I Need a Sabbatical!
My friends, I need a sabbatical from this blog column. Thank you for indulging me for fifteen months. Now I have books and poems to read and poems to write while I think through some things. I might summarize here what I have presented so far, but the series itself has been a highly concentrated summary. I hope to return.
I’ve enjoyed reading your thoughts, and will be interested to see what you say when/as you return!
Thank you for the encouragement. I would be happy to continue conversation in this space about anything I have already put out.
Here’s a question for you (I leave it to you to judge whether this qualifies as “continue[d] conversation…about anything I have already put out”):
Obviously, you have spent a great deal of time thinking about what a Mormon creative aesthetic (or perhaps more precisely ethics) should be like for writers. How (if at all) do you think these thoughts have changed the writing you do?
I ask this partly because it seems to me that literary manifestos by working artists (in literature or other media) often seem designed to explain what those artists are already doing. It’s less common (or perhaps less commonly acknowledged?) that someone changes his or her prior practices because of ideas about what they ought to be doing — and the examples that are put forward often seem negative (e.g., Botticelli burning his paintings under the influence of Savanarola, though I gather there is some doubt as to whether this actually happened).
I’ll even give an example from my own writing, though not a particularly Mormon one. On reading something in John Gardner about the responsibility of the writer to deal justly and charitably with his/her own characters (my paraphrase), I remember that suddenly my perspective on those characters shifted. Suddenly I felt very uncomfortable at the thought of having my characters endure something just because I wanted it to be a part of my story. Since then, I think it would be accurate to say that I’ve tried harder to make the events in my characters’ lives play an important and justified part in their own story, and not simply be paraded for the sake of titillating my readers, though I don’t think I can point to any specifics.
snippet {{Obviously, you have spent a great deal of time thinking about what a Mormon creative aesthetic (or perhaps more precisely ethics) should be like for writers. How (if at all) do you think these thoughts have changed the writing you do?}}
A few thoughts:
(1) I approach writing, as I endeavor to approach all things, in a spirit of consecration. This is not only in the narrow sense of making my linguistic skills, such as they are, available to the Church, but in the larger sense of making all that I do a gift to God, as we have a God who delights in all in which we mortals righteously delight. By making of the raw materials with which God has blessed us something that he can receive back as a gift is to contribute something positive to that “common storehouse of knowledge and experience of the Gods” of which B. H. Roberts (somewhere—I can’t find it again) said the storehouse of Zion is a type.
(2) In that spirit of consecration, I write as well as I can, endeavoring to make an offering to God that is worthy of acceptation. What is placed on the altar must be as close to unblemished as I can make it. I reject the idea that a pious motive compensates for careless workmanship. An organist who made wrong notes would not last long at the Tabernacle or Assembly Hall organs—why, then, ought incompetently executed doggerel to be enshrined in our hymnals, as it is?
(3) I write without apology or compromise out of my own being, which I hope is that of a converted Latter-day Saint who is on the path of sanctification. This is different from consciously and artificially attempting to give my work an LDS “spin.” It means, rather, following my creative imagination where it takes me, in the expectation that, to whatever degree of sanctification the grace of God has brought me, it will naturally reveal itself in the work. Conversely, the integrity of the work is not to be compromised to be made acceptable to an audience that is not intellectually or spiritually attuned to it—if the work is well done, the reader owes it some homework.
(4) In going where my imagination takes me, I do not exercise much censorship over my work in the process of writing. Censorship over my own work comes in the revision phases, when my own critical faculty might decide that something in the work is out of harmony with what the Spirit is trying to teach me, or make of me. If something in the work makes of it company that I myself do not want to keep (I am thinking here of Wayne Booth’s book on the locus of morality in art), then I will not publish it. On the other hand, I will not hold myself sinful in having written it, because the writing merely exposed something unworthy in me that needed to be identified in order to be repented (creation as discovery, again). This means that writing, for me, is an instrument of my own sanctification. Plainer language: we need to cut ourselves some slack. This does not justify putting down anything and everything that pops into my head in uncontrolled “automatic writing,” even in my “surrealistic” pieces. That dangerously exposes one to the influence of dark forces. It is necessary to maintain some awareness of “where this is coming from.”
(5) Prompted by Clinton Larson, I am seeking a style and technique that somehow correlate with and even encourage the operations of the Spirit. Larson claimed to find it in what he called the “Baroque sensibility”; I have sought it first in scripture, which would seem to be the obvious place to start looking for correlatives of spiritual experience, starting with natural rhythms of speech, parallelism, and concreteness of imagery. My poems are the only evidence of any success at that.
(6) I reject attempts to impose predetermined style or technique on the artist, as that is to deny the artist the freedom to exercise the God-given gift of discovery through creation. A little humility toward the artist is fitting. (That Romanticism just keeps on keepin’ on, doesn’t it?)
Actually, Jonathan, I’m not sure I answered the question you asked, which I generalize here to something else that you may not have asked: Does theorizing about his work actually make any positive difference to an artist’s praxis? Maybe for some, maybe not for others. I just find it necessary–I always want to know where pieces fit in the grand structure. I seem to move back and forth between poles of abstract and concrete. But then, any artist with a regard for craftsmanship criticizes his own work, in the process of revision, and practical criticism always implies a larger theory. Some seem to do just fine without working out the abstract system. I don’t think I can point at some poem or line of a poem and say, “I did this because such or another aspect of my theory required it,” but thinking things through comprehensively has sharpened the focus of my work and bolstered my confidence that it is, after all, worth doing.
I have been watching Dennis Clark in this regard for a year or more now, comparing what he has been presenting in “In Verse” with his own writing as I hear him read it on Thursday evenings and the occasional Tuesday evenings at the Enliten Bakery and Rock Canyon Poets (at Pioneer Books), respectively, and I get the impression that his studies have affected the way he constructs a line. He is very conscious of craftsmanship, others’ and his own, and though he seems to be more the practical critic (and a very good one) and less the (wannabe) theoretician than I am, he certainly could explain what he is doing and why. (Come on in on this, Dennis!)
So, how can it not help our work to step back once in awhile and take a look and ask, “Just what am I doing, and why? Is this really where I want to go?” But the French do that more than the English, and I have been reading a lot of French in recent years….)
Both of your answers are interesting, though you’re right that I was trying to probe about the effect of theory on practice. While I love exploring underlying rationales, it also seems to me that we have, in literary history, a fair number of instances of individuals who got so caught up in their own theories about what literature *ought* to be that they wound up creating unnecessary artistic straightjackets for themselves.
So I like your idea about essentially trusting yourself to *be* Mormon and not putting advance limits on the discoveries and experiments you might perform in the service of your art. Art, in my view, should be evidence for theories, rather than adjusted to conform to theories. In general, at least.
There is little if any space between us there.