The Heart of Who We Are
- At May 22, 2017
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
4
What is it we are “about?”
“Painting is damned difficult—you always think you’ve got it, but then you haven’t.”—Paul Cezanne
What is it we are “about” when we write? When we paint or produce a play? What are we after? Is it a certain feeling or mood, an emotional response? Maybe like the impressionist painters, it involves a specific goal—such as capturing the play of sunlight and shadow, accurately portraying the luminosity of light on water. Maybe, like Cezanne, the goal is to paint an apple that is both the essence of apple. and also an apple with such form and solidity that you could almost extend your hand and pluck it from the canvas.
Attempting to put into words our goals and desires as artists is difficult. What truth we are endeavoring to uncover one brushstroke after another, one word after another. These are questions that go to the heart of who we are as writers and artists, our identities as individuals living in the world.
As a fiction writer, it is important to me to establish a strong sense of place, conveying the immensity of the plains under a blue bowl of sky. Or the desolate beauty of the desert–and the emotional implications of each. Then following my characters as they live out their joys and heartaches against the backdrop of that landscape. I am also “after” a certain spareness in my writing, revealing powerful emotions in a restrained manner.
A poet friend says of her writing that she wants to discover that truth she did not realize she knew. The truth in her bones, what she learned in the womb before she was born.
What we are about can be said to be composed of many elements, and will change and evolve as time goes on. Some days we may just want to “write a good story.” Or paint a picture reminiscent of Monet or Cassat. And, like restless children, we may not be able to put our fingers on exactly what it is we want. We can’t say. But it is something–just out of reach, coming into our grasp from time to time and then gone. We may catch fleeting glimpses of that elusive something. In a paragraph we write, electric with meaning, or in the fervor in a face we sketch. And all our lives struggle to rediscover that electricity, that fervor.
“I’m just a pilgrim on this road,” Steve Earle wrote, and yes, we all are pilgrims. Seeking out that intangible element, that certain component or spark that will set our hearts racing, make the hairs on the backs of our necks stand on end. And know we are on the right road at last. –Lucy Adkins
For additional inspiration on living more creatively, visit our website http://thewritingandcreativelife.com.
Marge Saiser
This in itself is a beautiful piece of writing! It gives me much to think about.
Shelly Geiser
Lovely, Lucy! Thank you.
Dee R.
This has reminded me of how often you have inspired me to write about something I thought I had forgotten. Thank you!
David McCreary
Hi Lucy,
I’ve often thought the first impressionist must have been nearsighted and forgot his glasses when he went out to paint. Impressionism was a happy accident.
Joking aside, I do wonder why the mechanistic worldview of many scientists sees the qualitative as simply reducible to the quantitative. Real stuff (mass or matter) is what is measurable and therefore real. Qualities of beauty are merely subjective “epiphenomena” and not real. At least, when doing hard-headed objective research. In this world poetry is not worth much.
I think the qualitative aspects of experience are just as, if not more, real than the reduction of experience to measurement. Nothing is said against scientists following that method so long as it is recognized as a method. Promoting it as a total worldview diminishes
art, meditation and ritual, music, love of nature and it’s beauty, even the value of animals, plants and the earth itself.
There is a humorous indictment of this regnant worldview in Alfred Doblin’s (umlaut over the o) short story, “Materialism: A Fable,” in which animals, plants, even molecules and atoms learn from humans they are only empty stuff acting machine-like without purpose. Their behavior changes radically and they become depressed until they rebel against the atomistic theory and the humans, who should know better. (In Bright Magic.)
Recent philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead, have critiqued this worldview of “vacuous reality” and “misplaced concreteness” rigorously and in depth. But for the readers of this blog, I recommend Whitehead’s student, Suzanne Langer, whose work on symbolism, language, art, music, poetry and other forms of communication went beyond Wittgenstein’s aphorism: That whereof one can speak, one can speak clearly.
That whereof one cannot speak clearly, one must be silent.
I recommend Philosophy in a New Key, Feeling and Form, and, if you are still up for it, her three volume Mind:An Essay in feeling.
David McCreary