We Might at Least Risk the Question

The book Art Objects by Jeannette Winterson came out in 1995, the year I rather miraculously graduated with a BA in Honours English with honours. I mention the honours bit because when I was in high school, I never dreamed of going to University. I did so poorly in high school that I had to wait until I was 23 and an “adult student” to get in. I married an artist in 1993 and we spent five weeks on a honeymoon in Italy. When I graduated, I worked in a bookstore which is where I would have purchased this book. I wrote my first book in that mall bookstore, some of it composed at the food court, and it was published years later in 1999, a year after our daughter was born. She’d arrived a week early and I remember working on the edits of this book with her in a cradle I borrowed from my friend Lee — the cradle her own children had used. My book is about art, women artists, and the women who appeared as models in famous works of art. I look back at it and wonder how I even wrote it. This young woman who grew up so far away from the world of art, who had zero writer cred, and even less self-confidence. Writing the book gave me some confidence — there’s that about it. I learned as I wrote, and looking at it now, I see I was able to bring my thinned out hunger, my very great desire to be a writer, to the lives of these women artists. That book I wrote is not nothing. These days I wonder how much we as a society care about art?

In Art Objects, Winterson says, “If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question, “What has happened to our lives?” The usual question, “What has happened to art?” is too easy an escape route.” The title essay has been extensively quoted on Brainpickings, so I won’t do that here. But it has reminded me how much I have always craved conversations about art, questions about art, about life. Writing that book (and all of my books) was a way, for me, to ask questions, to imagine lives, faraway and unknowable, but with good intent and an open heart. Why? What were the conditions that produced this art? I was interested in knowing more. What were lives then, and what are our lives now? And what does art through time, say about our lives?

Daily we are reminded on social media that these types of conversations are vital and yet we receive mainly pronouncements and reactions and thou shalt nots or how dare yous. I’m not at all against social media. But one wishes for more poetic investigation, more hospitality being offered in a conversation. We want to talk things through, to get to another side, but acknowledge the mess of things, and to still find some kind of meaning, however impermanent, in flux it might be. I want to honour your intellect, and I would like you to also honour mine.

Whenever I think about conversations, then, (tangent alert), I turn to Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippett. She says, “The challenge of standing before open ruptures in civic life is matched, and complicated, by the challenge of standing hospitably before those who offend and harm and drive us crazy in an everyday way. So is standing hospitable with our own, perhaps justified, righteous indignation.” I think it’s interesting to think about the tone that has been adopted in many places. I get it; we’re all pissed off about a lot of terrible stuff. But is it getting us anywhere? Maybe sometimes, in some places. But what would happen if we reframed the questions? What would happen if we asked good questions and then listened to the answers? What if we spoke to each other as though we were sitting on our living room couch, hospitably.

I like what Tippett says: “The art of starting new kinds of conversations, of creating new departure points and new outcomes in our common grappling, is not rocket science. But it does require that we nuance or retire some habits so ingrained that they feel like the only way it can be done. We’ve all been trained to be advocates for what we care about. This has its place and its value in civil society, but it can get in the way of the axial move of deciding to care about each other.”

Tippett speaks about “generous listening” which she describes as being “powered by curiosity” and a “willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity.” And most importantly, I think, she says, “Generous listening in fact yields better questions. It’s not true what they taught us in school; there is such a thing as a bad question.”

Social media isn’t going away. I wonder how we can use it to ask better questions, and to do it from a position of caring about each other? Or is that absurd?

Again from Becoming Wise:

“I wish I could throw Elizabeth Alexander’s question by way of poetry, “Are we not of interest to each other?” into town hall meetings, the halls of Congress, and let it roll around for a while.”

“Our cultural mode of debating issues by way of competing certainties comes with a drive to resolution. We want others to acknowledge that our answers are right.”

“The alternative involves a different orientation to the point of conversing in the first place: to invite searching — not on who is right and who is wrong and the arguments on every side; not on whether we can agree; but on what is at stake in human terms for us all.”

You’ve all likely checked in with Kerry Clare’s Back to the Blog movement. And on Twitter, ha, yes, Austin Kleon, yesterday also recommended blogging. I like that the space of a blog is often a way of learning our way toward something. Best of all, the tone of a blog is very often a questioning sort of one. The stance is one that is interested, curious.

It’s the prevalent tone of certainty and self-righteousness that I’m never quite sure what to do with. Which is not to say that there aren’t people on there asking questions in transcendent ways. (Honestly, I wish I had this skill).

There is a passage from an interview Paul Auster did with Edmond Jabès that since reading it years ago I can never get out of my head, and I’ve quoted it often. EJ says:

“…when two people talk, one of them must always remain silent. We are talking now, for example, and as I am saying these words you are forced to remain silent. If we both spoke at the same time, neither one of us could hear what the other was saying. Now, during this silence that you impose on yourself, you are all the while forming questions and answers in your mind, since you can’t keep interrupting me. And as I continue to speak, you are eliminating questions from your mind: ah, you say to yourself, that’s what he meant, all right. But what if I went on speaking for a long time and we went away before you had a chance to reply?”

Which is to say that having a conversation with just two people is this amazing process, so tricky and complex and wonderful. But a conversation that takes place, disembodied, on the internet…how do we ever even get a handle on that?

But here, I’m going to end with a few more words by Krista Tippett:

“It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.”

And then one last thought…as writers, what questions can we ask that invite dignity and revelation?

February 14, 2020