We’re all told to omit needless words, that this is the key to good writing.  Simple, we’re told.  Just cut those extra or latinate words and you’ll find under the fluff the sinews of virile prose.   And the connotation is that this is almost a scientific exercise, one which yields objective truth which multiple observers would be able to reproduce after starting with the same raw material.   Occam’s Razor amputates opinions and incises down to reality, and all rational people agree when the results are right.  We’re told.  

But “needless” means different things to different editors.   Of course, it means “words that add nothing to the meaning or clarity”, but the individual editor’s worldview will define “meaning” and “clarity”, perhaps unconsciously.   Since each sentence emanates undertones and overtones of flavor as each word brings ancient seasons to the stew, no editor escapes value judgements about the validity of the slight tones in the ear or after-flavors on the tongue.  No editor escapes his own internalized set of meanings as he judges whether a word works.   

As you write or try to make writing better, yours or others, you talk metaphysics.

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I knew a man who had heard “omit needless words” and he wielded it.  He was a bit of a reductionist in his daily life, I thought.   He seemed to have little use for any of what I would call the intangibles.   He was an orthopedic surgeon, so had something of a scientific background  (though surgeons, in my experience, are surprisingly anecdotal thinkers).   Befitting his surgeon’s task-oriented temperament, he had little use for not only religion but art and humanities.  He liked astronomy.   You might think my calling him “reductionist” is just my bias against his apparent agnosticism,  but we never talked about religion and yet I still saw in him the reductionist tone.     

He liked to reduce prose to only the needed words.  In his work he would have occasion to approve documents such as hospital policies and patient education handouts.   He would cut ruthlessly till the sentences were short as Hemingway’s, and smile a satisfied smile.  He wanted everyone to learn this skill from him.   English teachers were his secret admirers, he was sure.  

I fancied myself a wordsmith and understood the principle, and generally agreed with it.  We’ve all felt the relief of reading the shaped-up paragraph, half as long as it was, and now both lighter and stronger.  But there was something about this surgeon’s scalpel on prose that bothered me.  I wanted to be loyal to Strunk and White and couldn’t imagine contradicting the hallowed Occam, so I thought it might just be me.   His product seemed skeletal.  It took me years to figure it out, but finally it dawned:  he cuts the overtones, nuance, and patina of language as if any letter added to subject and object is “fluff”.   He is an editor in search of the mathematical equation which is the reality beneath the smokescreen of words.   He sees the world as a substructure of impersonal logic draped in a fog of rhetoric.   i did not see the world the same way, so our conflict of visions was triggered, for me, in the simple act of killing an adjective.  

Nothing is not metaphysics.    

         

 

“Poetry can only be criticized by poetry. A critical judgment has no rights in the realm of art if it isn’t itself a work of art.”
-Schlegel

I’ve wanted to name the connection between drawing and composing poetry.

Drawing is a mode of seeing.  We don’t see, then draw; we don’t draw what we see; we see by drawing.   And we see, truly, only what we love.   So as we draw we fall in love with what we are seeing, and the movement of my hand, feeling inside my loving gaze, strengthens my love.

Love is always for the first time.   This is not just a hallmark saying, it is a literal truth.   As love escalates, the distinction between subject and object closes.  Vision becomes heightened until it is supernatural.   The lover sees but is no longer conscious of seeing; the lover and the beloved person or thing are one in vision.   As the distance between lover and beloved closes, it is not possible to retain any memory of previous moments, because memory is cognitive distance.  Love is always for the first time.

In the end each drawing is a new unique object:  the love of this artist for this thing in this instant.

In the same way, poetry is loving by words.   The poem is not about anything, it is a thing in and of itself.  This new thing is the love of this writer for this thing or person at this moment; it is their love reified from ethereal  into words, shaking their manes.   No distance remains between the vision, the thought, the feeling, and the emitted words.   When the poet reads back over last evening’s work, he does not remember how he wrote it.

We love by drawing, and we love by poetry.   As if, every time, for the first time.

Have you noticed it is exciting to start a painting, but you lose interest in the middle?  I argue that we never lose interest in a sound composition, whether we are the artist or just the spectator.   It is the geometric arrangement of lights and darks and lines of motion that capture our eye time after time as we walk through the gallery, even if we’ve seen the picture a thousand times before.   It never gets old.

If this is true, then when you lose interest in something you are working on, it can only be that the composition is not really the one you believe in.  Your compositional choices at the very beginning were a lapse into a second-hand, or borrowed,  aesthetic.  You are painting someone else’s picture.

The watercolorist Mary Whyte points out that it isn’t enough for the artist to simply feel something, even something forcefully, about the scene or the composition.  She must understand her reaction in a highly detailed way:  what, precisely, do I like about this specific sunset?  If the colors, what about the colors?  Haven’t I seen them before?  Why is this sunset different from every other sunset I’ve loved?

If I know myself deeply enough, I’ll be able to name (for a writer) or frame (a painter) the utterly unique quality of each aesthetic shiver.  “Thisness.”  This sunset, this flower, this smile on a child is different from all others.  But the truth is that the inner clarity to articulate Thisness to yourself is rare, even among hard-working artists.

I feel the first moment of delight from the inside, standing too close to the sensation to circumscribe it with intellect.  I feel  beauty wherever it is inside me that beauty feels, and my mind and heart are engaged in a unified feeling intellect.  But, caution:  in the second moment, distinct from the first, I will start making compositional choices, and it is likely that the precise element that delights me is ambiguously buried within the larger visual field in front of me.  It may be one shape in the clouds, one color bumping against another, or even a color that I’ve never seen before.  Whatever it is that caught my eye about this specific sunset is what the painting should be about.  It often is not.  It is surprisingly hard to know the precise, granular, unique object of delight in the second moment, the cognitive moment where I capture something useful about the sensation, as the first moment rapidly fades.   It is hard to know because, among other distractions, the subconscious offers memories of previous artists’ compositions.   Those subconscious templates will offer themselves as frames for your picture, and actually get in between you and the…Thisness.

This second moment might be only a nano-time from the first, the time of electrons between neurons, but it is so artistically distinct as to be a world apart.  We are fooled by how much fades in that split instant of time.   The mind immediately begins to work, and it is beginning in this second moment that I believe the entire inherited store of images comes rushing in to supply conventional templates for ordering the feeling and the memory of the image.   Most compositions actually belong to someone else that the artist doesn’t know.   So: boredom, halfway through the painting.  The good news is that you are not bored by your own creativity (impossible); you are bored by the ghost images obscuring your own creative vision.

I don’t want to sound too Zen a note here.  I believe many are bewitched at this point by the tone of Zen which has tinctured the literature of artistic practice, and head in the exact wrong direction.  The mind is not the enemy.  Nor does it it necessarily falsify the original vision.  It is a dead end to get this first flash of insight and move into the second moment  at all suppressing or subverting the mind, or in any way treat the compositional impulse as some corrupted addition to the initial vision.  The mind is not the enemy, the compositional impulse is not the enemy; the enemy is to not know your own subconscious store.  The enemy is alienation; alienation is when we are moved or affected by internal factors that we do not know.   The enemy is not that the mind is too active; it is that it is not active enough, not rigorous, clear, and disciplined enough.

The First Moment is very “zen”; every moment after is the opposite.  These two distinct moments with their distinct movements each have their own set of practices, and they feel – this is crucial – opposite.      To confuse the two is to hopelessly confuse your own self.  The key to the First Moment is to know nothing.  The key to the Second Moment is to know yourself.

This First Moment / Second Moment pattern has been recognized in widely disparate bodies of literature.   For example,  Wordsworth famously described poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.”  I’m using different words – “delight” and “composition”, and so on,  to translate into the language of the visual artist, but I think this is the same double movement of the soul.  Wordsworth’s “emotion” is the First Moment, the instant of “inspiration” (how I hate that word.)  Wordsworth’s “recollected in tranquility” is the poet’s hard work in the study, in the Second Moment, and beyond.

Writers have developed their insights into the differences between these distinct internal operations, and the “How to write” books are full of un-alienation wisdom.    I can’t rehearse all that they know here, except to observe that what works in one stage of artistic response is the opposite of what works in the next.

Back to painting.   I believe as artists grow in their knowledge of themselves they prune non-essentials from the compositional frame.   As they come to see more clearly their own eyes they zoom in, and throw more and more out of the frame.  Now this not new advice.  “Simplify”, we are told in a hundred different ways.  But few realize the advice to “simplify” is not just a technique of composition, a matter of craft; it is a matter of soulcraft.  Know nothing, then know yourself, then, and only then  – forgive me for this – be the painting.   Workshop instructors would do well to consider that the key to composition is not “the golden mean” or “movement through the picture plane” or even “blocks of value”, but… moral courage.   When the artist loses interest before the work is done it is a sign he is working on someone else’s painting.

Every painter experiences how mysteriously hard it is to hear the counsel to “simplify” and then to do it.  There is a resistance.  There’s a stubborn resistance from within that puzzles most of us for years.

Practical advice:  if you can, sit perfectly still for 5 minutes and look at what caught your attention, doing nothing else.  Notice the track of your own eyes around the visual field.   Your own eye movements will draw the center of attention for you.   Wherever your gaze wanders, that and that alone is what interests you.   So draw or put the brush only on the one thing you like the most – it will amaze you how small it is – and then blow that up to fill your entire picture frame.  90% of what you see can be thrown away.   If you do this right, it will give you cold sweaty palms, like working without a net.  And that’s you that you finally feel.

I’m giving advice to artists, as if I actually know something.  I’m talking to myself.

You don’t grow as an artist by thinking about working.  You work.  The lightbulbs only flash as you walk into the dark.

Why do writers write? The answers to this question have already become cliched, but I’m not so much interested in why they say they write, as in why they apparently write, which is a very different matter.

By the way, none of these categories cut along the same seam as the “fiction / nonfiction” distinction.

1. A love of words, phrases, and sentence-crafting. This is the person who enjoys working on one sentence for an hour. Many of these are drawn toward poetry, but not enough are. These do not need to get from A to B – in fact, they need to sit on A as long as possible.

2. A need to complain, or debunk the world. Father was not there, and the crap that is the world must be called “crap” over and over forever, in revenge. This is the essence of modernity,

3. A desire to see deeper — either deeper into the self or into the world, and this self/world distinction breaks down, at depths.

4. The didacts. All the arguers and explainers. This is not the same as #2 — these folks just have something to say, and try to say it well.

5. Joy in a good plot. The storytellers, who love to pose a situation, make some trouble, then solve it.

6. A need to say something — anything — intelligent. Not the same as #4; these people have nothing in particular they think needs saying except that they say things well. Many 1,000 page novels have been labeled “experimental” or “avant-garde”, when they were just under-employed IQ ohms arcing at random into the public air.

7. A need to exist. These are the coffeehouse writers, who emit 20 longhand pages a day, and who have 50 words for “sad”.

8. A need to capture a story that will disappear unless it is memorialized. The historians of all kinds, whether personal or academic.

The ethic of fidelity creates stories.  The struggle of living is a struggle to be faithful to something or someone outside the self. All else pales.  Interesting stories are about overcoming the obstacles to fidelity, because the interesting questions about your life and the lives you know are always about fidelity.  Will you be true?  When you lay down at night and think about how you did that day and what you’ll do tomorrow, your thoughts are only shapes against the background of that question.  Was I true?  Will I?  I want to, but how?   True to your wife, your husband.  True to do right by your children or your aged parents.  True to keep your feet against pressure to lie, cheat, and steal in business. True to God’s call each day.  True to the quest: the quest to find the lost lover.  Slay the dragon, save the girl.

The very meaning of “story” is a journey from one external place to another external.   There must be distance between where I am today and the state I desire for tomorrow or for the last hour of my life, and that distance is where my story takes place.  Without an external landscape there is no story, no plot.

True to yourself?  Well, there is a tiny reality in this phrase, but it only in the context of fidelity to others.  You can’t imagine a self in no context.  If you could, that self would have no content.  No color or meaning.

But for the modern person truth to self has become everything.

Modernity has created the idea of an internal journey.

There is an internal life which demands fidelity to itself, but the internal life       Here is the pattern: as you pursue fidelity, you learn more about yourself, about why and how you are made. That experience of sudden insight is exhilarating; now you see your self, for a bright moment, as an object of knowledge. And it looks pretty, right then, and it feels joyful because joy itself is just the experience of newness. But the mistake is to extract that new knowledge (and the moment of discovery) from larger life, and make it the direct object instead of the indirect effect.

Those who make it the direct object talk the language of the ethic of happiness, which makes sense for a little while, but the glow is really the burning off of capital fuel from the earlier fidelity. Two steps down the road the self is suddenly disoriented. The self, by itself, suddenly dissipates into nothingness — this sudden loss is surprisingly fast and surprisingly literal. The story of your life suddenly looks like a white page.

The ethic of happiness destroys drama, because the wiser the audience, the more they see that the traditional dramatic obstacles for the protagonist are first internalized, and then lost. The protagonist is no longer interesting. The pursuit of a lover is interesting; the quest for the grail is interesting; the fight with the dragon is interesting; the search for “self-actualization” is banal.

When there is no plot people can go on for a long time scratching at meaning, and even make the loss of plot a liberation. For a time. The art of self-actualization is the art of an instant of sensation, the snapshot. Haiku, imagism, the absurd, the barbaric yawp flung upon the roof the world, the song of myself in which I very well contradict myself — all fun stuff as momentary diversion.

Self minus plot equals black despair.   Despair is the sensation of a disintegrated self.

The brush is a better artist than you are.    The water is a better artist than you are.   Just introduce the colors to each other then go get a coke.   They’ll form their own friendships and you can sit in the corner and eavesdrop.

There is no plot without a protagonist, and the protagonist is not interesting unless he is a hero. He cannot be a hero if he is not good.

Hollywood long ago rejected the idea of objective moral law, and severed its own artistic nerve when it did so.

The corpse twitched awhile and so moguls thought it lived.

The expose of normalcy is a favorite device of wretched Hollywood types who’ve only ever known dysfunctional homes. So they can’t stand the thought that somewhere, somebody is normal.   They love to paint a picture of the heartland and then expose the seamy underside – “see, we’re all seamy.”

But the truth is, many, many people really did have a “Norman Rockwell” childhood. There really are loving families on quiet streets where the fireflies sparkle in the July twilight.   These streets just do not produce screenwriters.

One day I noticed that the ugliest buildings in town are at the art gallery, so I began pondering modern design.  How could the people most aware of the Beautiful veer so forcefully into making things ugly?   Since modernism is all about shifting blame to root causes,  I wanted to be fair to the artist community by blaming a root cause.     So I’ve decided that the poverty of modern plastic design is rooted in a failure of poetic vocabulary.

“Form follows function” seems to be a guiding epigram of the modern aesthetic.  And this produces minimalism.  It produces what we now call “contemporary style”.   But no art can survive long in minimalism, since the most fundamental function is simple survival.    Art is always an extraneous object from the point of view of mere survival; it is the very opposite of minimalism.   So the post-modern artist, in order to overcome the inevitable ennui that comes attached to modernism in all disciplines,  resorts to what some call “whimsy” — although, as I say the word, I want to restate it, since “whimsy” is a positive word, with an element of joy, and it is useful.  But I notice that the minimalist mood — wherever it appears — eventually kills all joy.  (more on Minimalism versus Simplicity)

So, what does the artist and critic mean by “whimsy”, really?   They mean “random”.   What the post-modern artist actually cultivates is randomnity of form.   Yet, the true random event has, by definition, no designer, so this path logically ends either in abandoning art entirely or in suicide.    Or spend your life designing forms that go against other forms — avoidance of pattern,  anti-form. (I know, I know, the lack of insight is breathtaking, but I’m just reporting here.)

But this stance is not new; we’ve seen it somewhere before…let’s see…let’s see…ah, it is old as adolescence.   The definition of oneself by adopting anything random that is new and is not what your elders did — to define yourself in contrast to others — is the adolescent pose.  What a sad spectacle is this: high intelligence, such as God gave an artist, harnessed to the end of intentionally avoiding order or value.  Unspeakable tragedy.

So that doesn’t work.   It produces the ultimate absurdity: the ugly art gallery.    What makes more sense?    Well, in the real world, form and function are intertwined inseparably, of course, but we do need to express their relationship in a verb, or we have no guide whatsoever for formal (design) decisions. The problem is in the verb “follows”, which connotes passivity.  It relegates “form” to a passive role, which is eventually always a death.   The minute we choose the verb “follows” in the epigram, and let that relationship be the way we think about form and function, we start down a road to random form.   Bad poetic vocabulary locks us in bad thought, and bad work.

Better: “Form REJOICES in function”. This gives both nouns something to do.  Within the building this architect is drawing, real people work.  Let the form rejoice in that work, not just accomodate it.  If Form rejoices in the function it facilitates,  then it  will be something worthy of beholding in its own right.  Art.   And the artist — the architect’s job is to rejoice.

A poet would know that if the wrong word sneaks into the communal mind, it can kill for generations an entire discipline.

The first proper object of our knowledge is the Creator.  He made it all, including my organ of knowing, and this “all” that He made is the Garden.   The entire world here below is the Garden, seen from from far away, in exile.

Normally, we observe the world via reason but we do not know it in the fullest sense, because reason is observing from an objective distance, a spatial point where any other reason (any other at all)  can stand and repeat the same observation.   This detached, repeatable observation we call science.  It is the spectatorship of exile.   It yields useful information, through which we master and improve the world.

By definition, science excludes all cognition that others cannot share.  The observation is repeatable or it is not valid.  So if I hold my epistemological position always on this detached, objective vantage point – which allows my reason to see – I cannot have unique knowledge.   I can validate the results of experiments.

If we hold that the deepest knowledge is what happens between two people, then science, for all its utilitarian glory, yields no knowledge of this sort.  (I do want to stipulate that science, the gift or reason, is an adornment on the human race.  What science has given us is…magnificent.  I write nothing to devalue it, in method or in substance.  But I want to talk about love.)

None of this makes sense to you unless you were raised listening to bible stories, which imprinted us with the true cliché that to “know”, biblically, is a wholistic experience between persons, often used of the intimacy between husband and wife.  Biblical writers don’t think of us looking out on the natural world and “knowing” nature.  We behold nature.  But we know a lover.

Full knowledge is participatory love.   Our knowledge of God is in the act of love, but is often called “mysticism” when a writer is trying to catch in words what, of love,  impinges the knowing faculty.

Our knowledge of The Garden, then, is not an act of analytical reason, but can be as we love The Garden, in an artistic work.   An exercise of loving the warm light as it kisses the molecules.   What we discover in art is never a means to any end, even though we might be able to capture in words.   Knowledge is useful, but the lover is indifferent to its usefulness.

So knowledge, in this biblical sense, is interpenetration; or participation in “the inner essences of created things” (I believe this is an expression from the Philokalia.  Think also of the poet Hopkins’ “inscape”.)

So, the artist seeks to befriend The Garden.  I love prose and poetry infused with the love of something – a landscape (Bronte), a country (Pasternak), a countryside (Cather).  Please, please, love something.  In words, or pictures.

All creation is in the art of seeing – Times Online

But now, because you asked me what drawing was to me . . . when you are drawing, anyway when you are drawing something which is alive, you are drawing the traces of what has happened to it until that moment at which you are looking at it. I mean, the traces of how it has physically become itself. 

For example, if it’s a face, how it has, by its experience or the soul behind it, become the face it is. So the drawing is, it seems to me, an observation of how the thing that you’re looking at has become itself. And that of course does have a lot to do with what we’re talking about — and storytelling.