Writing, Art and Life

It’s nine in the morning and I’m sitting in Indus Restaurant, minding a seat for my friend Clare. The place is packed; the mood alert, excited. I’m wondering how long I can keep Clare’s seat. This session, part of the 2018 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, is called ‘Gail Jones: The Death of Noah Glass’. Darryl Whetter, a Canadian poet, is going to interview Jones about her new novel. I have never heard of Gail Jones, nor read any of her novels; I am here on Clare’s recommendation.

Jones follows the poet onto the stage. She’s slightly built and looks tired. They sit and Whetter introduces her. She smiles politely. There’s a bit of chitchat then Whetter asks Jones about her art. She starts to speak.

‘The function of art is to make understood that which, if presented as an argument, would not be understood.’ She pauses, then adds, ‘… we don’t have to live under the tyranny of the argument. We can live in the openness of the question.’

I lean in. These words hit me hard. I realise that my life has been ruled by the ‘tyranny of the argument’. I have spent decades trying to school myself to think and behave rationally and logically, often at the expense of how I felt. Frequently it was a struggle, which caused me much internal angst and led to many domestic arguments. I had really hoped that making decisions based on logic would fix things. Jones turns this upside down. I hear her say, ‘ … our inner lives tell us that our lives are not linear, logical … they are layered, metaphorical’.

Jones talks about the emotional consequences of loss and how people recover from trauma and harm. For her, writing is part of that healing process of moving through to a better place. I realise that I have relied on logic to gain control in traumatic situations. She says, ‘Grief is unresolvable loss. It can be triggered by the most unlikely things and come back in full force.’ This has certainly been my experience. Just when I think I have ‘moved on’, a smell or a sound will catapult me right back into the thick of it. She says that writers have a responsibility to deal with the tough stuff.

Her words speak to me on a level that I have trouble articulating. Everything she says is a surprise, and yet makes so much sense. I have never heard anyone say the things she is saying. She is showing me that when things don’t feel right, that feeling can be valid. I love the idea that art can show us things that we cannot explain; that our behaviour and our feelings and our reactions can be free from the constraints of logic.

On reflection, the logical response is not always the most compassionate or the most loving. While logic may help me to see the bones of a situation, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Jones says that ‘… our own lives contain symbolic moments which form us. This is art. We only realise in retrospect how they shaped us.’ This brings tears to my eyes. I find these words so comforting. It is a relief to hear someone say that art can express things that logic can’t engage with.

In that short hour Jones also speaks about Shakespeare and love and crime fiction and family and time and loss. More than once she apologises for going on a bit, explaining that she’s jetlagged and on a ‘manic riff’. She is amazingly coherent to me. She’s given me much to reflect on.