What, is the Question

I’ve been wrestling with this idea that we all have a question that forms our life’s path: the pursuit of that question is at least part of what centers us and gives life meaning.

This has come into focus for me as a result of reading Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, by Lawrence Weschler. Irwin was focused on eliminating the literary narrative from the experience of art and creating instead a moment of presence: it was the viewer’s experience of presence rather than the intellectualizing of the painted object that he was after. That is, when we look at art, we want to make a story out of it. Irwin wanted the viewer just to be there.

 While a biographer’s job is to organize a life so it makes sense in ways that a lived life often doesn’t, I’m still struck by how much this singular focus animated Irwin’s work. Irwin talks about spending a couple of years moving a single line from one place to another on a white background, of painting the walls of his studio with certain types of paint to make the foreground and the background conceptually indistinguishable, the essence of what he was trying to do with his painting. Eventually, he gives up on painting all together and moves into light installations which blur edges and create a sense of infinity. You can see some of his work here: https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/robert-irwin/

Blurring the distinction between foreground and background isn’t something I can do with words; by their very nature I am tied to meaning, although the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets tried to divorce meaning from words. My animating question instead revolves around the distinction between sanity and insanity. Why and when do we drift into (or choose) irrational behavior? Why do we remain in behavior that appears irrational to others when we are offered alternative ways of thinking? (I am talking here of people society considers functional, however you choose to define that.)

For example, is it rational to believe that animals speak to you? To believe you can see fairies or that at night you leave your body and travel the world? To believe the dead speak to us—through mediums or directly? I have known people who believed these things. What about William Blake’s fairies? Those who stormed the capital on January 6? People who believe in UFOs? Native healing ceremonies? Who decides what’s a crazy belief and what isn’t? What rails do we use to keep our own behavior in line?

It is at this point that my husband said, “You need to put something in about yourself, maybe a time when you’ve experienced something like this.” And then I watched myself get unreasonably angry. I don’t want to talk about me, I told him. That exposes me to the scorn I feel about others who espouse these views. I need that scorn because if I allow those experiences to be true, then maybe some of the people that I have needed to be insane in order to save myself, and against whom I have protected myself with rationality, might have a point.

But I will tell you one time: I had submitted a manuscript to a well-known agent, who stopped to talk to me after I had embarrassed myself at a conference panel. Long story. She took a couple of months to get back to me—no surprise—and about three days before I got her rejection letter, I became certain she had decided against the manuscript. I was gripped by the power of this certainty. Where did that knowledge come from?

After a year of profound malaise around writing, this idea of an animating question offers a path forward. How does one shape work to discover part of the answer? Whom should I read to think more deeply about that animating question?

My writing teachers long stressed “butt in chair” was the way to become successful at writing. While I don’t disagree, the better wisdom about any artistic endeavor came from a drawing teacher who said that if we had a subject, we would continue to draw. By that, I think he meant an animating question. What are we powerfully drawn to? I’m never going to find the line between sanity and insanity, not even in myself. But it’s not the answer I need; it’s the quest.

Thanks for reading.