Mary Oliver on the Mystery of the Human Psyche, the Secret of Great Poetry, and How Rhythm Makes Us Come Alive

“Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.”

“Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world,” James Dickey wrote. “The way to develop good taste in literature,” Joseph Brodsky advised, “is to read poetry.” Wordsworth believed the poetic form to be “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” For Edward Hirsch, it requires “a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than coincidences, into a living entity.” But hardly anyone has captured the mesmerism of poetry more perceptively and, well, poetically than the inimitable Mary Oliver — winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, once described by The New York Times as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet,” and nothing less than a secular modern mystic of the written word. In her altogether magnificent 1994 book A Poetry Handbook (public library), Oliver teases apart the mechanisms by which poetry enchants us, exploring the magic of rhythm as not only the fire in the belly of poetry but also a gateway into a profound human longing.

Mary Oliver (b. 1935, right) with her partner of over forty years, photographer Molly Malone Cook (1925–2005) at the couple's home in Provincetown, Massachusetts

Oliver considers the intricate courtship between poetry and the soul:

If Romeo and Juliet had made their appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different—it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem — the heart of the star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say — exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself — soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.

Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo. It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by — risk is always hovering somewhere. But it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.

For the would-be writer of poems, this is the first and most essential thing to understand. It comes before everything, even technique.

Mary Oliver in 1964 (photograph by Molly Malone Cook)

She goes on to explore the spellbinding power of rhythm:

The reader, as he or she begins to read, quickly enters the rhythmic pattern of a poem. It takes no more than two or three lines for a rhythm, and a feeling of pleasure in that rhythm, to be transferred from the poem to the reader. Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter. When it becomes reliable, we are in a kind of body-heaven.

And yet, as in life itself, much of the vitality in poetry comes from artfully disrupting the smooth cadence of that steady, predictable rhythm:

Lines of good poetry are apt to be a little irregular. A prevailing sense of rhythm is necessary, but some variation enhances the very strength of the pattern. The singsong poem is a dull poem. Variation wakes us up with its touch of difference, just as a cadence of drums in a marching band keeps two things going at the same time: a strict and regular beat and a few contrapuntal accents, flourishes, and even silences… Within the poem, irregularities may occur for the sake of variation; they may also occur because of stresses required by the words themselves, for accuracy, for emphasis, etc.

Rather than opposing forces that tear asunder the aesthetic experience, Oliver reminds us that these seeming polarities of rhythm and irregularity actually exist in the osmotic synchronicity that lends poetry its power:

The name itself — free verse — implies that this kind of poetry rose out of a desire for release from the restraints of meter, or the measured line, and strict rhythmic patterns… Free verse is not, of course, free. It is free from formal metrical design, but it certainly isn’t free from some kind of design. Is poetry language that is spontaneous, impulsive? Yes, it is. Is it also language that is composed, considered, appropriate, and effective, though you read the poem a hundred times? Yes, it is.

Mary Oliver with one of her beloved dogs (photograph by Rachel Brown)

Above all, however, Oliver advocates for poetry as a sandbox for exercising that elusive yet essential willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery (a subject of which she has written beautifully) and make peace with the ambiguity of the unresolved — a concept John Keats famously termed “negative capability.” Oliver, with a spectacular simile, riffs on Keats:

Poetry cannot happen without it, and no one has talked about it more usefully and marvelously than Keats; his commentary is as up-to-date as a sunrise.

A Poetry Handbook is a fantastic read in its entirety, with ample wisdom not only on poetry itself but on all writing, the essence of which applies to just about every field of creative endeavor. Complement it with Oliver’s soul-stirring Dog Songs, one of 2013’s most wonderful books celebrating animals.

Hand-lettered illustration by Wendy MacNaughton

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Isaac Asimov on the Thrill of Lifelong Learning, Science vs. Religion, and the Role of Science Fiction in Advancing Society

“It’s insulting to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being.”

Isaac Asimov was an extraordinary mind and spirit — the author of more than 400 science and science fiction books and a tireless advocate of space exploration, he also took great joy in the humanities (and once annotated Lord Byron’s epic poem “Don Juan”), championed humanism over religion, and celebrated the human spirit itself (he even wrote young Carl Sagan fan mail). Like many of the best science fiction writers, he was as exceptional at predicting the future as he was at illuminating some of the most timeless predicaments of the human condition. In a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, found in Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas (public library) — the same remarkable tome that gave us philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility — Asimov explores several subjects that still stir enormous cultural concern and friction. With his characteristic eloquence and sensitivity to the various dimensions of these issues, he presages computer-powered lifelong learning and online education decades before it existed, weighs the question of how authors will make a living in a world of free information, bemoans the extant attempts of religious fundamentalism to drown out science and rational thought, and considers the role of science fiction as a beacon of the future.

The conversation begins with a discussion of Asimov’s passionate belief that when given the right tools, we can accomplish far more than what we can with the typical offerings of formal education:

MOYERS: Do you think we can educate ourselves, that any one of us, at any time, can be educated in any subject that strikes our fancy?

ASIMOV: The key words here are “that strikes our fancy.” There are some things that simply don’t strike my fancy, and I doubt that I can force myself to be educated in them. On the other hand, when there’s a subject I’m ferociously interested in, then it is easy for me to learn about it. I take it in gladly and cheerfully…

[What’s exciting is] the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.

MOYERS: When I learn something new — and it happens every day — I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest. I’m afraid that by the time I begin to feel really at home, it’ll all be over.

ASIMOV: I used to worry about that. I said, “I’m gradually managing to cram more and more things into my mind. I’ve got this beautiful mind, and it’s going to die, and it’ll all be gone.” And then I thought, “No, not in my case. Every idea I’ve ever had I’ve written down, and it’s all there on paper. I won’t be gone. It’ll be there.

Page from 'Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life'

Asimov then considers how computers would usher in this profound change in learning and paints the outline of a concept that Clay Shirky would detail and term “cognitive surplus” two decades later:

MOYERS: Is it possible that this passion for learning can be spread to ordinary folks out there? Can we have a revolution in learning?

ASIMOV: Yes, I think not only that we can but that we must. As computers take over more and more of the work that human beings shouldn’t be doing in the first place — because it doesn’t utilize their brains, it stifles and bores them to death — there’s going to be nothing left for human beings to do but the more creative types of endeavor. The only way we can indulge in the more creative types of endeavor is to have brains that aim at that from the start.

You can’t take a human being and put him to work at a job that underuses the brain and keep him working at it for decades and decades, and then say, “Well, that job isn’t there, go do something more creative.” You have beaten the creativity out of him. But if from the start children are educated into appreciating their own creativity, then probably almost all of us can be creative. In the olden days, very few people could read and write. Literacy was a very novel sort of thing, and it was felt that most people just didn’t have it in them. But with mass education, it turned out that most people could be taught to read and write. In the same way, once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries, where you can ask any question and be given answers, you can look up something you’re interested in knowing, however silly it might seem to someone else.

Asimov goes on to point out the flawed industrial model of education — something Sir Ken Robinson would lament articulately two decades later — and tells Moyers:

Today, what people call learning is forced on you. Everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class. But everyone is different. For some, class goes too fast, for some too slow, for some in the wring direction. But give everyone a chance, in addition to school, to follow up their own bent from the start, to find out about whatever they’re interested in by looking it up in their own homes, at their own speed, in their own time, and everyone will enjoy learning.

Later, in agreeing with Moyers that this revolution in learning isn’t merely for the young, Asimov adds:

That’s another trouble with education as we now have it. People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school — reading books, having ideas, asking questions — that’s kid’s stuff. Now your’e an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing anymore…

Every kid knows the only reason he’s in school is because he’s a kid and little and weak, and if he manages to get out early, if he drops out, why he’s just a premature man.

Embroidered map of the infant Internet in 1983 by Debbie Millman

Speaking at a time when the Internet as we know it today was still an infant, and two decades before the golden age of online education, Asimov offers a remarkably prescient vision for how computer-powered public access to information would spark the very movement of lifelong learning that we’ve witnessed in the past decade:

You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. They don’t stop playing tennis just because they’ve turned forty. They don’t stop with sex just because they’ve turned forty. They keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing. The trouble with learning is that most people don’t enjoy it because of the circumstances. Make it possible for them to enjoy learning, and they’ll keep it up.

When Moyers asks him to describe what such a teaching machine would look like — again, in 1988, when personal computers had only just begun to appear in homes — Asimov envisions a kind of Siri-like artificial intelligence, combined with the functionality of a discovery engine:

I suppose that one essential thing would be a screen on which you could display things… And you’ll have to have a keyboard on which you ask your questions, although ideally I could like to see one that could be activated by voice. You could actually talk to it, and perhaps it could talk to you too, and say, “I have something here that may interest you. Would you like to have me print it out for you?” And you’d say, “Well, what is it exactly?” And it would tell you, and you might say, “Oh all right, I’ll take a look at it.”

But one of his most prescient remarks actually has to do not with the mechanics of freely available information but with the ethics and economics of it. Long before our present conundrum of how to make online publishing both in the public interest and financially sustainable for publishers, Asimov shares with Moyers the all too familiar question he has been asking himself — “How do you arrange to pay the author for the use of the material?” — and addresses it with equal parts realism and idealism:

After all, if a person writes something, and this then becomes available to everybody, you deprive him of the economic reason for writing. A person like myself, if he was assured of a livelihood, might write anyway, just because he enjoyed it, but most people would want to do it in return for something. I imagine how they must have felt when free libraries were first instituted. “What? My book in a free library? Anyone can come in and read it for free?” Then you realize that there are some books that wouldn’t be sold at all if you didn’t have libraries.

(A century earlier, Schopenhauer had issued a much sterner admonition against the cultural malady of writing solely for material rewards.)

Painting of hell by William Blake from John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (click image for more)

Asimov then moves on to the subject of science vs. religion — something he would come to address with marvelous eloquence in his memoir — and shares his concern about how mysticism and fundamentalism undercut society:

I’d like to think that people who are given a chance to learn facts and broaden their knowledge of the universe wouldn’t seek so avidly after mysticism.

[…]

It isn’t right to sell a person phony stock, and take money for it, and this is what mystics are doing. They’re selling people phony knowledge and taking money for it. Even if people feel good about it, I can well imagine that a person who really believes in astrology is going to have a feeling of security because he knows that this is a bad day, so he’ll stay at home, just as a guy who’s got phony stock may look at it and feel rich. But he still has phony stock, and the person who buys mysticism still has phony knowledge.

He offers a counterpoint and considers what real knowledge is, adding to history’s best definitions of science:

Science doesn’t purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. This works not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life.

Asimov goes on to bemoan the cultural complacency that has led to the decline of science in mainstream culture — a decline we feel even today more sharply than ever when, say, a creationist politician tries to stop a little girl’s campaign for a state fossil because such an effort would “endorse” evolution. Noting that “we are living in a business society” where fewer and fewer students take math and science, Asimov laments how we’ve lost sight of the fact that science is driven by not-knowing rather than certitude:

MOYERS: You wrote a few years ago that the decline in America’s world power is in part brought about by our diminishing status as a world science leader. Why have we neglected science?

ASIMOV: Partly because of success. The most damaging statement that the United States has ever been subjected to is the phrase “Yankee know-how.” You get the feeling somehow that Americans — just by the fact that they’re American — are somehow smarter and more ingenious than other people, which really is not so. Actually, the phrase was first used in connection with the atomic bomb, which was invented and brought to fruition by a bunch of European refugees. That’s “Yankee know-how.”

MOYERS: There’s long been a bias in this country against science. When Benjamin Franklin was experimenting with the lightning rod, a lot of good folk said, “You don’t need a lightning rod. If you want to prevent lightning from striking, you just have to pray about it.”

ASIMOV: The bias against science is part of being a pioneer society. You somehow feel the city life is decadent. American history is full of fables of the noble virtuous farmer and the vicious city slicker. The city slicker is an automatic villain. Unfortunately, such stereotypes can do damage. A noble ignoramus is not necessarily what the country needs.

(What might Asimov, who in 1980 voiced fears that the fundamentalists coming into power with President Reagan would turn the country even more against science by demanding that biblical creationism be given an equal footing with evolution in the classroom, if he knew that a contemporary television station can edit out Neil deGrasse Tyson’s mention of evolution?)

'The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden' by William Blake from John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (click image for more)

But when Moyers asks the writer whether he considers himself an enemy of religion, Asimov answers in the negative and offers this beautifully thoughtful elaboration on the difference between the blind faith of religion and the critical thinking at the heart of science:

My objection to fundamentalism is not that they are fundamentalists but that essentially they want me to be a fundamentalist, too. Now, they may say that I believe evolution is true and I want everyone to believe that evolution is true. But I don’t want everyone to believe that evolution is true, I want them to study what we say about evolution and to decide for themselves. Fundamentalists say they want to treat creationism on an equal basis. But they can’t. It’s not a science. You can teach creationism in churches and in courses on religion. They would be horrified if I were to suggest that in churches they should teach secular humanism as nan alternate way of looking at the universe or evolution as an alternate way of considering how life may have started. In the church they teach only what they believe, and rightly so, I suppose. But on the other hand, in schools, in science courses, we’ve got to teach what scientists think is the way the universe works.

He extols the “thoroughly conscious ignorance” at the heart of science as a much safer foundation of reality than dogma:

That is really the glory of science — that science is tentative, that it is not certain, that it is subject to change. What is really disgraceful is to have a set of beliefs that you think is absolute and has been so from the start and can’t change, where you simply won’t listen to evidence. You say, “If the evidence agrees with me, it’s not necessary, and if it doesn’t agree with me, it’s false.” This is the legendary remark of Omar when they captured Alexandria and asked him what to do with the library. He said, “If the books agree with the Koran, they are not necessary and may be burned. If they disagree with the Koran, they are pernicious and must be burned.” Well, there are still these Omar-like thinkers who think all of knowledge will fit into one book called the Bible, and who refuse to allow it is possible ever to conceive of an error there. To my way of thinking, that is much more dangerous than a system of knowledge that is tentative and uncertain.

Riffing off the famous and rather ominous Dostoevsky line that “if God is dead, everything is permitted,” Asimov revisits the notion of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards — similarly to his earlier remark that good writing is motivated by intrinsic motives rather than external incentives, he argues that good-personhood can’t be steered by dogma but by one’s own conscience:

It’s insulting to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being. Isn’t it conceivable a person wants to be a decent human being because that way he feels better?

I don’t believe that I’m ever going to heaven or hell. I think that when I die, there will be nothingness. That’s what I firmly believe. That’s not to mean that I have the impulse to go out and rob and steal and rape and everything else because I don’t fear punishment. For one thing, I fear worldly punishment. And for a second thing, I fear the punishment of my own conscience. I have a conscience. It doesn’t depend on religion. And I think that’s so with other people, too.

'The Rout of the Rebel Angels' by William Blake from John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (click image for more)

He goes on to extend this conscience-driven behavior to the domain of science, which he argues is strongly motivated by morality and a generosity of spirit uncommon in most other disciplines, where ego consumes goodwill. (Mark Twain memorably argued that no domain was more susceptible to human egotism than religion.) Asimov offers a heartening example:

I think it’s amazing how many saints there have been among scientists. I’ll give you an example. In 1900, De Vries studied mutations. He found a patch of evening primrose of different types, and he studied how they inherited their characteristics. He worked out the laws of genetics. Two other guys worked out the laws of genetics at the same time, a guy called Karl Correns, who was a German, and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, who was an Austrian. All three worked out the laws of genetics in 1900, and having done so, all three looked through the literature, just to see what has been done before. All three discovered that in the 1860s Gregor Mendel had worked out the laws of genetics, and people hadn’t paid any attention then. All three reported their findings as confirmation of what Mendel had found. Not one of the three attempted to say that it was original with him. And you know what it meant. It meant that two of them, Correns and Tschermak von Seyenegg, lived in obscurity. De Vries is known only because he was also the first to work out the theory of mutations. But as far as discovering genetics is concerned, Mendel gets all the credit. They knew at the time that this would happen. That’s the sort of thing you just don’t find outside of science.

Moyers, in his typical perceptive fashion, then asks Asimov why, given how much the truth of science excites him, he is best-known for writing science fiction, and Asimov responds with equal insight and outlines the difference, both cultural and creative, between fiction in general and science fiction:

In serious fiction, fiction where the writer feels he’s accomplishing something besides simply amusing people — although there’s nothing wrong with simply amusing people — the writer is holding up a mirror to the human species, making it possible for you to understand people better because you’ve read the novel or story, and maybe making it possible for you to understand yourself better. That’s an important thing.

Now science fiction uses a different method. It works up an artificial society, one which doesn’t exist, or one that may possibly exist in the future, but not necessarily. And it portrays events against the background of this society in the hope that you will be able to see yourself in relation to the present society… That’s why I write science fiction — because it’s a way of writing fiction in a style that enables me to make points I can’t make otherwise.

Painting by Rowena Morrill

But perhaps the greatest benefit of science fiction, Moyers intimates and Asimov agrees, is its capacity to warm people up to changes that are inevitable but that seem inconceivable at the present time — after all, science fiction writers do have a remarkable record of getting the future right. Asimov continues:

Society is always changing, but the rate of change has been accelerating all through history for a variety of reasons. One, the change is cumulative. The very changes you make now make it easier to make further changes. Until the Industrial Revolution came along, people weren’t aware of change or a future. They assumed the future would be exactly like it had always been, just with different people… It was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution that the rate of change became fast enough to be visible in a single lifetime. People were suddenly aware that not only were things changing, but that they would continue to change after they died. That was when science fiction came into being as opposed to fantasy and adventure tales. Because people knew that they would die before they could see the changes that would happen in the next century, they thought it would be nice to imagine what they might be.

As time goes on and the rate of change still continues to accelerate, it becomes more and more important to adjust what you do today to the fact of change in the future. It’s ridiculous to make your plans now on the assumption that things will continue as they are now. You have to assume that if something you’re doing is going to reach fruition in ten years, that in those ten years changes will take place, and perhaps what you’re doing will have no meaning then… Science fiction is important because it fights the natural notion that there’s something permanent about things the way they are right now.

Painting by William Blake from Dante's 'Divine Comedy' (click image for more)

Given that accepting impermanence doesn’t come easily to us, that stubborn resistance to progress and the inevitability of change is perhaps also what Asimov sees in the religious fundamentalism he condemns — dogma, after all, is based on the premise that truth is absolute and permanent, never mind that the cultural context is always changing. Though he doesn’t draw the link directly, in another part of the interview he revisits the problem with fundamentalism with words that illuminate the stark contrast between the cultural role of religion and that of science fiction:

Fundamentalists take a statement that made sense at the time it was made, and because they refuse to consider that the statement may not be an absolute, eternal truth, they continue following it under conditions where to do so is deadly.

Indeed, Asimov ends the conversation on a related note as he considers what it would take to transcend the intolerance that such fundamentalism breeds:

MOYERS: You’ve lived through much of this century. Have you ever known human beings to think with the perspective you’re calling on them to think with now?

ASIMOV: It’s perhaps not important that every human being think so. But how about the leaders and opinion-makers thinking so? Ordinary people might follow them. It would help if we didn’t have leaders who were thinking in exactly the opposite way, if we didn’t have people who were shouting hatred and suspicion of foreigners, if we didn’t have people who were shouting that it’s more important to be unfriendly than to be friendly, if we didn’t have people shouting that the people inside the country who don’t look exactly the way the rest of us look have something wrong with them. It’s almost not necessary for us to do good; it’s only necessary for us to stop doing evil, for goodness’ sake.

Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas is a remarkable tome in its entirety. Complement this particular sample-taste with Asimov on religion vs. humanism, Buckminster Fuller’s vision for the future of education, and Carl Sagan on science and spirituality.

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Tom Gauld’s Brilliant Literary Cartoons Blur the Artificial Line Between “High” and “Pop” Culture

From Hemingway’s hangovers to the messiness of creative collaborations, wryly witty visual satire of intellectualism.

With his singular style of irreverent erudition, cartoonist Tom Gauld has emerged as an unparalleled visual satirist of the literary world. You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack: Cartoons (public library) collects eight years’ worth of Gauld’s wryly wonderful and wonderfully wry comics created for the Sunday Review section of The Guardian, mildly reminiscent in spirit of Kate Beaton’s literary cartoons and yet entirely, unmistakably original in style. From the odd habits of famous writers to the age-old tension between science and religion, Gauld leaves no cultural stone unturned in his heartening testament to Susan Sontag’s assertion that the divide between “high” and “popular” culture is a false and toxic one — after all, if a medium as “pop” as the cartoon form can serve, like Gauld’s art so masterfully does, as a form of meta-literary criticism and intelligent cultural discourse, then the polarization between “high” and “low” is instantly and spectacularly demagnetized.

In one cartoon, Gauld echoes E.B. White’s protestation that “a writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper” and Bukowski’s bold debunking of the excuses writers use for not writing:

In another, he seconds Virginia Woolf’s admonition about the evils of cinematic adaptations of literature:

Another reminds us that there is no magic formula (though there are some excellent tips) for writing a great story, and that in fact, as Steinbeck put it, “the formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader”:

Then there are our greatest techno-dystopian fears and anxieties — the worst manifestation of Saul Bellow’s admonition about “the distracted public” — followed to their most tragicomic end:

Gauld also extends beyond the literary and into the broader spectrum of cultural concerns, such as the lamentable present neglect of space exploration:

On and on Gauld goes, poking gentle fun at our cultural conceits:

The rest of You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack: Cartoons is immeasurably wonderful from cover to cover. Complement it with Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant and this charming compendium of contemporary graphic artists’ takes on literary classics.

Images courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly © Tom Gauld

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Donald Barthelme on the Art of Not-Knowing and the Essential Not-Knowing of Art

“Our devouring commercial culture… results in a double impoverishment: theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.”

“We try to see in the dark,” Annie Dillard offered in her superb meditation on writing, “we toss up our questions and they catch in the trees.”

Postmodernist icon Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931–July 23, 1989) was not only one of the most innovative and memorable voices in twentieth-century fiction, known for his seemingly plotless verbal-collage narratives, but also a writer with a special sensitivity to language and an exceptional ability to articulate its magic. In his 1987 essay “Not-Knowing,” which became the title of the fantastic posthumous anthology Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (public library), Barthelme explores an essential aspect of writing (and, for that matter, of all creative work), the uncomfortable but necessary skill that Keats famously termed “negative capability” — the capacity to rest in the unknown and the unresolved, using it as raw material for creative work.

Barthelme begins with a definition of a writer as a professional not-knower:

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do. . . .

Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written, even though they’ve done a dozen. At best there’s a slender intuition, not much greater than an itch. The anxiety attached to this situation is not inconsiderable. “Nothing to paint and nothing to paint with,” as Beckett says of Bram van Velde. The not-knowing is not simple, because it’s hedged about with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives. . . .

He then considers the essential problems of the serious writer:

Problems are a comfort. Wittgenstein said, of philosophers, that some of them suffer from “loss of problems,” a development in which everything seems quite simple to them and what they write becomes “immeasurably shallow and trivial.” The same can be said of writers…

The problems that seem to me to define the writer’s task at this moment (to the extent that he has chosen them as his problems) are not of a kind that make for ease of communication, for work that rushes toward the reader with outflung arms — rather, they’re the reverse. Let me cite three such difficulties that I take to be important, all having to do with language. First, there is art’s own project … of restoring freshness to a much-handled language, essentially an effort toward finding a language in which making art is possible at all. This remains a ground theme, as potent, problematically, today as it was a century ago. Secondly, there is the political and social contamination of language by its use in manipulation of various kinds over time and the effort to find what might be called a “clean” language… Finally, there is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense — I mean our devouring commercial culture — which results in a double impoverishment: theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.

Considering these “thorny” problems, Barthelme adds:

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

The self-consciousness of language itself, Barthelme argues, contributes greatly to this thorniness and the necessary un-straightforwardness of writing:

We have language deeply suspicious of its own behavior; although this suspicion is not different in kind from Hemingway’s noticing, early in the century, that words like honor, glory, and country were perjured, bought, the skepticism is far deeper now, and informed as well by the investigations of linguistic philosophers, structuralists, semioticians. Even conjunctions must be inspected carefully. “I read each word with the feeling appropriate to it,” says Wittgenstein. “The word ‘but’ for example with the but-feeling…” He is not wrong. Isn’t the but-feeling, as he calls it, already sending us headlong down a greased slide before we’ve had the time to contemplate the proposition it’s abutting?

The lack of nuance in news today is something I lament frequently. But while it’s certainly not something unique to our era — as the media treatment of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter attests — Barthelme’s words ring with double poignancy today, amidst our media landscape of clickbait and listicles:

The earlier newspaper culture, which once dealt in a certain amount of nuance and zestful, highly literate burly-burly, has deteriorated shockingly. . . . Where once we could put spurious quotes in the paper and attribute them to Ambrose Bierce and be fairly sure that enough readers would get the joke to make the joke worthwhile, from the point of view of both reader and writer, no such common ground now exists. . . . When one adds the ferocious appropriation of high culture by commercial culture — it takes, by my estimate, about forty-five minutes for any given novelty in art to travel from the Mary Boone Gallery on West Broadway to the display windows of Henri Bendel on Fifty-seventh Street — one begins to appreciate the seductions of silence.

He then returns to the role of the writer in society, a role osmotic with that of the critic — for better or for worse:

If the writer is taken to be the work’s way of getting itself written, a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the zeitgeist, this changes not very much the traditional view of the artist. But it does license a very great deal of critical imperialism.

[…]

There is, in [certain kinds] of criticism, an element of aggression that gives one pause. Deconstruction is an enterprise that announces its intentions with startling candor. Any work of art depends upon a complex series of interdependences. . . .

Modern-day critics speak of “recuperating” a text, suggesting an accelerated and possibly strenuous nursing back to health of a basically sickly text, very likely one that did not even know itself to be ill. I would argue that in the competing methodologies of contemporary criticism, many of them quite rich in implications, a sort of tyranny of great expectations obtains, a rage for final explanations, a refusal to allow a work that mystery which is essential to it. I hope I am not myself engaging in mystification if I say, not that the attempt should not be made, but that the mystery exists. I see no immediate way out of the paradox — tear a mystery to tatters and you have tatters, not mystery — I merely note it and pass on.

With his unmistakable intellectual agility, Barthelme then considers the interplay between the physical, the verbal, and the metaphoric, and the necessary messiness of teasing those apart:

Let us discuss the condition of my desk. It is messy, mildly messy. The messiness is both physical (coffee cups, cigarette ash) and spiritual (unpaid bills, unwritten novels). The emotional life of the man who sits at the desk is also messy — I am in love with a set of twins, Hilda and Heidi, and in a fit of enthusiasm I have joined the Bolivian army. The apartment in which the desk is located seems to have been sublet from Moonbeam McSwine. In the streets outside the apartment melting snow has revealed a choice assortment of decaying et cetera. Furthermore, the social organization of the country is untidy, the world’s situation in disarray. How do I render all this messiness, and if I succeed, what have I done?

[…]

To render “messy” adequately, to the point that you are enabled to feel it — it should, ideally, frighten your shoes — I would have to be more graphic than the decorum of the occasion allows. . . .

The words with which I attempt to render “messy,” like any other words, are not inert, rather they are furiously busy. We do not mistake the words the taste of chocolate for the taste of chocolate itself, but neither do we miss the tease in taste, the shock in chocolate. Words have halos, patinas, overhangs, echoes. The word halo, for instance, may invoke St. Hilarius, of whom we’ve seen too little lately. The word patina brings back the fine pewtery shine on the saint’s halo. The word overhang reminds us that we have, hanging over us, a dinner date with St. Hilarius, that crashing bore. The word echo restores to us Echo herself, poised like the White Rock girl on the overhang of a patina of a halo — infirm ground, we don’t want the poor spirit to pitch into the pond where Narcissus blooms eternally, they’ll bump foreheads, or maybe other parts closer to the feet, a scandal. There’s chocolate smeared all over Hilarius’ halo — messy, messy…

Echoing Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “words belong to each other,” Barthelme considers the crucial creative difference between human and machine — a difference premised on the contrast between not-knowing, the artist’s currency (as well as the scientist’s, for that matter), and predictable certitude, the computer’s:

The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered. It could be argued that computers can do this sort of thing for us, with critic-computers monitoring their output. When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble. But, artists will respond in such a way as to make art impossible for the computer. They will redefine art to take into account (that is, to exclude) technology — photography’s impact upon painting and painting’s brilliant response being a clear and comparatively recent example.

The prior history of words is one of the aspects of language the world uses to smuggle itself into the work. If words can be contaminated by the world, they can also carry with them into the work trace elements of world which can be used in a positive sense. We must allow ourselves the advantages of our disadvantages.

Conceding that constraints often enlarge rather than limit our creativity, Barthelme considers style:

Style is not much a matter of choice. . . . Rather it is both a response to constraint and a seizing of opportunity. Very often a constraint is an opportunity.

He then adds to history’s finest definitions of art:

Art is always a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality or a jackleg attempt to “be” external reality.

[…]

A couple of years ago I visited Willem de Kooning’s studio in East Hampton, and when the big doors are opened one can’t help seeing — it’s a shock — the relation between the rushing green world outside and the paintings. Precisely how de Kooning manages to distill nature into art is a mystery, but the explosive relation is there, I’ve seen it. Once when I was in Elaine de Kooning’s studio on Broadway, at a time when the metal sculptor Herbert Ferber occupied the studio immediately above, there came through the floor a most horrible crashing and banging. “What in the world is that?” I asked, and Elaine said, “Oh, that’s Herbert thinking.”

In a sentiment that parallels Susan Sontag’s convictions about the project of literature, Barthelme concludes by considering the ultimate purpose of art and style:

Art is a true account of the activity of mind. Because consciousness … is always consciousness of something, art thinks ever of the world, cannot not think of the world, could not turn its back on the world even if it wished to. This does not mean that it’s going to be honest as a mailman; it’s more likely to appear as a drag queen. The problems I mentioned earlier, as well as others not taken up, enforce complexity. “We do not spend much time in front of a canvas whose intentions are plain,” writes Cioran. “Music of a specific character, unquestionable contours, exhausts our patience, the over-explicit poem seems incomprehensible.” Flannery O’Connor, an artist of the first rank, famously disliked anything that looked funny on the page, and her distaste has widely been taken as a tough-minded put-down of puerile experimentalism. But did she also dislike anything that looked funny on the wall? If so, a severe deprivation. Art cannot remain in one place. A certain amount of movement, up, down, across, even a gallop toward the past, is a necessary precondition.

Style enables us to speak, to imagine again. Beckett speaks of “the long sonata of the dead” — where on earth did the word sonata come from, imposing as it does an orderly, even exalted design upon the most disorderly, distressing phenomenon known to us? The fact is not challenged, but understood, momentarily, in a new way. It’s our good fortune to be able to imagine alternative realities, other possibilities. We can quarrel with the world, constructively (no one alive has quarreled with the world more extensively or splendidly than Beckett). “Belief in progress,” says Baudelaire, “is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians.” Perhaps. But if I have anything unorthodox to offer here, it’s that I think art’s project is fundamentally meliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world. It is this meliorative aspect of literature that provides its ethical dimension.

Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews is well worth a read in its entirety, spanning Barthelme’s equally mind-tickling meditations — sometimes irreverent, often ironic, and always insightful — of everything from literature and art to architecture and urbanism to film and pop culture.

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