When You Write, Get Close to the Soul

“Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul—and you answer.”—Terri Guillemats

There’s a story about an enterprising French manufacturer, who after World War II, collected the brass from shell casings fired by German artillery to reuse in making musical instruments. The story goes that when melted down and recast, they made saxophones of world class quality. In fact, some of the best saxophones ever made. Astoundingly superior to what had been produced before. And when the supply of German shell casings ran out and the manufacturer went back to pre-war materials, the resultant instruments were somehow lacking. Unable to produce musical tones with the same resonance as before, the same richness.

There is some question as to whether or not this is a true story, that this actually took place. But I like to believe it did. That the implements of war were transformed into the means for expressing great beauty. And out of all the horror came some sort of redemption. By no means “making up” for the tragedy, but something.

For isn’t that what we do with our art? Take the raw material of our lives and turn it into poems or paintings or plays? Sometimes we create explosions of great joy, and at other times, beautiful, meaningful work, but imbued with tinges of anxiety or despair.

As a young woman, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo suffered a horrific trolley accident and experienced pain all her life. We see that suffering in her work. As we see Van Gogh’s emotional anguish in “The Starry Night,” and Milton’s in the lines of Paradise Lost.

When my father died, I wrote out my heartbreak in poetry. When my mother began experiencing the symptoms of Alzheimers, I did what I needed to care for her, I grieved, and I kept writing. As I look at those poems now, I consider them some of my best work. Work of the soul.

When you write, Anne Sexton said, you should “put your ear down close to the soul and listen hard.” When we listen carefully, we know of pain. Life is beautiful and painful and joyous and fleeting. We grieve, we hurt. The other side of love is loss. And what can we do but live out our love, live through the loss? And if we are artists, create something beautiful from the broken shards of love, the vestiges of what has since vanished.  -Lucy Adkins