Art and the Paradise of Not Knowing

Writing essays has enabled me to explore any corner of the world that intrigues me. In my imaginary sailing ship, I can cross oceans and set out on expeditions to exotic foreign ports as well as equally unfamiliar interior streams of my own consciousness. In theory, there are no limits to the questions I can ask, but something about these travels is making me seasick, something is making me want to stay home and stay safe. We live in an uncertain world.

Hampered by some timidity, some unwillingness to let go of the guardrails, I sense that I’m getting boxed in by words, ganged up on by sentences that insist on saying what they think they should be saying. I can feel them closing in on me, making demands. Back off, I’m telling  them. I want to be playful. I want to dance around not knowing what anything means, where anything is going. Listen, you phonemes and hieroglyphs, this is harassment. You are breathing down my neck. I want rust and feathers and porcelain and velvet. I want heavy cream in tiny pitchers for my coffee even though I drink my coffee black. I want to make mud pies and sandcastles and get lost in the paradise of not knowing.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

This is not so easy to do. Just saying it out loud makes me tearful because I believe in my blood that not knowing is the essential scripture and it saddens me and sometimes enrages me that my chosen art form, the essay, seems to keep me earthbound in the realm of argument and counter-argument. Maybe I should play with silly putty. I am in the midst of a hostile encounter with prose. I see the painters, the photographers and printmakers wandering  up hillsides on overgrown paths and falling out of trees while I cobble phrases together. This distress has found me just now for two reasons that I’m aware of and probably others that I haven’t yet met. The first is the inadequacy of prose to meet the grueling atrocity of these times we are living in. It’s never right. It’s never enough to silence the constant barking and braying of the world. This is another kind of not knowing. Not knowing how we’ll survive this horror show and, of  course, for all my pretense of living in the questions, when it comes down to it I ache for answers. 

The second reason for my struggle with prose is my growing familiarity and enchantment with people who make visual art. On this Substack, I have interviewed a number of gifted people who paint, create photographic images and make collages. All of them described a generative process that begins without a plan. All of them have the courage, indeed the desire, to jump off the high diving board and hope there’s water in the pool. They all describe something pre-conscious that unfolds on the threshold of giving birth to art. They use the word gift and the word surprise to set the stage for a dance that unfolds between them and their materials, between them and the Mystery. 

 Last week, after interviewing Peggy Reeves, whose work is an exploration of alternative photographic processes, I went back to look at previous interviews. Peggy had described her practice as “a plunge into the unknown.” I wondered if other artists experienced their creating in that open-ended, non-directive way. Rosemary Starace, who works in drawing, painting, constructions, and collage spoke of “Working with scraps and leftovers [as] a way to interact with chance and open myself to gifts that don’t come from my thinking mind. It’s a practice of surrendering to something greater than myself, a need that has come marching forward during this time of grief and change.” Rosemary’s remarks set me to thinking about the global healing potential of art that arises from outside the conscious mind. I found myself considering the possibility that words could not meet the current diffuse global anguish because we are experiencing a violent affront to our humanity at such a deep level that we need to respond from the same primitive place.

All of the artists spoke of images emerging from beyond the self, without intentionality, of allowing what’s there to come forward of its own volition. Often there’s an element of the unexpected. The painter Amber Chand suggested that it’s always a surprise. “I never know what I will paint when I am faced with a blank canvas and I never know what will show up at the end. There is always surprise at the finished piece, a certain delight as I find myself saying, “so it was you who were seeking to emerge?”

 Peggy Braun, who was at one time a potter, described how she made “a hand-built vase and caressed that silky clay into a set of wings off the side of the piece. It was a revelation, the first recognition that there was something internal that I knew nothing about that wanted to be expressed.”…   “It becomes all about learning to allow what’s really there. Allowing is a major feat of non-doing, non-making.” 

We shall see if I can allow the words to bubble up from a place of humility and not-knowing, from the realm of uncertainty where they lie in a sweltering heap in fear and wonder at the life all around them. I am all curiosity.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.