🌱 True wisdom comes from feeling
What Hubert Selby Jr., Max Perkins, Rilke and Marie Howe tell us about getting past ego to the emotional gold
Hello, everyone. Here in Maryland, the heat and humidity of summer have departed at last and we’re reveling in the intense blue skies and clear light of late summer. This includes sleeping with the windows open and waking in deep night to caterwauling owls. Their raucous hoot-howling morphed into dreams of monkeys.
In my first monthly installment of “Talking Back to Walden,” I said that metaphor is an unconscious habit, a way to maintain safe intellectual distance instead of wading into the precarity of full immersion in nature. If you’re curious to experience a shift from an egocentric gaze to eco-centric participation, you can read that post here. Thanks to all those who shared it.
In the comments and on Chat, readers and subscribers shared delightful encounters with our non-human cousins—turtle, barred owl, slug, fox, jackrabbit, green tree frog, desert tortoise, skunk, and praying mantis. Maybe those animals are just as curious about us as we are about them. They’ve been trying all this time to get our attention. Subscribers enriched the Chat with their wonder and appreciation. We’d love for you to join us.
Today’s post follows this open-heartedness further, into wisdom. I hope you enjoy it.
On the DVD of the 2000 film, “Requiem for a Dream,” the great actress Ellen Burstyn has a conversation with the book’s author (and co-screenwriter) Hubert Selby Jr. Written in the 1970s, the novel is an unflinching dive into the hell of addiction. The film is rendered with timeless pathos by Darren Aronofsky. Selby tells Ms. Burstyn that he works consciously to get out of the way:
"The ego has to go. I don’t have the right to put me, the ego, between the people in the story and the reader. They should have an interrelationship and experience each other. Because, if you really want to teach, you have to do it emotionally. The intellect can get a whole bunch of information, but it doesn’t turn it into wisdom. And it’s wisdom that we need if we’re going to save our souls and this bloody thing! We need wisdom."
He also tells her that it took him a year to write one twenty-page story, and after he was done, he went to bed for about two weeks.1 For him, this is what it took to go beyond telling a story, to put the reader through an emotional experience.
Selby is onto something here. He found a path to fearlessness (courage in the face of fear) and open-heartedness, both.
I have these two chamber musician friends who always seem to be pleasant and positive and great to be around. I thought they were delightful because they are so much in their element, living the creative life, in their prime. Surrounded by beauty and collaboration and discovery with other artists.
Now I think it has as much to do with this ego-checking as anything. Or ego-fluidity. To see and hear them play, you are directly connected to the music. They literally bring it alive through their bodies: mind, heart, torso, arms, hands, fingers. Instead of focusing on them, you feel the music and its tones. Its color. They don’t insert between you and the pure emotional experience.
In the 2016 film, “Genius,” about the great editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner, he tells Thomas Wolfe that the editor should be in the background, unseen. He had equal genius to his authors, who included Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but his ego was a servant rather than a master. In a way, his role was to pull the words of these artists through that gate of ego, to get to the heart of their stories.
My question is always, where’s the shortcut? If the ego starts off more pliant, or more compliant, does the writing or the painting or the music-making go easier or more smoothly? That is doesn’t quite work that way seems to be a necessary part of creation.
Marie Howe told an interviewer about her experience writing her brilliant poem, “Annunciation.” Acting on a suggestion (one might say a dare) from her longtime friend and mentor, the poet Stanley Kunitz, she made several attempts and threw them away. Then she gave up. Her will (ego) finally exhausted, another voice came through. And that’s how the poem feels. Like a visitation. It’s an anthem to the Great Mystery, as well as a doorway into it.2
Maybe the creative struggle, or living a creative life, is less the labor pains of a birth and more a wrestling with something far greater than us. Rilke nails this in his poem, “The Man Watching:”
What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights us is so great!
He likens the struggle to wrestling with angels, saying:
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
The ego keeps trying to control it, which only makes it puny and trite and insignificant.
The experiences and stories that cultivate the heart and emotions bend to this insight: true wisdom comes not from intellect but from feeling. These are the stories most needed now. Selby speaks of it as compassion, which is exactly the experience I had with his characters in “Requiem for a Dream.” I felt deeply connected to them, even (especially) the strung-out heroin addicts. I understood their choices, even as I wished for them to make different ones. The magic of his storytelling is so immersive, I felt their entrapment acutely. I couldn’t see any other way, either.
I sometimes fantasize about skipping all the struggle and resistance of the creative process and going straight to the giving-over part. It does seem to be a package deal, though. The will is a sentinel with the job of preparing you to cross the threshold. Entry is barred until you are sufficiently humbled. I must appreciate my limitations and give up the need for control and certainty. And choose to resist no longer.
When the story, painting, or design idea finally does come through, I recognize it for the miracle that it is.
I relate to this so hard.
Ah yes, the package deal. The yearning to skip the effort and the fretting to get to the flow. In my presentation this week I talked about how learning to question the way we think allows us, with practice, to transcend our ego and possibly the egos in the room because we give our thoughts a little space. In this space lies a glimmer of time in which we can more consciously choose our reaction, as well as curiosity and non-judgment. This is the same space that transcends the ego of the musician, the writer or any creator, parent, teacher or human. I believe that special space may grow more palpable with practice and yet, there is still that threshold of humanness to get over.
This is wonderful, Julie! I love the image of your musician friends becoming the music, the self dissolving into the creative thing coming through. That's such a great reminder for me! 🤗