August 1, 2025

What amazes me is the urge to create. It is there from the beginning and never dies. Or so I believe. It is perhaps the deepest anxiety of writers, visual artists, composers, and songwriters that someday they will no longer be able to create, that the well will run dry. It happens. Some writers, like Rilke, suffer painful writing blocks that go on for years, even decades. Others go on producing, perhaps by will and habit, yet the creative spark is no longer there and the work seems relatively lifeless and mechanical. Wordsworth lived to 80, and continued to write, but had written the work by which he will be remembered by about the age of 37. The great poem about poetic sterility is Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” In it, Coleridge speaks despairingly of how natural forms no longer rouse the imaginative energies within him:

My genial spirits fail;
     And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
     It were a vain endeavour,
     Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

Coleridge became, ironically, famous for being uncreative. Many if not most of his creative projects, in poetry and prose, were never finished. Or even begun: what he considered his magnum opus, a huge “treatise on the Logos” remained just a gleam in his eye. How ironic can it get? A treatise on the Word exists only as silence. Yet we should not pass by the paradox without pondering: in “Dejection,” Coleridge has written one of the great Romantic poems—about not writing.

No one is exempt, not even William Blake, who seems at first glance the epitome of exuberant, overflowing creativity in two different arts, verbal and visual. Yet there exists a startling letter written to his patron, William Hayley, on October 23, 1804, in which he speaks of having been imaginatively blocked for half his life by what he calls a Spectre, which he has finally overcome:

I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life....Suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchnessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters....O the distress I have undergone, and my poor wife with me: incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well. Every one of my friends was astonished at my faults, and could not assign a reason.... Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable years. (137-38)

Creativity is clearly in the eye of the beholder. Blake was 47 when he wrote this letter, and over the 20 years in the wilderness of which he speaks had produced work that earns him a place among the major English poets and artists. Yet it is true that around 1804 he had reached the conclusion that his first attempt at a definitive epic, The Four Zoas, which I am presently examining in the Expanding Eyes podcast, had failed, causing him to abandon it in manuscript. This is one of the tragedies of literary history, as it is one of the great Romantic poems, but it is also true that 1804 marks a surge in creative energy that over the next ten years or so would result in his two definitive statements, the twin epics Milton and Jerusalem. Nonetheless, that letter speaks of a long period of creative doldrums.

The Middle Ages spoke of acedia, a spiritual condition characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness that could become suicidal. Definitions were at times ambiguous, but acedia might be distinguished from despair insofar as the latter is anguished while acedia is characterized by indifference, an inability to care about anything. It is sometimes equated to sloth, but sloth is laziness, while acedia is a kind of numbed paralysis. Some commentary identifies it as Dante’s condition at the opening of the Divine Comedy, which describes a mid-life crisis in which Dante has “lost the way.” Dante is, however, actively, indeed frantically wandering, trying to find his way out of the Wood of Error, whereas acedia would be closer to the condition portrayed in Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melancholia I, in which a figure surrounded by emblems of various creative endeavors sits listlessly, sunk in what we could call depression. Acedia became personified as the Noonday Demon, an evocative phrase for the feeling of being stunned into indifference, as in the blasting heat of the desert in which monks and hermits sometimes lived. It is an interesting example of how translation sometimes does not just reproduce but invents. Psalm 91:6 is rendered in the King James as “the destruction that wasteth at noonday,” but Jerome, whose Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, became the standard version of the Middle Ages, personifies it as noonday demon or devil. It is significant that the feeling of being in a desert or wasteland shifted from a spiritual to an imaginative condition, but the two are not in the end separate. Possibly the greatest modern representation of acedia is Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus, in which Faust is modernized into a composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who sells his soul to the devil precisely in exchange for artistic creativity, though even that demonic creativity is spasmodic, periods of intense inspiration alternating with complete debilitation.

The great faith, perhaps the central faith of life, is that what goes away may yet return, that what was lost may yet be found. That is the plot of all four of Shakespeare’s final romances, in which characters disappear for many years and yet inexplicably appear again to those who mourn them. The ancestor of the romances is the Odyssey, which Shakespeare signals by naming a comic character in The Winter’s Tale Autolycus, the name of Odysseus’s grandfather. The thematic form of this narrative pattern is a seeming death, disappearance, and yet return that may be spiritual, emotional, or creative. In the Metaphysical poet George Herbert’s “The Flower,” one of my favorite poems, it is all three at once: the return of spring and blossoming of the flowers, Herbert’s emotional state, and his poetic powers:

     Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
     Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
               Where they together
               All the hard weather, 
     Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

It is with amazed wonder that he says,

     And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
     I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing. Oh, my only light,
               It cannot be
               That I am he
     On whom thy tempests fell all night.

So much effort has been expended trying to define what is distinctively human, what sets us apart from the animals. The most frequent answers are reason and the use of language—true answers, and interconnected ones, but only up to a point. What never seems to be considered is art—verbal, visual, musical. Yet it may be the most distinctively human activity of all. Animals can reason and use language to a greater extent than human pride has been willing to grant. But what of creative expression? Why has the process of symbolic expression we call art been so central even from the beginnings of the race, especially since art is not useful to the practical Darwinian struggle of survival? The role of art has been minimized: it is dismissed as mere escapist entertainment, a relief from the effort of struggling to survive. Art is a crutch, a regression to childhood, and perhaps a fully mature race would put such toys away. Speaking as a teacher, I must say that this answer does not get a very high grade for critical thinking. It is a response given by those whose relationship to the arts is shallow—though also by those whose relationship is deep but who have ideological reasons for denying art’s importance.

Freud is a good example. The standard Freudian view is that art is high-order wish-fulfilment, a “narcosis,” as he says. That is the party line of the ideologue in Freud who needed to argue that reality is hard and unchangeable, and that only science stares long and hard at the truth. Freud’s more honest answer is that he only gave scientific names and labels to truths the poets have always known—and in fact he named his two central theories after the myths that inspired them: the Oedipus complex and narcissism. He often arrived at psychological insights through examination of such literary patterns as “the uncanny” and the double. I will grant Freud the truth of both of his explanations, for art is not a simple phenomenon. It can be used narcotically—but it can also be used to wake us up out of the passivity of habit and social conditioning, a passivity that likes to pass as “realism” or “common sense.” But the psychoanalytic dismissal of art as a will to illusion is simplistic nonsense. The once-common Marxist view is no better: unless art is a didactic celebration of class struggle, it too, along with religion, is an opiate of the masses.

We get a more accurate sense of art’s importance if we think in terms of the creative process rather than creative products. By creative process we mean both a natural and spontaneous receptivity and an equally spontaneous expressiveness. Babies are already responsive to singing and rhythmic bouncing, to pretty shapes and shiny colors. Children’s drawings captivate us. Parents save them by the boxful: I have a hoard of my childhood drawings saved by my mother, and I assure you it wasn’t because I had any precocious talent as an artist. It is an interesting exercise to go back and look at them in later years, not to see the product but to do something like what Jung called “active imagination”—try to imagine what was going on at that moment in the head of the child you were. The same for children’s poems and stories, and for their theatre, which we call play. When you overhear children playing and really listen rather than tuning it out, you hear the origins of drama, the spontaneous becoming of characters, inventing plots, spouting dialogue—often taking both sides. Not everything has been reduced in modern life. We only had costumes once a year, for Halloween. I learned just yesterday at a colleague’s house that her three-year-old daughter has a whole wardrobe of outfits, one of which she changed into and showed off for us. I did not quite catch who she was—Elsa or Anna from Frozen, I think. I did, mind you, have a full cowboy outfit when I was about seven—there is one of those notorious family photos of me gleefully shooting my baby brother with a six-gun. And nowadays for older kids there are also video games, especially the role-playing ones, that young adults, and older ones too, are not only unashamed to play but can be drawn into until they inhabit something like Dungeons and Dragons as a world. Something of the same has happened with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Star Wars. We grumble at the endless spinoffs and prequels, sneer at the merchandising, as if all that were going on was the zombification of American youth by consumer capitalism. But I think it’s wonderful that today’s children have so many potential outlets for their effervescent imaginations. I had the world of superheroes, about which I have been writing lately, and I lived in that world intensely, along with the related but different world of the newspaper comic strips.

Sometimes naive literature operates on a deeper level than sophisticated literature, down close to the level of what Freud called primary process, the mode of thinking in the deep unconscious. It is the mode of thinking in our dreams, and its first principle is metamorphosis. In dreams, things are always “morphing” into other things, people into other people, or one thing replaces another, as anything longer than it is wide replaces you know what. That is exactly what happens in superhero stories, continual metamorphosis. A superhero becomes another identity, and that identity usually involves some kind of transformation. Peter Parker actually in many ways becomes a spider, able to climb walls and the like. In the early issues, Steve Ditko was capable of making him remarkably spiderlike, a bit creepy. So much naive fun to pretend we can actually transform, become other. The message of so much realistic and ironic writing is that, on the contrary, we are trapped, that we cannot change ourselves, our lives, our world. Metamorphoses don’t happen.

But this message can be doubted. Some of the writers who doubt it are anything but naive, and yet the worlds they create resemble the world of the superheroes. Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” wakes up to find he has become a giant insect. Granted, it does not go for him as it does for Spiderman. But transformations can be nightmarish in superhero stories as well. Bruce Banner has to avoid getting excited at all costs, or he will find himself turning into a huge green monster with titanic strength and a terrible anger management issue. But the point is that even such tragic characters live in a reality that is metamorphic rather than ordinary and stable. Another of my favorite poems is Wallace Stevens’ “Oak Leaves Are Hands.” There is no more admired 20^th century American poet than Stevens, yet the title clues us in that what he is writing about is metamorphosis, whose verbal unit is metaphor, A is B. Oak leaves do not just have a witty resemblance to hands: they are hands. The poem is about a character, Lady Lowzen, “For whom what is are other things.” She is metamorphosis personified:

Flora she was once. She was florid
A bachelor of feen masquerie,
Evasive and metamorphorid.

Mac Mort she had been, ago,
Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,
Weaving and weaving many arms.

She is ever-changing nature: Flora, the principle of life, and MacMort the principle of death with even more legs (or arms) than a spider. At the same time, she is the metaphoric power of language:

So she in Hydaspia created
Out of the movement of few words,
Flora Lowzen invigorated

Archaic and future happenings,
In glittering seven-colored changes...

It is a playful poem, a childlike poem, and Lady Lowzen is also the spirit of play. She has even more outfits than my colleague’s daughter. But what is the spirit of play, which the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga called the essential spirit of all human culture in his great book Homo Ludens? We have to proceed carefully, for it is not the same as “magical thinking,” of which there is all too much in the world at the moment. When children play, they pretend. On some level, they know that what they are pretending is not real, or not real in the same way as ordinary reality. If they lose that sense, they may fall out of play into magical thinking. Joseph Campbell tells the story of the three-year-old daughter of a great scholar, Leo Frobenius, who was playing with burnt matches under her father’s desk while he worked, making the matches into characters. Suddenly, though, she began screaming about “The witch! The witch!” One of the matches had become all too real. There used to be talk of “savage superstition,” of the tendency of “primitives” to fall into such literalizing beliefs. No doubt that could sometimes happen in people who lived closer to the imagination than we do. But those conspiracy theorists who believe in Satanic pedophiles that run the government and used to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein have fallen into the same kind of savage superstition.

Play enters a liminal realm, the haunted borderline between the conscious and the unconscious, in which what is are other things. But some adult play can be very serious. It is when access to the deeper levels of the psyche and their primary process has been lost, when we have become disconnected from our roots, that acedia sets in. In that case, there may need to be a descent journey into the psychic underworld, and that descent quest is perhaps the paradigmatic myth of modern times. In the Expanding Eyes podcast, I have begun speaking of Blake’s first attempt at an epic, The Four Zoas, the one that he wrestled with for years yet ultimately abandoned. The Four Zoas is a plunge into the realm of primary process as deep as any I know. The experience of reading it resembles Satan’s journey through Chaos in Paradise Lost: you never know from one moment to the next whether you are going to be walking, swimming, crawling, or flying. It is explicitly called a dream in nine nights, and it fully displays Freud’s dream mechanisms of condensation and displacement.

Blake’s hero by this time was Los, the creative imagination, but Los is by no means immune from metamorphosis. In his unfallen form, he was Urthona. When he falls, he becomes Los, and at the same time divides in three. On the one hand, his feminine nature or “emanation” splits from him and becomes the character Enitharmon. On the other, an alter ego figure called the Spectre of Urthona also splits from him. Los and Enitharmon are born into the fallen world from the womb of Enion, the emanation of Tharmas, who begins as a kind of principle of organic unity holding creation together but when he falls turns into a raging sea of Chaos. The portrayal of Tharmas is brilliant. From being the “parent power” who holds it all together, he becomes not just the physical mess of a deluge but the kind of emotional mess of someone having a breakdown. He is irrationally furious one second, sobbing in irrational grief the next, contradicting himself to the point of becoming incoherent. And so on. Tharmas the noble figure who becomes a raving, psychotic ocean could easily be a character in a superhero comic.

What is the point of this bewildering grotesquerie? That this is our world, seen without the repression and intense social conditioning that convince us that we are actually living in stable “normality.” Reading The Four Zoas is exactly like being inside the mind of a psychotic, the psychotic being the cosmic divine-human figure called Albion, who has fallen and shattered like Humpty Dumpty into the other characters. But we are each Albion, and we are shattered, a mess inside, however we cover it up from the world. In periods of social stability there can be a semblance of normality, and I am not putting it down. But I have now lived in two periods in which reality seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Frye also lived through two periods of psychic disintegration. One was the period of World War II in which he wrote Fearful Symmetry, not just as a scholarly work but as a response to the world crisis. Of the second one, Frye said in a preface to a new edition of Fearful Symmetry in 1969, “Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say” (7). We are now all living in a third period of nihilistic psychosis, and during such periods, reality becomes dark, surreal, shifting, and utterly terrifying. The matches have all turned into witches, and evil forces are howling with excitement as they smash all the structures in which we have lived our lives. They are approved of and supported by friends, lovers, relatives, parents who say that the destruction is necessary to make a better world, even if they are destroyed themselves in the process. In times like this, a poet like Blake can become a guide through the valley of the shadow.

Imaginative works like Blake’s Prophecies perform a special function in this world, working towards transformation by a process that Blake described as the “clarification of error.” Most people do not regard themselves as having a high prophetic vocation, and yet, as I started out saying, the creative process pervades common life in a way that is usually dismissed as unimportant. There is a kind of snobbery that demands that the word “creative” be reserved for a special elite, and regards the idea of a widespread creative process as a kind of sentimentality—“Oh, everybody wants to be ‘creative,’ whether they have any talent or not.” Such elitism focuses on the creative product rather than process, because products can be judged—though that immediately raises the question of the criteria on which judgment is based, with widespread angst when there turns out to be only a limited agreement about what constitutes high artistic standards. Judgment about what is “best” and what is “canonical” is a dreary and demoralizing process, even though we can’t escape it—we have to make choices about what gets published and what goes on a syllabus. But this kind of “gourmet” approach to the arts devalues an enormous amount of creativity that goes on all around us. To ask whether this popular creativity has any value is to ask the wrong question. The thoughtful question is not “How good is it?” but “If the arts are as much of a useless luxury as our culture routinely claims they are, why does creative activity appear everywhere in ordinary lives?”

It is possible that the dominant ideology is wrong, and that the arts represent a basic human need, one that is neither the status-activity of a small elite nor a reflex of mindless distraction on the part of the vast herd. I have spoken of children’s art, but I am moved by how the urge to create something appears everywhere, including among non-college-educated people who, we are told, are highly resentful of higher education. One form of cover, so to speak, is not to call it art but merely “crafts.” Art has pretensions: crafts are merely harmless diversions. And I understand the need for protective cover. Crafts are tacky, crafts are kitsch, crafts show the vulgarity of our consumer culture, and so on. Well, crafts vary, and I wouldn’t deny that some of them are kitsch, but absolutely not all. Some in fact achieve the status of genuine folk art, and in fact some folk art has come to be valued by museums—quilts, for example, which are important in African-American culture. Alice Walker has a fine story about two sisters who represent two attitudes about the family quilts. One wants to mount them on a wall as art objects, but the other would put them to “Everyday Use,” which is the title of the story and the attitude that the author thinks is better.

It sometimes seems as if every woman of my life has done crafts—not quite true, but certainly the majority of them have, in all generations, starting with my mom, who did every craft imaginable. So did her sisters, two of which took painting lessons when young. My aunt Helen produced afghans as a hen lays eggs, frequently and repeatedly. I still own several, and use them. My grandmother did quilts; my first wife Bonney could reproduce drawings by Picasso and Klee, and has a daughter who has a whole jewelry-and-more craft business on Etsy, that cornucopia of craft products. My second wife Stacey used to make jewelry, and my kindred spirit Mary Lynn makes paintings and collages, and also photographs the plants and flowers in her beloved garden, producing abstract close-ups of natural color and pattern that I think are extraordinary (but I’m biased). The common fate of craftswomen is to have boxes and boxes of both current and former crafts burgeoning in closets and garages. But men have just as strong an urge to create. Our culture just dictates that they do so in manly ways, often involving a wood shop in basement or garage.

Occasionally this wood-craftsmanship burgeons into something more ambitious. The city magazine of my new home of Brecksville just featured an article about a 93-year-old man, Alex McMasters, who for 15 years has been building model boats, each of which takes a year to complete. The largest is three feet long. All are historically accurate and actually seaworthy. They are displayed in the lobby of the assisted living facility where he is a resident. Longtime residents of Ohio may know of the Warther Museum near Dover, which displays the extraordinarily detailed trains carved by Ernest Warther in the mid 20^th century. I remember a school field trip when I was a kid to see the trains and hear then-still-living Warther talk about his work. For other men, I think remodeling becomes a creative outlet, so that homes may get redone when they don’t strictly need it, not for the sake of status but as a creative outlet. For many women and men, gardening becomes yet another labor of love, almost a religious ritual.

A universal impulse to create challenges most theories of human motivation. Most conventional theories of motivation are more or less versions of utilitarianism. This is even true of evolutionary psychology, which merely says that what is “useful” is whatever contributes to the survival of the individual or the species. But the poets aren’t having it. “All art is quite useless,” said Oscar Wilde, who was associated with the movement of “art for art’s sake.” “Poetry makes nothing happen,” said W.H. Auden in his elegy for the death of Yeats. What is the use of a work of art? As well as what is the use of a flower, even though Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like the contents of my grandmother’s garden, an explosion of rose bushes so dense and amazing that the local paper used to come photograph it. Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and a certain brand of literary theory treat art either as an instrument of ideological propaganda or as a sedative, a way of deadening the pain of living under the rule of repression common to all societies but especially capitalist ones, a bone thrown to a dog, who will happily worry it for hours. There is no doubt that art can be used this way, as passive entertainment whose object is a state of mildly euphoric mindlessness designed to keep people from thinking the dreaded thought, “My life sucks.” Oligarchs and authoritarians do not care whether their subjects are genuinely happy or not—their subjects are not real enough to them for that. But they want to keep them passive, drugged, lobotomized, because restlessness and discontent are dangerous to the stability of any regime.

There is a kind of commercialized art designed to submerge its audience into a herd-animal condition through triggering stock responses that get a dopamine response. This is clearly true of a lot of pop music, whose repetitive formulas rely on “hooks” and huge spectacular stage shows and music videos. There is a lot of popular film and fiction that likewise depend on manipulative formulas—car chases and fight scenes that have no purpose other then raising the level of adrenaline, romance formulas that are generic and predictable. And there is, of course, the endless distraction of TikTok videos and other content designed to keep bored young people endlessly scrolling. I have nothing against such commercial art and sometimes enjoy it, but it is almost the opposite of the individualized and small-scale creativity I am talking about. A century and a half ago, William Morris understood this distinction, and, in the face of the generic mass production of the growing Industrial Revolution became the prime mover, along with John Ruskin, of the Arts and Crafts movement. The movement’s model was an idealized Middle Ages populated by anonymous craftsmen. Morris designed furniture, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestries, and other items. He also founded the Kelmscott Press in order to create books that were both readable and beautiful, individualized works of art. His great predecessor was Blake, who, trained as an engraver, more or less invented self-publishing for himself. Blake’s “illuminated” books published his own poetry interwoven with watercolored drawings that do not merely illustrate the poems but whose images form an intricate contrapuntal interplay with the text. Each version of a poem was watercolored differently, so, of the surviving copies, no two are alike. In this way Blake tried to become independent of the artistic capitalism of his time, in which the artist was dependent upon a rich patron who might give him an order for a lady’s fan. Blake’s patrons pressured him to paint more “normally,” meaning conventionally, and the living Blake managed to make was precarious. In some ways, Morris’s successors included Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant of the Bloomsbury group, who also deliberately tried to subvert the artificial distinction between art and crafts by designing carpets, textiles, dinner plates, and, in Bell’s case, the jackets of Virginia Woolf’s books.

For most of my lifetime, it seemed that an arts and crafts movement was a rather pathetic, quixotic idea. Any such movement would be easily bulldozed by the juggernaut of global capitalism, with its mass production of shoddy and generic but cheap goods of all sorts, including works of art. No one predicted, however, what has happened recently. First of all, commercial art, by the logic of late capitalism, continued to grow larger and larger by eating everything in its path, seeking ever greater profits, until small and middle-range producers were simply abandoned in favor of huge moneymakers. Pop music became dominated by superstars, film by mega-budget bloated Hollywood hits, fiction by blockbuster best sellers from a few name-recognition authors. Small and even mid-range artists were simply thrown out into the wilderness. At the same time, however, the internet revolution gave unknown, individual artists at least a chance to survive. Self-publishing, Kickstarter and Patreon funding campaigns, YouTube channels, Etsy and other craft sites—these and other innovations have not solved the problem of making enough money to survive, but they have made it possible for people to make their work accessible, for free or a small subscription. The economic situation is simply depressing, but the ability to make individual and small-scale creativity available is a promising development. This applies of course also to Substack newsletters.

The idea of free-range creativity, so to speak, is now more widespread than it used to be and is in my opinion one of the more hopeful signs in our ailing culture. It is the subject of several essays by Abraham Maslow in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1970). Maslow makes clear that his interest is not in special-talent creativity but in what the title of one essay calls “the creative attitude,” characteristic of self-actualizing people. Some artists have begun to offer a kind of instruction that begins prior to the training in skills of traditional art courses, starting with the creative mindset, how to find it and how to encourage it. The graphic novelist Lynda Barry, winner of a MacArthur Grant, offers workshops in visual creativity, and has recorded their contents in a series of enchanting books beginning with What It Is (2009), where “It” is the imagination itself—“the formless thing which gives things form,” as the book’s cover says. Barry speaks of writing as well as drawing and painting, but insists that creativity cannot be willed or controlled: my mind has a mind of its own, she says at one point. She recounts her struggles in her early years to acquire faith in her own creative potential, which is the biggest single factor in creativity. Likewise, my former student, Molly Chidsey, of Lady Fern Graphics, offers technical instruction combined with means to enhance creativity. She too speaks personally, having chosen to dare becoming an artist in mid life.

This newsletter was inspired by an essay in the New York Times by Alissa Quart, "My Mother, the Artist, Discovered at 90." Quart is on a continuing quest to find homes for the more than 400 paintings created by her mother over a span of 30 or more years. Her mother, a retired literature scholar, painted largely on her own, never attempting to sell her work, showing it only to a few friends, most of whom were amateur artists like herself. She showed her work in group exhibitions but never sought a gallery show. Now, Quart’s mother is dying, and Quart is unwilling to accept that all those paintings might suffer the usual fate of amateur art—and really of almost all art. She says:

Hundreds of thousands of artists in this country whom no one has ever heard of have their art, like my mother’s friend’s, simply gotten rid of when they age or die. They are never discovered in their lifetimes. At best, they have a thrift-store-painting afterlife. According to one study, only 20 percent of artists will exhibit their work in their lifetime.

Quart refuses to accept that the essential identity of her mother will vanish into air, into thin air, and leave not a wrack behind. So she is distributing them, planting them like seeds wherever she can find a place for them:

One of my mother’s paintings now hangs in my friend’s Upper West Side office; another is owned by the guy in Massachusetts who hauled away her ancient broken air-conditioners, and a third by a local cleaning woman. Another I sold to a couple who said they had no art in their home. My friends who are professional artists are the most keen: One photographer I am close to has three, two on her mantel. There are paintings of a pond with lily pads, cows, a cosmic night sky and a downright goth portrait. | Today, as I wrap the 35th painting of my mother’s I have distributed so far — in leftover plastic from the dry cleaner — I feel some relief. A painting is the promise that our consciousness can persist beyond the hand that picked up the brush.

This reminds me of a passage in a great essay by Loren Eiseley, “The Chresmologue”:

I never make a journey to a wood or a mountain without experiencing the temptation to explode a puffball in a new clearing or stopping to encourage some sleepy monste that is just cracking out of an earth mold. This is, of course, an irresponsible attitude, since I cannot tell what will come of it, but if the world hangs on such matters it may be well to act boldly and realize all immanent possibilities at once. Shake the seeds out of their pods, I say, launch the mildweed down, and set the lizards scuttling. We are in a creative universe. Let us then create. After all, man himself is the unlikely consequence of such forces. (69-70)

All those seeds, those creative microcosms holding a world in potentia within themselves. People create, and leave it to time and chance to survive or not. Eiseley, a paleontologist, wrote a popular book on Darwin, Darwin’s Century, but his is a philosophical, visionary Darwinism far beyond the understanding of the “survival of the fittest” people. He also wrote a book on evolution as what he called The Immense Journey. Works of art go on a journey. Most of the time the artist will never know where their work ends up. Two of my unknown treasures are small jars that I bought at a woman’s bookstore called Emma in Buffalo in, apparently, 1982. dark blue with white images of women dancing beneath a moon on the one, serpents beneath the same moon in the other. They are signed by someone I read as Margo Kolutz. If you are out there, I want you to know your work is kept and valued so long as I am alive. The moon renews itself, and is no older now than it was then.

Alissa Quart’s essay was listed under Family-Grief-Loss in the Times. Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, said that art, and indeed all cultural expressions are immortality projects, ways of trying to beat death. Certainly an undeniable observation, given all those Shakespeare sonnets about how art bestows immortality on what it contains. Milton spoke, in a prose moment, of wanting to write a work that the world would not willingly let die. Immortality projects are not necessarily just the ego’s pathological attempts to become like Pharaoh, usually by transforming itself into something nonhuman. The Pharaoh was embalmed and became, well, an art object. These days the psycho billionaires are looking into cryogenic freezing. Let’s become our own ice sculptures, shall we? For the ego, the only way to survive is to become something that is permanent but dead. But we are not talking about the ego. The ego, or what Paul called the natural man, can only think of survival in terms of a condition that is static and unchanging and thereby avoids death. But if the self is a seed, Jesus told us that the seed must fall into the ground and die if it is to blossom into new life. When we create a work of art or craft, we put something of ourselves into it. In a sense, we die into it, give up a piece of ourselves that becomes a new self in a new form. Among my treasures are a dozen or so fossils from the front yard in North Royalton, because that is where the glacier stopped. How far into the depths of nature does the creative process penetrate? Did those small marine animals create their prints for me to discover and read like Miocene hieroglyphics, small creatures greeting me, saying not just “I was here” but “I am here”? Mind you, it is this kind of mystical babbling that caused at least one of Eiseley’s colleagues to call him a disgrace to science. But I have nothing to defend. I teach English, and English professors are known lunatics, dancing beneath the feminist moon, hanging out with Lady Lowzen.

We haunt thrift shops and antique stores not just to get “bargains” but because we are drawn to old things that still have something of the previous owner, perhaps the maker, as well as the owner’s time, pulsing within them as an aura. I finally understood, after all these years, that this is why people go to such enormous lengths and spend so much money to own vintage guitars despite the fact that we are, by common consent, in a golden age of guitar making, luthiers being one of the foremost examples of an Arts and Crafts mentality in our time. It used to bug me: can these people really think that makers of acoustic guitars in the 1930’s or electric guitars in the 1950’s really made better instruments and pickups than those made now with sophisticated techniques? They claim there is something unique in the sound of a 1930’s Martin, but I don’t think what they are hearing is acoustic. I think they are hearing the voice of the past haunting an object nearly a century old, making it sound different not to the physical ear but to the ear of the imagination. I was wrong—they aren’t just deluding themselves. There is a difference for those who have ears to hear.

When we preserve the past within a work of art, then, we are not just embalming it. Neither paint nor words nor musical sounds are mere recording devices. The point is not reproduction but transformation. When Mary Quart painted a landscape at a certain moment, in a certain weather, in a certain frame of mind, she was not just preserving the experience but recreating it—selecting details and ignoring others, arranging or discovering patterns, perhaps changing the “accurate” colors, in short transvaluing natural objects and experiences into a new world, into imagination.

We do this in memory before we do it in art. My memory is not just a recording device. What we fault as inaccuracy in memory is often memory recreating past experience, processing it, selecting, repressing, finding significant patterns. If I write a memoir, it is in a sense a recreation of a recreation, imagination reworking material that has already been reworked by memory.

The attempt to preserve the past, paradoxically by changing it through imagination’s alchemy, is, we could say, the Apollonian side of the creative process. But there is also a Dionysian side. People can create art not to produce an object but in order to be lost in the present moment, to be totally absorbed, to become part of some kind of energy that is always there, latent, waiting for us to become part of it. The object we are creating is an entry point, a nexus. That’s the old definition of a symbol: an image that doesn’t just represent what it signifies but participates in it. If there is a life “after” death, it is not going to be some static museum where we are all arranged like objects on a museum shelf. Instead, we shall find the center, the center sought by the alchemists at the heart of things, the center of the mind where primary process throws a wild masquerade party, which is also the center of nature which has its own primary process of particles that are really energies that are really relationships that are really changes in time. Speaking of which, with her usual witchy timing, Mary Lynn has just sent me a quotation from the primary process of the internet, in which the English comedian Noel Fielding says, “I don’t want reality. I want colours, wigs, and talking moons. Life’s boring—unless you throw glitter at it and scream poetry at a bear.” That’s the creative process, a party with Lady Lowzen, archaic and future happenings invigorated in glittering seven-coloured changes, the mandala as kaleidoscope. And the bear—he reminds me of a song by another gifted Englishman, Richard Thompson:

Jet plane in a rocking chair 
Roller coaster roll nowhere 
Deaf and dumb old dancing bear 
I'll change this heart of mine 
This time, this time.

That poor bear, the heart—he really needs the poetry, and you have to scream it because he’s deaf. In his last book, Northrop Frye spoke of a “double vision,” a phrase from Blake (as what isn’t, after all). The double vision is of this world and that other one, the one we call primary process or the Otherworld or Hydaspia (Lady Lowzen’s home town). There’s a party going on over there, and mostly we are missing it, but sometimes we manage, while lost in the woods of ourselves, to find a door.

References

Blake, William. The Letters of William Blake. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956.

Eiseley, Loren. The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2004.