30 Posts in 30 Days Challenge
On Why I’m Showing Up
Is painting really that different from poetry? Why it’s crucial to be consistent
I might be cheating in this post.
Why? Because I will be helped by great men, poets.
This entry is about showing up. How do we show up in writing?
Did you notice it, too? Writing has this tendency to be self-referential.
Some of the best stories and poems are about what it means to write. Do painters do this? Painters just paint, right? The colors and patterns and techniques don’t ask questions that are hard to answer. They are just there.
Poetry and Painting: Oranges
This reminds me of Frank O’Hara. I wasn’t going to mention him when I told you I am getting help from poets today. But Frank O’Hara has a great poem on this subject. Poets and painters.
It’s called Why I Am Not A Painter. He says:
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not.
There is no why. He just is.
If you take the time to read the poem — I recommend it — you will come to see that painting and poetry are not that different. Or maybe they are.
Poetry, and writing is expansive. It starts from one word, “oranges”, and then it goes on to talk about “how terrible orange is/ and life”. The painting starts with “SARDINES” and proceeds to cover them up until they are just letters, just material.
Showing up is about constancy. Just like you wake up in the morning and go to work. Go to the gym. Pick a language and practice it every day.
I’ve always struggled with that concept. I am a firm believer in astrology, and as a Sagittarius sun with a Sagittarius ascendent, I believe that it’s in my stars to be fickle, inconsistent, impermanent. Showing up is really hard for me.
Which is one reason why I am doing this challenge at all, why I am coming to Medium every day, to do one post, review it, publish it.
It’s not about love. It’s discipline. You could love something and still not do it. I love reading but I have to make room for reading, I have to tell myself “Now you pick up that book, open it and read it”.
Painting and Poetry: Up that Mountain
My second aid today is the German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke. His most famous poem is The Panther but we will talk about another one today. The Mountain was released as part of the New Poems alongside The Panther and speaks about a painter that is showing up every single day to work on his subject:
Thirty-six times and a hundred times
the painter limned that mountain, each time torn
away, then driven back there; each time borne
(thirty-six times and a hundred times)
back to that blank, volcanic, deadpan face.
Blissful, wholly tempted, free from thought.
whereas, within its silhouetted grace,
splendor held back nothing — not a jot — ,
The Mountain, translated by Len Krisak
It seems clear to me that Rilke is talking about Paul Cézanne here, the great French post-impressionist. Cézanne’s importance on Rilke’s work cannot be overstated. It was 1907 when the poet, living in Paris at the time, came across a retrospective of Cézanne’s work. Day after day he kept going back and talked about his experience in letters to his wife Lou Salomé.
He saw Cézanne’s dedication to his work, his craftmanship. The painter’s withdrawal to the French countryside — Aix-en-Provence — and the fervor with which he pursued his work fascinated Rilke. Revisiting Cézanne’s paintings over and over, Rilke started to develop his own poetics.
He meditated on the tension of the motive, the thing depicted, and the technique, the depiction, and by virtue of these meditations started developing his own approach to poetry, one where “each spot knows of every other one” (als wüßte jede Stelle von allen, translated by the author). In this poetics, things become stripped of their external references and get a different, new meaning within the poem, a supercharged one that is in constant exchange with other words and images in the poem but also in the body of work at large.
Some visuals
This is getting deep. Are you still with me?
The mountain that was Cézanne’s muse is the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain close to Aix-en-Provence, where the great painter spent the last years of his life.
Ever since the 1880s the mountain and its surroundings magnetized the artist.
He kept approaching his subject again and again, finding new perspectives, new colors: new statements to share with the world.
His last versions of the Sainte-Victoire feel like painted sculptures but are just as entrancing as the older versions.
How about this for showing up?
What is your Mont Sainte-Victoire? See you tomorrow.
Part of my Medium challenge — 30 Posts in 30 Days
Day 6/30
Further reading
