Creative Disturbance
By Greg Gerke
There is something that has left me perturbed: Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist, says the imagination is weak and perception is strong. Wallace Stevens, a poet, goes back and forth between “sensibility” and “imagination.” He uses this example in his essay “The Relations between Poetry and Painting”:
…if one questions the dogma that the origins of poetry are to be found in the sensibility and if one
says that a fortunate poem or a fortunate painting is a synthesis of exceptional concentration…we
find that the operative force within us does not, in fact, seem to be the sensibility, that is to say, the
feelings. It seems to be a constructive faculty, that derives its energy more from the imagination than
from the sensibility I have spoken of questioning, not of denying. The mind retains experience, so
that long after the experience, long after the winter clearness of a January morning, long after the
limpid vistas of Corot, that faculty within us of which I have spoken makes its own constructions
out of that experience. If it merely reconstructed the experience or repeated for us our sensations in
the face of it, it would be the memory. What it really does is to use it as material with which it does
whatever it wills. This is the typical function of the imagination which always makes use of the
familiar to produce the unfamiliar. What these remarks seem to involve is the substitution for the
idea of inspiration of the idea of an effort of the mind not dependent on the vicissitudes of the
sensibility.
Stevens uses the example of Corot and nature — the experience of the “limpid vistas” and “the winter clearness of a January morning” that come from the constructive faculty as it “derives its energy more from the imagination than from the sensibility.” This seems to fly in the face of the artist attesting “I had some feelings I wanted to express.” No, the imagination wanted to make its own constructions out of experience, whether art or life. There are corollaries here with William Gaddis’s “Compositional Self,” the self that endures “the real work … the thought and the rewriting and the crossing-out and the attempt to get it right,” and Proust’s innermost self: “… a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, our social life, in our vices […] it is the secretions of one’s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public.” For instance, a writer who has never written a word about Cezanne might be most especially influenced by his art. Does experience make the imagination? How could it be any other way? I sometimes wake up in a frenzy in my fifty-first year. I know the newsreel section is at the beginning of Citizen Kane, though it’s not the true beginning (that is the uttering of “Rosebud” in the castle), yet, slowly, I am magnetically drawn to think the film proceeds from the newsreel into the reporter going into Mr. Thatcher’s archives — “You will be required to leave this room at 4:30 promptly.” But no, he first goes to see Kane’s last wife, Marion Davies, but gets nothing since she won’t talk to him. I might spend ten minutes of wake-up time trying to figure this out, as if the order of scenes in Citizen Kane is one of the grand mysteries of our world — and, of course, for a few moments, it is. I’ve recorded it in a certain way, and I should be able to recall it in a manner that is true to its form — that is its content. This is a younger version of my Self trying to show off, attempting to slow the fragmentations of age that start to dispose with “knowing” or at least knowing the correct order. We should never quote exactly, we should mangle and make our listeners feel good at how wrong we are — when I had the chance to correct a legendary author on a Wallace Stevens quote in his book, I deferred, and it seemed, even at thirty-six, I began to make progress. Yet another morning might bring up more mud, as in trying to remember who were the Best Picture nominees from 1974. The byways of the mind are littered with debris from the entire color spectrum (Stevens named a poem “Debris of Life and Mind”). Some things glitter and some will never gleam, especially the recounting of the 1974 Best Picture nominees. Still, aren’t these quasi-investigations a product of our experience? In my teens I looked at Oscar books and trivia over and over. I can’t tell you why, probably because I wanted to be close to that world, to see De Niro and Nicholson win their Oscars while bemoaning that Scorsese had none. At some point I shucked this off to take hold of different types of mantles — I specifically remember my art-influential uncle who lived in Boston, saying to my twenty-one-year-old self, about my new wonderings, “You’re not thinking differently, you’re beginning to think.” For years I told people that I thought writing was a form of therapy — as in I had to work out some feelings — but so much that I’ve been examining in that last ten years had flown in the face of this, including words by Cezanne, Proust, Stein, Gaddis, and now Stevens: “Make use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar.” I like this more than I can possibly profess, because I only desire art that is unfamiliar, if it is too familiar it fails the grade and if it consistently takes detours from the familiar while cloaked in the familiar, there is something going on. If one follows this to a logical conclusion — how could “feelings” be so familiar to us that we should be able to “express” them in some artistic form? Kubrick’s definition of sensibility is quite different:
I don’t think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they
particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like
words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don’t
think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought
he was.
Doesn’t the “constructive faculty” stand for one “feeling” under another name? Well, no. Sensibility is the feeling, Stevens initially writes—but what does this mean? “The ability to receive sensations” or “awareness of and responsiveness toward something (such as emotion in another).” But a slightly different concept of “sensibility” emerged in the 18th Century Britain, possibly tied to Jane Austen’s novel and it takes this question into another realm: “An acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another.” Hangdog, I stare at these words. How can this have much to do with feeling when being responsive towards the emotions of others is kind of a double-edge sword — one can be a vampire in the Ingmar Bergman sense, sucking on the lifeblood of others, and one can be kind and considerate, and one can be over the top, domineering.
Why am I so drawn to these questions? They are, in a way, the crux of art. Perhaps because many things we know about creativity have been bitterblued over the last thirty years or so and we have gotten away from the certain process model that had come to dominant the 20th-century from Stein and Joyce to Beckett and Schutt.
One could also consider how one needs the sensibility for the constructive faculty to feed on, but like a steppingstone, the sensibility is dispatched (Merleau-Ponty: “From the very start, Cezanne’s life found its only equilibrium by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary project of his future work. The work to come is hinted at, but it would be wrong to take these hints for causes, although they do make a single adventure of his life and work.”) as a steppingstone and Gaddis’s Compositional Writer takes over. Paula Fox once told me about writing, “It’s the way light, for example I’m looking at branches now. The light hits the branches on the top, but as the sun drops the light to hit differently. It depends upon where you are sitting or standing or lying. How you see that light.” Surely, one doesn’t need to know exactly why one creates art — any answer will be pompous — “because I have to,” “because I can’t do anything else” …the possibilities drone on and on. To think about the creative act in a Non-MFA program way is the key. Jose Rodriguez-Feo once said of meeting Wallace Steves, “I realized then that to him a piece of fruit was more than something to eat… It was good enough for him to look at it and think about it.” Maybe if we think we aren’t simply getting feelings out, then we can owe more to the muse and develop the sense that is at the heart of this constructive faculty. It is possible this might change how we write.
Greg Gerke has published In the Suavity of the Rock (Splice), a novel, See What I See (Zerogram Press), a book of essays, and Especially the Bad Things, a book of stories (Splice). He edits the journal Socrates on the Beach.