Letter from Galicia 6

Thomas Mann has Breisacher tell us how perspective destroyed art by destroying illusion and making the image too obvious. He thought that the mystery should remain as it was in the Middle Ages with at a little distance from the real. It must remain with arms outstretched in welcome yes but still at arms’ length. And is this not the case with the poet. Indeed, it could be said that the poet’s task is precisely not to allow the word to come too close but remain withdrawn. Truth, aletheia, is un- forgotten, there on the rim of the world of the senses, waiting, trembling and always and for ever illusion.

That in his late works Beethoven wasn’t straining to reveal some realm of the absolute but has rather the “ruthless indifference of one who has risen above it towards the sheer earthly difficulties of technique”.

I sometimes worry, more often than sometimes, that if you worry too much about the philosophy of language or the problems of creativity then you are unlikely to create anything much. The mind must give up and drift. Soto zen meditation asks, I think, much the same, although, with writing, nirvana only comes after the event when you wake up and discover, as in Adam’s dream of Eve, that she is there by your side.

Keats wrote of “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. He elsewhere calls it, “diligent indolence”. Where the Miltonic mind creates through the power of its own efforts, the poet’s character intrudes into the text, imposes itself on it, the Shakespearian mind creates in spite of its own efforts. Blake writes of his epic Milton, “I have written this poem from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even against my Will [..] & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produc’d without Labour or Study”. Well, thinking along these lines got me through the eight years of my part-time doctorate and finally got the results published. And it sold pretty well and in those day university libraries bought almost all academic studies automatically. I had to reprint it myself when it went out of print and it sits there on Kindle and in a box in the attic patiently waiting.

The creator gives up his ego, his will to the work. Keats wrote, “Enter none / Who strive therefore. On a sudden it is won”. Cezanne writes, “This landscape thinks itself in me”. In this sense it is indeed determined, inevitable. There is nothing the artist can do to alter the way the gift is granted. As Mozart said to Schikaneder, “the thing is written, now it is only scritch, scritch, scritch”.  As Rembrandt surely knew, the artist is blind, the pen or brush is like the blind man’s stick. He places it before him in order to find out what might be there, to test the ground. Before he does this, his possibilities are still open; obscure. Nietzsche writes, ‘I love my ignorance of the future and do not wish to perish of impatience and of tasting promised things ahead of time’ In a drawing or etching the light areas (the areas where something is) are where the artist has done nothing. He has retreated back to work on the shadows. All the gradations of darkness and shadow are the result of his pen or incisor. Light is the result of cutting into darkness. This is a profound paradox and one that the etcher, Rembrandt understood. Caravaggio and the tenebrists surely understood this.

So the artist walks backwards “Abstract as in a transe” leaving his work in front of him in a moment of recognition. “He awoke and found it truth”.