Bibliopath #20: In which we attempt an act of transmutation
This one is dedicated to M.
Dear reader,
“First you shape the vision of what the projected work of art will be. The vision, I stress, is no marvelous thing: it is the work’s intellectual structure and aesthetic surface. It is a chip of mind, a pleasing intellectual object. It is a vision of the work, not of the world. It is a glowing thing, a blurred thing of beauty. Its structure is at once luminous and transcendent; you can see the world through it.”
Once again, Annie Dillard. Again, it is from The Writing Life, which I recently finished, and can’t wait to start again. Here she describes where any artist’s journey begins: with a Big Idea, a vision.
One common feature of my favourite sentences is that they mirror their meaning in their grammar, while also aiming for something beyond both. Notice the careful parallel two clause structure of almost all the sentences leading up to the last. But this last sentence elevates further: the second clause expands beyond description into a verb, beyond a description of the objection into the action of what that vision should do: surprisingly, naturally, a vision should be something one can see the world through.
Great art doesn’t just entertain, but leaves us seeing the world anew. Which leads us into the ethical realm of art, for art can leave us seeing the world anew in less than positive ways: what about art that leads us to be more suspicious of people of colour, or to implicitly believe that the white male hero is the only one capable of earning victory?
Hence those two adjectives—“at once luminous and transcendent”. “Luminous” is both a description of it in the artist’s mind, but also as a beacon of meaning. “Transcendent” as a way of escaping narrow contexts toward empathy and understanding. ‘Does it illumine?’ and ’Does it transcend?’ are both reasonable questions when you are interrograting art.
Later, she will describe how the alchemy of transmuting vision into reality is a thankless process, by which the vision is ruined into something earthly: “You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.” This is both slightly depressing, and yet familiar to anyone who has undertaken that kind of transmutation.
But, as I read it, I wondered if this sentence also describes love. Compared to passion—through which you see the whole world as a single person—love elevates and illumines, and gives you the telescope to see yourself and the world differently. ‘Does it illumine?’ and ‘Does it transcend?’ are both reasonable questions when you are interrogating love.
And I am beyond grateful that I can answer yes.
Towards empathy,
Guan