Silent and Invisible (Growing All the Time)
The Marxists wouldn’t like it….
Much is said and written nowadays of the proper functions
and uses of leisure. Some people,
as we know, are all for the organisation of spare time. Some take exercise; some sleep; some
wind up the gramophone; some lean against bars or mantelpieces. Others develop the resources of the
intellect. I myself have been, all
my life, a privileged person with considerable leisure. When asked how I spend it, I feel both
dubious and embarrassed: for any answer implying some degree of activity would
be misleading. Perhaps an
approximation to the truth might be reached by stating that leisure employs me
– weak aimless unsystematic unresisting instrument – as a kind of screen upon
which are projected the images of persons – known well, a little, not at all,
seen once, or long ago, or every day; or as a kind of preserving jar in which
float fragments of people and landscapes, snatches of sound.
It is a detached
condition. It has nothing of the
obsessed egotism of daydreaming, and only a ghost of its savage
self-indulgence. One might almost
be dead, watching from the world of shades, so pure is one’s observation, so
freed from will, from the desire to shape or alter to personal ends. There is no drama in which one plays
star-role; there is no emotion but that mild sort of satisfaction, based on
familiarity and recognition, which one gets at the cinema, when the film turns
out be an enjoyable one seen several times before.
Yet there is not one of these
fragile shapes and aerial sounds but bears within it an explosive seed of
life. For most of us they will
flit and waver by, and be gone again; but for a few, the shadowy and tranquil
region which harbours their play is a working-place, stocked with material to
be selected and employed.
Suddenly, arbitrarily one day, a spark catches, and the principle of
rebirth contained in their cold residue of experience begins to operate. Each cell will break out, branch into
fresh organisms. There is not one
of them, no matter how apparently disconnected, that is not capable of
combining with the rest at some time or another.
Perhaps this is a wordy,
unscientific way of describing the origins and processes of creative writing;
yet it seems to me that nowadays this essential storing-house is often
discounted, and that that is the reason for so much exact painstaking efficient
writing, so well documented, on themes of such social interest and moral value,
and so unutterably boring and forgettable. The central area has not been explored, and therefore all is
dead. There is not a false word,
nor one of truth.
I am surprised when authors have perfectly clear plans
about the novels they are going to write; and I find it dismaying, for more
reasons than one, to have the projected contents related to me, at length and
in rational sequence. I would be
more encouraged by such an answer, given in rather a hostile and depressed way,
as: It is about some people; and if the author could bear to pursue the subject
and mention any of the images and symbols haunting his mind – If he spoke for
instance of a fin turning in a waste of waters, of the echo in the caves, of an
empty room, shuttered under dust sheets, of an April fall of snow, of music
from of the fair at night, of the burnt-out shell of a country house, that
woman seen a moment from the bus top, brushing her long dark hair – I should
feel that something was afoot.
Writers should stay more patiently at the centre and suffer themselves
to be worked upon. Later on, when
they finally emerge towards the circumference they may have written a good
novel about love or war or the class struggle. Or they may not have written a good novel at all.
Rosamond Lehmann is saying something profound here, if only
we could stop for a moment and listen.
She is writing about the nature of creativity; an organic process that
lives inside us; leisure the soil where it is seeded, hibernates and
grows. The origins of art, this
passage suggests, have nothing to do with our conscious mind or self-directed
will; rather, Lehmann implies, they exist somewhere else in our bodies: art an independent
being, a parasite, is perhaps the better word, that lives off the human animal,
and which requires the freedom to create itself, mostly from its own resources.[i] We are simply its vehicles, clapped out
old bangers or flashy Jags; providing, that is, we park up, and sit silently by
the roadside, to watch as the pedestrians go by… A man approaching in the wing mirror, his t-shirt a white
graffiti’d wall, his pink mini-skirt clashing with his blue tights; and his
white boots incongruously sixties in today’s 1930s Shoreditch. From the rear he could be a woman;
Marilyn inevitably smiling back at me; defaced in spray can style; his bum
wobbling just a little. Pink suits
it. The zip provocatively
exposed. A hooker or civil
servant? Which street will the
mind turn down… we leave him as he walks across Hoxton Square; heading, we
think, towards Sh!….
We have to absorb the world, if we want to create it. This is what I receive from this
passage. Once you turn your senses
off - by not paying attention; by constantly doing things; by talking too much;
by imposing a conscious intellectual pattern - the rain stops, and the plant
dies. The work of art needs to be
buried deep inside the body, let us call it the unconscious, otherwise it will
wither very quickly away; even if it breaks the surface: a published novel in
paperback; fragments of Camden on the cover. For art, existing below the conscious mind, although it
needs the latter like a country estate its skilled gardener, must, in its
germination, follow its own laws and be attracted to its own fancies; only then
can it recreate the natural world in its own form – for now something of the
profundity of reality has grown into its aesthetic structure. Second hand ideas, that world of talk
and quick fire social response, are merely excrescences, the stuff we have
subtracted from life and add onto it.
Immensely important, but weak and trivial when put inside the artwork;
and left there un-integrated – like coke cans thrown into flowerbeds. Even the ideas of the greatest
philosophers are less important than the thinking processes which created them:
it is the reason why a Kant or a Hume can still be read with interest - how
they think is akin to how an artist creates; and it is this which excites us. For thought is different from life, it
follows its own rules and requires its own country houses; where it lives
mostly alone; only occasionally coming out to perform.
We need so much time!
Or at least the creative thinker or artist needs a great deal – a
lifetime, if possible. Others may
find such large temporal expanses tiresome.[ii] But even time is not enough. Lehmann didn’t write for years after
the sudden death of her daughter; her will to create was overcome by her
emotions. For an artist needs both
leisure and the creative urge; it is the latter that defines them. The relationship between the two is complicated. François
Truffaut once brilliantly expressed it when he wrote, describing himself, that
the laziest people are the busiest.[iii] For years I was fascinated by
this idea, but could make no sense of it – there were times I thought it simply
a clever paradox; François flirting as usual. What he means, I think, is that when an artist works they
work superhumanly;[iv] but it also
captures something of Lehmann too: an artist never stops, even when they are
lying on the sofa, half asleep, a tea on its tray beside them – always working,
even when doing nothing, absolutely nothing, at all.
[i] See the discussion in the footnotes to Sea-Grape
Tree; and particularly the quotes
from Tsvetaeva. This post has an
extended discussion on Lehmann’s interest in spiritualism. The quoted passage here, written before
her interest developed, may give some insight into the nature of that
experience.
[ii] Think of the novels of Turgenev, where most of the
leisure class fill up their time playing cards.
[iv] This is also captured in a scene from Die Zweite Heimat, where a coal merchant says to a lodger that he has
always respected artists because they are the hardest workers.
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