"You Must Change Your Life"
TORN BUTTERFLY WINGS THREE
How do I improve as an artist? The question resounds mentally week after week, if not often, then too many times to ignore. The obvious options are always there: improve your technique through repetition (the 10,000 hours theory of acquiring mastery comes to mind) or through developing new skillful means. But the artists from the Past that we have come to admire often speak of something else. Don’t change the instrument or how you wield it; change the artist.
So what does that mean? Changing the artist, I think, refers to how we look at others and how we look at the world. Give up daydreaming and talking to yourself. Instead, notice, pay attention, open yourself up to the world, sacrifice your prejudices, show love to plants and animals.
This sounds awfully mushy. But it is actually intensely practical and feelingful. Tending to the world will help us notice more. Sacrificing prejudices will help us hold onto contraries, that is, ideas, sentiments, visual elements that seem to contradict each other. But instead of extinguishing one of the elements, we hold in consciousness both of them for as long as we can—permanently, if we wish.
The poet Keats called that negative capability, and, for him, negative capability ensured a wealth of new impressions and insights. The poet Rilke developed his aesthetic while he was working with Rodin. Rilke believed that a focused attention to the details of the world resulted in a creative fire, particularly when combined with sympathy and a desire for understanding. What is interesting from our point of view as contemporary readers is that empathy, that is much talked about today by psychologists and psychotherapists, is actually a term invented by artists and writers on art in the 19th century to describe the state induced when one is deeply connected to a work of art. The Germans called it Einfühlung, literally meaning “feeling-in. Originally, empathy was used as a means of enlivening an object, even by kinaesthetic means. Freud read the various essays on empathy and introduced the term to psychology, and many years later, new ideas of empathy emerged that were more caring. Initially, however, what was sought was a means of temporarily merging with an object in order to know and to feel its essence. Without losing oneself of course.
Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908) shows us in a startling way what is necessary. It ends like this:
“…for here there is no place
that does not see you,
you must change your life. “
Of course, as an artist you still show up at the studio. You still do the work. There is no way around that.
