The Effortless Effort of Creativity:
Jane Hirshfield on
Storytelling, the
Art of Concentration, and Difficulty
as a Consecrating Force
of Creative
Attention
“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are
finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote in lamenting
the artist’s struggleat a time “when something awful is happening
to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more
crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only
the poets can make.” We no longer have Baldwin to awaken us to the gravest
perils of our own era — one in which the poetic spirit isn’t merely neglected
but is being forced to surrender at gunpoint. To produce poets, in this largest
Baldwinian sense of creative seers of human truth, seems to be among the most
urgent tasks of our time.
The mastery of that task is what the
poet Jane
Hirshfield examines in her 1997 essay collection Nine
Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry .
Defining poetry as “the clarification and
magnification of being,” she writes: “Here, as elsewhere in life,
attentiveness only deepens what it regards.” In the superb opening
essay, titled “Poetry and the Mind of Concentration,” Hirshfield examines the
nature of this clarified, magnified deepening of being — concentration as
consecration — by probing its six main components: music, rhetoric, image,
emotion, story, and voice. Although focused on the reading and writing of
poetry, her insight ripples outward in widening circles (as Rilke might way) to
encompass every kind of writing, all art, and even the art of living itself.
Hirshfield writes:
Every good poem begins in language awake to
its own connections — language that hears itself and what is around it, sees
itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and
knows more perhaps even than we do about who are, what we are. It begins, that
is, in the mind and body of concentration.
By
concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified,
and focused, yet also permeable and open. This quality of consciousness, though
not easily put into words, is instantly recognizable. Aldous Huxley described
it as the moment the doors or perception open; James Joyce called in epiphany.
The experience of concentration may be quietly physical—a simple, unexpected
sense of deep accord between yourself and everything. It may come as the harvest
of long looking and leave us, as it did Wordsworth, a mind thought “too deep
for tears.” Within action, it is felt as a grace state: time slows and extends,
and a person’s every movement and decision seem to partake of perfection.
Concentration can also be place into things — it radiates undimmed from
Vermeer’s paintings, form the small marble figure of a lyre-player from ancient
Greece, from a Chinese three-footed bowl — and into musical notes, words,
ideas. In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self begin to
cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be
felt, what may be done.
Considering the
unparalleled pleasures of practicing familiar
to all who endeavor in the “absorbing
errand” of creative work, particularly to those
who attain mastery, Hirshfield points to deliberate practice as
an essential aspect of concentration — one that transcends mechanical skill and
reaches into the psychological, even the spiritual:
Violinists
practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not
simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how
to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning
to come into steady presence, free from the distractions of interest or
boredom.
With an eye to the obsessive
daily routines and strange
creative rituals of many writers, and to the state of
intense focus in the creative act known as “flow,” Hirshfield explores the path to concentration:
Immersion in art itself can be the place of
entry… Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears —
paradoxically — at the moment willed effort drops away… At such moments, there
may be some strong emotion present — a feeling of joy, or even grief — but as
often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into
the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself.
This
may explain why the creative is so often described as impersonal and beyond
self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something
“breathed in.” We refer, however metaphorically, to the Muse, and speak of
profound artistic discovery and revelation. And however much we may come to
believe that “the real” is subjective and constructed, we sill feel art is a
path not just to beauty, but to truth: if “truth” is a chosen narrative, then
new stories, new aesthetics, are also new truths.
A century after Rilke extolled
the soul-expanding power of difficulty and
urged us to “arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult,” Hirshfield writes:
Difficulty
itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a
task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of
love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with
painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when
suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is. The
eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: “For the
raindrop, joy is in entering the river — / Unbearable pain becomes its own
cure.”
Echoing Nietzsche’s insistence that a
full life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty and Alfred Kazin’s beautiful case for the
reality-enlarging quality of contradiction,
Hirshfield adds:
Difficulty
then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre
called genius “not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate
circumstances.” Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into
limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of
any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a
balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a
gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions,
physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we
might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and
shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth
and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows.
Hirshfield turns to the role of language in
concentration and the role of concentration in language, in writing, in poetry
itself:
Great
sweeps of thought, emotion, and perception are compressed to forms the mind is
able to hold — into images, sentences, and stories that serve as entrance
tokens to large and often slippery realms of being… Words hold fast in the
mind, seeded with the surplus of beauty and meaning that is concentration’s
mark.
More than a century after William James
asserted that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” in hisseminal
theory of how our bodies affect our feelings,
Hirshfield examines the dimensions of time and space in language through the
focusing lens of the body:
Shaped language is strangely immortal, living
in a meadowy freshness outside of time.
But
it also lives in the moment, in us. Emotion, intellect, and physiology are
inseparably connected in the links of a poem’s sound. It is difficult to feel
intimacy while shouting, to rage in a low whisper, to skip and weep at the same
time.
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