The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy

By Maria Popova

Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy

Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced mathematics working out the logic of black holes.

Another time, on the train with a poet friend, none of the other passengers could have known that behind her faraway look she was doing the invisible labor that would eventually win her the Pulitzer.

“Artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are,” the visionary theater director André Gregory wrote to the visionary photographer Richard Avedon in his courageous antidote to the Cartesian myth of work/life balance. “They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.”

We call the titans of creativity “visionaries” precisely because their work is a kind of subterranean vision that only the inner eye can see, indiscernible to any surface observer until it takes a tangible shape — be it a poem or a theorem — that touches the world, that changes it.

Leo Lionni (May 5, 1910–October 11, 1999) offers a timeless defense of this invisible, vital work in Frederick (public library) — his 1968 philosophical postulate disguised as a children’s book.

Leo Lionni

A wartime refugee from Holland, Lionni went on to become one of America’s most beloved writers and illustrators of children’s books — more than forty of them in his long life (along with innumerable drawings, paintings, and sculptures of wood, metal, and glass), taking on the largest questions of what it means to be alive with extraordinary subtlety masked as simplicity.

A decade after Little Blue and Little Yellow — which he wrote for his own grandkids — offered a foundational understanding of color that went on to influence generations of graphic designers and artists, Frederick offered a foundational understanding of creativity — the mightiest defense of the imagination since William Blake’s famous letter.

Well before philosopher Bernard Suits subverted Aesop’s famous fable to make the grasshopper its hero, not its fool, by demonstrating that play is more rewarding than productivity, Lionni’s kindred story insists that creativity — the key to which Einstein termed “combinatory play” — nourishes more deeply than consumption.

We meet a family of field mice living in a stone wall, working day and night to gather food in preparation for winter — all but one. As the rest toil, Frederick stands still and quiet, staring into space.

“Frederick, why don’t you work?” they ask.

“I do work,” he answers.

He is, rather, laboring — I am thinking of Lewis Hyde’s timeless distinction between work and labor. Frederick is laboring at a lighthouse for dark times: It is not food he is gathering but light and color, images and ideas — those immaterial mercies that make life at its coldest and harshest more livable.

When winter does come, the mice huddle between the stones and begin feasting on their cache, chatting happily about inconsequential things. But little by little, the food runs out, the conversation hollows, and they begin wondering about Frederick’s gatherings.

He instructs them to close their eyes, and suddenly there is magic — his words conjure up light and color in their marveled minds, sealed with a verse he speaks from atop a stone, doing what all artists ultimately do — open the door to the mystery of what it means to be alive:

Who scatters snowflakes? Who melts the ice?
Who spoils the weather? Who makes it nice?
Who grows the four-leaf clovers in June?
Who dims the daylight? Who lights the moon?

Stephen Hawking was asking the same with his eternal question: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Frederick’s answer reminds us that we may never know what created us, but that creative force is in us, of us — the divine within:

Four little field mice who live in the sky,
Four little field mice… like you and I.

When Frederick finishes his verse, the other field mice suddenly realize that he is a poet, that he had been doing the poet’s work all along — all through those still silent hours when he appeared to be doing nothing, he was wresting meaning from the bewilderment of being alive, finding the words to praise the brief miracle of it.

Pulsating beneath the story is a reminder that whether the poem is made of words or of mathematics, it is only ever made in the mind — that strange and solitary place where ideas are born like new stars out of the fertile cosmic darkness, molecules of thought pulled together by the gravity of feeling to become light.

BP

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

By Maria Popova

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, “involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”

Every generation believes that it must battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it must fight harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our integrity of selfhood springs. Some of this belief stems from the habitual conceit of a culture blinded by its own presentism bias, ignorant of the past’s contextual analogues. But much of it in the century and a half since Nietzsche, and especially in the years since Heaney, is an accurate reflection of the conditions we have created and continually reinforce in our present informational ecosystem — a Pavlovian system of constant feedback, in which the easiest and commonest opinions are most readily rewarded, and dissenting voices are most readily punished by the unthinking mob.

E.E. Cummings by Edward Weston (Photograph courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography)
E.E. Cummings by Edward Weston (Photograph courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography)

Few people in the two centuries since Emerson issued his exhortation to “trust thyself” have countered this culturally condoned blunting of individuality more courageously and consistently than E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962) — an artist who never cowered from being his unconventional self because, in the words of his most incisive and competent biographer, he “despised fear, and his life was lived in defiance of all who ruled by it.”

A fortnight after the poet’s fifty-ninth birthday, a small Michigan newspaper published a short, enormous piece by Cummings under the title “A Poet’s Advice to Students,” radiating expansive wisdom on art, life, and the courage of being yourself. It went on to inspire Buckminster Fuller and was later included in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (public library) — that wonderful out-of-print collection which the poet himself described as “a cluster of epigrams, forty-nine essays on various subjects, a poem dispraising dogmata, and several selections from unfinished plays,” and which gave us Cummings on what it really means to be an artist.

Illustration from Enormous Smallness by Matthew Burgess, an illustrated tribute to E.E. Cummings

Addressing those who aspire to be poets — no doubt in that broadest Baldwinian sense of wakeful artists in any medium and courageous seers of human truth — Cummings echoes the poet Laura Riding’s exquisite letters to an eight-year-old girl about being oneself and writes:

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Page from Enormous Smallness by Matthew Burgess

Cummings should know — just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship — the MacArthur of poetry — Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of breaking with tradition and being nobody-but-himself in his art. With an eye to that unassailable creative integrity buoyed by relentless work ethic, he adds:

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

Complement the thoroughly invigorating E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised with a lovely illustrated celebration of Cummings’s creative bravery, then revisit Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren on what it really means to find yourself and Janis Joplin on the courage of being what you find.

BP

Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die

By Maria Popova

Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die

The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by reason of demobilization of men.” When he received the discharge papers, he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER” on the envelope in big bold letters to signal that he was never willing for the job he was being fired from. The FBI took note and opened a file, to which they would later add the World Peace Movement he organized on his college campus, his acts of civil disobedience to protect old-growth forests from the corporate chainsaw, and his attendance of a Conference in Defense of Children in Vienna, deemed “communist initiated.”

Even as a teenager, Abbey understood that ideologies are only ever defeated not with guns but with ideas, so he decided to subvert the system by enrolling to study philosophy and literature at the University of New Mexico under the G.I. Bill. He spent the rest of his twenties traveling (he fell especially in love with Scotland), thinking about what makes life worth living, and dreaming of becoming a writer. It was when he took a job as a park ranger at thirty that he found the material for his first book: the ravishing Desert Solitaire, which went on to inspire generations of writers and environmental activists, among them Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Cheryl Strayed, and Rebecca Solnit.

Edward Abbey as an off-duty park ranger. (Photograph: Phillip Harrington.)

Throughout his life, Abbey kept a journal that stands as a crowning curio in the canon of notable diaries, selections from which were posthumously published as Confessions of a Barbarian (public library). In an entry penned just before his twenty-fifth birthday, when most of us move through the world feeling invincible and immortal, Abbey contemplates the end of life:

HOW TO DIE — but first, how not to:

Not in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt, expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest on the naked heart.

Not in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-prolonged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.

Not in the muddymire of battle blood commingled with charnel-flesh and others’ blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor in the mass-packed weight of the cities atomized while masonry topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.

Not the legal murder either — too grim and ugly such a martyrdom — down long aisled with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim sticky-quiet officialdom and heavy-booted policemen guiding the turning of a pubic hair gently grinding in a knucklebone an arm hard and obscene fatassed policemen everywhere under the judicial — not to be murdered so, no never.

But how to:

Alone, elegantly, a wolf on a rock, old pale and dry, dry bones rattling in the leather bag, eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off, dim distance alone, free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below — before the crash, before…

With none to say no, none.

Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming.

When he did die a lifetime later in his desert home, Abbey left a winking note for anyone seeking his final words: “No Comment.” He requested that his useless body be used “to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.” Wishing to have no part in the funeral industry’s embalmments and coffins, he asked his friends to ignore the state laws, place him in his favorite blue sleeping bag, and bury him right into the thirsty ground. If a wake was to be held, he wanted it simple, brief, and cheerful, with bagpipe music, “lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,” and no formal speeches — “though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge.” When the wake was held at Saguaro National Park, where he had found his voice as a writer, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams were among those who felt the urge.

Edward Abbey in his late fifties.

Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:

It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.

So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.

Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman’s spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.

BP

Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity

By Maria Popova

Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work. The notion of a “workaholic,” often worn as a badge on the lapel of the modern ego, presupposes someone who makes work the central axis of life at the expense of living. The very question of “work/life balance,” inherited from the industrial model of labor, asks us to live in parts — a portion of the person doing the working, another doing the living. But culture is not made the way cars are made. We create — anything that is not mechanical, that is not a commodity, that touches anyone else in a meaningful way — with everything we are: every experience we have ever had, every book we have ever read and every place we have ever walked, every elation and every shattering. The simplest poem pouring from the poet’s pen, the smallest wooden spoon taking shape in the carpenter’s hand, is the work of a lifetime.

André Gregory

On the cusp of turning seventy, as his lifelong friend Richard Avedon was dying, legendary theater director André Gregory took up drawing to his own surprise and found himself returned “to some very early state, a time before loneliness, abandonment, and fear” — that lovely feeling of breaking the template of oneself, leaving the comfort zone of competency on which reputations are built, and venturing into the vivifying firstness of something new. Such seemingly unproductive pastimes, Gregory realized, feed the life that is the raw material for the work, though we never know what will sprout from each lived seed.

Shortly after Avedon’s death, Gregory wrote to his friend the letter he “always intended to write but never did,” addressing their divergent views on life and work — the “one deep source of disagreement and friction” in their profound friendship. (Everyone who has lost a loved one knows that the conversations continue, knows what Hemingway knew: that “no one you love is ever dead.”)

In what might be the mightiest defense of the creative spirit since William Blake’s, Gregory writes:

Let’s face it — artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.

Art by Balint Zsako from Bunny & Tree

In a passage evocative of Kurt Vonnegut’s magnificent poem-parable about the Shelter Island billionaire and the measure of enough, Gregory holds up a mirror to his departed friend — one from which every living person who wouldn’t know who they are without what to do averts their eyes:

You owned that exquisite house in Montauk, one of the loveliest I have seen anywhere, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. You designed it yourself. But you almost never went there. Did you yearn for another kind of life? Yes, you had friends—almost all driven and workaholic artists—but never a community. You saw each of us alone. In those lovely rooms of yours, over superb dinners, the talk would always be of work, work, and work.

Each time you stopped, you would descend into a depression, believing that you had hit a wall and lost the ability to work, that you would never work again.

The contrast Gregory paints is a miniature manifesto for the fundamental indivisibility of the self and the combinatorial nature of creativity:

You chose work. I have chosen the life. The work and the life.

At least I have done so in the last 30 years. Doesn’t the work on the self inform the Work? When we inch closer to ourselves, to who we originally were, who we’re meant to be, doesn’t that serve the work, doesn’t it connect us more deeply to others? Isn’t there value in spreading laughter, love, and compassion to the people around us? … The work changes the life, and the life changes the work.

Couple with Benedictine monk and philosopher David Steindl-Rast on the relationship between play and purposeful work, then revisit Lewis Hyde’s classic meditation on work vs. labor and how to sustain the creative spirit.

HT Letters Live

BP

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