An Illuminist Manifesto?
In Which there is Not a Discussion invoking Herbert Marcuse, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a calming air through its absence.
“People, there is a thing called love! People let us love!” — Vincent van Gogh
Caveat emptor! This is but a stone’s throw from literary criticism, and leans toward snobbery.
I am not at all sure
that it’s beneficial for a “writing person” to delve too deeply into their motivations regarding form and structure. But I’m gonna do it. Out of a project conceived by Kate Stone Matheson (and me) called The Ten Year Lunch (not about writing, exactly — best to click on the link and look for yourself) I am thinking about my writing and process, and, for lack of a better term, intentional stance, much more carefully than I have in years*.
English prose has an accepted structure, from spelling and word-meanings to grammar to “style appropriate to its subject”. That structure scaffolds the language so the reader’s ideas are encouraged toward the writer’s ends. I am finding that my own writing doesn’t fit neatly into what I know of Style-As-It-Is-Written (William Strunk and Andy White, I love you both.); I would much rather refer to painting, and more specifically to light.
When we look at a painting or drawing, we see a picture of some sort: shapes the artist has crafted give the illusion we’re seeing the light reflected from the actual scene designed for us to see; not mere blots and scratches. It is a sort of prestidigitation. The structural elements are those of line and shape made by blocks of color, or dots and streaks of black or white. The Illuminist school uses multiple large transparent layers of superimposed color to suggest movement and reveal form. The lines and shapes are suggested by washes of transparent color. Some are more explicitly linear, using a bare handful of scribbled-looking lines, blotches of color, and erasures to create an image whole.
The process of writing is also a sort of prestidigitation, a way of confounding the reader by the overlap of words and phrases, the hints of shadow and light, into believing the structures we create are real, and feeling the images and emotions in their own minds and hearts as true feelings evinced from reflections on the structures and events alive in the writer’s mind and heart. The structural elements are words and punctuation in blocks of grammar on a page, lines of alliterative consonance shading meaning toward bright, or dark.
Our words have power. Sometimes it’s in the meaning of them; more often (for me) it is in their movement and shape; the light that shines through layers of almost song felt through the rhythms and pace of language. My little scribbles attempt to create a scaffold from which meaning can be felt and seen; the shapes of agrammatical layers of assonance and referential direction suggest movement and reveal emotional resonance. Meaning and intention are suggested by the flow and stop of smooth and harsh, pushing writing into the emotional pulse of language; evincing, from the overlap of resonating emotions and rational grammatical constructs, waves of understanding.
I would like to invite all my friends, associates, readers, here on Medium, to assist in the ballistics of this fledgling project (yes, it’s a project; maybe even a movement — not sure who’s moving, though). The trajectory has only been explored a few times in my writing, and it’s more valuable than that. I’m still pushing at the boundaries of accomplishment, stretching toward meaning in layers of emotional resonance, watching the light emerge. I would truly love to engage with a framework of criticism based on the ideas of Illuminism; of images emerging from the flow and rhythm of language. Not specifically poetry, though I have no objection to that. More a continuation of rhythmic and evocative language through poetry and out the other side into concrete images developed in transparent layers of overlapping metaphor, allusion, and iterative self-reference. Please criticize, here. I’m certain of my ideas; less sure how well I execute them. And please, please, please help me think about writing this way, at least sometimes (maybe after a couple glasses of wine). The layers have depths of expression we have never explored, nor examined.
Thank you.
*Brief apologies to my friends and readers for my absence these many days. I have been struggling to find time for any writing, stealing it from alarmingly few peaceful moments, at work or in the depths of exhaustion, a lead curtain descendant. It’s getting better; life and light return.
*Note: Many of the ideas I try to work through were spawned long ago in conversations with the two artists above. Their thoughtful consideration and kindness toward my youthful eccentricity and bravado helped me to find peace at a time when life was largely a barren wasteland of my own making. More examples of Lescek Forsczek’s art are here, and Sandy Goodman’s here.
