Category: On Creativity

Abide

Pilgrim, artist, lover.

Between the first and the last of anything worthwhile, most of what happens is a series of endlessly radiating paths, brilliant branches of first light and with these, miles upon acres of decisions––each loaded with portent and potential for disaster––and enough interruptions to challenge anybody with a scrap of sense to doubt their reasons for starting.

These hazardous undertakings are, it turns out, so utterly compelling that it cannot be helped. This is what we do: remake our worlds again, and again, either refusing the call to witness or taking it so fully to heart that the act evokes its full muscularity, the labor of it reminding with each strain, how difficult it is to bear these beams––even of light, especially when looking long and well.

***

Inspired variously, including by William Blake: “We are put on the earth a little space/ That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”

Forum

Actors in space.

Whose space is this, and who is allowed to dream here? Whose imagination shall be lifted, and who may perform? Who may not, and will? Which displays are sanctioned, and which hidden, and which of those in hiding will emerge today? If performance is a negotiation between revelation and concealment, any public space may be its locus.

What is happening now?

Let’s go. Bring your costume and your instrument.

What is happening now?

Now is the time.

***

Inspired by art historian Nada Shabout’s article, “Whose Space Is It?” and my love of people watching.  

Art Friends

In loving conversation.

Dear friend.

Caro mio.

Fellow artist.

How good it is to share this devotion.

Let me soothe your self-doubt, and you can remind me that I am not invisible.

Let us venture forth, co-conspirators in these dangerous, obsessive, sometimes gallant adventures in our separate mediums. 

Here is a womb for your thoughts.

Here is a loving gaze.

Here’s company in your distaste for certain fashions of the moment.

Let us be proudly unfashionable, together! 

Alas, confidence ebbs.

My love, let this encouragement flow.

A reminder: to nurture those odd traits most vulnerable to misunderstanding among strangers.

Also, here is a spicy retort! Now passionate disagreement! Tart reply!

Stand with me, friend, when the wasteland offends to the point of nausea.

By the way, why must you be great? Why not be more like yourself?

You know, sometimes you need to forget this pious improvement.

Remember to play. Eat!

You notice I am silent when you speak.

Because with you, dear, there is just so much to watch!

***

I don’t know why a query about hyperbolic surfaces led me to Joel Salzburg’s article, “The Rhythms of Friendship in the Life of Art: The Correspondence of Bernard Malamud and Rosemarie Beck,” but I was intrigued to read about the long friendship, lived mostly through letters, between the American novelist and the abstract expressionist painter (Salmagundi, Fall/Winter 1997). Several phrases above are adapted from the excerpts and commentary provided by Salzburg.

Little

Worlds within worlds.

If every universe is wrapped in curves, each around an imagined center, 

and attention is a magnifying glass, consider the patience required

to work in miniature, to fit an entire nature in a grain of sculpture

and how the dreamer can renew the small world simply by moving

the face.

Here, too, is all of it,

and here the entrance

and 

now

here.

***

With found phrases from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Ch. 7 “miniature,” (section V., 159-163). 

At the Shore

A conversation in the interim.

With the tides coming and going, finding the hidden treasure is often a matter of patience.

Which ocean?

This mind, or whatever you call it. There’s something I am trying to recover.

So now what?

Now I wait.

Hmm. It doesn’t look like you are doing anything.

Yeah. But remember those seeds we planted?

I love those trees! It’s amazing how they went from––

Yeah, but before all that, remember? After we planted, it looked like nothing. Root growth always does. But the tree won’t take if it doesn’t happen.

Wait. Is this about the ocean, or tree growth?

I’m mixing metaphors. It’s about learning to wait when you are trying to make a thing happen.

Got it. What’s happening now?

Survival

A dance lesson.

No, it’s not a luxury you said, of your art.

Dear poet, show me, please 

––some lesson in survival.

In lieu of an answer, you took position on the line. 

There’s safety within the perimeter, they say.

Do you know this? Perhaps, and still reject it.

Or perhaps not, because for you that inside

is no such thing. Your silence won’t protect

you, you whisper––then sing, to signify the

alchemy by which you transform its impulse

into language, the language into music, into

a body’s dance along the wire.

The Memory Tower

For Leonora Carrington.

Everything happened after my birth, you said, as you left on the boat of the herons, a new Eve, refusing to be devoured as anybody’s muse. You had spells to cast, self-portraits as alchemy, your spine a hearing trumpet, listening between the worlds; mère, mer; now mother, now sea.

The solar systems of your eyes kindled by your own light, you rode the seventh horse away from the house of fear, passing through the stone door to the land where the serpents sing stories from the well to the pilgrims ascending the memory tower.

El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas, Leonora Carington

***

Inspired by the life and work of artist Leonora Carrington, with phrases borrowed from the titles of her paintings and stories, as well as her interviews. 

Finding the Essence

Of restraint.

When it comes to composition––a painting, a poem, a film––so much of the work is about discovering the essence of the thing. The rest is arbitrary. The art comes from learning what to eliminate. This takes time.

***

My interest in the art and life of Louise Bourgeois led me to the writings and interviews assembled in this book. The italicized phrase above is from one of her early letters.

Reparations of a Body

Old woman, new art.

Past, present, future: body. It’s a reaching place, this blood house, this mother’s form––out, out, she paints balloon bodies bursting with anxieties of desire, washing together in tides of pink, crimson, vermillion. She paints the sound and the fury of the gaping mouth, wild eyes; body like a net, like a sac, flower petal breasts like octopus arms: reach.  

The images shock. The nerve, to dare production beyond her reproductive years. With a nod to decorum, might she not try creeping around the flesh?

Given her advanced age, wasn’t she supposed to have floated into something ethereal by now? Suffusions of light, passive serenity, reflections on a lake? Flowers would be appropriate. Ripe fruit, perhaps. 

With flamboyant irony, she rejects easy ripeness, preferring instead to quarrel with time, to paint within her bodies the unresolved contradictions of her still-becoming self.

I am about to find the past, she says. I feel it, she says.  I own it forever. 

Her mornings continue in this manner, her mourning still undone.

***

Inspired by Louise Bourgeois, whose life and works are of deep interest to me lately. This morning, I was reading Rosemary Betterton’s article, Louise Bourgeois, ageing, and maternal bodies, published in a 2009 issue of Feminist Review.