Why write? Why art?: Metaphor

Why write? Why art?: Metaphor Why do we write? Why do we create art? Why do I write on this blog? I suppose an argument could be made for it being a waste of time, but this is one of the reasons why it isn’t. Metaphor. From Wallace Stevens’ “The Motive for Metaphor” “The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilirations of changes: the motive for metaphor” The mental act of metaphor changes the subject and the writer. It expresses something that will never be fully and satisfyingly expressed, and once exposed to or having created a good metaphor a person is forever changed. For example, in Moby Dick Melville compares the soul, or the inner man, or an inner need inside of us, to a miner. The quote deserves to be placed here again: “The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?” - Melville. Reading Moby Dick changed me in several ways. To get the full effect of the quote it is necessary, I believe, to read the book, but ever since I read that (it took the second read for it to really sink in) I’ve had an image of a miner digging through the mine shaft of my soul. Sometimes I think I can even hear that muffled pick chipping away at the rock. But still, why? The above almost sounds horrifying, but the soul is an idea that we will never fully express or understand. This metaphor has given me a place to start. The most amazing thing is that this metaphor combined with a D.H. Lawrence metaphor about a soul being a pile of unlit tinder. My understanding of the soul grows the more metaphors I discover. I will add another, happier, metaphor here. After I wrote about the following poem I added another reason for writing and art: happiness. “Of Mere Being” Wallace Stevens The palm at the end of the mind, Beyind the last thought, rises In the bronze decor, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. According to me and some others, the bird is the imagination. The imagination is beyond the mind, beyond reason, something we cannot control, something free and beautiful and singing. Happiness comes not from reason, but from our imaginations. Happiness comes from art.

Literature: Exercising the Imagination

One thing I love about literature, one thing that might be unique to literature, is that it forces the reader to imagine and view the world form a different perspective. Fiction forces belief and emotional connection to a world that is created from the imagination, vision and beliefs of another person. By believing and imagining this world, a similar mental journey is taken by the author and reader, and the reader becomes a unique combination of their own imagination and the thoughts and imaginings of someone else. This does not mean the reader adopts the beliefs of the writer, but some kind of alteration will occur to someone who has been so deeply exposed to something so powerful and personal. It is growth. It is change. Self-discovery and experience gained through the exercise of the imagination. Literature is the unique and personal imagination and vision of one concentrated into their fingers, gripping a pen or hovering over keys slowly being forced into the form of sentences. Forms may not be the same as the original imagination, but they allow the reader to create a new world unimagined by the writer. Each book is an infinite world and minds take one of those worlds and populate it with their own imaginings influenced by other books. The simple act of reading literature forces the reader into a metamorphosis, and after each book the reader is a new person, a stranger, even to themselves.

Virginia Woolf, p.1, Passion for Living

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

No matter what anyone says, Woolf is a great writer. This question she asks, "What's this passion for?" is one I have asked myself often. The thing is, the passion I feel and I imagine the passion that Woolf feels, is not connected to anything particular. For instance, I know people that are passionate about very specific things and I cannot imagine what that is like. Someone I know is passionate about the poor in Africa, specifically Sudan and Uganda. How do you decide that? It's just weirdly specific.

The way I feel is more of a general passion, maybe regarding emotion and life, and maybe this is why I feel compelled to write. Freaking people always ask, "What do you write about?" and seriously what kind of question is that? I write about... life, but it hurts to say something that cliche.

My sister has a passion for unborn children that may or may not be aborted. She has a passion for something. All I have is passion streaming through my brains and heart valves without landing on anything. Why?

It is like I have no direction, but not for the lack of looking for some. I've tried to ground myself in something specific, but I eventually get bored. If anything, my passion has something to do with being ungrounded, some would say free.

Arthur Rimbaud, p.1, Bohemia (as a lifestyle)

"My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound/ And I listened to them, seated on the side of the road,/ In those good September evenings when I felt drops/ Of dew on my brow, like a strong wine:/ Where, rhyming in the midst of fantastic shadows,/ Like lyres I plucked the elastics/ Of my wounded shoes, one foot near my heart"

It feels somehow like cheating using something that I posted on Facebook to write about here. There was a mediocre movie, "In the Land of Women" on the other night, and I only watched part of it. It is about a writer that hasn't accomplished anything, and is, for some reason, wasting his privileged life. At one point he says something like, "I've been given all the advantages possible, and what have I got to show for it?" He has never suffered, never done anything, but he wants to.

As I read Rimbaud it was this idea that came into my mind thinking about what it is I want to do. Writing is all I want to do. I don't want to change the world, I just want... to do what I am supposed to do. If I am here for a purpose, let's get to it.

Life is great, too great, and I am almost too happy, or content, but I long for something. I yearn, but I'm not sure what for. The kid in the movie says if maybe he writes something beautiful he can make someone love him. That'd be great, I'd love to loved in the true love "Princess Bride" way, but I don't know if that is what I'm looking for.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not looking for anything, I have no goals, I'm just walking down a road enjoying the crunch of gravel under my feet, and excited about what is on the other side of the hill. Does that mean I need to start walking?

Herman Melville, p.1, Faith and Dying with a Smile

"Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

In everything that Melville writes there is a heavy feeling of death, of shadow, and darkness, but he always makes sure that the dark tunnels have some kind of light. Moby Dick is a dark novel, but there is a lot of humor in it as well. Few have read this book, and some would say that is a tragedy. I say, sucks to be them. And if you have read it and do not love it, then there is no hope for you. Stop reading. I'm only sort of joking, at the least you should feel badly about yourself.

Death being a major theme of Moby Dick it is easy to see why people are uncomfortable with the book, but as I read it death became to me what it was for those sailors on The Pequod that worked a job where death was always with them. Always a possibility, and a quick one that left no body. The ocean as a grave is more final then dirt, and in their case often more sudden. That is life, no matter who you are death could be any number of unfortunate random occurrences. Or, is there more to life than chaos, but some kind of order, fate, destiny, to everything?

"Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being"

It is almost cliche to say, but death is no end it seems. That depends, I suppose, on what you believe, but even believing death is not an end does not make it less sad or less frightening to most.

Shakespeare, p.1, All the world's a stage, or Emotion is of the Heart, Mind, and Soul

"All the world's a stage,/and the men and women merely players"

Does this mean that we are all merely playing at life? Is Shakespeare saying that we aren't really living, but acting out emotions?

Maybe only some people do this. It seems that some react to life based on emotion. Avoiding unpleasant things because it makes them feel bad, or pursuing pleasure for the sake of feeling good. For instance, a guy not asking a girl out because he is afraid of rejection, or having sex as often as possible for the pleasure. Is that really living through emotion though?

In the case of a guy not asking a girl out it is clear that he is forsaking something possibly great for the feeling of comfort and stability. Instead of pursuing something, he is doing nothing. Is that living based on emotion?

Someone who has sex for pleasure is pursuing a pleasurable feeling, but not the possibly greater feeling of being truly close to someone. So, emotion is separate from sensory pleasure.

Emotion comes from emovere, which is Latin for out (ex) move (movere). Emotion is outward movement, but from where?

Is emotion more than a mental and physical process then? It can, of course, be tracked and measured in the brain, but that only answers how emotion exists. Not why. Is emotion more than just feeling good, or feeling sad, or feeling angry, or feeling at all? Maybe emotion goes beyond even the mind, and comes also from the soul.

So, does emotion come from God?

Henry Miller, p.1, Passion for Living Comes Not From Me

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive"

And it seems that he was the happiest man alive, which I found to be a shock because as Anais Nin said, "in (Henry) alone I have found the same swelling enthusiasm, the same quick rising of blood, the fullness. Before, I almost used to think something was wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on". He writes always about being a writer, and he savors everything about life. The dirty, grimy, awful things are to him diamonds.

There are passages where his passion becomes so clear it can be felt, and this passion is directed toward living. He doesn't live life to the fullest as a choice, but rather he was born "so damned well off" that it is the way he is. I feel so connected to him, because this is the way I have always felt. No matter what, I've been soaked through with joy almost as if I couldn't feel anything else. Henry Miller says, "I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy". It wasn't that he was so terribly good, but he was so well off that the only sensible thing was to be good. The only interesting thing was to do good.

"I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard-and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of the idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself."
Tropic of Capricorn