The “I”s Have It…

 

Like many new bloggers, I was consumed with anxiety when I posted my first, tentative essays on WordPress.   “Will people like them?”, I wondered.   “Will anyone take time to read them?”   “How will I ever know?”

As time passed and I grew more assured, I began to think less about others’ response to my words and  more about the writing itself.  Georgia O’Keefe once reflected on a book of photographs and text published to mark her 90th birthday by saying,  “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant.  It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest”.  Reading her words, I felt an immediate kinship.  Over the months, I’d begun to make similar comments when discussing my own work. “This is how I understand things.” ” This is the way I experience the world.”  ” This is what I would like you to see.”

To be frank, that’s a lot of “I”. At one time, it would have made me uncomfortable to say such things.  During my formative years, ”I” was a bad word.  No one ever said so explicitly, but if any of us began to use it just a little too often, we knew we needed to stop.  ”I” was a  selfish word.  “I” was self-centered,  vain and egotistical, prideful, frivolous and perhaps even a little smart-alecky, like the inevitable kid in the back of the classroom who loved to wave his arms and yell, “Teacher! Teacher!  I know! I know!”  It was impossible to stop using “I”, of course, but we weren’t supposed to celebrate its necesssity.

Life being what it is, someone was bound to challenge that view of things.  My challenge appeared in the form of a rumpled and utterly distracted professor who bore a vague resemblance to Quentin Compson.  Tie pulled loosely to one side, occasionally missing a button, shedding files and paper like autumn trees, he was a natural actor whose classes could be pure theatre.  He didn’t precisely teach but rolled through our lives like a force of nature, tacking signs above his desk that proclaimed  Creato, Ergo Sum  and asking questions like,  “If you had to wear a scarlet letter, which one would it be?”   His lectures were filled with a mix of literary classics, myth and religious texts.   We got Genesis, Gilgamesh and the Gospels filtered through Melville, Eliot, Faulkner and Greene.    

Confident Vision: Barack Obama & The Green Bear

References to “that vision thing”, now common in political discourse, tend to irritate me. First used during the 1988 campaign by Republican presidential candidate  George Bush, the phrase itself is dismissive, reducing a powerful force in human life and history to little more than a marketing ploy. “Without a vision the people perish”, says Proverbs, but the vision of peace and justice held up by Biblical prophets and Wisdom literature has very little to do with the shallow, ephemeral ”vision thing” offered by dissembling  politicians and politically opportunistic spinmeisters who seem to enjoy working  both sides of the national street.

Vision, of course, refers not only to the content of what we see, but to the way in which we see it.   Our envisioning of reality tends to be idiosyncratic and malleable, shaped by our sensitivities and preferences as well as our convictions about how the world is, or ought to be.

Imagine, for example, four friends who just have shared a day on the beach. Back at their rented cottage, feet propped on weathered railings and drinks in hand, they watch drifting sand swirl off dunes as the wind stiffens and a neighbor wanders over.   Reaching for a beer as he settles onto the top step, he asks, “Well, how was it?  Have a good day?”

Persuaded to Poetry

 

Months ago,  I published “The Surprise of Tiny Purple Things“, an essay about Florida environmentalist Charles Torrey Simpson and a pair of shells I found tucked onto a Texas beach.   The shells, a deep, rich purple, are known in scientific circles as janthina janthina.  They are, in fact, elegant and tiny purple sea snails.  Simpson had found a literal raft of them in the Florida Keys, and his chronicle of his experience helped me identify my own tiny bits of purple. 

Almost immediately, one of my readers stopped by with a request.  Her love of all things purple had been stirred by the piece, and she wanted a “purple poem”.  I don’t think of myself as a poet, and I was reluctant to accede to her request.  As it turns out, she does think of me as a poet, and was convinced  I could produce the poem.

We went back and forth about it for a few days, teasing one another, until she finally became insistent.  “Please do give me that poem”, she said. “I know it’s in there, and can’t wait till you spit it out.” Wanting to be polite, but not having the vaguest idea what a purple poem might look like, I replied, “The poem, she is percolating. Or, should I say, “purple-ating”?

I didnt’ hear back from her, and assumed our discussion had ended, until this appeared just a few days later.

“Ahoy Shore,
Can you see my right foot a-tappin’?
Bet you know why.
I’ll give you a hint. It’s small and shiny and purple and yearns to be heard (or read). I cannot wait to hear its voice.”

The Gift of Reality, The Gratitude of Artists

 

Long before I had seen a palm tree, years before I fell in love with watery azure, turquoise and lapis ribbons twined around Caribbean islands, lifetimes before I walked through tangles of bougainvillea and tumbles of poinciana into the shadows of tropical dreams, I loved Winslow Homer and his art.

One of the premiere American watercolorists, Homer (1836-1910) moved from New York to Prout’s Neck, Maine in the summer of 1883. Despite his love of the New England coast, he often vacationed in Florida and the Caribbean. His mastery of his medium and his unique vision of the islands produced exquisite renderings of sun-drenched homes, symmetries of palms and great, vivid falls of blossoms that seem touched with scent even on the printed page.

Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection.

Traveling to the Caribbean for the first time, I was stunned to discover the reality of its marvelous palms and beaches had intertwined so completely in my mind with the artist’s work it was impossible to untangle the threads. The islands were beautiful, but the work of the artist was equally striking. Wriggling my toes into sand softer than sugar and tasting the salt-heavy air, I expected to think, “Winslow Homer’s painting looks like this.” Gazing with bemusement at the shimmering island, I came to a rather different conclusion: “This looks like Winslow Homer.” It was as though the painter had absorbed, intensified, and re-presented sea, sand and sky in such a way that his paintings were distillations of the islands – purer than reality itself.

That same distillation of reality was a hallmark of another American artistic icon, Georgia O’Keeffe. Her saturation of bold, idiosyncratic form with color sometimes ethereal as a swallowtail’s wing and sometimes so intense it seems illuminated from within can make reality seem only a poor reflection of the art.

In Georgia O’Keeffe: Arts and Letters, Jack Cowart remarks that, “O’Keeffe admitted carrying shapes around in her mind for a very long time until she could find the proper colors for them… No reproduction will ever do justice to the intensity, the solidity, or the high pitch of these colors.”

In O’Keeffe’s words, “I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me — so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.”

She advised Russell Vernon Hunter, “Try to paint your world as though you are the first man looking at it (21 October 1933). She often seems to have been the first person to see Taos, Abiquiu, or the Chama River, just as she can appear to have been the only person in the world to truly see the essence of morning glory, jimson or rose.

Like Winslow Homer, her images can appear more real than reality itself. It’s as though the world arrived on her doorstep and said, “Come here. Let me show you my heart, so you can convey it to the world.” Looking at her 1938 painting of two jimson weeds, it’s impossible not to say, “Georgia O’Keeffe did that.” On the other hand, her way of seeing has so deeply influenced our own that when we take time to look at an extraordinarily vibrant flower blooming in the garden we say, “Georgia O’Keeffe could have done that”. And we would be exactly right. Neither Winslow Homer nor Georgia O’Keeffe invented the world they represent. Long before their genius manifested itself in brushstrokes, it lived as a willingness to see, an ability to enter into a deeply intimate relationship with the world and a capacity to allow that relationship to re-shape vision as they committed it to canvas.

In a wonderful essay in Art and Perception , Richard Rothstein recalls his early days of pondering the nature of perception and artistic production:

“As a young man off on his first world adventures I was stunned by the revelation that many of the great artists I admired did not invent their mysterious landscapes, colors and visual signatures of China, Japan, Tuscany and Provence. Rather they were brilliantly capturing the unique moods, colors, light and shapes that nature had already chosen to create. I remember gazing over the hills of Tuscany for the first time and thinking, “Oh! So that’s where Leonardo got that.” And I remember the day I realized that Van Gogh was “photographing” (through his unusual lens) the unique palette and landscapes of Provence.”

An artist himself, Rothstein reflects on the confrontation with reality in terms of gratitude. “I can only speak for myself,” he says, “but I often walk away from something I’ve just photographed in Manhattan with a sense of gratitude…toward my subject.” He goes on to ask, “How much of an artist’s talent is in his ability to create (and how much in his ability to) record – not just the obvious visuals but also the mood and the energy of the subject? “

Rothstein seems to suggest that one side of the artistic coin may be the artist, but the other side is the subject itself. Reality drags the artist – the painter, the writer, the photographer, the poet – over to the face of the cliff, the face of the building, the face of the nameless and forgotten ones among us and says, “This is my gift to you. I am giving you the vision. Now , the responsibility is yours.”

It may be that the first way to recognize an artist is neither by canvas nor manuscript, but by a deeply personal, intensely visceral response to the gift of vision.  Having seen the world in all of its depth, breadth and particular beauty, it may be the artists among us who are most capable of rejoicing in that vision and gratefully sharing it with others.

Winslow Homer knew the experience well.  It was Homer who said, “The sun will not rise or set without my notice, and thanks.”  Vincent Van Gogh knew it, too, saying, “I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.”  Even the solemn philosophers agree, with Nietzsche himself declaring, “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

If pursuit of visions and expressions of gratitude are marks of the artistic soul, it may be that we’re closer to the artists than we think.  Not so many months ago I witnessed a six-year-old running in to her house bubbling and breathless.  “Look, Mommy!”, she exclaimed, waving about a fistful of leaves.  ”Look what the tree gave me!  I’m so happy I’m going to make something no one’s ever seen!” 

Winslow Homer, Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe and Richard Rothstein would understand perfectly, and they would tell us to follow the lead of that child.  Look at what the world has given you.  Do something with it.  Be grateful.

 

Copyright © 2008 Linda L. Leinen.   All rights reserved.

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