The Blank Page
Although I have nothing but disdain for graduate students, and although he looks like the junior counterpart of Sanford & Son, I do proudly make an exception, welcome, and present our newest Author: Adam Marc. Here is his first submission…
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Art draws from us two of our greatest strengths, our capacity to feel and our ability to design. The former is a visceral experience, the latter an analytical tool. Combined, these two basic human attributes allow us to express and create beauty and ingenuity. They also allow us to reverse engineer the fruits of others’ labor; they grant us the privilege to critically engage with the art that surrounds us. Subject, form, and content are the constituent elements of art upon which to base any such appraisal. Though these elements may be most salient with visual art, they also apply to the written word. Indeed, both writer and reader stand to benefit enormously from assuming this perspective.
Because it is so often construed as the foundation of a work - debatably so - subject stands as a profitable starting point to understand writing’s essential qualities. Truth be told, subject is not so very important to the success or profundity of a piece of writing. The sublime can be universally educed from the mundane, so long as there is an adept observer willing to expend the resources in the process of extraction and refinement - a tall order to be sure. Here it is elucidating to invoke the meaning of Einstein’s famous e = mc2 equation. This simple mathematical formula conveys that each atom throughout the universe contains a staggering amount of energy, as evinced by the nuclear fission that at once provides us with a viable, albeit controversial, source of energy and a means of self-destruction, and also the nuclear fusion that can power our sun for billions of years. Similarly, everything we experience, corporeal, metaphysical, imaginary, is laden with the vast potential to transform the way we conceive meaning and purpose in our lives. This is no less true for writing as it is for nuclear physics.
A personal example that immediately comes to mind is D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. The novel tells the tale of three generations of a rural English family from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The details of the lives of this, the Brangwen, family are unremarkable. They are all decidedly average. And yet, the events of their lives, particularly their emotional reactions to those events, are the source of a resplendent order of narration. So well acquainted with the capricious, enchanting nature of love is Lawrence that no reader can walk away feeling as though they are alone in the intensity of their daily libidinal pleasures and pains.
We are collectively endowed with the ability to detect, record, distill, and embellish the poetry that fills our lives. This is an invaluable gift. Another example, albeit from another discipline, is the style of Paul Cézanne, the Frenchman who pioneered Post-Impressionism. Like Lawrence, forty-six years his junior, Cézanne was a master at capturing the highest qualities of the often-overlooked aspects of existence. In particular, he painted still lifes, an apple arrangement here, a landscape of his native Aix there, always devoting utmost attention to depicting the purities of visual forms. His signature tool was color. Cezanne radically transformed the artists’ palette by illustrating how light and natural color complements can yield a work that is as vivid and nuanced as a Realist painting. Heavily criticized during his own time, Cezanne has since come to be regarded as one of the few individuals to incite a paradigm shift in his craft. His contribution has little to do with subject.
And yet despite how arbitrary the choice of subject may ultimately be, it is a persistent cause of much angst amongst novice and virtuosic writers alike. A blank page is an intimidating page. Being able to write about literally anything can be paralyzing for the writer who has so much to say (read: show) and no conduit through which to say it. In a recent address to a group of aspiring wordsmiths at Ithaca College, the author Tom Wolfe noted that every 20-something has one autobiography to write, but they don’t have two. Implicit in Wolfe’s remark is the notion that subjects accrue with the accumulation of experience. Experience does not have to be equated solely with a quantity or even a quality of life events. It may also refer to an enriched perspective on life. As time passes and lives follow their course, people naturally become more attuned to the highs and lows of the human condition and are thus increasingly capable of articulating them. Thus, a person might conceivably be able to write two categorically different autobiographies on the same period of their lives; the subject would be the same, but there would essentially be two different authors coloring the details.
In the end, subject is about exposure. An individual - a reflective mind - needs only remain open to either the breadth or depth the world has to offer in order to wax eloquent and prolific. The most moving accounts can come from intensely probing the presumably insignificant aspects of our daily routines, as in Robert Burns’ poem To a Louse, plumbing the vortices of our psyches à la Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or circumnavigating swaths of the globe in the manner of Bill Bryson. Even subject can be the subject of writing. From one self-proclaimed aspiring wordsmith, explore your environs, both internal and external. Do not be afraid of the span of the horizon or the reach of the sky; they are your muses.
Next installment: Form.
