Finding Words / Art Speaks
Lately I have found myself completely unable to write; like I have all these words, thoughts, and ideas swirling in my mind that, when I sit down to write, will not translate onto the page.
I don’t know when this sudden ‘choking’ of my thoughts began or what causes it. I want to keep this blog current and make progress on my book & article projects, but I’m stuck. As someone who has spent their life writing, not being able to put the article or essay I have been narrating in my head onto paper the way that I would like has been maddeningly frustrating. Even these words don’t seem to be coming out right.
“Just write!” I tell myself. But it isn’t so simple.
Most of my writing is written with the expectation of an audience, be it those who read this blog or my academic peers. I enjoy that fact. I like putting my thoughts and theories out into the world for people to find, read, and think about. …. Except as of late, with this new unwelcome constant where I find myself not able to say anything at all.
What would happen, I thought, if I sat at my computer and simply began telling this story of why I have been so absent from this and my other online endeavors? So that’s I’m doing; breaking from the theme of this blog to say that I have been in creative pit and hope to eventually find the muse that will carry me out of it. I’m still here.
Victor Hugo, The Hanged Man (c. 1855-60). Brush and ink with wash over paper, 12 x 7 11/16 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Throughout my creative drought, I have been contemplating how easily art speaks. All art says something and all art elicits a response. Sometimes, an image will become embedded in our minds and we have to return to it, over and over again, until we are satisfied that we have arrived at what we believe it is saying to us. Bernini had a similar experience when, after seeing Poussin’s Sacraments in 1665, he said “I can’t get the thought of those paintings of his out of my mind.”1
One of the works that has been stuck in my mind is Victor Hugo’s The Hanged Man (c. 1855-60) held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is something solemn, even sacred, about this image to me, and I find it remarkable that such a simple composition created by a few strokes of the brush can convey such a profound sense of sorrow, hopelessness, loneliness, and loss. The only mourners that this man has in death are the birds flocking around his corpse.
I tried to resist the temptation to conduct a study of this image in order to bask in the mystery, but the historian in me had to know: Why was this man hung? Surely such a powerful image would not arise without a profound motivation; a catalyst from Hugo’s own life. Indeed, this is one of four drawings Hugo made depicting the horror of the gallows after witnessing an execution in the Channel Islands in 1854.2
Victor Hugo, Ecce, The Hanged Man (John Brown). Black ink and brown wash with white heightening. Département des Arts Graphiques, Louvre, Paris.
Five years later in 1859, Hugo urgently and passionately petitioned to save the life of John Brown, an American abolitionist sentenced to death.3 After false hope that Brown might be released, the abolitionist was hanged. Hugo mourned Brown’s death through the written word and art, creating a drawing which he titled Ecce — Behold. Ecce is a commanding image wherein the viewer is confronted with the injustice of Brown’s execution. A kind of divine light illuminates Brown, who otherwise hangs amidst still darkness, alone. He is a martyr.
Ecce challenged contemporary viewers to reconcile Brown’s horrific punishment with the righteousness of his cause. Those who knew Brown’s story would quickly realize that such a feat is impossible, for the punishment does not fit the crime. Hugo had Ecce distributed through prints, with proceeds from the sales going to various charities, “including those to provide medical supplies to soldiers in the Civil War.”4
Hugo’s drawings were in part the catalyst that led me to thinking about the power of art and the ability of art to speak regardless of one’s knowledge of its context. This has given me the idea to try something new with this blog, a brief series called The Painting Speaks. The Painting Speaks will be an experimental exercise in intentional slow looking and description that relies solely on the work of art itself – a kind of formal analysis. I am not sure when I will be posting this series, but hopefully I will find the words soon.
Notes
1 For the Bernini quote and further reading regarding the idea of images being stuck in one’s mind, see T. J. Clark The Sight of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
2 See “Recent Acquisitions: A Selection: 2002-2003,” in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Fall 2003): 36.
3 Florian Rodari, “Shadows of the Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo.” Last accessed September 24, 2015. See also “Victor Hugo and John Brown,” The New York Times, April 19, 1902.
4 Matthew Josephson, Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Romantic (New York: Jorge Pinto Books Inc., 2006, originally published in 1942), 432-433.
Writing blocks and what to do about them.
I have no perfect or reliable formulas, but the following is what I’ve observed in my life:
Reasons why I can’t write:
1. Depression, even low level depression, can collapse the writing impulse for me. Why? The root of it is that I’m too trapped within myself. There’s a kind of self-referentiality that locks me in, that closes off the necessary floating element of consciousness—a quality of awareness that doesn’t stick to itself, but is to some degree free to move.
2. Doing the same things too much. My brain, and I suspect others, needs to operate in different modes in order to function with the level of creativity that writing can require. By different modes I mean varying mindsets, emotional states, energy levels, various hard-to-categorize external inputs. I explain this in terms of neural networks—activating the same words, categories, concepts, verbal rhythms, objects of attention, internal states, and whatnot, makes it harder to activate less familiar/frequent areas of memory, which in turn reduces creative capacity. Taking in more varied inputs and cultivating more varied internal states shakes up these too-frequently used neural patterns.
3. Physiology, nutrition, exercise, sleep. Despite years of self-analysis, there are complexities and patterns in my body that I still don’t fully understand nor can I predict. Too much sleep kills my writing better than anything. Too little sleep enlivens my creativity for writing but slows my processing speed. Hard exercise makes me feel dumb, and so does too little movement. Not getting enough brain chemicals like choline probably plays a role, but I haven’t experimented with this enough to have good advice. Besides, people vary considerably physiologically. The podcast Smart Drug Smarts might have some useful tips for anyone wanted to jar their mind into a more productive mode.
What gets me writing again:
1. Getting out of my routines in any number of ways helps: Travel, meeting new people, getting slightly drunk, losing sleep, having an emotional reaction to a movie or a book or a social situation. Another thing that helps me is switching gears from one area of focus to another. If I read or write too much poetry there’s a point of diminishing returns. I have to switch out of that mode and, say, practice martial arts more. Or, if my music isn’t progressing as much as I’d like, I might quit it for a while and read some history or a novel.
Best wishes to you! :)
Hi Eric!
I am blown away by your kind and thoughtful response. Thank you!
I’m really looking forward to trying out some of the tips you discussed. :)
Amy
Art only appears ‘to speak easily.’ That is an illusion. It’s always hard, so start looking for those words in all the places you’ve never looked. Write in uncomfortable places. The bathtub. The corner of a noisy intersection. Next to a rooftop air conditioner.
Hugo didn’t wait at home for this man to be hanged. He went to the hanging so that the birds were not “the only mourners that this man has in death.”
He witnessed the hanging. Now we are witnesses too.
We need witnesses.
Write.
Hi Tony,
How right you are – we are also witnesses. Such a simple statement, but full of power.
I look forward to sharing The Painting Speaks series with you soon.
Amy
Thank you for sharing these works! I had no idea that Victor Hugo was such a gifted artist as well as a writer. My only exposure to his work was when I labored through Les Miserables as an eighth-grader (all 1,000+ pages of it!) I had to keep a copy of Heath’s French Dictionary alongside me at the time, because so many of the words were in French. However, by the end I had grown so absorbed in the story that I no longer needed it. Hugo was so adept at painting a landscape or a character or a battle scene with his words – one could almost smell the gunpowder and the blood amid the dank atmosphere of Paris in the 1830s – I did not realize that he could do the same thing with a brush. I guess a picture really is worth a thousand words!