Does Writing Matter? #

The invention of writing began around the year 2300 BCE. Its primary function was to record commercial transactions using symbols stamped onto wet clay tablets. Eventually bored by the mechanical recording of trade, scribes began to experiment by recording the songs and ballads of the tribe. It is believed the first author is Enheduanna, the love priestess daughter of one of her father, King Sargon the Great, who had created an empire centered at the city of UR in the fertile crescent on the banks of the Tigris River. She enthusiastically expresses the joy of existence.

Since then creative artists have experimented with many forms or genres to recreate life as they envisioned it. All art is the act of creating something from nothing; improving on a blank space. The aim is to make:

“Order out of chaos, clarity out of confusion, sense out of the senseless, inspiration out of nothing”.

John Olson claims:

“art is a revelation of the unknown” – the unknowable?

Art doesn’t answer any questions; rather as, Ezra Pound advised Yeats, it attempts to ask the right questions. Baudelaire had written that about thirty years earlier, but then so had Socrates - who insisted he knew nothing.

Emily Dickinson advised,

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–/ Success in Circuit lies."

Henry James was the nonpareil of the hiatus:

“the whole of anything is never told,”

We need to be wary, because good Art can get into our minds before we have a chance to block the ideas out.

Polyphonic music consisting of many voices or sounds, each with an independent melody, but all harmonizing; contrapuntal (opposed to homophonic), can have some subliminal effect upon the listener, an almost hypnotic or haunting counterpart.

We can be caught or mesmerized by the spell woven by the lulling descriptions, the direct colloquial narrative, the lilting rhythms, regular ‘rimes’, rich tapestry of images, symbols and the searing feelings of the narrator.

Incantatory repetitions and use of onomatopoeia can have a hypnotic, haunting effect on us.

In a 2006, letter to kids in an English class at Xavier High School in New York Kurt Vonnegut gives advice to young writers:

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow”. Start immediately, Vonnegut told them sternly — write a six-line poem about anything, but don’t show it to a soul. Once you have perfected it, tear it up into “teeny-weeny pieces” and distribute them across several bins. You’ll find you have already been rewarded, he said. “You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”

Ambiguity of Art #

Art can get ideas into us before we have a chance of blocking them out.

‘Nothing replaces the reader’s responses: the sound of poetry on both the outer and inner ear, the visions of fiction in the mind’s eye, the kinaesthetic assault of total theatre’ Handbook of Criticism – Guerin.

T.S. Eliot’s poetry appears self-conscious of it purpose, techniques and effects. It could be called meta-poetry.

Eliot trusts his readers to reach their own conclusions.

“The reader’s interpretation may be different from the author’s and be equally valid – it may even be better. There may be much more in a poem than the author is aware of. “

“Art to express the world as it is - its purpose to understand ourselves.”

> “to purify the dialect of the tribe”.

Emotions are sometimes too complex for simple rational language and the thoughts too deep for intellectual articulation. For this reason, Poets resort to metaphor, images, rhythm, style and myth.

Martin Heidegger expressed it as:

“To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.”

Heidegger also claimed:

“The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.”

Robert Frost claims we can never know anything for certain.

“My poems are set to trip the reader’s head most foremost into the boundless, into the dark and let them find their own way out.”

We dance round in a ring and suppose. But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Art’s Influence #

Art has a greater permanence than most other mediums - even stone sepulchres. According to Juvenal, writing can be more durable than stone.

a name that might Cling to the stones that guard their ashes, those stones the barren Fig tree’s malicious strength is capable of shattering, since Even their very sepulchres are granted a limited span by fate.

Ovid assert the power of artists to survive anything that “Jove” can do to them, culminating in the epic’s (Metamorphoses) final word, vivam, “I shall live”:

I’ve made a masterpiece Jove’s wrath cannot
destroy, nor flame, nor steel, nor gnawing time. . . .
I will be read on people’s lips. My fame
will last across the centuries. If poets’
prophecies can hold any truth, I’ll live.

When Auden quotes Yeats’ “Poetry makes nothing happen”, he could have his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

Art can make a difference. The poems of William Blake effectively reformed child labour laws, while Charles Dicken’s novels influenced authorities in the area of social conditions and justice.

In Australia, David Williamson’s The Removalists spawned a number of inquiries into police corruption.

George Orwell “Why I write”:

“My starting point”, “is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice … I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Arthur Koestler, the author of Darkness at Noon, and George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four — all produced cautionary novels alerting us to the dangers of creeping authoritarianism.

FDR’s New Deal forged a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together.

Art as therapy #

While some art attempts to be detached from the writer, the whole of all artists engaging with anything outside of one’s own mind cannot be done unless through the lens of the self.

Writing is a way of conveying to our descendants how to live and love; how to overcome travail, failure, suffering, doubt to find joy, hope and purpose.

Writers recognise the beauty in brokenness and find ways to repair the wounds of the past.

Writing is a relief/release. We all need narratives to understand the identity of others. The World is filled with impossible lives; Fiction reminds us they exist.

The inner truth of experience and authenticity of emotion are, cleansing to a defiled world. Both writers and readers can experience the therapy of catharsis or purification by engaging with the text.

Sandra Cisneros:

“If I didn’t have poetry, I would have to be on Xanax or Prozac. It’s my medicine.”

The idea of art for justice and demonstrate potential power for it to heal. Dean Walker, Ford Foundation

The inner truth of experience and authenticity of emotion are, cleansing to a defiled world.

Both writers and readers can experience the therapy of catharsis or purification by engaging with the text.

All the authors are prepared to devote any amount of time and intellectual industry, and to renounce almost everything, in the exhausting bid to wrestle the world into words, leaving us to revere the result and to inquire how much was entailed in the sacrifice. Anthony Lane

Writing is a relief/release. We all need narratives to understand the identity of others. The World is filled with impossible lives; Fiction reminds us they exist.

Patrick White wrote: “I can’t say why I do write except by saying that I seem to suffer from a disease that can be eased only by writng.”

Hopkins, Dickinson, and many other writers express deep manic or depressive feelings.

Eliot, Lowell, Plath were advised through, cognitive behavioral therapy, to redirect compulsive thoughts.

Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop attempt to do it with objective and impersonal detachment.

The nineteenth-century writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child was impressively prolific. “By her own admission she frequently suffered from a depression that writing seemed to alleviate.

Child of divorce? You’re into cryptocurrency now. Grew up in a stable, loving household? Sorry, but you’re never going to finish writing that novel.

All Art attempts to articulate pre-rational human awareness of the world around us, natural phenomena, our place in nature and our capacity for self-reflexion. It expresses our dark intuitions that cannot be articulated in the light of reason. Anthony Lane

Art as Empathy #

The Banaliy of Empathy

Narrative is an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it. But if witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will? Namwali Serpell

Elena Ferrante #

To Elena Ferrante, true writing is a convulsive act, arguing against the media’s “demand for self-promotion”.

All literature, is the product of tradition: a sort of collective intelligence.

We wrongfully diminish this intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist behind every work of art.

We owe a complex debt to literature through reading. A restless critique of one’s reading and writing can add fuel to the fire.

Books arrive in Ferrante’s hands like a divine gift, offering just what she needs. Messages appear in chance readings, re-readings and re-evaluations of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and others.

She learns that writing requires deep courage, that the small “I” of a woman might link herself to history, that women can tell their own and each other’s stories. In Dante, she sees Beatrice speak with wisdom and authority, and it spurs her on.

Louise Gluck #

I look for archetypal experience and assume that struggles and joys are not unique.

Poetry renders experiences of heartbreak and hope from new perspectives. It finds the world and the self wanting. The poetic voice is honed to speak to us from the grave.

Gluck viewed the sexual act as: the low humiliating premise of union or connection.

……

Art happens when someone wants to do it and needs to express an idea.

Advertising and propaganda start from given ends and work backward to means.

Writers driven by ceaseless curiosity can have the urge to share their newly found knowledge.

Genuine art attempts to depict the essence to establish the truth through the medium of fiction.

The writer needs to convince the reader to believe the narrative, even though both know that it is fiction. Margaret Atwood

Writers are mysteries to themselves, constantly trying to solve the mystery through invented characters and scenarios. Joanna Murray-Smith

“Writers know that talent is real, success is arbitrary, and that the relationship these two facts bear to each other is a mystery.” B. D. McClay

Genuine art attempts to depict the essence to establish the truth. Aristotle

Writers driven by ceaseless curiosity can have the urge to share their newly found knowledge.

“Writing is a duty to history,” Behrouz Boochani

“‘Creating’, wrote Albert Camus, ‘is living doubly’. He was thinking about Proust when he wrote those words – the Frenchman’s assiduous assembling of the living details of his world. The carpets, the flowers, the wallpaper patterns, the dresses, the table settings, the jewellery and walking sticks, the teacakes and bed blankets: the sheer clutter of stuff in space and time. His imagination was like some nightmare.”

Matthew Arnold claimed that “the study of literature gives you the best vantage point from which to understand an entire society”.

Marshall McLuhan stated that: “the chances of understanding the meaning of our involvement in the present is very small. It is generally the artists who see what they are living in the present and we are always one step ahead (of technology)”.

Heidigger acknowledged that:

“The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.”

Aesthetic artefacts can generate insights. Stories, history, art are where we glimpse the meaning of it all.

Freud claimed all great art originated from a diseased mind, while Robert Frost admits that “being a poet is not a profession; it is a condition”. Though they attempt to hid behind masks, most poets express their deepest guilt, fears, insecurities, hopes, ecstasies or obsessions, all the while pretending to be creating art. Writing is being haunted by your own ghosts, only exorcised by expression.

Great literature can give us a clearer perspective of our own perceptions of life in all its complications. It helps us to see the big picture rather than our own narrow and limited experiences reveal; it helps us to transcend and globalise our concerns. It gives us a chance to learn from the giants of the past and can give us a cautionary warning about the direction our society is taking us.

Literature – all art - focusses a spotlight on an issue. It gives it a center within an aesthetic space, which is then manipulated to bring out the essence; what Hopkins calls “inscape”.

Other quotes from great writers: #

You can make anything by writing. C. S. Lewis

“The novelist’s job is to turn a slight, even a rumour, into a certain reality”. Julian Barnes

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job. Jeanette Winterson

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it. Alex Haley

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one. Thomas Carlyle

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream. Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else. Gloria Steinem

Juvenal refers to “the itch for writing”, while Cerdiwen Dovey confesses to the guilty pleasure of writing.

Every writer I know has trouble writing. Joseph Heller

“I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am.” — Jane Austen

A funny writer is a writer to whom the reader gives a great deal of power. Lauren Groff

To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself. Anne Rice

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. Anne Frank

“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments…” —Virginia Woolf

If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.

Truth and fiction #

Myths are beautiful lies that tell eternal truths.

Prince Harry has defended the Netflix series The Crown, saying that – while it was not “strictly accurate” – it portrayed the pressures of royal life.

Virginia Woolf said that “fiction is like a spider’s web” (A Room of One’s Own 2), a web that resonates every time it is touched. The spider’s web is an image of a complex, but coherent structure. Like many Modernists, Woolf tried to create a cohering pattern underneath the chaos of reality.

“There are some stories that have to be told by each generation”.

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”

“Yes, I deserve a spring– I owe nobody nothing.”

“anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”

………..

The poet’s skill lies in the summoning and semantic energies of words. Seamus Heaney

Art relies on nuances, suggestion - the multiples meanings of words and the inferences we all choose to draw.

Re-creating, imitating or reflecting reality is problematic. Reality exists in a liminal undefinable space often protected by a shell, masquerading as something else. Hopkins refers to attempting to pierce that façade to discover the essence; the impossible space behind the mask - Inscape. All art is an attempt to represent tangible objects in real time and space, striving to depict an invisible self. Successful art, like The Mona Lisa or The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, intrigues us by tantalising enigmatic mystique.

………..

Most common regrets of the dying: “I wish I’d had the courage of expressing my feelings”, or “I wish I’d spent more time with my family”.

Literature can enflame our determination to pursue justice. - Susan Sage

Esteemed by some philosophers as the highest virtue, the delivery of justice demands and rivets attention. And the opposite is true as well: the perceived miscarriage of justice commands attention, sparking outrage and condemnation.