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Date Posted: 21:03:00 05/28/08 Wed
Author: SS
Subject: *****************TUESDAYJOURNAL#4*************

Noah Eaton
May 24, 2008
Writing 420

Praising The Butterfly Experience


William Stafford states directly in a conversation with Steven Ratiner titled “Opening the Moment”, published in his critical works compilation “Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation” that he likes to think of his poetry as poetry of praise, adding: “Praise in the sense that it is an embracing of emerging experience. It is a participation in discovery. I am a butterfly, I’m not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.“ (31)
This fascinated me to the fullest, because I have simultaneously been taking a writing rhetoric class (holds breath) where I have been reading, among other things, theory studies into visual rhetorics and mental images, metaphor as a linguistic device, cognitive development, emotion in writing and personality in writing and, upon reading “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing” by Janet Emig, I was especially struck by how she alludes to Stephen Spender’s essay “The Making of a Poem”, where he distinguishes artists into two categories; Mozartians and Beethovians.
In summarizing Spender’s key notions, Emig explains that the Mozartian “is one who can instantaneously arrange encounters with his unconscious; he is one in whom the creative self leads a constant and uninterrupted life of its own, serene to surface disturbances, oblivious of full upper activity--coach riding, concert-giving, bill-paying.” (52). Emig continues: “The Mozartian can ‘plunge the greatest depths of his own experience by the tremendous effort of a moment.’ and surface every time with a finished pearl.” (52) such as in some Piano Concerto in C Major.
In contrast, Emig explains that the Beethoven “is the agonizer, the evolutionizer.” (52) where its creative self “is not a plummeting diver, but a plodding miner who seems at times to scoop south with his bare hands.” (52). Emig also presents us with the metaphor of an artichoke eater in explaining how a Beethovian composes: made up of “pricks and inadequate rewards in our tedious leaf-by-leaf spiraling toward the delectable heart.” (52)
Looking beyond Spender’s other claims, such as those of the eccentricities of poets likely coming from “mechanical habits or rituals developed in order to concentrate.” (49) whether they be drinking endless cups of tea or lodging rotten apples in the drawer of your writing desk, I found myself thinking: “What about those who both have a penchant for simultaneously gracing the sea floors of their own experiences, while also being consciously aware of the conflicts and inadequate awards that pepper them? Are there not a notable number of composers who possess this balance of expectations and results?”
This led me to brainstorming about other composers I have been familiar with. Was Antonio Salieri not a teacher of both Beethoven and Mozart’s son Franz, whose distinguished chamber music sound consequentially became forgotten as Mozart soared in popularity, and has only most recently been recognized again? Has Franz Joseph Haydn not been widely regarded and credited as the “Father of the Symphony”, who was famously known for his jocose, optimistic personality but nonetheless also was known for writing famous “storm and stress” compositions that relied heavily on intense expression? Was Franz Schubert not instrumental in popularizing the Lied genre; forming a new balance between words and music so that we find ourselves immersing in the music through our sense of the poetry in them?
Then another prominent name entered my head: Antonio Vivaldi. A Venetian priest-turned-Baroque musical composer, well-known for his violin virtuosity, whose work was surprisingly unknown as recently as 1930 to the masses, when 18 of his operas and 300 concerts, both religious and secular, were discovered in a Piedmont monastery library, yet whenever anyone hears “The Four Seasons” he is immediately recognizable?
I certainly remember the first time I ever listened to the full-length recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” when I was eight years old. Upon my first listen, I clearly remember how good it felt listening to the opening allegro of “Spring”, but then feeling a bit of uneasiness when listening to the closing Presto of the “Summer” portion with its tumultuous thunderstorm undercurrents nonetheless coupled with the lilting whimsicality of butterflies kissing the tiger lilies, leading to the gentle reflection of “Autumn” ending, finally, in a languishing yet pleasing “Winter”, where the tone of its closing Allegro feels nonetheless phlegmatic, yet its Largo also has tinctures of joviality.
Are there not composers among us who so eloquently have the gift of not only dabbling a tone to a poem, but also gauzing it with contradictory themes and results? I would surmise that, to insinuate that there are only “constant” (Mozartians) and “clumsy” (Beethovian) composers among us, I believe, leads us right back to the central question Emig raises in the first place which is: “Why do we receive such surface scrapings?” I do not doubt that Emig recognizes the problem we, as writers, face, in that implicitly through our actions and attitudes we “believe writing to be wholly, or predominantly, a conscious action; or, to state the matter inversely, by acts and attitudes that suggest there is no unconscious self importantly engaged in the composing process.” (46) yet I also feel, in the end, she offers little assurance in how we can go about re-examining these acts and attitudes, and ultimately only succeeds in scraping the surface again.
While not dismissing that there are indeed Salieris, Haydns, Schuberts, Albinonis and Sweelincks, among others, permeating the literary world, I would certainly argue there are many “Vivaldians” among us; who are both directly shaped by their experiences as well as intuitively defined by conflict, where both these qualities are essential to the anatomy of any composition.
Which leads me right back to Stafford’s fascinating conversation, where I was also moved by his explanation to a question regarding a line in an essay of his that reads: “It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.” where Stafford responds:

“I have this feeling of wending my way or blundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It’s endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. The words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.” (30)


Gertrude Stein himself provides some sense of how a “Vivaldian” might approach the paper with pen as quoted in Emig‘s article, where they “write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery” (48) and that one “cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole--and there it is and you have made and felt it, but it has come itself--and that is creative recognition “ (48)
And it is this quality that I feel has made “The Four Seasons” a definitive work of the Baroque classical era. Despite all the constant shifts in tone between the seasons, despite the varying textures of each season, from the lingering heat of the summer to the icy precipitation and haze of winter, it comes across as a cohesive, whole work produced intuitively from that virtue of discovery, where even my eight-year-old self was able to sense those uninterrupted transitions from one seasonal cusp to the next, yet also appreciate the composition for its instinctual grasp of balancing tension and repose.
Can there not be evolution without constancy? Can there not be serenity without agonizing? Whether Vivaldi had a specific daemon of sorts is beyond our present knowledge (hopefully none of that quill-scratching much-maligned by Emig, LOL!) yet when she says herself that ones own written words is a form of incantation altogether, after one has written a number of words on a page and has examined them, one can “discern a pattern or theme in the seeming written chaos.” (51), is this not the mindset of someone who is not quite Mozartian yet one who is not quite Beethovian at task, but rather someone who is wending through that proverbial jungle?
If indeed, as Stein also argues, the creative recognition has came itself, rather than us coming to greet this creative recognition, then I conclude by asking: “Why settle with just “Don Giovanni” and “Beethoven’s Tenth: A Symphony in Prose”? If I had my druthers I’d rather go skipping barefoot in the azalea glade chasing butterflies to the tone of “Farnace“! :)

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