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| "Femme a la Toilette" Edgar Degas 1886 |
It is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, a hundred times..
.I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result
of reflection and study of the great masters, of inspiration,
spontaneity, temperament...I know nothing. Edgar Degas
(a few edits since originally posted...)
As I become aware of the process of aging--both physically and mentally--I'm astonished at two things: in addition to the odd things my body does, I'm becoming alert to the changes in my attitudes. It's not a new story to most people over fifty: the little things that held such urgency in our thirties and forties have lost their lure and are now replaced by interests, for me, that I sometimes imagined but never expected to realize.
One interest I share with many in my "age group" is the urge to purge stuff. After spending my thirties and forties doing what must be biologically-governed--collecting stuff--I'm ready to streamline my possessions.
The humorist Joel Stein in a recent Time magazine article, called "Stuff and Nonsense" (Time allows no link) analyzed the tendency for people to amass clutter. He quotes Jeanne Arnold who explains the habit: "We wrap ourselves in these objects because they talk about our history, and without them what do we have? They're our biographers." So perhaps our objects, as they evolve, tell the story of our personal transformations.
Yet some people never collect in the first place, and that's too bad because at maturity they don't have a mass to edit in order to make a new whole, to start another chapter in new surroundings (blatant rationalization, I know). Editing, changing, re-creating oneself can be seen as self-indulgence in some sense. For me it's an old draw to the "esemplastic power" Coleridge espoused--to create a new whole from disparate parts.
As a change addict, I like making new wholes, especially a new structure to my arrangement of living. And every time writers start a new project, they are creating a whole from their own disparate parts--those parts that achieve more depth with age.
In a recent interview Pico Iyer talked about the Japanese aesthetic for finding beauty: start with a large amount and edit it down so only the most powerful is left. He said, "The Japanese aesthetic is about emptiness, and the Japanese way of life as I've embraced it is about doing without things."
I like Iyer's writing because it's so dense, so full of depth of thought and rich language. It's distilled down to the essence of his subject, empty of non-essentials. Full and empty--a paradox, for sure.
As always for a memoirist--knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to include. Creating shapely negative space is as critical for a writer as for an artist. But you can't leave it out until you have enough to include. So my advice is to write, write, write, draft after draft. Only when you have significant accumulation can you usefully edit. It's critical that you let the story take you where it will, let your memories unfold on the page until you find your purpose.
Just as dangerous as it is to choose a title before you start to compose is to decide the outcome, theme or purpose before you see what you've got to say. And doing it "ten times, a hundred," yes. Make final shapes, as Degas has here, that contain their own whole, filling the page completely.
