Thursday, April 26, 2012

Ted Hughes has a more dramatic story about it.  'The Thought Fox,' an essay in his collection Winter Pollen.   He's in university trying to write a final paper, and he has a dream.  A half-burned fox comes to him, leaves a bloody hand print on the paper, and says, 'you must stop this.'

In my case, writing papers got harder and harder.  I willingly invested long periods of time in them.  The papers became late.  I got bad grades because of their lateness.  And more or less at the same time I was discovering the simple sentences that made sacred ordinary daily life, first in early Hemingway, and then in later Hemingway.  Before it had been Paradise Lost, and Donne, and Eliot, that caused me to pause, as I was assigned to write.  Then, for whatever reason, it was Hemingway, first "The End of Something," and then, for my supposed attempt at a senior thesis, Islands in the Stream.  For the latter, I transcribed sentences into a notebook, finding something very profound going on within them that I couldn't quite pinpoint.  "Abandonment to the textual truths of life," was the best way I could put whatever it was that was going on in these apparently mundane but somehow greatly evocative touches in each I copied.

What makes the artistic eye tick, I seemed to be asking myself.  What makes it see what it sees in the sense of something being worthy of report.  Why, the trout beneath the bridge holding itself still in the current above the pebbly bottom?  Why, for that matter, the rust colored gin and tonic?  I found the details fascinating, like a child must find the blocks he plays with fascinating, indeed, three-dimensional.

But what had come over me in all this was even a bit deeper, it intuitively seemed to me.  What it all showed was that the way to best observe something, maybe the only way to truly observe something, was to adopt a passivity.  Let the object come at you as it does.  Try not to let pre-judgments get in your way.  Be open to what you see.

Nature created the tomato, basil and olive oil.  God makes the wine, we humans just stay out of the way.  It is the genius of nature that makes things, not our own.  We simply put things together, quite largely on what already exists as tradition.

The passivity required of the artist has a way of bleeding over upon one's general attitude.  Passivity takes a larger role in decisions and one's actions.  And regrettably, in a  competitive and semi-judgmental society, one can come off looking a bit like an idiot.  Praise is more likely to be heaped upon people who, at least to the naked eye, appear to be do-ers of things, conspicuously active types, those who seem to want to 'write their own story.'

But in the end, genius is accessible to all.  Genius is simplicity.  Genius is discovering the themes of nature's music and then the variations that lie within those themes.  The eye is inexplicably drawn, by the strongest most compelling unseen gravity, to the genius already present in nature and in the world.  And that all makes a person fairly quiet.

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