Holding Wonder Like a Cup
On the difficulty of seeing + power of the meticulously observed image + the intersection of art & science + the challenge of understanding things as they are and not as we are
The title for this prompt comes from Sara Teasdale’s famous poem, “Barter,” and the first part of the full line is, “Children’s faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup.”
I discovered Teasdale’s poem in 2000, when I was teaching first grade, and I loved that line because I looked out on those faces every morning, and I observed them throughout every day as they did, indeed, take in the world with great wonder.
And that level of child-like wonder is necessary for what we are about to do with this prompt.
This week, we’re going to play with capturing images for their own sake so that we can get a sense of what that feels like and come to appreciate the quiet power of a meticulously and honestly observed image with no agenda. Like so many things worth doing, this is simple and very, very difficult. I hope you will give it a try!
And this is something of a Part Two or next chapter of a prompt I gave last week, as part of the 30-Day Creativity Challenge, when I wrote about fairytales one powerful portal into newer, deeper versions of the stories we might be trying to tell, even ones that we think we know by heart.
Part of what I addressed in that essay is the difficulty many of us face in trying to write prose in what I call “the mood of a fairy tale,” and how that difficulty can stem in part from our inability to get past the inclination to write from a stance of already knowing (or thinking we do) what something is about, rather than simply writing what is, and letting the aboutness exist as its own, separate glimmer. Here’s part of what I said in that post:
If you find yourself struggling to continue the fairy tale (or even to come up with a first paragraph), you can try this advice from Paul Matthews, who recommends:
… [taking] the familiar theme of being lost in a dark place, a forest, and groping your way toward the light—the door of a house, perhaps, or a gate (some threshold inwardly seen). Go through it, and describe what you discover.
Writing in a true fairy tale motif is, Paul Matthews goes on to say, is very difficult for modern people. He explains:
Apart from the fact that castles and princesses no longer belong to our immediate experience, our modern consciousness is one which separates meaning from image. Since Freud, Jung, and others did their pioneering work, we know all the psychological interpretation of such “symbols.” The traditional tales, however, emerged out of a consciousness that thought in pictures. Certainly those pictures are filled with wisdoms, but those wisdoms cannot be extracted from the image without reducing its meaning. The image is not the meaning in disguise—it is its revelation. So often, modern attempts at fairy or fantasy story makes us feel that we are being preached at from beneath the surface.
What I did not say in that post is that Goethe, too, described something very beautiful about image for its own sake, from the perspective of the poet—and although Goethe uses the word poet, I would argue that most of us as prose writers could benefit profoundly from a more devoted attention to image in the way Goethe describes:
There is a great difference between a poet seeking the particular for the universal, and seeing the universal in the particular. The one gives rise to allegory, where the particular serves only as instance or example of the general; but the other is the true nature of poetry, namely, the expression of the particular without any thought of, or reference to, the general. If a man grasps the particular vividly, he also grasps the general, without being aware of it at the time; or he may make the discovery long afterwards.
The thing about Goethe is that he was as much a scientist as an artist. In fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was apparently influenced—and quite profoundly—by Goethe’s approach to art and science, called Goethe the “surpassing intellect of modern times” and said:
Such was his capacity, that the magazines of the world’s ancient or modern wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command—he wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used it as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical, painter, composer—all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed to look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men breathe. Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at home in it as he. He was not afraid to live.
More objectively, from Wikipedia, we have this about Goethe:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[a] (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic.[3] His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color. He is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language, his work having a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day.
I like to imagine, and it makes sense to me, that Goethe’s scientific training helped him to see things more clearly, more precisely, and more objectively, without leaping to assign “meaning” in the way we modern writers often do. What I want, what I yearn for in the best writing of our time, though, is for the images to contain their own meaning, meaning that is inherent to the thing that stands behind the image, and not imposed upon it by the writer (which, as Goethe describes, is often then a reverse-engineered image, selected to fit a certain meaning or aim, versus discovered and rendered accurately just because of what it naturally already is).
You may remember me writing about this before, because I have. In fact, I have even transcribed an interview between Krista Tippet and the brilliant poet Marie Howe, in which Howe discusses her method of teaching poetry to students, requiring them to describe only what is (no metaphor, no explanation) and how hard it is for them. “It hurts us,” Howe told Tippett.
Such a great selling point for this week’s prompt. Of course, I jest … but not. I believe whole heartedly this is one of the most important things we can learn as writers: to see and conjure the thing itself. Without that, we are forever cleaved from truth.
So if you missed the post with the interview with Marie Howe or want to revisit it before jumping into this week’s prompt, here it is. Otherwise, we’ll be jumping into the prompt, which will guide you through some simple exercises for seeing what is, and writing what is, so that what lies beneath and beyond can, when we are diligent and lucky, emerge.
Writing Prompt: Holding Wonder Like a Cup
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