Yield (2)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Yield by Anne Truitt.
Welcome to the second installment of Asynchronous Studio Book Club for Yield by Anne Truitt. Notes that follow pertain to the second and third sections, “Spring” and “Summer.” Kindly respond to them or anything germane in the comments.
A point
Page 33:
The distinctness of consciousness.
A point at the apex of a triangle.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch just lost a bet made 25 years ago against philosopher David Chalmers that in the intervening time, someone would find evidence of a neurobiological structure correlating to consciousness. We are distressingly far from understanding consciousness considering how progress in artificial intelligence is galloping.
A bad decision
On page 35, Truitt relates a decision by her parents to relocate the family domicile.
My parents sold their beautiful house there [in Easton, Maryland] and moved us all to Asheville, North Carolina, in the fall of 1935. The exiled us all - my sisters and me and themselves…. A complex decision. It took courage. I respect that…. But it was a bad decision. They lost their place in the world. They were not faithful to what it had taken them fifteen years to build.
That hit a nerve. I pulled up stakes in Boston after fourteen years. My lawyer, of all people, tried to dissuade me of the idea that the events of 2020 and 2021 were indicative of things to come. But we’re happier here. A turkey just came through the yard with three chicks. When earlier this year The Monoculture forever disgraced the Boston Commons with an H.R. Gigeresque excrescence in ostensible recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr., it was no longer my city and I was thus spared the embarrassment of association.
Images of sculptures
Page 36 records a graduate student from Hunter who asked what Truitt would have done if she had earned more money.
She didn’t mean to make me sad, but she did: images of the sculptures I have not been able to make rose up in my inner eye, springing up around and over me like a forest of balloons inflating.
That hit a nerve of even greater sensitivity. I had to close the book, tell my wife I love her, and take a break from reading more for a few days. Degas once recalled that he had locked away a wealth of ideas in a cabinet, but in old age had lost the key. Truitt retained the key but had no means to turn it in the lock.
A new award program to which I applied, one that I was hoping would not yet be corrupted, just published its list of recipients, all sporting pronouns next to their names and enmeshed in progressive politics. Of the two white male recipients of this award, of fifteen total, one is fluffing for Ukraine, about which one does not have to be a Russophile to think an idiotic American cause. The other uses his work to “explore stories of revolution, gentrification, climate change, [and] racial injustice.” I will one day find my cabinet sealed because of the political prejudices of the people running most of these programs, prejudices that are more acute, intractable, and evil than the racism of most racists and the sexism of most sexists. Racists, in my experience, generally understand that their prejudices are frowned upon. On the contrary, the politically prejudiced believe their hatred ennobling.
Morris Graves
The death of Morris Graves is noted on page 48 with the news that his home “will become an artist’s retreat under the aegis of the Morris Graves Foundation.” I attended that retreat in 2012, unsure whether I’d return to a marriage or a divorce. It was the latter. Perhaps because I never had children with the woman in question, and married again, I don’t understand the nostalgia that Truitt expresses for her former husband. It is like her nostalgia in Yield for Japan, which I gathered from Daybook she didn’t especially care for.
I have great nostalgia for the retreat.
Some self I have known
Page 56:
It took me a long while to believe that I actually am an artist. And even now, defined, I think of myself as some self I have known for as long as I can remember, whom I look out of rather than inhabit.
Yes, it is like that. And yet she was able to recognize the greatness of David Smith merely by the way he walked. One would think that someone, at some point, granted himself that recognition without arrogance. But I have never heard of it.
I chose the paint
Pages 69-70:
A doctor’s appointment at 8:45 a.m. forced me to choose between washing my hair and starting the coats of paint that will finish Twining Court. I chose the paint.
Brenda Ueland, from If You Want to Write, still the best book about how to make art ever written:
“If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you.”
Muses
Page 79:
“Muses,” Yeats wrote Ezra Pound, “resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain.”… Curiosity can be prurient, analysis irrelevant. To artists ever deadly, the mind being so nimble yet so eager to know, to reach an emotional resolution that can freeze-dry an impulse into comfortableness. The leap to “Chinese porcelain” has to be taken over an abyss of unknowing.
You could go to art school until the end of time and never encounter instruction so wise.1 Understand this and act accordingly, and you will be free. This is a note to self.
Intimacy and the Creative Pair
The paragraphs on pages 82-83 highlight just how lame most contemporary exhibition conceits seem to people who actually know what they’re doing. As I wrote about “Philip Guston Now” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:
What the MFA characterizes as complacency regarding white supremacy is in fact a sharp intensity of artistic seriousness. The institutions are in danger of forgetting that such seriousness ever existed.
Truitt’s is the kind of seriousness I was talking about. The same goes for the reluctance to recommend a particular artist for a fellowship, recalled on page 85. “As I weighed the many pages of her resume I kept seeing the image of a skein of water over a wide landscape, a shallow pond reflecting a colorless sky.” One suspects that the analogy is better art than the art it describes.
Pleasure
Page 87:
Pater’s innocent enthusiasm is endearing. He reminds me of Clement Greenberg. Clem used to go by what he called his “take.” The most lively companion to look at art with: his pleasure rose so spontaneously that it seemed to pull his temperature up with it.
From the Aphorisms:
Art rides in on pleasure.
The pleasure carries something with it, something very precious to us that is inseparable from the pleasure itself.
I live with that something every day, but I can’t say what it is. No one can. If you have an eye, you comprehend it in an instant; you feel it and you know it.
Two
Two, mentioned on page 89 and after, is pictured above.
Aristocracy
Page 102:
[Clyfford Still] claimed that “art is the only aristocracy left where a man takes full responsibility.” I remember David [Smith] saying that too: “Artists are the only aristocrats.”
Now, hardly any of them are. See “Democracy is Killing Art,” from 2015.
All will be obliterated
The dream recalled on pages 111-112 is harrowing and I have ones like it not infrequently. I hope you don’t.
September 11
Remember how Trump’s border wall was supposedly exorbitant, impossible to pay for? We have sent eight times its proposed price tag to Ukraine in conjunction with the Russian incursion. It is in that light I read the recollections of 9/11 on pages 123-25. Progressives once loathed war and feared the prospect of a nuclear conflict. Now they’re courting them.
“Planetization” (p. 125) is explained in a footnote as a concept from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A Great Event Foreshadowed: The Planetization (1945) can be found in its entirety online. I’m sorry to say that while the progressives have lost their appetite for pacifism, they have only gained in their fondness for crackpot collectivism.
Although our individualistic instincts may rebel against this drive towards the collective, they do so in vain and wrongly. In vain, because no power in the world can enable us to escape from what is in itself the power of the world. And wrongly because the real nature of this impulse that is sweeping us towards a state of super-organization is such as to make us more completely personalized and human.
The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion.
Beatings will continue until morale improves. It was in response to this kind of Gnosticism that Eric Voegelin pointed out the fallacy of trying to immanentize the eschaton. Artists’ politics are usually soft-headed, and to this point I’ve been forgiving about them in Yield. It will be harder for me to look past them going into the next sections. This is all upstream of Covidianism and similar failures.
Edifying myself about Teilhard de Chardin prompted me to wonder about a note from Yield on page 113:
Every single instance of disharmony in my experience had been initiated and egged on by egoism. Not that other people haven’t contributed to the disharmony - egoism is catching, and perhaps I have sometimes caught it from others.
To this she tries to respond by “Turning on a beam of intelligence until it dissolves.” Sure enough, here’s Teilhard, emphasis and capitalization his:
It is to this alarming course of psychic decomposition, and at the very moment when it seems to be reaching its crisis, that the prospect of a human planetary fulfillment brings the appropriate remedy. If, as we have shown, the social phenomenon is not merely a blind determinism but the portent, the inception of a second phase of human Reflexion (this time not merely individual but collective), then it must mean that the phylum is reconstituting itself above our heads in a new form, a new ramification, no longer of divergence but of convergence; and consequently it is the Sense of Evolution which, suppressing the spirit of egoism, is of its own right springing to new life in our hearts, and in such a way as to counteract those elements in the forces of collectivization which are poisonous to Life.
I feel as though I have lifted a rock and found centipedes. I have forgiven artists for much worse than susceptibility to spiritual quackery, but it’s disappointing in comparison to Celia Paul’s sensitive Anglicanism.
Kindly share your thoughts about the above or anything relevant in the comments.
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I would like to make the School of Shape and Form an exception.
That aphorism you quote is of course referring to art that is the genuine article, not just something designated or accepted as art. To my mind, what is carried by and inherent in the pleasure is a sense of rightness mixed with wonder, a delight in discovering that a fruitful idea, impulse or intuition has taken tangible form and become manifest, and that its rightness is a validation and a gift.
What you call the politically prejudiced I would call the politically corrupted, if not possessed. It is a state that is essentially anti-human, and its manifestations reflect that perversion.