The writer in a time of change - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kate Grenville
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies...'
– Emily Dickinson
WRITERS HAVE WAYS of going into the darkest places and taking their readers with them, yet coming safely out again. It's scary in there. It might overwhelm us. But without the process of mourning – plunging into the dark places and walking through them till we reach somewhere else – we're doomed to the paralysis of melancholia. Specifically, in the shadow of the change bearing down on us, we're going to have to confront what we're about to lose, and why, and not turn away hopelessly from the job of saving it. Writers know that words, like Orpheus' lute, can give us a way to walk through the dark places with our eyes open. They put words to the otherwise ungraspable, so we can comprehend it; imagine the otherwise unimaginable, and put words to it.
They can also try to rescue the language from eco-vandals. How can a shopping bag made of thick strands of woven plastic really be ‘green', even if it is green? What are ‘eco' baked beans? What about the corruption of thinking embedded in an ad for air-conditioning that I saw recently: ‘creating climate change in your own home'?
Above all, we're experts at a particular kind of problem-solving. Let me give an example: you've lost your car keys. You know, rationally, that they must be in the house somewhere, because the car's sitting in the driveway. You look in every place you think they could possibly be. You work yourself into a lather. You get angry at yourself, at the keys, at the shelf where they ought to be. Finally you give up, and go and do the dishes. Just as you're balancing the big white plate against the blue mug and reminding yourself that you'd better buy more detergent, it comes to you in one piercingly clear moment: your keys are on top of the fridge.
This isn't usually called problem-solving; it's called inspiration, or intuition, or daydreaming – ironic, patronising labels. We don't get diplomas in daydreaming. And yet this kind of problem-solving is where the answers to the toughest problems come from.
Inspiration feels as if it comes from outside, a kind of magic. You didn't know where your keys were, but it did. It, in my understanding, is a sophisticated resonance-effect in the prefrontal cortex that can keep a lot of different inputs all bouncing around simultaneously. But this can't happen if you try too hard. The endless chatter of the conscious brain has to be quietened enough for the small voice of it to make itself heard.
Artists use this kind of problem-solving every day. We've learned to trust that not knowing the answer is often better than knowing it. We know how to live for long periods without knowing exactly where we're going. What writer does just one draft of a work? Uncertainty doesn't make us rush to a quick fix. We've learned to accommodate it and trust a kind of potent receptivity or passivity – what you might call negative capability.
Because art can't be hurried or forced, artists understand the deep truth of that ironic Polish proverb ‘Sleep fast – we need the pillows.' So, as writers in a time of change, we have a lot to offer. But, just as there's resistance to the message that coal is too cheap, there's also resistance to the contribution that artists and art can make. Two hundred years ago, Shelley could claim that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' and not be laughed out of the room. Somewhere along the line, our axe turned into a little plastic tomahawk.
On the grounds of irrelevancy and elitism, hundreds of years of literary heritage is being allowed to fade: it's ‘not relevant'; it's ‘too hard'. Even when it is taught, its blade is blunted by the works being presented only in their immediately understandable dimensions: ‘the journey'; ‘the individual and society'. The boundaries are being patrolled by genre police, demanding to see the passports of pieces of writing: Is it fiction or non-fiction? Is it history or all made up? The work, and whatever ideas it might be suggesting, disappears behind a pointless barrage of labelling. Resistance to art – that labelling – is the impulse to control, to reduce art to the comfortable and the bland.
Where art sits – between boundaries, where the real and the imagined collaborate – is where new things happen. The scary place that evades control is the very place where change is going to come from, if it's going to come from anywhere. Sidelining difficult art means that the generations of people who are going to be dealing with our terribly difficult future have never been exposed to the products of centuries of creative problem-solving and wisdom. The people who are going to be catapulted into the most difficult time humans have faced since the last ice age won't have experienced the humbling and exhilarating knowledge that a work of art might be more complex than they can readily understand. Their brains are going to be denied all the new pathways that would be created by engaging with complex art.
MY MOTHER WENT to school in the 1920s, to a very ordinary country high school. She learned Shakespeare's plays and huge amounts of poetry by heart. At any moment of importance in her later life, she had in her memory a piece of literature that spoke to that moment.
By the time I was in high school, in the 1960s, the values of our culture had changed. No one learned anything by heart any more. As I listened to Mum quote entire poems, I marvelled at this inner resource that she had access to. It was clear that, in remembering the words someone else had written, often hundreds of years before, she was joining her little moment to the bigger moments of the human race. She was being reminded that whatever was happening to her, whatever she was feeling, she was not alone. Others had been there before and felt the same things. They had found ways to give words to their experience, articulating their version of what she was feeling. Having access to their words enriched her emotional life, allowing her to understand her own experience and learn something new.
This was her favourite poem: ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', by Keats. Not surprisingly, it's about the way art takes us into new places – into a moment of change.
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific – and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
IF WRITERS AND writing are to play a part in our time of change – if we're going to be ‘stakeholders' in it – then our first task is to assert that we have something to contribute. Let's recognise the power of art to bring about change at the molecular level. Let's assert the value of art, in an age where the quantifiable and the immediately understandable have come to rule.
As writers, let's pick up our axe and hone it to a fine old edge. Let's hoist it up onto our shoulders and swing it with a mighty arm. Let us write with passion; let us write deeply into the mysterious folds of the human interior. Let us write as if it matters, because it does. ♦