## Metadata - Author: [[Jane Hirshfield]] - Full Title: Ten Windows - Category: #books ## Highlights - What a writer or painter undertakes in each work of art is an experiment whose hoped-for outcome is an expanded knowing. Each gesture, each failed or less-than-failed attempt to create an experience by language or color and paper, is imagination reaching outward to sieve the world. ([Location 191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=191)) - it is as if the fish of perception did not exist until it is caught. ([Location 194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=194)) - Looked at from its own word-history, a statement is how we declare our place in the world. The word’s Indo-European root leads back to “stand”—holding oneself upright on the earth. Standing is the human posture in the body, and statement the human posture in the mind. ([Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=330)) - “Muse” derives from the Latin mussare, meaning first “to carry in silence,” then “to brood over in silence and uncertainty,” and then only finally “to murmur or mutter, to speak in an undertone.” ([Location 346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=346)) - The linguistic root of “art” means most simply “skill”: it signals a task undertaken in some particularly effective way. Near it in the dictionary are words concerning themselves with small, ingenious, and movable fittings: words used to denote the body’s physical joints, or the idea of compression, or the condition of things packed tightly together while still maintaining their distinctness. Etymologically, then, an “articulate” person is one who speaks by dividing things into their precise parts, but also with awareness of the precisely geared clockworks on which an argument must turn. ([Location 387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=387)) - Art—some part of a life distilled to essential and self-aware gesture— ([Location 407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=407)) - Art’s desire is not to convey the already established but to transform the life that takes place within its presence. ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=427)) - Drop a leaf into water and it will simply be taken, sliding swiftly between rocks and away. But that small fish in the creek, living, both darts at will through the current and resists it. Just so, a work of art resists time while shaping itself to a form that can navigate and answer time’s continual pressure. ([Location 434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=434)) - The rustling fabric of Herrick’s consonants and vowels, the muscular wit not only of Glück’s mind but of her music, are the means by which their lines’ language-joy is taken in. This steady undercurrent of joy is the elixir vitae by which good art revives us, moistening the dry regions of more straightforward thought, more straightforward ways of seeing and hearing. ([Location 448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=448)) - It may feel as if we have done nothing, only given a little time and space of attention; but some hairline-narrow crack opens in the self’s sense of purpose, and there art, there beauty, is. The result is as irresistible as eros, as voracious as the new green weeds in the crack of a sidewalk. Art’s limitlessness awakens in us the sense of the psyche’s own limitless rooms. It is how the inner world grows continually new. ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=455)) - What have we gathered thus far into our fold? The outer world of image in all its mottled shapes and scents, its antlered and stamened densities, its secretions of nectar and sweat. The complex or simple statements that are our reply to that world. The moods and modes of the gatekeeping Muses, their playfulness and also their silences, pauses, and doubts. The necessity for musical shapeliness and its muscular, resilient collaboration with time. Movement. The shivering joy of aesthetic encounter. ([Location 459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=459)) - Every good work of art holds something that was not quite knowable before its own existence. ([Location 505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=505)) - Lawrence’s requirement for a poetic “thought”—when we enter its words, a door is felt to open, and a light wind recognizably true blows through the reader. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=518)) - with a forensic pleasure in close perception, we distinguish one anonymous Old Master from the rest by the idiosyncratic pose of the hands, by the strange largeness and extra height of a woman’s forehead. ([Location 525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=525)) - Virgil’s warning to Dante when traveling in hell: if he is to see rightly, pity is forbidden. The eye that wishes to see human nature complete must be unclouded by tears, unclouded even by allegiance. Pity, William Blake wrote, divides the soul. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=538)) - Art carries all the flavors and scents of the human. The single, fundamental request of sensibility is that we respond in turn to what we perceive. As strong feeling initiates outer events, it initiates also art. ([Location 542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=542)) - It was the Greek gods’ pleasure, it seems, to stir up troubling passions; the working out of what then unfolded amused them. It also allowed them to partake of the range and weathers of human feeling, more interesting than their own eternal and essentially unchanging repetitions of stylized follies and feasts. In the human realm, what we make of our feelings matters: has weight, has breath, creates an irreversible fate. And so Antigone’s millennia-old dilemma still moves us, and Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice remains both the story of a heartbreaking surrender to human weakness and a clue—the true musician is the one who sings on, after the second loss. Even when music is powerless, even when it includes failure and shame as well as grief, he sings. Feeling what cannot be borne, he sings. Amidst and past his own dying, he sings. ([Location 544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=544)) - “It is our task to imprint this provisional, perishing earth in ourselves so deeply, with such passion and endurance, that its reality rises again in us ‘invisibly.’ We are the bees of the invisible. We distractedly plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it into the great golden hive of the Invisible” ([Location 566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=566)) - The artist and language and the page are given over to one thing alone—or rather, into no separable thing at all: they have surrendered the condition of noun to become fully verb. They are working. And this working, the creative act of a whole and undivided being, is the one true appetite of the writer’s tongue and mind and heart, ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=587)) - The English word “hiding” is sewn from the hides of animals’ bodies. Both words derive from Old German and Sanskrit terms for protection, and it’s worth noticing that many animals’ skins offer not only a physically protective membrane but also the visual protection of coloring, whether by strategies of camouflage or drabness. The German huota lingers on as well in the intimate dwelling place that is a “hut.” ([Location 1130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1130)) - Only words that enlarge the realm of the possible merit borrowing our attention from the world of the actual and the living: they will return us to it restored to the knowledge of a malleability and amplitude we may have forgotten. ([Location 1249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1249)) - Lyric poetry rests on a fulcrum of said and unsaid, and lives by clarities and complexities alloyed in mysteriously counterbalancing proportion. ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1302)) - W. H. Auden called great art, “clear thinking about complex feelings. ([Location 1305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1305)) - As the making and solving of riddles creates intelligence, so a distinctive self is created by navigating a path between the desire for a sheltering hiddenness and the wish to both see and be seen. ([Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1351)) - the British psychologist D. W. Winnicott described the dilemma of childhood by saying “It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.” ([Location 1355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1355)) - In life, as in literature and myth, the desire to strip reality down to some bare and blunt truth reflects delusion, hubris, or reductionism’s inedible dust. ([Location 1370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1370)) - Until she engages the world with oil lamp and open eyes, Psyche cannot become what her name has come to mean: a soul, a being fully engaged in the living through of her own deep existence. ([Location 1372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1372)) - Certain jokes, teaching tales, and koans share a similar intention: to dismantle all certainties concerning a person’s place in the world. ([Location 1377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1377)) - When the world is looked at from the condition of asking, each thing is seen both for itself, just as it is, and as the holder of the immeasurable mysteries good questions unlatch. A world—or book—that is felt to contain the hidden is inexhaustible to the imagination. New possibilities surround any moment that presents itself as question rather than answer. ([Location 1385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1385)) - Hiddenness is the ballast in the ship’s keel, the great underwater portion of a life that steadies the rest. The thirteenth-century Zen teacher Eihei Dogen described its weight of presence thus: “There are mountains hidden in treasures. There are mountains hidden in swamps. There are mountains hidden in the sky. There are mountains hidden in mountains. There are mountains hidden in hiddenness. This is complete understanding.” ([Location 1396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1396)) - As Ted Hughes wrote, “Like Cordelia in King Lear, perhaps the more sure of itself truth is, the more doubtful it is of the adequacy of words.” ([Location 1405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1405)) - For those willing to let themselves feel it, any story leaves behind an uneasiness, sometimes at the center, other times at the edge of perception, and like the remainder left over in a problem in long division, it must be carried. Literature’s work, and particularly poetry’s, is in part to take up that residue and remnant, to find a way to live amid and alongside the uncertain. ([Location 1448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1448)) - Poetry often enacts the recovering of emotional and metaphysical balance, whether in an individual (primarily the lyric poem’s task) or in a culture (the task of the epic). Yet to do that work, a poem needs to retain within its words some of the disequilibrium that called it forth, and to include when it is finished some sense also of uncomfortable remainder, the undissolvable residue carried over—disorder and brokenness are necessarily part of human wholeness. ([Location 1497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1497)) - Wallace Stevens called writing an act of self-preservation, the imagination pressing back against the inward-pressing real. This is less a wisdom coolly achieved than sleight of hand, a conjured aikido of language. The most serene works on the bookshelf are nonetheless in the lineage of Scheherazade’s stories—art holding incoherence and death at bay by invention of beauty, detour, and suspense. This is Sartre’s definition of genius: not a gift, but the escape a person invents in a desperate time. ([Location 1509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1509)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - How to name where poetry’s consoling powers may lie? One part can be found in what has already been seen in Anna Swir’s poem: the sense of connection with others that good poems both emerge from and forge. In the simplest act of recognizing the imaginative, metaphoric, or narrative expression of another, you find yourself less lonely, more accompanied in this life. Another part may come in what the medieval alchemists called solutio—the process of making something workable and transformable by making it more fluid, whether in the physical or metaphysical realms. A difficult thing is “hard,” we say; a mathematical answer arrived at is “solved.” A good poem, then, is a solvent, a kind of WD-40 for the soul. This is the efficacy of Aristotle’s catharsis. To feel oneself moved creates in itself an increase of freedom; outward circumstance is not the self’s only definition when the imagination is present to press against it. ([Location 1525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1525)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Another facet of poetry’s solace, related to solutio, is the increase of subtlety a good poem provides. Subtlety’s etymological roots lie in loom-woven cloth. It is the name we give to thought that is both finely textured and ranging, able to bring disparate and multiple qualities into the unified, usable fabric of a new whole. The uncertain is subtlety’s inscape: what is woven has—and needs—gaps. In subtle response, thought is stitched into place with its own undertows, opposites, and extensions, by a mind that questions and crosshatches its statements and feelings. Language itself is subtle by nature, multi-stranded of meaning—and what is good poetry if not language awake to its own powers? ([Location 1534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1534)) - Oracle bones stand at the beginning of writing as well—in the mythological pantheon of China, as in Greece, the god of divination is also the god who brings writing into existence. Among the earliest remaining abstract markings are those notched upon bones; such artifacts go back at least fifteen thousand and possibly forty thousand years. To imagine the moment of discovery is easy: a person about to discard a femur or rib notices the marks of the hunting axe, or perhaps a row of nicks and scrapings left by the flaked-stone butchering knife, and decides to add to the pattern. Bone, whose hardened calcium enables terrestrial fleetness, is transformed after death into something quite different: a way to make a record at once portable and lasting. The white surface becomes a first, glimmering intimation of paper. ([Location 1595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1595)) - Gamblers’ dice are different: they do not search for a path toward the knowable or recordable, they search for risk. They are a reply tossed gamely—in both that word’s senses—into the face of the uncertain. The terrain of dice is feeling, not truth. Faced with what cannot be known, the gambler’s response is to take it on, as if chance could somehow be wrestled, charmed, winked at, conned. Spinning the wheel, wagering, playing the odds, we engage the unengageable and hope to move fate. ([Location 1601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1601)) - Encounter with the unknown seems almost a nutrient in human life, as essential as certain amino acids—without it, the untested self falls into sleep, depression, boredom, and stupor. ([Location 1612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1612)) - good poems undercut their own yearning to say one thing well, because to say one thing only is not to say enough. ([Location 1647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1647)) - What I have been saying here at such great length is rather simple: to be human is to be unsure, and if the purpose of poetry is to deepen the humanness in us, poetry will be unsure as well. By multifaceted statement, by subtle resolutions and non-resolutions of circumstance and sound, by the navigation of open-ended yet resonant conclusions, good poetry helps us be more richly uncertain, in more profound ways. ([Location 1771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1771)) - Transformation of outer situation into an internal, metaphysical condition that is then further described again in physical terms: the pattern runs so deep in Dickinson that it could be called part of her poetry’s genetic code. ([Location 1897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1897)) - We go to certain good poems as children go to certain stories, to be rightly frightened. ([Location 1901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1901)) - a preposition tells us the mind is about to be moved in time or place. ([Location 1934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=1934)) - Good writing will have points of view—but they will be plural. No truly good work of literature faces in only one direction, is single in its allegiances, or looks at existence from only one angle, one theory. Theory—including literary theory—is the stance of argument, not of art. To live only in the socioeconomic self is to starve the self of its capacity for purposeless joy. To live only in the ideological is to deny ourselves uncertainty, fragility, loss. To live only in the emotional and autobiographical is to ignore what transcends the personal story and ego. To live only in the intellect or narrowly spiritual is to miss the saturation of the senses. ([Location 2112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2112)) - Pound described the paradox simply: “Poetry is news that stays news.” ([Location 2147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2147)) - We write or read poems because we need them. The first poems were work songs, love songs, war songs, lullabies, prayers—rituals meant to carry assistance. ([Location 2160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2160)) - What surprises, etymology tells us, is what is “beyond grasp.” ([Location 2187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2187)) - Surprise, then, is epiphany’s first flavor. It is the emotion by which we register shifted knowledge, in a poem, in a life. ([Location 2197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2197)) - The Latin verb cogitare, “to think,” has at its root in the act of shaking things together, and the idea that agitation is needed to make something new is found both in myths and in social and political revolutions worldwide. The etymology of intelligo adds something different: intelligence involves sorting, intention, selection. This recalls Chekhov’s definition of talent: the ability to tell the essential and inessential apart. The third quality of creative making’s cognitive tripod is different again: counterfactual thought’s recombinant question, “What if?” ([Location 2206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2206)) - Issa’s “Don’t worry, spider—I keep house casually,” ([Location 2234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2234)) - “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.” ([Location 2263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2263)) - E. E. Cummings, when asked his technique in poetry, responded: “I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting the eternal question and immortal answer of burlesque: ‘Would you hit a woman with a baby? No, I’d hit her with a brick.’ ” He went on. “Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” ([Location 2270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2270)) - As evolution’s creatures, we align with goal attainment, self-protection, and the useful. The part of art which is art, and not device, unshackles us from usefulness almost entirely. It emplaces us far into those impractical conditions that nonetheless feel to us somehow essential: laughter, contemplation, wonder, tears. ([Location 2298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2298)) - an artist is a person whose hunger refuses yesterday’s bread. ([Location 2698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2698)) - As the Irish poet Yeats—himself, we should note, deeply involved with the struggle for Irish independence—once said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” ([Location 2796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2796)) - poetry allowed its full root-run unbinds us, and itself, from all knowable ends. ([Location 2869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2869)) - Thoughts, like runner beans or climbing roses, are able to travel farther when given both free range and a lattice. Form, in all its conceptual, syntactical, and musical presences, is what changes the mind’s stutterings into graspable language, and graspable language into poems. Poems, in turn, transform fate: they make of intransigent outer circumstance something workable, softened. ([Location 2883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2883)) - Poems search for transformation not least by seeking beauty. Beauty in nature and the human-made beauty of poems are not the same. Still, if given a choice between the freedoms of extravagant, bounding, delirious excess and exuberant word-display on one hand, and the dutiful plod of purpose on the other, even nature appears to have voted for the mad-seeming tail of the peacock. The idea of a choice between pleasure and purpose—in art, or in life—is a false one, a Puritan’s hat we can choose to wear or leave on the shelf. Aesthetic discovery and evolution are perhaps purposeful in the same purposeless way: each arrives in invention and eros, in the tried-on costumes of rhinocerous horn and sestina, in recombinations mostly accidental and unplanned. Pleasure, not purpose, mates one creature or image with another, and art’s seemingly useless pleasures are not idle. They are imagination serving the future in ways beyond will’s reach. ([Location 2959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=2959)) - Even the word “verse,” though, upholds the idea that poetry is centered on transformation: the root of that term means a turning. It refers, in its original usage, to the change of an ox’s direction when plowing a field; the pattern then came to name the turning lines of writing. Some kinesthetic and visual sense of an animal moving, some scent of opened earth made more fertile, remain among poetry’s hallmarks. ([Location 3121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=3121)) - Alteration—a changed state of being, a changed state of feeling and comprehension—is what we have built art’s cupboard to store. ([Location 3137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=3137)) - Hyperbole, the fabulous, the straight-out lies of metaphor and fabricated image—when the impossible enters the mind, the carrying capacity of thought increases. ([Location 3238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=3238)) - In certain archaic cultures, anthropologists report, what matters is less the border between “real” and “fiction” than the one between the insignificant and the memorable. ([Location 3299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=3299)) - No matter how many poems exist, there is, it seems, always room for another—another mode, form, diction, subject, view. Poems make new reaches of language and feeling the way evolution makes new hooves, air bladders, ankles, tails, and scents. ([Location 3405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=3405)) - The table of art is infinitely expandable—any good poem can set itself a new place. In this way, poems are like life itself: an ever-increasing inhabitance of the possible, a realm in which something else is still able to happen. ([Location 3407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PD4IG&location=3407))