How the Light Looks
Since this is a newsletter about creativity, I am going to get all meta here, and tell you I felt a bit of writer’s block when it came to what to write for today’s newsletter. I managed the first week of three posts just fine, but I’ll admit I actually forgot this was something I had to do until Sunday night. I’m still getting used to my new schedule this year, as I make yet another career transition, and the weekend got away from me amid piles of other things to be done.
One of the newsletters I subscribe to on Substack is “Methods and Madness,” written by Meredith Lewis. Right now, Lewis is running a series of holiday prompts, and I loved this description from the final prompt:
Learning to pay attention – to observe and notice and be taken with things in the world – is a part of cultivating a creative mindset. And noticing things that you mightn’t have noticed before, or looking at them in a different way, or noticing that which no one else is paying attention to, invites you to look at the world with fresh eyes.
I’ve written about this before, how being a creative person, being an artist, is, in large part, about a way of seeing the world. It starts out as just a way we naturally are, at least some of us, though I think it can be cultivated even if it’s not innate. And I believe this way of approaching the world can be restored when it is lost. I hope so. I’m trying to do this myself after a long period being very burnt out.
I’ve been trying to pay attention, to notice things the way I used to do, and it feels like I’m getting back to myself.
One of my favorite novels is The Art Lover by Carole Maso. On her website, Maso describes the book this way:
What is the power of art in the face of death? Traversing the white space of loss and death, The Art Lover shows Carole Maso in exquisite form creating a moving and elegant narrative about a woman experiencing (and reliving) the most painful transitions of her life.
Caroline, the protagonist of this lyrical story, is a writer who has returned to Manhattan to sell the family's apartment after the death of her celebrated art historian father. Through the chaos of complex feelings for her father and mother (dead for twenty-five years, a suicide), Caroline discovers that her best friend is dying of AIDS.
The Art Lover, published in 1990, is groundbreaking in form and content. In the novel, Maso breaks the fictive form by relating a personal experience with a dear friend's death. It is a daring move, startling in its empathetic power. It helps make clear the degree to which art is a necessary bridge between life and the surrealness of death. Maso also uses illustrations to explode the novelistic conventions, and intersperses the narrative with a novel within the novel.
The Art Lover is a novel of reckless love, wild hope, dark hilarity, and devastating sadness. In its inventions, transformations, designs, and cadences, it is also an act of faith, and a testament to redemption.
I remember being immediately taken with the protagonist, and the recurring motif wherein she talks about “how the light looked” in various places and times in her life, and this pursuit of light. I happened upon this novel at age 14, choosing it for the title and book jacket copy, and fancying myself an art lover as well.
Discovering Maso’s writing at such a young age had a profound affect on me and my work. I didn’t meet anyone else who was familiar with her until over a decade later, in my doctoral program at Utah, and by that time, Maso’s entire oeuvre was indelible in my brain. Before I even knew how experimental and brilliant her writing is, I fell in love with it, and took her on as a mentor-on-the-page, before I had a chance to learn from a writing teacher what a book was “supposed to” look like. If you haven’t yet read The Art Lover, I implore you to do it now. It holds up remarkably well, which can’t be said for every book written in 1990, to be sure. It’s really no wonder that I’m primarily a poet, since Maso was my favorite novelist for so many years.
My whole life, that idea of how the light looked has followed me around, and I think most humans probably notice a warm, buttery winter glow on their kitchen wall, but it illustrates this idea of creative people being willing to pay attention. I used to keep a notebook where I would record descriptions of particularly beautiful light, and I carried that notebook from Iowa to Vermont to Paris, all around Europe and North Africa. I loved witnessing how different the light was in each place. Changing photographic technology means I no longer have access to digital photos I took in those eras, but I have the notebook, and the memories. I recall especially the bright blue sky in Tunisia, and the winter light with an almost translucent quality. The deep cobalt and yellow of the sun shining through stained glass in Chartes. The deep, heavy, gray winter light that felt thick and fuzzy in Vermont, and that night I was up late in college and saw what I learned later was the aurora borealis dancing in the sky, magical lights that I’ll never forget.
Russian filmmaker Andre Tarkovsky once said that an artist must always be attentive to "beauty summoning” them. This notion pervades Maso’s work, and, I hope, mine as well, though perhaps not as explicitly.
Poet B.K. Fisher said once that, “poems are acts of attention.”
Whether it is how the light looks, or the colors around you, I hope that this week, you will practice paying attention to the world around you, and jot down some thoughts about it, even if only for your own memory. If you like, please share what you notice in the comments.
Now, let’s close with a poem, by Christopher Gilbert.
Fire Gotten Brighter Remember that memory. In this dimness when the sounds I make are foreign, my home is not my own. when I think of another winter and the distant whiteness of its walls— when even the sun seems set outside the world. In this dimness the edge of things removed to thought the numb call touch, remember that memory— the young black self the whole black body painted hot by the fresh orange scene in the basement of our old house when I was nine. When it was my turn to keep the fire going while my family slept — my father off divorced somewhere, my older brother resting after work, and what shadows hovered at the fringe of light spilt from the furnace’s mouth— I stuck my shovel in the flame, had its intensity its heat travel through a vein in the handle to a part of my head. The coals gotten smaller, brighter. Out of that fire, my frightened shovelling in the night now a framed power, that young effort made a little orange scene kept the whole world excited— gathered near its center. In this dimness where I can’t tell if my longing is my own, it is gotten winter. Above me I watch a jet that be’s perfectly still, yet gets so distant, goes so pointless. I could take a plane, fly from here to somewhere small till I’m ashes of myself— but everything burns repeatedly or keeps burning. Remember that memory. I am dark with effort, back at my mother’s house someone’s thinking of me, and old and smothered flame gets waked, and it warms the gap between image and real light. From Across the Mutual Landscape (Graywolf Press, 1984). Copyright © 1984 by Christopher Gilbert.
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