raw material

notes from london

Kandinsky, Improvisation Deluge

Quick Notes from London

London today: shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers on the train on the way to Tate Modern. I finish reading East of Eden lying on the grass outside. Some parts of it make me want to cry. In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love.

The Expressionist exhibition was beautiful. That’s not even close to the right word to describe it. The paintings feel uninhibited, full of fervor, longing, and devotion. Macke, Kandinsky, Bossi, Münter, Werefkin. You can tell when something is made with a certain yearning. It spills through the artwork. It carries a compelling magnetism, an internal fire. I’ve read books like this, seen paintings like this, even met people like this. Something pulls on you like an invisible force.

Raw material

Everything that comes to us is raw material, but nothing escapes transfiguration.... I don't think I ever confessed to you, or did I? Maybe that's the secret. Maybe that's what I sensed in you... there are certain presences that allow transfiguration (Clarice Lispector)

In life, as in art, there’s a great deal of raw material. Drawings, sketches, blueprints that never make it to production. Seemingly disparate or useless information gathering. Wrong turns and failures. Bad drafts. For many years, you wrangle with a shapeless mass of knowledge, data points, conversations, trying to synthesize and abstract something clean and beautiful from a great deal of murkiness.

Incoherence is part of the journey. It takes a long time to think and speak like yourself. Any visible immediate success in others is often the product of hard work over many cycles of despair and euphoria and despair again. It often means working harder and quieter than what feels necessary.

All good curiosity is fed by revolt and pain, experience and change. The thankless jobs or the inconsistent blogs or the graveyard of failed commitments have their place even if they felt useless or embarrassing for a long time. Nothing is truly useless in that it gives you self awareness: where you misjudged, tugged the wrong string, fed a faulty thing, gave up too easily. The research is its own form of richness.

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.” Hesse, Siddartha

Some presences allow for transfiguration

The best thing we can do for others is to pay attention to the potential we see in them and tell them often. In high school I was all nerve and callousness, intensely soulful. I had more raw material than I knew what to do with it. When I graduated, my english teacher sat me down and told me very seriously to keep writing, even though I wanted to explore other interests. There’s something here, he said, and it would be a real shame to let it die. I packed up two suitcases, moved to America. I kept writing. I didn’t keep updating him though. I should probably send him an email at some point. I wonder what he’d think of Substack. The point is: that conversation changed my life. It gave me some kind of mental framing to maintain this valuable, beautiful, important experience to me; how to fight for it against inertia and conflicting priorities.

My definition of good transfiguration is allowing people I trust to show me what they see in me clearly. We see ourselves with a great deal of blurriness, often with a negative tilt. Other people can see the line of continuity threaded through every seemingly disjointed experience, or the richness in your raw material. Other people can very much help you envision the possibility of who you can be.

Still, I find openness very difficult. This is ironic because I write a public Substack, but the truth is I battle with showing people who I am and what I care about, and I still find expressing my needs embarrassing. Often I’m protective with myself and my desires. The great paradox is the more I share with select people who genuinely know my intentions and hopes, the more tangible and concrete my good ideas become. Every time I feel scared, it brings me comfort that you see something beneath all the raw material: a flash of gold in the heap.