against confinement (solnit & woolf)

‘Woolf is calling for a more introspective version of the poet Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes,” a more diaphanous version of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “I is another.” She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression. It’s often noted that she does this for her characters in her novels, less often that, in her essays, she exemplifies it in the investigative, critical voice that celebrates and expands, and demands it in her insistence on multiplicity, on irreducibility, and maybe on mystery, if mystery is the capacity of something to keep becoming, to go beyond, to be uncircumscribable, to contain more.

Woolf’s essays are often both manifestoes about and examples or investigations of this unconfined consciousness, this uncertainty principle. They are also models of a counter-criticism, for we often think the purpose of criticism is to nail things down. During my years as an art critic I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something of that desire to secure, to stabilize, to render certain and definite the open-ended, nebulous, and adventurous work of artists is present in many who work in that confinement sometimes called the art world.

A similar kind of aggression against the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist’s intent and meaning often exists in literary criticism and academic scholarship, 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, to classify and contain. What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether.

There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself great art.

This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective.’

Uit Rebecca Solnits essay Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable (opgenomen in Men Explain Things to Me).

liminal space (artful #2)

‘You told me Leonora Carrington was an expert in liminal space. What's liminal space? I'd asked you. Ha, you'd said. It's kind of in-between. A place we get transported to. Like when you look at a piece of art or listen to a piece of music and realize that for a while you've actually been somewhere else because you did? I'd said. Or liminal like limbo? Maybe, you'd said, getting excited, wait, I'll look it up, maybe limbo and liminal share a root, it sounds like they might.’ (p. 116)

Er komt geen antwoord. Limbo. Maar die ruimte, liminal space, maakt deel uit van het boek (en het boek zorgt er natuurlijk voor dat de lezer die ruimte betreedt). Er komen nogal eens bomen voor in dit boek, de hoofdpersoon werkt met bomen, ze gebruikt veel boomtaal, en als het uitgelezen is lijkt Artful een boom te zijn (bovendien: het boek is letterlijk gemaakt van bomen) — Limbo en liminal zijn sowieso familie, of ze nu wortels delen of niet.

clever trees

‘City trees are great. They coat their own leaves with stuff that means that every time it rains any pollution that's gathered on them just slides off. Even those spindly young trees, they'd see themselves through the winter fine.

The thing about trees is that they know what to do. When a leaf loses its color, it's not because its time is up and it's dying, it's because the tree is taking back into itself the nutrients the leaf's been holding in reserve for it, out there on the twig, and why leaves change color in autumn is because the tree is preparing for winter, it's filling itself with its own stored health so it can withstand the season. Then, clever tree, it literally pushes the used leaf off with the growth that's coming behind it. But because that growth has to protect itself through winter too, the tree fills the little wound in its branch or twig where the leaf was with a protective corky stuff that seals it against cold and bacteria. Otherwise every leaf lost would be an open wound on a tree and a single tree would be covered in thousands of little wounds.’ (p. 102)

Uit Artful van Ali Smith.