It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly.
In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. In a sentiment of chilling prescience today, as we witness tyrants drunk on certainty drain the world of its essential inspiration, Szymborska considers the destructive counterpoint to this generative not-knowing:Īll sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.” Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. Noting that she, too, tends to be rattled by the question, she offers her wieldiest answer: It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself. It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. In her acceptance speech, later included in Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006 ( public library) - which also gave us the spectacular speech on the power of language Toni Morrison delivered after becoming the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize - Szymborska considers why artists are so reluctant to answer questions about what inspiration is and where it comes from: That difficult feat of insurgency is what the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) explored in 1996 when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for capturing the transcendent fragility of the human experience in masterpieces like “Life-While-You-Wait” and “Possibilities.” (In my own life, looking back on my ten most important learnings from the first ten years of The Marginalian, I placed the practice of the small, mighty phrase “I don’t know” at the very top.) But to live with the untrammeled openendedness of such fertile not-knowing is no easy task in a world where certitudes are hoarded as the bargaining chips for status and achievement - a world bedeviled, as Rebecca Solnit memorably put it, by “a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate.” What is true of art is even truer of life, for a human life is the greatest work of art there is. “In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know.”
“One doesn’t arrive - in words or in art - by necessarily knowing where one is going,” the artist Ann Hamilton wrote a generation later in her magnificent meditation on the generative power of not-knowing.
It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard Diebenkorn counseled in his ten rules for beginning creative projects.
0 kommentar(er)
