I write as always to clear my head. It works for me like a good vigorous headshake; a bit like a dog juddering dry after a forced dunking.
I found Wislawa Szymborska on The Middle Stage recently (Many thanks CC!) and have spent quite a lot of time gluttonously trawling through her poetry. Redundant to say, I suppose, that I loved her. Her work I mean. Or her too actually. But in different ways and her work more. See, this is the reason I always strenuously avoid knowing too much about the people whose work I like. I have now reconciled to the fact that it is logical and efficient to make note of their names so as to increase the probability of finding another piece of work to enjoy, but I really wish I could always draw the line there. But it is incredibly difficult nowadays to resist something that will take (as Google unfailingly informs us) less than a quarter of a second. So it happened that I knew quite a lot of Szymborska’s life, opinions, and even a bit of her character even as I began to know her poetry.
Now I find that knowledge of her context informs my appreciation of what should have ideally been only me and the poetry. Suddenly the poems are no longer ephemeral shimmering chords of empathy altering their nuances with the colours of my mood; they are now loaded with political intent, carry baggage of time, place, personality and context. Now they are more solid and… lesser for that. No, too dramatic to say that the pleasure is gone, but diminished certainly.
The thing is, a piece of poetry or a work of art – the very best ones I mean – is always so much more than the sum of parts of the maker, even all the best parts. Nothing in a whole person can ever compare to that glorious event of inspiration that precipitates a work of art. Nobody is as wise as their work, as spiritual as their ideas, as wonderful as their paintings or as centred as their sculptures. Moments are what people cannot be.
I think it is unwise and quite misleading to seek for the root of art in the psyche or context of the maker. All real art has an identity quite individual of the artist. It is the artist’s curse and privilege to lend the use of herself to labour the weight of inspiration and birth a unique entity and then, her generosity that she offers it to the world to relate with as it likes. It is unrewarding, I say, to go dissecting the gene pattern of such offspring.
Talking then of inspiration, it is true that some people are visited far more often by the jinn than others and we have a name for those people. Genius! we say, and rightly so. But genius is its own reason, and we have no cause to analyse it further. But I find it fascinating that a lot of the acknowledged geniuses talk uniformly of intense industry. I wonder then if measure of genius is how hard you are willing to work to capture inspiration? I think perhaps, it is about giving yourself generously, wholly on a glimmer of a gamble that sometimes, just sometimes, pays off – beyond all expectation.
But why should I try my uninspired hand at explaining it, better just let Genius do the talking… so I’ll leave this with something I found so singularly inspired that in it there is no space for any falseness. It says what I’ve been groping to say, as if there were no other words to say it.
The Joy of Writing
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.
They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.
Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?
The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
*Another genius talks of inspiration:
Aaten hain gaib se ze mazamin khayal mein,
Ghalib sariir-e-khama nawa-e-sarosh hai
