The Artist's Way: Week 4

I am now into the fourth week of Julia Cameron's Artist Way, and on my third day of the “reading diet.” When I first saw the task--not to be skipped, she demands at the opening--of not reading for a week, I thought She must be joking. Then—No way. Then—Well, I’ll finish my book first. And I need to write my review of Heller’s “Artist Journey Inward.” This just isn't right for me. It's going to push me back, just when I decided to be reading more about art.

Then came pacing and jumpiness, like I was an addict locked away from dope.

The very strength of the visceral reaction told me that I had to give it a try.

One interesting side effect of not reading is that I find lines from poems that made an impression on me floating across my brain. It's like they were drowned out by the cacophony of text, and in the sudden stillness are emerging to be heard.

This morning it was mostly Gerard Manley Hopkins. An internal rhythm, with fragments of his line swimming in and out, yet without the darkness and drive they usually demand:

I am gall, I am heartburn

God's most dire decree

Bitter would have me taste

My taste was me...

Self yeast of spirit

A dull dough sours...

Their sweaty selves only worse...

Betweenbepie, a mountain

Let joy cling God knows when to God knows what

Give comfort root-room

Spliced, out of order, and misremembered, they've been recreated into a medley that is both more personal and strange.

I have been working with Hopkins' poetry in my art for close to three years. I remember at first, I just sat and wrote it out from memory with ink and brush. When I checked the text, I was shocked to realize that many of the lines that drew me were often from different poems, that they each belonged to separate units, were saying different things. I began working with the text of the poem present, giving more pressure to the lines that meant something to me--but some of the magic went out. It became more calculated.

I now think it might have been a mistake to return to the text: the lines that stuck to the flypaper of my brain were the ones that mattered to me. And the lines I got wrong and recreated were my personal investment in the poetry, my own transcription into my work.

Sometimes you have to Let be. Let art spring God knows when from God knows what.

And, in a tribute to Hopkins, I post here what I think is one of the greatest poems of the English language--in its original form, unaltered by my brain (I am resisting, and not rereading it as I post it):

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Márgarét, are you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves, líke the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins