“Well obviously if your entire concern is for saving things in life, items of thought or description that seem to be otherwise perishing, and that is the propelling force behind your constantly writing up these valuable paragraphs–then your entire opus must fall under a similar mandate; or your whole existence is twice a tragedy.”
“Yes,” I had to agree, “a double tragedy, or an utter farce; for I saved in my expressions a world, and then the larger world, the uncaring and ignorant world, didn’t save what I had saved and expressed–of the world. Even if only an aspect of the world, I put my life into saving it.’
“However, if your work finally is saved, then it will be a consummate miracle! All the original items will be, as it were twice saved. The first time, when you wrote them, and the second time, when . . . readers make them historical, or whatever has to happen formally to make sure they are actually and finally saved. Whew, that’s a hard second part of the equation, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and also, to make a caveat, this does not address the fact that inevitably what I saved was changed, even partially created, in the act of saving it. Not just because it was put into words; but in fact it had it’s first material existence in words, perhaps–if my language is true its literal poetic aim. No, it doesn’t address that, but I obviously understood that from the beginning. In fact, I was thrilled by it. In fact it was the fragile nature of the things I was saving that informed me, often surreptitiously, that they could be lost–utterly, unless action was taken. Perhaps I use the word surreptitiously in the opposite sense you might expect. But still, my writing is done in the spirit of saving things, saving reality!, that must always be kept in mind, that it was never just clay, and I was not just some egomaniac artist wanting to make anything at all, I was not just constructing castles in the air–no, I mean yes, it was fragile and real, it was like . . . flower petals.”
“Though neither, as you said, was it material to be treated as if it were a preservation project, like flowers under glass. It was neither of those operations you performed in your writing, Theopilus,” said my kind visitor, addressing me by one of my old pseudonyms.
“Yeah, well maybe all I have done is gather everything together in one place, described the world from one point of view, and put it in a series of uniform volumes, or one file on a computer–so the whole shebang can be totally done away with, erased in one shot,” I said. And for some reason, I vividly recalled that square glass jar of crushed flower petals, in the library on the baby grand piano, in the country house we lived in, a lifetime ago in Vermont. They were roses.
February 2, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Music, flowers, and a little George Berkeley, cool,
February 3, 2008 at 12:55 am
For me it was the forsythia… dripping with rain, a break in the clouds, the sun turning each drop into a prism. Twelve years old, coming from an art class at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
“You are responsible for this…. ”
I didn’t have those words, but the meaning was there… overwhelming.
That what I felt, what I saw in that moment… I would be a thief to hold to myself. That if I failed to pass this on… and I clearly understood this to mean.. that to die without giving it form, to what had happened to me in that moment, and all such moments I might experience in the future… that if I failed to make them real to others… then I might as well have never lived at all.
That whatever I knew of beauty in the world… I was responsible for. That I experienced it as a debt to be paid, as something that I owed… for my very life.
The gift of the sublime is not free… we are responsible for every passing glance that takes it in. It doesn’t matter whether I’m remembered or forgotten… others have surpassed anything I’m likely to do, and if my work is forgotten, it will be because others have surpassed me in my own time. What matters, is that I never forget that day, the forsythia drenched with rain, and what I learned in that moment. What matters, is that I not forget… that I not forget
February 3, 2008 at 9:47 am
You write pretty.