Art, not Nature

It was increasing impatience with (or even revulsion from) woolly Romanticism which led in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to movements in art and literature where form and colour were pursued as if for their own sakes, to create new worlds of experience, which in a sense parted company with Nature.

“The nature of a work of art is to be not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase), but a world in itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for the time the beliefs, aims and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world of reality.” (ACB 1901)

“Oui, l’oeuvre sort plus belle
D’une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.

. . .

“Sculpte, lime, cisèle ;
Que ton rêve flottant
Se scelle
Dans le bloc résistant !”

(Yes, the work comes out better when the form is resistant to being worked on, as in verse, marble, onyx, enamel. . . . Carve, polish, chisel; may your floating dream be sealed into the resisting block!) (TG 1852)

I suppose I am retracing my steps. In the Sixth Form at school I discovered a famous poem from Émaux et Camées and it came with all the force of religious conversion; or was it a deprogramming from the cult of romanticism, as its author Théophile Gautier intended? Never mind which. I find myself as if by hazard rediscovering the way out of an impasse: same way, different impasse.

Writing—synonymous for me, in these days, with blogging—has become an essential part of the survival equation. Caged birds, they say, sing the sweeter. Never mind that the bars of my cage may seem like freedom to others, for I’ve been granted the gifts of time and freedom from cares known vulgarly as “retirement”. Perhaps the cage consists in accepting to live in the cheapest part of town, a little more squalid and rat-infested than free choice might have dictated.

I haven’t been able to prevent myself from constructing a kind of formula or rulebook for my writing, as an angler constructs his own mythology for successful catching of fish: this weather, this time of day, this spot on the river-bank, cunningly-crafted flies to persuade the fish to rise and be hooked. I have encouraged in myself the religion of instinct and tuned to the sharp impulses of the hunter-gatherer, from which the inventive intelligence arises, like a sort of libido to be quenched in wood and metal—or the fashioning of prose. Those impulses pull me outdoors to long treks, whose aim is not hunting for herb or hind, but inspiration which can be preserved for translation into language. But then the actual fashioning of verbal strands (adornments of feeling and reason) must be done when mind is clear and blood is fresh: therefore in the stilly caverns of darkness before dawn.

I must confess to a profound flaw in my modus operandi till now. (Perhaps the difference between art and engineering is this: that in art, flaws may be tolerated.) I have confused the catalyst with the thing itself. So, in my last, I confessed this:

“In this Northern hemisphere, it is Spring, but I cannot begin to describe its beauty, only respond to the urgency of its summons to my soul.” Such was my ecstatic worship of Spring, that I chided myself for not singing its praises; and equally chided myself for being so preoccupied with everyday chores as to miss various stages of the procession of miracles that constitute this season: the emergence of leaf-buds, blossom-buds, changing songs of the birds in trees and on chimneytops . . .

So, to summarize, I was hemmed in by the rituals which trial and error had revealed to be necessary offerings to the Muse; overstuffed with high ideas of the edification my writings should engender; whilst being consumed with daily lust for the writing of something meaty, shapely, lively, cheeky, alluring.

Now the floodgates start to open. I’ll publish this, and get on with the next.