The World of the Creative Artist

It seems a little strange for someone to be talking about the ‘world of the creative artist’ who is deaf to music and sings like a crow, whose liking in painting is for simple religious pictures or attractive nudes, and who reads Science Fiction for pleasure. But of course there is poetry as well. I sometimes write poems; and perhaps there’s some kind of underground communication between painters and poets and composers and sculptors and novelists, each chipping away like a deaf miner in the dripping dark at his own coalface of human knowledge; perhaps the coal is the same for each, though each one uses different muscles and different tools. So I can ignore the history of art and literature, about which I don’t know much, and talk instead about the world I inhabit, one man’s world that I make poems in, and grieve and act and love in, and see out the bathroom window when I am shaving. I know only a little about the world; and most of it is somewhere in the poems I have written – but of one thing I am quite certain, that it never is or can be a private possession. We all come into it hot and kicking and go out of it when we are too cold to kick any longer. We will get all the privacy we want in the cemetery. At bottom an artist’s job is no different from that of any other man: to maintain a relation to a living centre, so that he can keep his heart and mind alive as far as the grave and it may be beyond the grave. When Ipage 252 say ‘beyond the grave’ I do not mean the bogus immortality of being read and remembered by one’s grandchildren; I mean simply that I hope a little for Heaven. But while the living centre and the need to maintain a relation to it are common to all, an artist has a special way of performing the common labour, and the fruits of his labour are of a special kind.

In our own time people have tended to rely greatly upon, even at times to worship, the discipline and method of science and the authority of the human intellect. The dependence is natural enough, but it can be blind and dangerous. The obvious value of scientific knowledge as an aid to understanding the processes of natural law, and as a tool to control our physical environment; the aura of greatness which surrounds the atomic physicist who can demolish matter, the surgeon who can stave off death, the jet pilot riding his thunderbird – these influences lead the mind away from the dark, secret chamber of individual being, the internal weakness and confusion from which these apparently godlike powers have emerged. The physicist, lying awake at midnight, asks an unscientific question – Who am I? What is the World? Why does my life wear at this moment a negative and terrible face? The jet pilot, standing at the canteen door, sees his girl dancing with another man – his heart turns over in his breast; he goes and gets bitterly drunk. The surgeon comes back after twenty years to the farm he grew up on, and is confronted by a younger and judging self in every paddock and turn of the road. These are the inward occasions of poetry. It must enter the chamber of individual being and give a voice to the prisoner who waits there; some have claimed that it can give him the prison keys, but that is wishful thinking. I believed it once myself. I looked on the processes of art as a kind of magic which could change the laws under which we live; just as many people secretly look on science as a similar kind of magic. But there is no magic, only the look of recognition between living creatures in their weakness and suffering, and the voice of intercession which speaks for all people through the mouth of one man:

My soul stands at the window of my room,
And I ten thousand miles away;
My days are filled with Ocean’s sound of doom,
Salt and cloud and the bitter spray.
Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

My selfish youth, my books with gilded edge,
Knowledge and all gaze down the street;
The potted plants upon the window ledge
Gaze down with selfish lives and sweet.
Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

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My night is now her day, my day her night,
So I lie down, and so I rise;
The sun burns close, the star is losing height,
The clock is hunted down the skies.
Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

Truly a pin can make the memory bleed,
A world explode the inward mind
And turn the skulls and flowers, never freed
Into the air, no longer blind.
Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart
Clumps in the breast with heavy stride;
The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart,
The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide.
Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

Karl Shapiro, an American poet, wrote that as a soldier in the recent war. In some ways it is a very private poem; but when Shapiro speaks truly for himself, the blood flows onto the ground, and it is the same colour as mine or yours. He does not speak with the authority of the human intellect, but with the authority of suffering. This private elegy and love poem finds a voice for the deaths which each man has to die, not just a soldiering death: so at its deepest level it ceases to be private and becomes an act of intercession for mankind.

There have been a good many times when I have felt that my own poetry was valueless, because a great deal of it embodied private sexual fantasy or alcoholic depression. But the particular kind of private material my life was giving me to use didn’t really matter much. If I was standing on the rock of real knowledge when I wrote, then the poems would be significant for other people; and in some cases I had been standing on the rock.

Through education and example we have become used to devaluing any kind of knowledge which cannot be tested at least by intellectual processes, preferably by experimental method. I suggest that in so doing we are trying to make a philosopher’s stone out of what is at best an admirable tool. The difference between artistic knowledge and scientific knowledge (both of which I value) is fairly plain if we consider the different approach of a poet and a scientist to the natural world.

The scientist is concerned to construct hypotheses of cause and effect for the elucidation of natural law. The fossil bones of a whale are to him evidence of a significant pattern in time and place, especially in time. His wonder at the hugeness of the creature, his joy at the discovery, are subordinatedpage 254 to intellectual enquiry, which will yield what it is looking for, a significant intellectual hypothesis. The poet’s reaction is likely to be different – Can’st thou catch Leviathan with a hook? or make him a plaything for thy hand-maidens? Who and what is Leviathan? A holy mystery of natural pride and energy; a symbol of the unconscious forces, creative and destructive, in the mind; Ikthus, Christ the Fish swimming in the baptismal font of the Pacific Ocean; Moby Dick, the Great White Whale of Melville’s allegory, the submerged evil which must be encountered, known and overcome – when Captain Ahab goes out to meet him it is the last autumn of the world and the mowers have been mowing on the slopes of the Andes; Leviathan vor, the big whale, about whom my grandmother used to read in her Gaelic Bible. Through nature a poet elucidates not natural law but our nature and destiny. Is poetry therefore more subjective than science? As a reader of Science Fiction, perhaps I am no good judge; but it seems to me otherwise. Through science the human intellect, confronted by the natural world, draws its own conclusions, hypotheses checked by experiment. Through art the whole human nature, intellect, feeling, sensation and intuition, rises to meet a new occasion: a work of art is a record of that strange meeting. You can understand then why there is antagonism between poetry and science, not between poet and scientist looking for significance in different ways, but between the language and vision of poetry and the prevailing climate of tired rationalism which has emptied the world of human significance. George Barker, an English poet, has stated the case for poetry very clearly:

There is a spirit of turbulence
Inhabiting the intelligence
Determined always to impose
Another reason on the rose

Another cause upon the creature
Than the privilege of its nature;
A handcuff and a history
Upon all natural mystery

And this turbulent spirit starts
That insurrection in our hearts
By which the laws of poetry
Are broken into anarchy . . .

But over the known world of things
The great poem folds its wings
And from a bloody breast will give
Even to those who disbelieve.

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By the known world the intellect
Stands with its bright gun erect,
But the long loving verities
Are kissing at the lattices . . .

We see them out of the corner of our eye, the lovers walking by the swans and the ruffled water in the park, the child playing Indians in the long grass beyond the railway yards. For them our casual nightmare of blind matter and impotent affection does not exist; they are temporarily free to do as they choose, and what they choose is right. That is the climate of Heaven. Wordsworth wrote that Heaven lies about us in our infancy; one could say with equal truth that Heaven and Hell lie about the adult person. Hell is the place of iron causality where we are always what we have been, the city of iron-grey stone which Dante entered in imagination, and which a part of our nature belongs to. There intellect can concern itself only with phantasmagoria and pain. But poetry is concerned with a living centre, and a different kind of suffering, that which rises from incomplete relationship, whether with the natural world, with God, or with one’s fellow creatures.

The popular conception of an artist at work is that of a man full of confidence, exercising his skill in self-chosen isolation. My own experience has been very different. I have little pleasure in making poetry; though some in looking at it after it is made. I am never more keenly aware of my own stupidity and clumsiness, the inadequacy of my faculties to cope with a real occasion. It is like a man wearing three pairs of gloves and trying to pick up a key from the ground; or like a man almost blind trying to distinguish the colour of a flower he has never seen before. Consider also the horror of artistic impotence, those periods of dearth and dryness when all effort is useless, the mind and heart sluggish, and when one can only fill a sheet of paper with junk, junk, junk! I do not know any frustration to compare with it.

The bright gun of the intellect can be used to shoot down any chimera. That is all for the best: we cannot afford illusions, they eat us out of body and soul. But modern man has turned the gun on himself by asserting that an idea without a concrete referent is meaningless. I am not competent to discuss the philosophy of Hume or the discipline of logical positivism. But when I see the waves breaking on the rocks, I know that I stand on the edge of another sea whose reality will, if I let it, enter and suffuse my mind and heal me of the blindness and dumbness which is my ordinary condition:

And it is good to walk upon the sand
In winter when the dunes are hard and dry
With frost that binds an iron earth and sky.
Bone of my bone, the stubborn rocks withstand

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The ebb and surge of grief. The ocean I
Once feared, I love more than the frozen land . . .
(‘Letter to Noel Ginn II’, CP 70)

There is intellectual method in the construction of a poem; but it is the servant of reality enjoyed or endured. I know that I could never write a line of more than trivial, competent verse if I did not search for, and even pray for a heightened knowledge of my own nature and the nature of the world I live in. Such knowledge is never of a comfortable kind. It is usually the factors in human living most neglected by the age which art brings to the surface. For example, in Roy Fuller’s poem, ‘Harbour Ferry’, written like Shapiro’s in time of war, matters of patriotism are quite irrelevant, and even matters of politics, though Fuller has a Marxist view of history. He expresses the private grief of the married conscript, but goes far beyond it:

The oldest and simplest thoughts
Rise with the antique moon: How she enamels men
And artillery under her sphere,
Eyelids and hair and throats
Rigid in love and war;
How this has happened before.

And how the lonely man
Raises his head and shudders
With a brilliant sense of the madness,
The age and shape of his planet,
Wherever his human hand
Whatever his set of tenets,
The long and crucial minute.

Tonight the moon has risen
Over a quiet harbour,
Through twisted iron and labour,
Lighting the half-drowned ships.
Oh surely the fatal chasm
Is closer, the furious steps
Swifter? The silver drips

From the angle of the wake:
The moon is flooding the faces.
The moment is over: the forces
Controlling lion nature
page 257 Look out of the eyes and speak:
Can you believe in a future
Left only to rock and creature?

A question entirely relevant in the age of the Atomic Bomb. One could stress the technical excellence of Fuller’s poem; but I would rather point to what he is saying:

. . . a brilliant sense of the madness,
The age and shape of his planet . . .

Fuller confronts simultaneously the mystery of isolated human identity and the mystery of the natural world. He sees the demonic forces in human nature infecting man’s relation to the natural world with a terrible sterility. The moon, a customary symbol of fertility, brings rigor mortis to the war- broken ships and the men on the battlefield. Like the archaic Gorgon on the wall of a Greek temple, with ‘furious steps’ she scatters death and poison, a devouring force of blind causality; and love as well as war comes within her orbit. The ‘fatal chasm’ of which he speaks is more than a state of purely personal weakness or expected death. It is the loss of relation to a living centre, endangering (in Fuller’s view) the human race:

. . . the forces
Controlling lion nature
Look out of the eyes and speak . . .

He personifies the ancient strength of nature as a lion. To the intellect the natural world is neutral and objective; but at the moment of full relation it is either lovely or terrible, and in Fuller’s symbol both aspects are contained. The final question comes with an undertone of accusation:

Can you believe in a future
Left only to rock and creature?

Fuller is a humanist who questions the power of human will and reason to create a fertile order. He sees the same destructive forces at work in the microcosm of personality and the macrocosm of collective civilisation.

Where does this lead us to? To a conception of art as a process which continually lays bare realities of our human situation with which the systematised thought of our society is unable to cope; lays bare not only the destructive but also the healing powers.

I remember a chap I knew in my late teens, a drinking cobber of mine. He had been a science student for several years, working through a rationalpage 258 discipline and seeing the world very much in terms of it. Then he erupted suddenly. He began reading Rimbaud and wearing a polo-necked sweater. He quarrelled with his parents and failed his term exams. He sprouted antennae where he had never had them before. He developed a peculiar affection for certain features of the local landscape. He wrote several poems obscure, vigorous and erotic. There had been a landslide in his mind. From his parents’ point of view, no doubt from that of the examiners also, it was a minor tragedy, something which would pass like boils in spring. As far as I know it did pass; and that to me is the real tragedy. Organised society can offer little more than a plush coffin to the man who has for a while stood outside it, and seen what Barker has called –

The unveiled vision of all things . . .
The vision that the world brings
To those her most beloved, those
Who when she strikes with her wings
Stand rooted, turned into a rose
By terrestrial imaginings.

That vision cracks open, like a nut, the causal universe.

An artist struggles to give shape to an experience in its entirety. But as we become more and more a community of technocrats we tend to departmentalise our living – No, Madam, you won’t find love in this Department; I suggest you try the Department of Internal Affairs. We are all specialists, or in the process of becoming. I am a specialist, though a poor one, at pushing and coaxing children in a primary-school classroom. This job has its special language which I find extremely depressing to read or listen to. But when I write poetry I am not a specialist. The words I use are mainly from common speech; the material I work with is the raw, unclassified, uncontrollable occasions of my own life which I hold in common with other people. Dylan Thomas once said ‘I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval . . .’. Now I don’t think Thomas looked upon himself as a stray into the human fold from some region of gods and demons; he thought that other people were much the same as himself. But his view of himself and other people was more honest than the highly selective one which our society enjoins upon us. Not long before he died he spoke in these words about the plan of a new poem:

The godhead, the author, the first cause, architect, lamplighter, the beginning word, the anthropomorphic bawler-out and black-baller, the quintessence, scapegoat, martyr, maker – He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called His country, one of His worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself.

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And, when he weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the poem-to-be, he weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the country-men of Heaven crouch all together under the hedges, and, among themselves, in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late turning homes in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedgerow rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow men who were once of the Earth, tell one another, through the long night, Light and His tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hairsbreadth of the mind, of that self-killed place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all that you and I know and do not know. The poem-to-be is made of all these tellings.

And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth. It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies. It is a poem about happiness.

Part of this poem was completed; and it nearly accomplishes what Thomas asked it to do. Thomas’s own comment expresses a good deal better than I can what the world of the creative artist is, or can be when it is integrated. In the long run all art centres upon human beings – not just social beings, but the incarnate mystery who lives in squalor and anxiety, suffers death, and is capable of love. There is no answer in the language of art, or science, to the real problems of adult life – How shall I avoid an inward death? How shall I learn to love my neighbour when he is so much like myself? – but an art form can state the human situation in something like its entirety, when the voice of the flesh and spirit are bound in one. In John Donne’s words –

As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.

To the rational eye, the world is an environment, a sphere of operation. To the eye of the artist, whatever his belief, it looks more like an annexe of Purgatory, which the mediaeval writers described simultaneously as a place of torment and a garden of flowers.

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