Wise Words

Thoughts on Art from people born December 20:

 

from American philosopher Susanne K. Langer (Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, Feeling and Form, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling) (1895-1985):

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.

Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art—plastic, musical, poetic, balletic—serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

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from American author Hortense Calisher (In the Absence of Angels, Queenie, The Bobby-Soxer, Sunday Jews) (1911-2009):

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

The novel is rescued life.

Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action—I will write it out.

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from Romanian-born Peabody Award- and Ovid Prize-winning American author Andrei Codrescu (Road Scholar, The Blood Countess, No Time Like Now) (born 1946):

The real technology—behind all our other technologies—is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.

These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use.

The time has come for writers to become inaccessible again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious (though it helps), but the fact that no real writers ever lay down anything real in public—they work in solitude, they think hard, and their thoughts are rarely nice or 'friendly.'

Only the poor can create art.

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from American writer Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street, Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories) (b. 1954):

I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a testimony.

Writing is like sewing together what I call these 'buttons,' these bits and pieces.

We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what's hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.

There are two things you need to ask for, to open up that channel, so you get the light. One is humility, because our ego is always going to block that guidance, and so you ask for humility. And the second thing you're going to ask for is courage, because what you're going to be asked to do is bigger than what you think you can do

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other people’s eyes. All good books do this.

I'm a witch woman—high on tobacco and holy water. I'm a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A profession of sorts...I have the magic of words. The power to charm and kill at will.

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from Swiss-born philosopher and author Alain de Botton (Essays in Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Architecture of Happiness) (born 1969):

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver—because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator—a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?