The Art of Darkness: A Craft Essay by Louie Land
My creative momentum—whether writing fiction, essay, or poetry, or even working with musical practice or composition—evaporates when I figure out the draft too early. When I defer to my inclination towards tidiness, my curiosity fails me, and I disengage. A rigorously plotted outline of a novel is a novel diminished, with nothing for me to discover. It is as if the clay of the work, exposed too early to air, loses its malleability and becomes rigid.
Even when I power through to the end of a draft, the draft fails when it is too easily understood—the author who requires no reader; the schema of the poem a maze drawn as a straight line, like a technical manual or recipe for chocolate fudge. In my estimation, a work fails when the work is only what it is.
“I seek both immanence and transcendence, as if the unknowable is known while remaining unknown, like a body and its shadow, delineated by the absence of light.”
Similarly, a work fails when it is only what is beyond it. This is dogma or propaganda, or the teaching of AP Literature at its worst, wherein the work serves as a membrane of varying transparency/opacity one must pass through to receive what my students call The Hidden Meaning. Here, too, the author/text requires no reader; the experience of traversing the poem’s schema is secondary to the chest of treasures waiting at the hedge maze’s center.
The goal, for me, is to generate work that deals in multiplicity. A work must seem larger than itself while also being fully rich and realized on the page.
As an Asexual author, I think often of presence and absence, as in the presence of the body (which is, necessarily, central to so much Queer literature) and the absence of attraction to and from and between the body(ies), Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation notwithstanding.
Or, in theological terms, I seek both immanence and transcendence, as if the unknowable is known while remaining unknown, like a body and its shadow, delineated by the absence of light. Both are fully necessary, and creative work fails when it too readily disregards one for another—the immanent (when my students ask with raised eyebrows, “Did the author really mean any of that?”) or the transcendent (when those same students want only to know what will be on the test), rather than both/and.
Tacked on the corkboard beside my desk is a passage from Yasunari Kawabata’s Nobel Prize lecture from 1968, given almost precisely fifty-five years from the time of this writing. (If only I’d delayed beginning this draft a few days longer!) In the speech, titled “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself,” Kawabata writes:
The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.
So too do I think often of a short essay by Yusef Komunyakaa on writing titled “Improvisation/Revision.” I’m drawn to this essay as both a fan and performer of jazz music. Komunyakaa writes:
After I have written everything down, sometimes hundreds of lines that meditate on the poem's central subject, I begin circling words and phrases that seem to undermine the poem's emotional symmetry; I am eager to find the elastic pattern and tonal shape within the words. The surprises. A composite of surprises. Perhaps the true gods work in severe darkness. They don't care about constant gazing into the mirror for clues…Working back up through the poem, listing all the possible closures, I search for a little door I can leave ajar.
In fiction, too, one is reminded of Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
In all cases, the gestures towards asymmetry are essential. Tidiness diminishes the work. Only through the tension and imbalance of what is seen (the immanent) can what is not there (the transcendent) be known. This is only true of varying degrees through the metaphors (the subaquatic mass of the iceberg is fully present, merely invisible) but metaphors are only useful in their limited vision. If a body is immanent and a shadow, the absence of light, is transcendence, from whence comes the light?
I find asymmetry present even in Pacioli’s Divine Proportion, otherwise known as Euclid’s Golden Ratio:
This is not to suggest that the best creative work is without control. Consider again Kawabata: “The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening.” Hemingway, too, would posit that the writer fully knows their work, including the mass of the iceberg beneath the surface, even though it is absent from the page.
In my creative process, the challenge of any work, necessarily, is to discern and divine the sensibilities and impressions which will yield Komunyakaa’s “composite of surprises.” Perhaps paradoxically, the goal is the freedom granted by control, a spontaneous improvisation born of rigorous rehearsal.
It would be presumptuous to assume that every work arrives there, but it is my hope to try, to seek the place where the absent waves of the great ocean break upon the cliffs, and the gods work in severe darkness.
References:
Yasunari Kawabata, “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself.” Nobel Lecture. December 12, 1968. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1968/kawabata/lecture/
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Improvisation/Revision.” Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries. Radiclani Clytus, Ed. University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon. Scribner, 1932.
“Golden Ratio Line.” By Traced by Stannered - Image:Golden ratio line.png, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1830029
