dreamlessness

a blogalectic

This place of which you say ‘It is a waste’
There shall be heard again the voice
Of mirth, and the voice of gladness

There’s not much moon tonight. So Masha has given us this question:

Moonlight is dangerous, but beautiful, essential for artistic dreamings, which is why, this week, in the darkness of the moon, I’m bringing the discussion over to the lack of dreams. What happens when the artist looses sight of the moon and flounders for awhile?

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I’ve lost sight of the moon or of dreams, when I’m afraid I have nothing to say and nothing to create, I try to create things. Like a Happy Haggis:

Since this Haggis is Happy, we can presume it survived Burns day, and has another year to roam peacefully and free in the Tesco wilderness, before it’s poached by drunken poetry enthusiasts, and goes boom. Haggises always go boom. That’s just part of being a haggis. That looks like this:

This haggis doesn’t seem to know this about haggises. It’s smiling.

Surprisingly, other authors have different ideas about what to do when there are no more ideas. Masha explains:

Some must "stay drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy you" (Ray Bradbury), others insist that "One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot" (Lev Tolstoy). I can’t say I fall into either camp. Unfortunately, I’ve too many things to do each day to stay drunk on anything – writing, or vodka, or wine, and I would never get anything written if my flesh had to be included in it all

Bradbury and Tolstoy certainly can’t be accused of incessant good cheer, but then one would assume they know a bit about writing. These statements, though, strike me as meaningless. If one has really left a bit of flesh in the inkpot—or, the modern equivalent, got one’s fingers stuck in a keyboard—it’s probably better to call the doctor than write a novel.

And, like Masha, I don’t find writing terribly intoxicating. Mesmerising, yes. But there has never been an instance when too many rounds of drafting short stories has prompted me to actually use the karaoke machine.

The idea behind these quotations—that an must be wholly, utterly, entirely an author, that an author writes from a deep place of passion and love—that cannot be taught. It is or it isn’t, and that’s all.

So Rilke seems a bit closer to the mark when he says

to be an artist meant: not to reckon and count, to ripen like the tree which does not force it’s sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without fear lest no summer might come after.

With Rilke, as with Benjamin, I always get the sense that he’s whistling in the dark. It seems to be the dread of nightfall in winter without a star that makes him proclaim that summer is sure to follow; it seems a fierce self-reckoning that makes him declare an artist should ripen, not count.

This creative desperation seems in itself a fertile ground for an artist can take root. The challenge any artist is not to be too afraid in the dark, moonless nights, to learn to welcome winters, and doubts and questioning. To find and love the hidden lights of winter, the darkest nights of stillness and starlight. To learn to whistle in the teeth of despair.

After all, we only say the moon drives lovers and dreamers mad because they’re laughing.

 

an achievement

After some serious pondering, I decided that the reason my wonderful blogs are never featured on the WordPress Freshly Pressed page is that I never have pictures up here anymore.
So, for my 301st post at Paradoxes, here is a picture of a happy cookie:

That should do it.

the delusion of day

A blogalectic

What is a world, and how is it made? Or to put it another way, in Tom Waits’s immortal words, ‘Did the devil make the world while God was sleeping?’

We might be inclined to wonder that if Waits doesn’t know the answer to that, who does? Nabokov, apparently, confirming my general suspicions. This week on the blogalectic, Masha starts us off with this striking and salient quotation:

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world
and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Masha suggests that Jenna and I tend to read books with a bit more charity, whereas she tends to read with more criticism. I’m not often accused of charity, so I found her remark unduly flattering.

katabasis

a new blogalectic with Masha and Jenna St. Hilaire, or
a poem without words

When you go to bed, don’t leave bread or milk on the table:
it attracts the dead.

Masha gives us the words of Rilke today, together with a reminder that many people avoid myth, and magic, and fantasy because of the ‘the darkness, the spirits, and the sense of evil lurking that they feel in the background’. And she asks us, ‘We’ve touched a bit on darkness before, is there a line that shouldn’t be crossed? When does myth and magic become occult? When do fairies become demons?’

The answer, as everyone knows what read a proper story, is that fairies become devilish when they’re angry, or threatened, or lonely, or afraid. Anyone can live comfortably with the Good Neighbours nearby, if you mind your own business and don’t go digging where you’re not invited. Or if invited, take nothing away with you unless bidden, bring nothing with you that isn’t asked, do not tell what you saw unless you are told to speak. In other words, be polite. Be a gentleman, or a lady. Manners that you think arcane and old-fashioned will serve you in good stead. These are the Good Neighbours, unless wronged.

on not liking schlock

In blogalectic with Jenna and Masha

Happy New Year, good readers. This year begins with something different. Jenna has graciously injected a line of fervour into the discussion, taking on the large and sticky question of church music, specifically “the failure of many Christian recording artists to realize that music itself actually means something, not just the lyrics.” Consequently, she says, ‘our hymnals contain some of the worst schlock I’ve ever caught posing as music’, with ‘lyrics that would make a cheap Hallmark card blush’.

Masha concurs with Jenna’s sentiments, blaming much of it on the current culture of advertising, and offers a possible explanation: ‘We stop trying to pursue beauty, to form ourselves in imitation of beauty, and follow the easy path that leads to badness and banality.’

Personally, I don’t have a dog in this fight. It’s a fight I’ve been around several times, and if those of you reading this blog would like it discussed here in more details, I can certainly secure some competent guest bloggers. What intrigues me though, is the broader subject of beauty, and the lack thereof.

I believe, simply, that there is something properly basic about the human need for beauty. We are humans; therefore we will search for beauty and surround ourselves with beautiful things. This is of course true whether you’re Christian or Muslim or Pagan or whatever; this is simply, humanly true. The world is not beautiful—it is wild and tragic and heartbreaking—but Beauty is in it. And people look for Beauty.

We see this at a straightforward level if we watch a child watching a Disney film. Not even Disney enthusiasts care to argue that the opening credits of Winnie-the-Pooh is art on the level of, say, Citizen Kane. And yet the colours and sound and the invitation into “the enchanted neighbourhood | Where Christopher Robin plays” is mesmeric, enthralling, transcendent to a very young child. Beauty beckons to us, and draws us into itself.

The difficulty is following Beauty where it leads us. To recklessly paraphrase C. S. Lewis, one should never lose delight in the opening credits of Winnie-the-Pooh, and yet one should eventually try to comprehend Throne of Blood. One story, encountered earlier, gives us the straightforward consolations of childhood. The other undermines our confidence in human nature, or anything else. It is the harder lesson, and necessary, and beautiful. But looking at the reds and yellows of Pooh, we do not at first expect that is where beauty will lead.

These examples, of course, depart from Jenna’s in an important particular: there is actually artistic merit in Winnie-the-Pooh. The examples she and Masha give have none. This leads to a difficulty—one might say, perversity—which is also prevalent outside Church music. And it’s just as human as the need for beauty: the urge for ease.

We do not have to think about these songs. Emotion comes pre-packaged, and we can pick our favourite style and have a grand old weepy time. You can see this on X-Factor: beautiful contestants sing familiar tunes in the usual way, and the crowd on the screen reacts appropriately, the judges tell us what to think, etc. Music, and the art of the musician, and the reality that music arises from the art of the musician regardless of style or degree of ability, never seriously enters the frame. We are allowed to relax.

Beauty never lets us relax. Beauty bring us instead into rest, “costing not less than everything.” Beauty does not offer us anything or make demands of us; it simply is, and it points to itself. when we see Beauty, in its manifestations, we cannot but respond and follow. Even if Beauty does not wear its familiar aspect, we can still come to recognise it, though the process may be painful.

There seems to me to be a too frequent dearth of beauty, caused in part by the reality that Beauty is not static, nor does it simply exist to be observed. Beauty changes us. It knocks away the lines and boxes, and knocks away the idea of boxes, and shows us the absolute stillness of rest and hope and despair and tears and laughter that lies within and behind it, regions ‘where all that is not music is silence’.

Our own fear would side with the jailors, and keep us in the realm of the comfortable, the comfortably challenging, faux-development and self-important seriousness. But Beauty shows us levity in the face of tragedy, hope as the companion of despair. Beauty teaches us how to wonder; beauty teaches us how to laugh.