Have you ever yearned to return to a place you saw years ago? Trust me, it’s never the same. Either it changes, or inevitably we change without knowing it, and see the world differently. We think we have memories, when in fact they are mere fragments of consciousness. A fleeting impression of something too complex or too intimidating to recall in full. The same can be said of any book or work of Art. Invariably, what we come away with is a memory of reading or looking, some singular element or the concrete discernment that made it unique in our minds at the time. We may even go so far as to have contained a strong impression of the emotional timbre or intentional structure of a novel, the use of gestures and depth of color in a painting, and so forth. Returning to these favorite experiences, in both primary and secondary contexts, we reinforce the original impression with our contemporary ability for judgment. Our minds have grown up along with our personalities. We have replaced daydreams with lifetime aspirations. The writer is essentially a dreamer. He fills up his world with words to describe where he wants to go, who he wants to meet, and what he wants to know. If he is lucky he can have actual experiences, or see enough of that world that his observations can shape a vision of life strong enough to pull in others.
A repeat voyage to a story possesses inklings of the need to be nurtured in innocence. To have the same experience over and over again is to remember, if not the very first time, then the last time. Finding a memory is perhaps our only surviving private act. It’s mostly non-verbal and not even something that reports well in social media, where all of the intricate qualities of intimate moments are erased in the glare of absolute and universal communication. Some truths are not slogans, or memes, or adroit smarmisms (new word).
When I was 16 years old and at summer camp in upstate New York, I had a job as the Assistant to the Director of Athletics. I had to keep track of the sporting equipment and show up on time to distribute and collect it. I had some freedom to do as I liked when I wasn’t busy. One day I biked into town where I had lunch, read through comic books, and on my way home, passed a local church that was having a book sale. Inside were dozens of cardboard boxes each labeled with a theme or with a price. I bought three books, all of which still remain important in my creative mind: THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway, and the one least known to me, DEMIAN by Hermann Hesse. I also fell down and skinned my knee so I then had plenty of time to read. It was an eye-opening summer full of the dreams only great stories can bring, and great lives, if we can live them. That day was the beginning of my life in literature.
Those three books became a large part of my summer, and after I finished with them, I started looking everywhere for new books. I came home in August with a shelf of books that surprised my family. I stopped reading comic books and found a local shop where I could trade in my childhood books and other science fiction and fantasy novels for literary authors. They kept a credit account I could use to afford new books on my allowance, and I started taking local jobs to make more money for more books. DEMIAN remained a favorite of mine, and I started collecting all the books I could find by Hermann Hesse, some of which were in my family’s own library. I really got into the story of Emile Sinclair, a good boy from a good family whose youthful difficulties being a pawn of stronger boys, and his continued challenges growing up, were affected by the presence of one older boy named Max Demian, whose mind worked in very different ways. It’s typical of a theme in literature, the Bildungsroman, or story of childhood. As I was in the same period of life, teen and soon to be twenties, I felt and affinity for Emile and shared his fascination with the persona of Max. Here was a protagonist with almost no aspirations of his own except to somehow remain pure and unadulterated by the temptations of the physical world. Yet he had become connected to this other person, call him a friend for want of a better word, who had mysterious origins, and whose continued presence in Emile’s life complicated the simple vision he had for himself. Max himself has a novel way of approaching ideas and life, coming at them always from the opposite perspective, relinquishing the demands of enlightened discourse in favor of ideas that plunge the speaker and his conversation partner into doubt. He has a definite effect upon Emile, who later on seeks to investigate the sources of this platform for himself. At this Emile is unsuccessful, for although he wants to explore the two poles of belief, he cannot separate them from their previous associations. Faith makes him happy and doubt makes him miserable. He makes himself so emotionally desolate that he’s on the verge of losing everything that once mattered to him, and on a whim. This is how he perceives of nihilism, the element of thinking that he had originally received from Demian. Creation and destruction are all in our choices, though they may take forms that we do not recognize until years later.
I’ve dealt with the theme of creative destruction here on my Substack, in ‘The Making of Unmaking” parts 1 and 2, and will appear again in upcoming posts that are very much on my mind. Though these examples are specific, they point toward a cultural barometer that continues to take the temperature of how we respond to the changes happening around us all the time. Chaos, decay, and destruction are a part of history, and they affect everyday life as well. Days and years pass into time and become our shared past, a context we can interpret together. You will see it in the photographs of Raphael Zollinger, the collages of Bernice Sokol Kramer, and the drawings of Megan Greene, among others.
Humans seek safety when the world shakes, and something in them resets itself. Sinclair finds a way to realize his dreams through painting, and the few images he produces alter his understanding of what he’s going through and how he can change his fate. He paints the images that occur in his dreams. Once depicted they become part of the real world; they are reduced to an expressive cipher. He can think about them as they have taken on a finite and concrete form. They become useful symbols. The same can be said of artworks, though we come to them as viewers naked before the truth, unsure as to how or why they were originally made. Every artist, even those working in the same genre, has dramatically different reasons for creativity, and different strategies in their work. What they achieve in individual style and constancy of vision is equivalent to the realization of a unifying symbol, one which brings together elements once considered mutually opposed into a single form. Like a person, a successful art work achieves a degree of complexity and ambiguity all at once.
By the end of DEMIAN, Sinclair has not only answered most of his existential questions, but he has also met the figure that has haunted him, this strange woman whose image contains a man and a beast. It is Max Demian’s own mother, the source of his beliefs, and the core of his identity on the physical plane. Just as Sinclair had idealized his mother and the creed of his family’s spiritual life as being categorically one and the same, so had Demian come to represent a more knowable version of his mother. Together they form a family that embodies a different path to knowledge. We all reach an age of reason when it’s necessary to turn a certain corner, or many corners all at once, in order to see a mutable future.
Every year I come to the end of a season with some thoughts unresolved, and I wonder what truths will present themselves in the process of my writing, my looking at art, my reading of books, and my tasting of life. Thanks for reading this letter. I plan to be writing them at least twice a month if not more, between art and book posts and fiction. Please suggest my Substack to others and please follow it as a paid subscriber so that I can keep writing for only the best readers.
I want to thank everyone who's been loyally reading my emails and also on the site. It's averaging over 200 visits per post. I want to please ask that you consider becoming a paid subscriber, it would really help. Monthly subscriptions are $7.00 and Annual ones are $100 while for the most ardently loyal, a Founding Membership is $210 per year. See the button above. --Regards, David
I want to thank everyone who's been loyally reading my emails and also on the site. It's averaging over 200 visits per post. I want to please ask that you consider becoming a paid subscriber, it would really help. Monthly subscriptions are $7.00 and Annual ones are $100 while for the most ardently loyal, a Founding Membership is $210 per year. See the button above. --Regards, David
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