Sensibility and the Imagination
DISINTEGRATING RAIMENT
We all want to replenish and renew ourselves, but as artists there is a special need because art comes out of the body. Our toolbox is found within ourselves, wherever we store feeling and imagination. Some days those can feel flat, almost without a pulse, and the work if it emerges is mechanical and lifeless.
Some people resort to technical innovations to simulate life and energy, but ultimately technical means cannot replicate energy or inspiration.
What we need as artists is to develop a sensibility that feeds us rather than exhausts us, a sensibility that is connected to all the senses. Not in Jane Austen’s sense, but something free of courtesy and social mores.
Sensibility as I intend it is an old word used primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries. Similar to imagination, but not quite. Similar also to an appreciation of the world through the senses, but much more than that. Connected to an aesthetic awareness of the world around us, but then we would have to know more fully what was meant by “aesthetic”. Because the word has fallen out of favour we have no easy way to understand or communicate what it used to mean and what it could still mean.
In the late 18th and early 19th century, the Romantics (including Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Fuseli, Caspar Wolf, Gericault, Delacroix) were very much influenced by doctrines that emphasized feeling rather than logic, and their work, such as the ‘Sturm und Drang” of the Germans, focused on paintings of storms, shipwrecks, natural disasters that could all be read allegorically for social upheavals and personal passions.
But it was the poets who provided the clearest doctrine on how artistic sensibility could be developed. The English poets, particularly Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats wrote extensively on how poets (and artists) could develop their creative powers.
First there was a distinction made between ordinary daydreaming and fantasy and the superior Imagination, which was held to be a spiritual power, in touch with God. The idea was that if an artist was inspired by God, then provided that the skill was there, the work of genius would emerge.
The ideas on what an artist could do were quite specific. Central to all of them was some sort of relationship with Nature. Such a relationship would feed the “sensibility.”
Sensibility in their sense was a mental capacity in touch with feeling that operated when one opened to Nature with full attention, and then made sure to remember the details of an encounter or of an observation with all the senses. After returning home, the artist would recollect (re-collect) either in sketches or journaling the precise details of the experience. Such a collecting constituted a remembering (re-membering), that is, an operation of the inner intelligence with feeling which helped to form a unity of being, a “self”. This self was connected to the senses, but also had the power of reflection, and thus could begin to shape the recorded impressions. Immediate sensuous experience, reflection, artistic work, and memory were all connected in one effort that resulted in the making of the Artist. Over time, the responses fed an aesthetic, a consistent way of apprehending the world based on beauty and meaningfulness.
Such an enterprise of the imagination may sound complex, but it is as simple as any direct way of thinking and feeling about the world. The one distinction is that the artist tries to channel most of her or his experience through mindful attention to Nature and the senses.
Such activity energized and fed the ability to create art. Turner had himself tied to ship masts during sea storms when sailors hid below decks so that he could experience the storm directly and feel it within himself. They thought he was crazy. The poet Wordsworth was the original tree-hugger. Fuseli cultivated dreams so that they would flow into his work when needed. Delacroix studied horses so intensely he could feel their musculature within himself. These were not the efforts of hobbyists but of those dedicated even at the cost of their lives to the making of art. As long as the goal was clearly transcendent few questioned what artists did. The results showed us Nature or a version of paradise. But by the mid nineteenth century, during the Symbolist period, artists sought to remake themselves by trying to experience the darker pleasures and worse, deliberately courting what religions might characterize as damnation. They were not interested in restricting themselves to Nature. They ere deliberately interested in decadence. Or, in the spirit of Blake’s “Tyger”, they sought the infernal energies, which they believed were part of human experience. Poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud crossed to the other side of the street so to speak and embraced everything. Moral restrictions were associated with bourgeois loving and outmoded religious thought. Rimbaud indulged in every kind of extremism in order to stimulate his imagination and ability to produce poetry. Instead of Nature as the source of inspiration, the mind and its ability to construct intricate dialectical harmonies with violence, addiction, even depravity, became the source. Such a change happened at the same time as urban centers became the drivers of culture and artistic movements and chaos became the resounding tone. Experimentation was the new driver of artistic cultivation.
It is difficult to do justice to the way the gradual loss of connection to our bodies and to the imagination affected culture. Since we tend to use the same words, we don’t notice that we mean different things by them from one century to the next, and now even from one generation to the next. Words like imagination, nature, recollection, sensuousness, contemplation—even conversation—mean something very different. We may say that meanings change to show the changes in circumstances. Of course. But what have we lost, and can we re-gain what we have lost? Some words, like sensibility, sound quaint or academic, when originally they were powerful, body-based concepts tied to practice and the creation of beauty. We can re-acquaint ourselves with such concepts, but they cannot be New Age enthusiasms if they are to work artistically.
We begin simply, with ourselves, our bodies, our habitual ways of responding, and we pay attention to the language we use about all this. And then we take a step towards what is in front of us. The first step is openness and appreciation. From there how we memorialize the new connection depends on our ability to accept the gift of what is without demanding specific outcomes.
