Perhaps then these two stages would be better described not as primary and secondary, or as former and latter, but as one and another, or forward and backward, and maybe, also, not even as stages but as regions or modes, the order of whose deployment matters little with regard to how a particular work of art reaches its substantiation.
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Though I would add that the mind of the artist, when it is producing a work, can flicker between these two stages continuously, and almost instantaneously, for extended periods of time, and does not necessarily linger in the former stage (where the subconscious has precedent) except when it is away from a work, or prior to beginning a work, when the artist will often seem to abide in a daydream, or under a cloud of abstraction.
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So that the work of the artist, in this respect, may have more in common with passivity or receptiveness than with, say, activity or striving, which is more clearly the mode that belongs to the artistic process in its secondary stage, when it involves the conscious part of the mind, as opposed to the subconscious.
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I suppose you could say that what I have described is another way of articulating the dynamic that exists between the artist and the muse, although, if that were the case, I might then say that the artist does not obtain to those landscapes of fertility by involving themself in “imaginative reaching” as much as by opening themselves, or making themselves vulnerable, to the slings and the onslaughts of whatever singularity of emotion or duende has fallen in love with them, or that they have fallen in love with.
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Which speaks to a paradox that isn’t limited to the arts, but that in the context of the arts reveals, I think, that the genealogy of each talent involves not only technique, by which any given artwork is externalized, and made sensible to an audience, but also a relationship to landscapes of fertility that are extrinsic to mind (so that they have a life beyond it), and that, if not for a kind of imaginative reaching, on the part of the artist, would remain at a distance from the artist’s creative power.
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To the question of what then happens to the many works of art that an artist might abandon, or never bring to fruition, for any of the reasons one might imagine, I have no answer, except to say that maybe they continue to inhabit the realm of potentiality that do all things we might conceive of but not realize. So that they run alongside us, in the torrent of history, as energies that find their power by remaining unspoken.
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All of which is to say, in terms of any fiction I might write, that the part of me that is most essentially an artist will recognize, first of all, the independent existence of the story, as a metaphysical fabric that has its reality beyond the measure of my articulation of it (so that it isn’t invented as much as revealed), and, secondly, that its manifestations of character and event (like the appearance of the little white terrier that one of the women is walking in the ‘novel’ I just began) arise out of an inevitability that can be sensed (which isn’t to say known), and that, though specified in language, begins and remains in mystery.
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For an artist must, at certain points, cede control of that which they are imagining to the inclinations that they recognize as belonging to the fictive world that exists somehow apart from them, like a blueprint of their psyche, and that they do not invent so much as uncover, in spite of their authorship of it.
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Meaning, I suppose, that I’m almost more interested in watching myself, as a writer of fiction (or as a mind that has, as one of its agencies, a fictive impulse), than in the worlds that I sometimes imagine, and introduce on the page, and follow for a while, as they pursue their own meanderings (so that they might reveal, through their drama, whatever preoccupations are hidden in my subconscious), though of course they must be beautiful too, as works of language, in order to be art, or else they become indulgences — vehicles by which to express a point, or an agenda, rather than objects possessed of their own life and integrity.
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Though I must admit that sometimes there are, in my fiction, events of a curious and impossible nature, even if those events are followed by consequences that would seem predictable, insofar as something can be predictable in the context of the strange and the uncanny.
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That could be the beginning of a novel, if I wanted it to be, though I’m not sure where I’d allow such a novel to go, or how I’d sustain it as a plot, for I’m less interested in plot than in momentum of a more ordinary kind, wherein the inertia of a particular psychology, or a soul, meets the accident of mundane events, and wherein anything that seems contrived cannot be sanctioned by the universe of the story, or allowed by it to happen, though things must still continue to happen, and will be recorded as happening by whatever voice or intelligence presumes to be observing them, and all of which is contrived anyway, insofar as all of it is fiction (the voice as well as the happenings), and fiction is, by definition, contrived.
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On the way back from the store, when they were still a block or two from the building where the friend’s studio was, they crossed paths with a woman who the friend knew, but who the painter herself did not know, and who they stopped beside to talk to for a minute, and who they ended up inviting to join them in the friend’s studio, to drink the alcohol they’d purchased, and to chat, once the woman had finished walking her dog, a small white terrier on a leash who the painter just then had knelt in front of to greet and interact with, and to reciprocate its enthusiasm, so that once the painter and the friend were continuing on toward the building where the friend’s studio was, and the woman with the dog had gone a few steps the other way, and had disappeared into her own apartment, having assured them that she’d join them soon, once the dog was asleep or at rest, the painter needed to ask her friend to remind her what the woman’s name was, so that she’d know it when the woman returned, and they were all three together again, though she had not forgotten the woman’s dog’s name.
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In the studio of a friend who was also a painter, and who she’d stopped to see on her way through the neighborhood, though she hadn’t known for certain that friend would be in, and had tried her buzzer only when she’d passed her building, and had happened to think of her (so that when her friend had answered and had let her in she’d been somewhat surprised, insofar as she hadn’t imagined she might be seeing her until a minute or so before she in fact did), she sat on the floor against a wall and watched as her friend worked on a canvas of her own, though after a while, because they’d started talking, and her friend found it difficult to talk and paint at the same time, as doing so divided her attention, her friend rinsed her brushes and lay them out to dry and stood back from the painting and regarded it with folded arms while continuing to talk, and sometimes to listen, before turning to her and sitting cross-legged on an area of floor where she’d been standing, somewhere in the middle of the room, and remained that way until their conversation had progressed from one subject to another, and they’d decided, more or less together, to get up and, because it was a nice day, go outside and walk to a store where they could buy a bottle of liquor that could be mixed with water or soda, or some kind of juice, so that they wouldn’t have to drink it straight, and bring it back to the friend’s studio, and keep talking.
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A painter who’d been working on a canvas for a long time without seeing in it, as she’d been hoping to, any image she wanted to settle on, and realize, or elucidate and bring to fruition, decided, as it appeared to her not to be progressing, but to always be in a state of change and indecision (so that one could not say that it was indicative of any subject, nor possessed of a particular purpose, other than that which might have been attributed to it, by an observer, due to whatever arrangement of form the brushwork could be said to have established, accidentally, at any given moment), that she would put it away for a while, and not look at it, but return her attention to it only after enough days had elapsed that her memory of it had diminished, and she could seem to herself to be seeing it for the first time, with, as it were, fresh eyes, though between now and then she would not work on anything else, nor start something new, but, during those hours that she usually spent in her studio, brushes in hand, would wander the city, allowing her thoughts to avail themselves of other ideas, and her gaze to find distraction in whatever appealed to it, regardless of whether those things could be described as art, or as instances of ordinary life.
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Which is why most artists don’t maintain too firm a grip on the medium with which they work, or too preconceived a notion of what some given work will become, while it is underway; for, if they do, the element of chance tends to be excluded from their process, every unforeseen movement in the composition is regarded as a mistake, and the vitality that belongs to the horses of their imagination is reined in, stifled, and lost.
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Which, in the case of the drawings I have mentioned, might have manifested as, say, a slip of the pen that the artist did not intend, but that he nevertheless recognized, once it happened, as fortuitous, and that he incorporated into the image that he was helping into existence, through a process of becoming.
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Luck being, of course, an element of the artistic process. Though perhaps it is better described as ‘accident,’ or chance.
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For they have an intentionality, and a continuity of effect that cannot be achieved easily, or through luck alone.
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They are what one might call rudimentary, those drawings, insofar as they seem to have been rendered hastily, are not filled in, and are evocative rather than precise. And yet they remain somehow masterly, as if the artist was in command of his talent when he produced them, and was mindful of what he was doing, stylistically.
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I remember in high school, when I first read the book because it had been assigned, paging through it slowly, as I sat at my desk in a classroom, looking at those drawings, and wondering about the artist who had sketched them.