(But I also need to go down on my knees before you, Reader. Please don’t ever indulge in writing just because you’ve been taught the craft as some do-it-yourself technique, like fishing, and now you have something momentous to convey to the world, like fish knowledge; and please don’t ever write just to mourn the fading in the water of Narcissus. I don’t want to hear of your achievements, prizes, grants, grunts and groans. Please don’t show your soul to me. Help us keep banality down by regularly, quietly and undramatically eliminating a creative-writing-course-produced or academy-embedded poet. Through drowning, if possible; as a boat put to water. . It’s a matter of moral hygiene, of conserving the merits of madness.)
LIFE WORK
I’m not certain about the extent to which life — the ‘ordinary’ or ‘living’ life one is leading — enters or impinges upon the work. (By ‘work’ I mean writing and painting, making films or plays, etc.: that activity of the mind and the hand which purports to metamorph matter into art and imagination into memory, that is, into the substance of consciousness-making.) Of course, your life can be the gray matter of your writing if that’s what you set out to reflect, and even when you don’t do so on purpose it is more than likely still seeping through.
In any event, what is ‘world’ and what ‘word’? Geoff Bennington, who advanced many insightful ideas about The New Modernism, wrote: “Referral is not referenced in the linguistic sense. Deconstruction does not have a place for language over here and a world over there to which it refers [my italics]. Elements in the language refer to one another for their identity, and refer to non-linguistic marks which refer in turn for their identity and difference. There is no essential difference between language and the world, the one as subject, the other as object. There are traces.” (But not to be different does not mean that one is the same. .)
One’s own experiences, emotions and relationships, constitute the most readily available materiaclass="underline" however broadly and distantly one may imagine and project the stories, they still must come from the mind, and mind — I believe — is both the origin, the originator and the product of all the above, or at least of our translation and interpretation of those experiences. The mind is also the imitator of outside reality, the way the markings on a moth’s wings will imitate the eyes of a predator. We paint our faces to ward off homicidal spirits, we write to capture (and captivate) reality in a living mirror. This lies at the heart of what writers do. (By the way, I think a possible definition of ‘heart’ can be mind plus hand — in other words, mind being able to help itself, including imagining the mind and the I and killing it and ‘self’ if necessary; ‘heart’ is an agent of activity, it only exists when it is manifest, when it leaves traces, as in writing.)
(I’m not now talking about ‘me-ism’: the seemingly inexhaustible fascination with the self — its history and manifestations and consumation, its aches and joys and glories, its strangeness and the smells of its gases. We so often dote on ourselves as on long-lost children. Obviously, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with exploring the self; it is even a necessary point of departure for the knowledge of others — the philosopher Levinas claimed that the Subject is both the host and the hostage of the Other — but narcissism, the closed-in mirror, the capitalist and consumerist entitled self-referent, is very meager ground indeed upon which to engage the reader. The domestic ‘self’ is not exactly a transport toward more exciting insights: it eventually pales into insipid indifference through masturbation. Fish need water to breathe. Why get stuck in the known? The point is not to ignore the ‘self’ but to avoid becoming blinded. Buddha advised us to take care of the ‘body’ as of a person with nine wounds, with great care and compassion but without attachment.)
Writing is a necessary form/expression of schizophrenia: it implicates the observer and the doer. It demarcates the joints and ruptures between the ineffable fullness of being and the full autarchy — nearly an autism! — of a system that captures perception and expression within its own history and horizons. I don’t think one should attempt to ‘resolve’ the problem of duality or even imagine to ‘understand’ oneself better through creativity. Writing is not therapy. Forget the sloppy self-indulgence of ‘healing.’ If one has to be ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ enough in order to write (naive and cynical, innocent and manipulative) the purpose is not to be cured but to write better. In other words, to transform better and more effectively in the work, into narration, the ambiguities and imperfections and impossibilities thrown up by the process.
(The ‘better’ and ‘more effectively’ I allude to here have to do with clarity of communication and affect. And by ‘clarity’ I don’t necessarily mean intelligibility: we all know by now that a shadow will be obscure, or that a flock of words can be without cognizable connotations, while still being ‘clear’ if there is texture, and still expressing ‘saying’ if it hangs together in contexture (conjecture/context).
“The higher he ascends/the darker is the wood;/it is the shadowy cloud/that clarified the night,/and so the one who understood/remains always unknowing/. . This knowledge by unknowing / is such a soaring force/that scholars argue long/but never leave the ground/. .” (St. John of the Cross, I Came Into the Unknown)
I sat down at the table
and the poem descended like a mantle
upon my shoulders. The rain was outside.
Out there was such a rush and rattle of rain
that no footsteps could be heard on the roof.
My window was open to the waterfall of sky
but I at bay in my moth-whispered cloak,
wrapped in wings with no memory of flying
The act of creativity is the beginning of unleashing metamorphosis, of putting something out there, of starting a process. We become aware of the implications of tangling with matter, of engaging others. In the ‘making of things’ (stories, poems) we shape identities, we forge links between aesthetics and ethics, we learn about the importance of an environment within which rhythms and resonance can take on meaning, we begin to understand about embellishing the existent, we reach out to the supposed non-existent, we bring new light to known objects. It makes it possible for us to imagine transitions and bring together the discrete in a plausible bounded mirage of purport. After all, the collection comes into being because of the collector. On condition that you remember the fact that your vision is only one possible way of seeing, collecting, and thus of making. One must not confuse the finger with the moon.
It was painting that made me aware of the thingness of creations, of the object’s ‘own language,’ with logic and internal references and therefore history, of the similarly explosive functions of metaphor and image, and that meaning will be secreted from the dialectical game of look-alike-alive components which, when drawing in the reader or onlooker or listener, provoke the illusion of movement and thus become process: rhythm, pattern, space, reference, harmony, dissonance, repetition, obliteration, the color underneath, texture, structure, jump, break, fuck-up. . (Thing as process and not as product, now that’s democracy for you as opposed to the fascism of making of everything a commodity!) For ultimately this: the process (and its mirror — poem, painting) is the matter of awareness for both maker and taker. Montaigne says: “Je ne peins pas l’être, je peins le passage.” I don’t paint the being, but the going.