Reticence and the beauty of restraint. The Power of No thing.

Part 1



I've been thinking for some time about not doing things. I recognise this as a continuous underlying theme in my thinking with many aspects and significant details to it. I can see how it applies across the whole of my life and acknowledge that it is something we all have to consider, possibly on a daily basis, and no doubt, for the main part, at an subconscious level.

Choosing whether or not to do something is an intrinsic part of thinking and decision making. We choose each time we act or don't act. There is not time enough to do all the things we might consider doing. If there is not opportunity, we may decide to work at creating an opportunity, or we may decide to leave that thing aside. I could, at this point, decide to go down many different paths with my thinking and eliminate all the obvious aspects of choosing, deciding, or being forced by circumstances not to do things, not to include things in our experience, our life etc. I choose, however to not do that but to consider the origins of my current thought process;

The "something" that lead me here was being told about the work of a poet called George Oppen, who is described as an Objectivist. L.S. Dembo, author of such works as "Conceptions of Reality in American Poetry",  attempts to sum up Oppen's approach with these words;

" aesthetic qualities of objects or events - apprehended not in terms of their associations or conventional meaning, but in terms of their form or motion - [were] considered by Oppen to be 'empirical' "

At this point, I considered the word empirical. I extracted the essentials of the way it is described by Wikipedia and laid them out as a list :



EMPIRICAL :


Evidence

Sense experience

Knowledge

Source of knowledge

Acquired by the senses

Observation

Experimentation


from the Greek word for experience :  emporia



Bearing this in mind, I considered the stated approach of Objectivist poets, which is, I read, to;



" emphasise simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme "



Whenever I have read about such apparently spacious approaches to creativity, I have been drawn to them by their misleading impression of the simplicity of their method. Oh how wonderful it would be to clear the mind of its crowded thoughts and images so that you could tread an easy path, thinking clear thoughts and producing lucid work.

Yet the world and life and daily life in particular are not simple. To establish a way of living and creating takes a lot of hard work and a lot of that involves a task which I now recognise as akin to earth moving or sorting through piles of rubbish in which many precious things nestle and amongst which those precious or significant things are hard to recognise. In fact, there are some days when each and every item in this pile seems potentially precious and significant. In addition to this, the earth you have moved, the things you have put aside must be put somewhere else. We are, after all, only moving stuff around, randomly picking things out to be viewed as significant - for a time. We could so easily go back to the pile of abandoned things, the old dug earth and resift, looking again with different parameters, if our thinking is adjusted in some way.


In addition to the fact that George Oppen worked in an Objectivist style, I am also interested that he stopped writing poetry for a period of his life when he became involved in politics. Twenty eight years elapsed between his initial success and recognition and his re-engagement with publishing poetry. Twenty eight years of not publishing might not, I realise, entail 28 years of not writing, but the fact that he didn't publish anything during this time presents us, who view him as a poet from the outside, as someone who is no longer a poet, or maybe a poet in suspension. A resting poet. A latent poet. A poet who chooses not to write perhaps. Certainly a poet who has decided not to allow us to read what he has written.


Jonathan Galas, poet, translator and publisher,  said of Oppen's writing career that it was;

"a life-long confrontation between an unimpeachably free spirit's sense of order and a 'world of things'.

Another critic described his approach as;

"the effort of the mind to reach clarity of vision by turning always upon itself, travelling back and forth between things and words, reconsidering and correcting earlier impressions or pondering."

This paring down process begins to sound arduous, entailing a lot of graft, both mental and physical. If I relate it to George Oppen's description of it being empirical, I start to think about how it is that we can begin to know what to extract, pick out, focus on, from the life that we live, portions, components, elements, to be considered and possibly transformed into what may be regarded as a work of art, in whatever form that may take.

An eavesdropped aphorism sums up this approach simply;

" art is what is left when you think you have erased everything. "


It is, perhaps, our chosen "form" that will dictate, for the most part, what to include and what to leave out. We could, conversely, decide to let the content create the form. Forms can also be combined if we choose to be inclusive. So begins the sifting and sorting, the oscillations of thinking and choosing which may or may not lead to an action and its corresponding impact.