‘What we see of the world is the mind’s
Invention and the mind
Though stained by it, becoming
Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies—
Can shift instantly
A dirty bird in a square time’
From ‘Sourdough Mountain Lookout’ by Philip Whalen.1
I read this poem today (after hearing it on 92Y’s Read By podcast), thinking of how I might describe what I want to do in this newsletter.
For a long time I have been interested in synthesis—in how the mind makes a coherent picture from experience, from its disparate parts. I think this process involves finding patterns in our environment that point to the interconnectedness of things, in turn incorporating our selves into the greater whole. This is how we locate and make sense of our selves in the world. It is the same process of making art, of constructing meaning from our particular realities.
Another work featuring a mountain: Ascent to K-2 by Joe Frank (first heard on Scott Carrier’s Home of the Brave podcast). I listened over and over to this 1996 audio essay laid on top of a trip-hop loop, and kept wondering about what it means to have ‘risen above the concept of ascension’. It’s not an easy thing to have done, that much Frank makes clear.
My past has been chequered with graphs and gnarly drawings2 trying to visualise or chronicle the various identities I’ve tried on and aspired to, through a paradigm of ascent.
At present I think perhaps the only worthwhile measure would be a pendulum swinging between two poles—a feeling of emptiness and a feeling of wholeness, with emptiness equating to separateness and wholeness equating to interconnectedness, or (dis)harmony with my environment.
Of my peregrination, I might say: I drew some lines and then I coloured outside of them.
My dad had to tell me how all the subjects in the photograph were related to me.3 I had invented a few reasons for why I might've been compelled to paint the image. It looked painterly, or ripe for painting maybe. The woman looking head-on at the camera conjured something of Flannery O’Connor’s x-ray vision—I have been reading The Complete Stories—so I felt the need to blow up her gaze and work on it, slowly, using a paintbrush. Rendering my ancestors in their future would reveal something of how we are all knit together and composed from spirits of the past, while our own ghosts will be one day live on through our descendants.4
But how much do we know about anything we are doing, until after we have done it. All we can do in the meantime is look for clues.
Over the past 17 months I have been writing a novel. I won’t say much about it yet, but I experiment with a musical substructure in it, by which I mean I have taken pieces of music which the protagonist is familiar with, deconstructed and ascribed aspects of them relating to classical theory (harmonic progression, tonality, texture, dynamic, tempo, cadence, etc.) to sections of narrative prose. Music theory being the default analytical framework of the protagonist, whenever she encounters an inexplicable event, this is the (un)conscious mode that she applies, and it will be legible to varying degrees, on multiple levels to readers of the story.
The main conflict is ostensibly one in the protagonist’s external reality, though the one inside her own head about her identity as an artist is more essential.
The point, I believe, is that we are all artists but conscious to greater or lesser extents of the ways in which we craft our realities. The dialogue between art and life assumes that art and life are separate, but patterns and structures are always working through us, whether or not we are working through them.
I am also making illustrations for the novel so will share work on those in future posts and would love to offer a limited edition print to the first 10 founding subscribers.
To have risen above the concept of ascension is to have risen above any outcome to define us, or to have adopted a more process-oriented conception of life allowing for space to receive what is happening around us all the time. This is where creativity lives and it is how the mysterious forces that we are always grappling with, however aware of them we are, start to make themselves apparent.
But I have nothing to teach anybody here. My aim is not want to make anyone, including myself, more productive—I think we could all use more rest, away from the ‘smart’ tools—but simply to cultivate a sense of the interrelatedness of things so that we might all feel more creative, or receptive to the patterns through which we create our realities.
Philip Whalen, “Sourdough Mountain Lookout” from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen copyright © 2007 by Brandeis University Press and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
My dad said:
The man with hat on is your great grandfather E B Woodard, a very colorful character. The girl on far left looks like your cousin Teresa Vantrease Lawler and the lady in red looks like her her mother Sissy Duke Vantrease. Sissy was sister in law of E B. Uncle Charles and Sissy Vantrease kept a home in Fort Myers, Florida. I would speculate that E B and ‘Granny’ were visiting Granny’s brother Charles and Sissy at their place in Florida. All are gone now except Teresa, who may have provided this photo.
Time laid bare by such constructions: