“Sincerely,” The poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry about the creative endeavor, “The world and the self begin to merge. In that state comes an increase: of what may be known, what may be heard, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, an art of mastery, and its difficulty lies in the constant reconciliation between the self and the world – a difficulty peculiar to certain conditions of our time. Two hundred years before communication, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the suffering necessary to avoid social interference in creative work; A century and a half later, Agnes Martin instructed emerging artists to show understanding in the distractions that allow, or destroy, the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy where inspiration comes from.
But since self-criticism is the most merciless form of criticism and self-pity the most severe form of compassion, self-impairment is the most dangerous form of disorder, and the most difficult to protect creative work from.
The way to hedge that danger is the beloved poet Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) examines a beautiful piece entitled “The Mighty and the Time,” which is entirely based on witchcraft. Above: Selected Articles (public library).
Oliver writes:
It's a silver morning like any other. I'm at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my intellect. I reluctantly get up, answer the phone or open the door. And the thought I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs to be solitary. It requires concentration, without distractions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no watching eye to reach the certainty it desires, but it should not have it at once. Privacy then. A place apart — hurrying, chewing pencils, writing and erasing and writing again.
But often, if not more often, the disturbance comes not from the other but from the self, or some other self within the self, whistling and banging on the door panels and throwing itself, stumbling, into the pool of meditation. And what is it? That you should call the dentist, that you're out of mustard, and that your uncle Stanley's birthday is two weeks from now. He reacts, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the ideas have fled back into the fog.
Oliver calls this the “proximal distraction” and warns that it is more dangerous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:
The world pours out, in the powerful way of an open and compact space, its many greetings, as the world should. What argument can there be with that? But how a person can disrupt himself – and do it – is a dark and very curious story.
Echoing Borges's confusion about our separate selves, Oliver sets out to excavate the building blocks of the self to understand its mutual capacities for focused creative flow and ruthless disruption. He identifies three main qualities that he lives in, and that live in him, as they do in all of us: the childhood personality, which we spend our lives trying to fit into the continuation of our personality (“I was a child” you write “You are with me in this present time, you will be with me in the grave.); the social personality, “bound in a thousand ideas of obligation”; and the third person, a form of awareness of the other.
The first two qualities, he says, live in the common world and exist in all people; the third has a different plan and lives easily for artists – this is where the source of creative energy resides. You write:
There is certainly something within each of us that is not a child or an hourly worker. He is third person, occasionally to some of us, cruel to others. This self comes out of love with ordinary people; it has fallen out of love over time. It is eternally hungry.
Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of two ordinary people with that of a creative individual:
Say you bought a plane ticket and intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask a pilot when you board and sit next to a small window, which you cannot open but through which you can see the disappointing heights to which you have been lifted from a safe and friendly world?
He definitely wants the pilot to be his normal and familiar self. He wants her to approach and do her job without any calm excitement. You don't want anything fancy, nothing new. He asks her to do, normally, what she knows how to do – fly a plane. He hopes he won't be daydreaming. He hopes he doesn't drift into some interesting thought. You want this flight to be normal, not abnormal. So, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let them all work, as they are wont to do, familiar with confidence and whatever the work requires, and there will be no more. Their commonality is the guarantee of the world. Their familiarity makes the world go round.
[…]
In the creative work – the creative work of all kinds – those who are active artists in the world are not trying to help the world to move, but to move forward. Which is completely different from the norm. Such work does not contradict the norm. It is, quite simply, something else. Its work requires a different perspective – a different set of priorities.
Part of this otherness, Oliver says, is the unusual integration of the creative person — the artist's work cannot be separated from the artist's whole life, and its wholeness cannot be divided into mechanical pieces of specific actions and practices. (Elsewhere, Oliver has written well about how habits shape but should not control our inner lives).
Echoing Keats' notion of “bad skill,” Dani Shapiro's insistence that the artist's job is to “embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and sharpened by it,” and Georgia O'Keeffe's advice that as an artist you must “keep the unknown always outside yourself,” Oliver considers the creative life's central commitment — that of making unknown art:
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always – these are the forces that fall within them, the forces that must go beyond the space of the hour and the restriction of habit. And real work cannot be neatly separated from the rest of life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little a man of creative inclination can do but prepare himself, body and soul, for the struggle to come – for all his visits are unknown. In fact, the work itself is an adventure. And no artist can do this work, or would want to, with extraordinary energy and concentration. Strange is what art is all about.
With a sentiment reminiscent of Van Gogh's spirited book about risk-taking and how inspired mistakes drive us forward, Oliver returns to the question of what circumstances lead a person to be:
No one has yet made a list of places where the unusual can and cannot happen. However, there are indications. Among the crowds, in the drawing-rooms, among the places of rest and comfort and pleasure, it is seldom seen. Loves the outdoors. It likes a focused mind. It likes to be alone. The ticket taker is more likely to stick than the ticket taker. It is not that it will undermine comfort, or the established practices of the world, but that your concern is directed elsewhere. Its concern is the edge, and to form without being formless beyond the limit.
Above all, Oliver sees in the “fortune field” of a long, meaningful, and fruitful life, the work of the artist is one of strong devotion to art:
In this case there is no doubt – creative work requires absolute fidelity like the fidelity of water to gravity. The person who walks in the wilderness of creation who does not know this – who does not swallow this – is lost. He who does not desire that place without a roof forever should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and beautiful, but he is not a musician. Such a person should live better with desires at the right time and complete the work designed to shine in the moment. Such a person should go and fly a plane.
He returns to the problem of concentration, which for the artist is a form, perhaps the last method, of sanctification:
An active, focused artist is an adult who refuses to be distracted from himself, who is always focused and enthusiastic about work – who is committed to this work… Therefore, serious distractions at work are never useless, pleasant, even loving distractions from others.
[…]
It's six o'clock in the morning, and I'm working. I am reckless, careless, neglectful of social obligations, etc. It is as it should be. A wheel breaks, a tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. A poem is being written. I'm in a fight with an angel and I'm anointed with light and I'm not ashamed. I have no guilt either. My burden is not regular, or timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to a lost button, or beans in a pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and however. If I have a meeting with you at three o'clock, be happy if I am late. Be even happier if I don't come at all.
There is no other way that a work of art can be done. And occasional success, for the enthusiast, is worth it all. The most regretful people in the world are those who feel the call to creative work, who feel their creative energy resting and rebelling, and who do not give it the energy or time.
Up the river it is the most important reading in its entirety, focused and uplifting at the same time. Fill it with Oliver on love and its necessary craziness, what it means to really pay attention, and the measure of a life well lived, and revisit Jane Hirshfield on the difficult art of focus.
