Robert Rauschenberg again:
“People ask me, “Don’t you ever run out of ideas?” In the first place I don’t use ideas. Every time I have an idea it’s too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven’t run out of curiosity.”
So many things you might read are painfully clotted because the poet is tying the whole thing in knots, trying to express an idea. This is a different thing from a conceit; a conceit can be a graceful, airy thing - like a tissue-paper funnel lit by a match. An idea is a thing that will weigh any work of art down with its constant need to be stuck to.
This (idea) reminds me of when I used to sit in a writing workshop where someone would read a story, based on their great-aunt or whatever, and if anyone said, for example, “the ending isn’t really working,” they’d say: “But that’s what happened!” People could get quite heated.
Or is that not about ideas? Well, it’s about thinking you know the end before you know the beginning, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it.
10 Comments
May 14, 2008 at 11:45 pm
You know, I’d never really thought about this before, but I’ve never had an ‘idea’ for a story or a poem or even a novel in my life. I’ve sat down and started writing and ended up where I ended up. If there’s an idea or two lurking in there then it’s pure fluke I can tell you. I like what Rauschenberg says about curiosity because I suppose that’s the core, especially with my fiction, put a character in a situation and play with them. Where’s the fun if you have any idea what’s going to happen?
May 15, 2008 at 12:07 am
The intuited final outcome, of endevours yet to be undertook, the stuff professed as prophetic text, the verse all yearn to create, has some mix of the supernatural to it, clear in the choice, the premeditated appearance of well wrought verse, such as Yeats cooked up in his own mad world of make believe; which needed a lot of years practice before he inhabited the final mask, and the trajectories he took, his balance of intellect and spirit, faith in the daemonic fanatsy his intelligence alone, coupled with the energies of M and G, and this is perhaps the stuff of the marvelous poetical zone where words arraign balanced and weighted, the process and practice having entered the new space of eloquence, speak or rather, appear due to what rules and con-tricks of poetry, and intuiting the end before a beginning, this is all we do..slip on the Frostean ice at the stove, the words falling loose and onto the page, the persona paying off, a world within, love and peace, a wing and prayer, but human it has to be..
May 15, 2008 at 9:42 am
Yes, poems based on ideas are not likely to amount to much: better ‘a piece of ice on a hot stove’ than a blueprint for an ice sculpture. The same could be said of much of the work produced by YBAs and their adherents; the idea is uppermost; in fact, most of it is nothing MORE than ideas, and pretty crude ones at that.
May 15, 2008 at 1:31 pm
What’s a poem if it’s not an idea?
Ideas are what you see, driving past somewhere.
May 15, 2008 at 1:45 pm
If auntie’s story has a poor ending then she needs ideas -clever ideas, that’s what people go to writing classes for -in vain hope.
May 15, 2008 at 7:05 pm
“What’s a poem if it’s not an idea?”
Experience, emotion and understanding distilled into a linguistic form that resonates rhythmically (and memorably). It will probably involve metaphor or imagery or both. It may contain a conceit. It may even have an idea or two knocking about in there. But it will certainly not BE an idea.
When I see something striking from a car, plane etc. it presents firstly as image. If the image is resonant enough, if I’m lucky and the right neurons fire, it may translate to a couple of words, ’synaptic lightning’, a phrase, even a line. Sure, you can argue that images are ideas; ANY conception is an idea; language itself is an idea, one of the big ones. But I think it is fairly clear what Robert Rauschenberg meant when he said he found ideas ‘too limiting.’ His American flag paintings may have ideas in them, but those ideas (political etc.) are very pale ghosts beside the paintings themselves.
Returning for a moment to your own phrase: ‘Ideas are what you see, driving past somewhere.’ I once saw, from the window of a plane, two flame-towers from an offshore rig between snatches of cloud. The image was the first thing that leapt at me. I wanted to take a photograph but they were already gone. Then a word or phrase came, possibly ‘candles’, since they looked rather like candles. Then, at some stage, a line from Yeats: ‘Heavenly mansions blazing in the dark.’ Later, over a few months, a couple of years, the poem came together. A very short poem, but I was happy enough with it. My point is, the image came first, long before any ideas, and it was my guiding light. One may lose sight of the image; it may collapse into an idea too easily. The flame-towers may be overtaken by a wish to write a poem about eco-catastrophe. Personally though, I think this is usually a mistake.
When ideas have primacy, as they do in the art world at present and for quite some time now, we get cold, flashy icons of self-infatuation, like Hirst’s shark or diamond skull or Emin’s pathetic dome tent; ‘art’ that would shrivel up and die on the spot without those Ideas (hugely inflated like overly decorative Victorian hot air balloons) supporting them.
May 15, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Whoops, Jasper Johns was the flag painter, sorry. Rauschenberg’s the goat and tyre man. Same difference.
May 15, 2008 at 8:31 pm
You can invent images, create the truth. I wrote about a bloke pissing in a piano while a woman was playing. I never saw it, I made it up, but it’s true, because I know him; he’d do that.
A monkey can see images, you need ideas. Or as my shifty lawyer used to say: “Well I wouldn’t quite put it that way.”
ha ha. It’s how you put it, that’s right.
May 15, 2008 at 11:36 pm
“A monkey can see images, you need ideas.”
Sure, a monkey can SEE images. A monkey can also ’see’ ideas (e.g. grasp the elements of sign language).
But I don’t think monkeys have quite reached the stage of selecting one, poetic image from the welter streaming into the primary visual cortex and then finding words to encapsulate it. Not to my knowledge anyway.
May 16, 2008 at 6:46 am
Okay.
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