Scientific vs. Fictional Literature Revisited

I've been rereading a previous entry on my blog "Scientific vs. Fictional Literature," and as so often happens, I ran across a related passage in a book I'm now reading: Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry by Stephen Dobyns.

"As I said, we go to poetry and the other arts for knowledge, to expand our moral experience of the world, for sustenance, survival, and connection. The degree to which we get this necessary mixture from textbooks, biographies, memoirs, and journalism is limited. We see the apparent effects of a series of uncertain causes. These forms of nonfiction present us with the shadow, while the arts have the ability to present us with the living body. Doesn't one learn more about whaling from Moby Dick than from the best piece of nonfiction written on the subject?

"In Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer writes:

"Non-discursive form in art . . . [articulates] knowledge that cannot be rendered discursively because it concerns experiences which are not formally amenable to the discursive projection. Such experiences are the rhythms of life, organic, emotional and mental, which are not simply periodic but endlessly complex, and sensitive to every sort of influence. All together they combine the dynamic patterns of feeling. It is this pattern that only non-discursive symbolic forms can present and that is the point and purpose of artistic construction.

" . . . every work of art expresses, more or less purely, more or less subtly, not feelings and emotions which the artist has, but feelings and emotions which the artist knows; his insight into the nature of sentience, his picture of vital experience, physical, emotive and fantastic.

"Such knowledge is not expressible in ordinary discourse . . . . [T]he forms of feeling and the forms of discursive expression are logically incommensurate, so that any exact concept of feeling and emotion cannot be projected into the logical form of literal language. Verbal statement, which is our normal and most reliable means of communication, is almost useless for conveying knowledge about the precise character of the affective life."

Isaac Babel

Thanks to everyone who's stopping by. I'm in the middle of a move right now and have had to take some time off to pack.

Some food for thought from Isaac Babel:

"Art implies a kind of freedom, the freedom of choice, of possibility, of the individual imagination.

The most important things . . . [are] observation and consciousness. Keep your eyes open.  See clearly, think about what you see and ask yourself what it means.

The wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interesting and truthfully you will write."

Happy writing! 

One prompt I've enjoyed: write about something you heard or overheard when you were a child, something someone told you or said to you that made a deep impression.

Photo: Luna moth at my front door beneath the porch light welcoming me home after vacation.

Rumi

         

           "Let yourself be silently drawn

             by the strong pull

             that you really love

             It will not lead you astray."

                                           Rumi

                                    

        

She withdrew into herself

First writing just for one.

 Then touching thousands.

She incarnated ghosts, hurt, and joy

Into paper-and -ink stories of wonder.

  

"One author said, 'I can get rid of anything by writing about it.,' meaning that the process of externalization could liberate him from the pain of his soul.

That realization produced a delicious dichotomy:  to free himself, or to hold onto both joys and tortures by remaining silent about them.

Writers write because they must:  They need to express something from deep within themselves.  They hear voices that others do not.  They listen urgently, and they must communicate what they hear."

 

 

I will try to get the source for this; I understand it's a commentary on the Tao Te Ching.

   

 

         

Truman Capote: Writing Advice

"I often use 'real' people in my work, and then create a story around them.  You must get into the habit of writing even if it is only a paragraph a day.  Try keeping a journal.  One good exercise is to describe, in a page or two, some scene or person exactly as you see them:  when I was your age I used to do this exercise religiously--it strengthens you, like piano practice . . . In any event, write about what you know about.  Write a portrait of someone you really like very much, then one of someone you really dislike."  Truman Capote, Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke, from a letter  written to Alvin Dewey's son.

Milan Kundera

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come . .  .

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison.  We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of  something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."

                                                                                      The Unbearable Lightness of Being

                                                                                     Milan Kundera