubert
A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him. Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of vowel and consonant is the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself. Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gaiety by contrast with the burden it carries — for this exquisite lilt, this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry’s career, perhaps new awarenesses discovered, really new awarenesses and not verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to this Fragment of Life.
3. It does seem very important to empty oneself, to disappear. The strange thing is that in order to reach that point of disappearance, one has to travel through this immensely egotistical act of beginning to make something. There’s a wild single-mindedness to the process, which is mentioned in the lines Levis quotes from “Thrushes” by Ted Hughes:
Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.
People do love to think about Mozart’s brain. Me too! I am also people. I’ve written about this before, but if you have not read it, I highly recommend Daniel Dennett’s “Could there be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?” in which he quotes Mozart and the painter Philip Guston on their creative processes. Dennett writes that Mozart “is reputed to have said of his best musical ideas: ‘Whence and how do they come? I don’t know and I have nothing to do with it.’” Guston’s take on the matter feels just about perfect:
“When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.”
Here’s to disappearing! And thank you, Alexis, so much for these words.
that schubert graf is perfect.. thanks for this long and lovely comment, heather, and thanks back to alexis for her terrific essay..
that schubert graf is perfect.. thanks for this long and lovely comment, heather, and thanks back to alexis for her terrific essay..
Cheers to disappearing! Wonderful, Heather.
Cheers to disappearing! Wonderful, Heather.
Such good stuff here, Heather. I like what you saw about, say, animals vs. otter. I feel the same way. Naming the otter as such can take away from the moment, the journey and make you focus on the details. Maybe not always, of course. For instance, you may want to use rooster vs. bird, ala Edson.
Another great point: “poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking.” That’s the tightrope thing I’m getting at. You have to walk the line–what Orr calls the threshold space–etc. etc.
I’m all for disappearing. Let’s all do it!
Thanks for that, Heather.
Such good stuff here, Heather. I like what you saw about, say, animals vs. otter. I feel the same way. Naming the otter as such can take away from the moment, the journey and make you focus on the details. Maybe not always, of course. For instance, you may want to use rooster vs. bird, ala Edson.
Another great point: “poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking.” That’s the tightrope thing I’m getting at. You have to walk the line–what Orr calls the threshold space–etc. etc.
I’m all for disappearing. Let’s all do it!
Thanks for that, Heather.
I loved that class as well! Thanks for this, Alexis.
I loved that class as well! Thanks for this, Alexis.