An Act of Attention

ANN HAMILTON: the event of a thread
Park Avenue Armory
December 5, 2012 - January 6, 2013 

December 13, 2012

Artist Statement

I can remember the feeling of swinging—how hard we would work for those split seconds, flung at furthest extension, just before the inevitable downward and backward pull, when we felt momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain and our torsos raised off the seat. We were sailing, so inside the motion—time stopped—and then suddenly rushed again toward us. We would line up on the playground and try to touch the sky, alone together.

Suspended in the liquidity of words, reading also sets us in motion. We fall between a book’s open covers, into the texture of the paper and the regularity of the line. The rhythm and breath of someone reading out loud takes us to a world far away. As a child, I could spend hours pressed against the warmth of my grandmother’s body listening to her read, the rustling of her hand turning the page, watching the birds and the weather outside, transported by the intimacy of a shared side by side.

the event of a thread is made of many crossings of the near at hand and the far away: it is a body crossing space, is a writer’s hand crossing a sheet of paper, is a voice crossing a room in a paper bag, is a reader crossing with a page and with another reader, is listening crossing with speaking, is an inscription crossing a transmission, is a stylus crossing a groove, is a song crossing species, is the weightlessness of suspension crossing the calling of bell or bellows, is touch being touched in return. It is a flock of birds and a field of swings in motion. It is a particular point in space at an instant of time.

No two voices are alike. No event is ever the same. Each intersection in this project is both made and found.

All making is an act of attention and attention is an act of recognition and recognition is the something happening that is thought itself.

As a bird whose outstretched wings momentarily catch the light and change thought’s course, we attend the presence of the tactile and perhaps most importantly—we attend to each other. If on a swing, we are alone, we are together in a field. This condition of the social is the event of a thread. Our crossings with its motions, sounds, and textures is its weaving; is a social act.

~ Ann Hamilton

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See also: "The Audience as Art Movement," by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, Dec. 6, 2012

The Indispensable Silver Lining

Consolation
by Wisława Szymborska, from Poetry (April 2006)

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.   

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,   
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,   
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

See also: "Wisława Szymborska," by Janusz R. Kowalczyk, Culture.Pl  

Charlie Darwin
by Low Anthem, from Oh My God, Charlie Darwin

Set the sails I feel the winds a'stirring
Toward the bright horizon set the way
Cast your wreckless dreams upon our Mayflower
Haven from the world and her decay

And who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Fighting for a system built to fail
Spooning water from their broken vessels
As far as I can see there is no land

Oh my god, the water's all around us
Oh my god, it's all around

And who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
The lords of war just profit from decay
And trade their children's promise for the jingle
The way we trade our hard earned time for pay

Oh my god, the water's cold and shapeless
Oh my god, it's all around
Oh my god, life is cold and formless
Oh my god, it's all around

The Excitement of Really Concentrating

Excerpt from "Several Short Sentences About Writing," by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Ecotone, Spring 2012:

What lurks behind “flow?”

Above all, the idea of naturalness.

“Natural” is a word that invites suspicion.

It should always present itself in quotation marks,

A sign that its meaning is slippery.

Humans can justify almost anything by calling it natural.

Naturalness is the pervasive myth—the one to root out of your head.

There’s nothing natural about writing except the tendency to assume that it’s natural,

Thanks to a false analogy with talking.

The connection between talking and writing is nearly as complex as the connection between reading and writing.

You probably don’t remember learning to talk as a child.

You probably do remember learning to shape letters and spell words.

Talking is natural.

Writing is not.

Most children can say words before they’re two and speak in sentences before they’re three.

They can sing the alphabet song almost as soon as they can sing.

But they can’t write the alphabet until they can hold an instrument of writing.

It may seem strange to think that the manual dexterity needed to hold a pencil—or use a keyboard—comes later than the lingual and mental dexterity needed to speak.

But it does.

In writing, there’s always an artificiality, a separateness,

The sense of manipulating a tool for producing words at arm’s length,

Out there at the ends of your fingers,

Unlike speaking, which arises invisibly from within, like thought and breath.

In writing, there’s a psychological separateness too,

The sense of watching yourself think and thinking about it as you do,

A self-consciousness that interrupts the movement of your thoughts

If you experience it while talking.

Humans have a language instinct

But not necessarily a writing instinct.

The difference between talking and writing

Is the difference between breathing and singing well.

“Natural,” like flow, is also an effect in the reader’s mind.

It doesn’t describe the act of writing.

It describes the effect of writing.

And like “flow,” “natural” is one of the words behind writer’s block.

So let’s suppose there’s no such thing as writer’s block.

There’s loss of confidence

And forgetting to think

And failing to prepare

And not reading enough

And giving up on patience

And hastening to write

And over-visualizing your audience

And never really trying to understand how sentences work.

Above all, there’s never learning to trust yourself

Or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.

People will continue to believe that writing is natural.

This harms only writers who believe it themselves.

And yet good prose often sounds spoken,

As if the writer—or the reader reading aloud—were saying the sentences.

(This isn’t the same as sounding colloquial.)

But the arc of education—and the arc of emulation—is usually

Away from spokenness and toward the unspeakable,

Toward longer, more convoluted sentences

Using more elaborate syntax and more jargon-like diction.

There’s nothing natural about making sentences that sound spoken,

No matter how natural they sound.

What are their characteristics?

They’re fairly short.

They’re rhythmic, often with the rhythms of actual speech.

The diction is simple—very few multi-syllabic words.

So is the construction—almost no suspended phrases or dependent clauses.

This simplicity makes the rhythm more perceptible.

There’s also an acute awareness of the listener’s attention and understanding,

A sense of contextual alertness and a vivid sense of the unspoken.

These are all qualities worth building into your prose.

They must be created, discovered, revealed, constructed.

They don’t appear “naturally.”

It’s always worth asking yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence

And adjusting it until you can.

When your prose begins to stiffen and your thoughts get stuffy,

It’s sometimes worth reworking the piece you’re writing as if it were

A letter or a long e-mail to a friend,

Someone who knows you well but hasn’t seen you in a while.

What happens?

The prose relaxes, the sentences grow more informal.

You remember to use contractions,

Even the words grow shorter.

Suddenly things are clearer and simpler and more direct, as if they were being spoken.

But something else happens too.

There’s suddenly a wider variety of tone, an emotional latitude,

A sense that the reader will be able to fill in the gaps,

Even the possibility of humor.

Why the difference?

It isn’t the change in genre.

It’s the change in the reader.

You’re writing to someone who knows you, who understands your allusions,

Your patterns of speech, who’s quick and empathetic

In reading your thoughts and feelings, whether they’re spoken or unspoken.

What makes this reader valuable is a sense of connection and kinship,

An intuitive grasp of what you say and don’t say.

You can make any piece feel like an informal letter

By using the generic characteristics of an informal letter.

But it’s far easier to get that feel

By writing to the reader you imagine reading it.

The reader you construct in your imagination

Changes the way you write almost without your noticing it.

Behind “flow” there’s something else,

Even something ecstatic—

The priority of thoughts over sentences.

Thoughts leaping ahead, words barely keeping up,

A hectic chase.

Or the other way around,

Sentences spinning out of each other, one after the next,

Phrase eliciting phrase, words—if not sentences—rushing ahead of thought.

It feels like inspiration.

We’ve all had these moments.

They’re enticing.

The mistake is overvaluing them.

You have an effusion one day.

It spawns a piece.

As the piece evolves, you try to protect those original, effusive sentences.

Only to realize, at last, that what you’re writing won’t come together until they’ve been removed or revised.

What were you trying to protect?

The memory of the excitement you felt when those words “came to you.”

(Where did they “come” from?)

You were protecting the memory of the excitement of really concentrating,

Of paying close attention to your thoughts and, perhaps, your sentences,

The excitement of feeling the galvanic link between language and thought.

That excitement matters, and the memory of it is worth preserving,

Even if those sentences aren’t.

Concentration, attention, excitement will be part of your working state.

Daily.

Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences—will not.

That distinction is worth keeping in mind.

The workings of your unconscious mind,

The current of your subterranean thoughts and intuitions,

The flickerings of insight and instinct—

These will always surface, if you learn how to let them.

But they’re only some of the tools of your daily work,

Which is making sentences.

The most damaging and obstructive cluster of ideas you face as a writer are nearly all related to the idea of “flow.”

Like “genius.”

And “sincerity.”

And “inspiration.”

Distrust these words.

They stand for cherished myths, but myths nonetheless.

“Inspiration” is what gets you to the keyboard,

And that’s where it leaves you.

Inspiration is about the swift transitions of thought,

Sudden realizations,

Almost all of them carefully prepared for by continuous thinking.

Inspiration has nothing to do with the sustained effort of making prose.

You’ll have many serendipitous moments while writing.

You’ll learn to expect them.

But “inspiration,” as it’s commonly used, is just another word for “flow.”

More...

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See also: Recent and archived articles by Verlyn Klinkenborg of The New York Times.

After the Birth of the Simple Light

My good friend, Kit, read her favorite poem and chatted about it on Read Me Something You Love. 

Fern Hill
by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas 

Kit Spahr reading Fern Hill by Dylan ThomasNow as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

     The night above the dingle starry,

          Time let me hail and climb

     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

          Trail with daisies and barley

     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

     In the sun that is young once only,

          Time let me play and be 

     Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

          And the sabbath rang slowly

     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

     And playing, lovely and watery

          And fire green as grass.

     And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

     Flying with the ricks, and the horses

          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

          The sky gathered again

     And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

     Out of the whinnying green stable

          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

     In the sun born over and over,

          I ran my heedless ways,

     My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

     Before the children green and golden

          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

     In the moon that is always rising,

          Nor that riding to sleep

     I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

          Time held me green and dying

     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

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"It's Better to Read a Good Writer than Meet One"

Excerpts from "John Irving: By the Book," The New York Times, June 7, 2012:

Illustration by Jillian TamakiI am a slow reader; when I’m tired, I move my lips. I almost read out loud. My grandmother read to me, and my mother — and my father. My father was the best reader; he has a great voice, a teacher’s voice. Yes, I grew up around books — my grandmother’s house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

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There is no one book that students of writing “should” read. With young writers, I tried to focus on the choices you make before you write a novel. The main character and the most important character are not always the same person — you have to know the difference. The first-person voice and the third-person voice each come with advantages and disadvantages; it helps me to know what the story is, and who the characters are, before I choose the point-of-view voice for the storytelling. 

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There’s nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn’t in their books. It’s better to read a good writer than meet one.

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There are a lot of outsiders in my novels, sexual misfits among them. The first-person narrator of “A Prayer for Owen Meany” is called (behind his back) a “non-practicing homosexual”; he doesn’t just love Owen Meany, he’s probably in love with Owen, but he’ll never come out of the closet and say so. He never has sex with anyone — man or woman. Dr. Larch, the saintly abortionist in “The Cider House Rules,” and Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother in “The World According to Garp,” have sex only once and stop for life. The narrator of “The Hotel New Hampshire” is in love with his sister. The two most heroic characters in my new novel, “In One Person,” are transgender women — not the first time I’ve written about transgender characters. I love sexual outsiders; the world is harder for them.