THERE’S A REASON IT’S CALLED WORK

Perfection: the goal. The end of craft. The essence, completely uncovered. Yet writing is never perfect. Can never be. Not even in its own era, its own place, its own vernacular. So we’re working within a field of potentialities, choosing one aspect over another. Liquids at play. The words themselves will change over time. Energy fields. Northern lights. Sunsets. The mind and flesh, mixing.

Consider a square grid sheet neatly intersected, and then place yourself at the center, where the four quadrants intersect. Take the horizontal line and name it for one continuum, say “highly emotional” at one end and “completely rational” at the other. Now take the vertical line and apply another continuum, say “public” at one end and “private” at the other. As if we could actually measure any such qualities and then scale them on the grid. (We could even consider this as a color field, with white/black as one dimension and red/green or blue/orange as the other.) We could even consider this as a kind of Chinese checkerboard, but stepping outward. The point is, you have to move: to stay at the center produces a muddy gray: nothing unique emerges. The fulcrum remains static and lifeless. As one proceeds away from the center, a kind of balloon or blob may appear on the grid: you’re working somewhere between selflessly emotional and rational, for instance. Or maybe it’s highly focused. In an art – and possibly other areas of life – I see the goal being to move out to an arc from the ends of the horizontal and vertical axis lines – somewhere along an optimal and growing frontier of two qualities. Beyond that, however, destruction awaits. An orchestral conductor, for instance, can emphasize a work’s inner rhythms or its singing lines – or, more likely, arrive at some combination – while counterpoising them with architectural structure or emotional outpouring. The choices determine whether the result is an orthodox repetition of familiar security or an insightful and exciting (and even disturbing) revelation.

So there’s the question of when to stop, on a given piece. When we’ve depleted ourselves. Or when we’ve moved on. Or when it’s more or less accomplished what we set out to do – the less ambitious works having more prospects for success than do those that attempt to soar closest to the sun. Or when the piece moves off into the marketplace, one way or another. Or when we die or grow infirm. Or when we realize we’ve completely missed the mark.

My focus here is primarily on poetry and fiction, although the concepts can be readily expanded outward through all of the arts and probably into a number of other fields as well.