The Habit of Art

"Education by poetry is education by metaphor." - Robert Frost

How do we search for the high art in life and writing?  

We need to refine definitions of who we are. Flannery O'Connor said, "Teaching any kind of writing is a matter of helping the student develop the habit of art. This habit becomes art by experience and awareness. We must push and reach for that level of awareness that forges connections between like and unlike ideas and moods.  

Our communication needs to extend beyond syntax, grammar, and punctuation. Then we discover layers of meaning to add that whisper beneath the lines.

Questions must abound when we read. Then we will not take anything for granted even if we like a piece of writing. 

When we read the writers we do not like, it encourages us to discover why it promotes our understanding of differences. 

We benefit when we search for what is the most difficult.

"I'm always doing what I cannot do in order that I may learn how to do it."  - Pablo Picasso

Scott Russell Sanders feels if he had freedom in the University, he would, "Take my classes on field trips to forests and rivers and caves, to museums, to warehouses and factories, to quarries and mines, to housing projects and trailer parks, to chemistry labs and cyclotron, to playgrounds and barbershops. I would urge my students to learn a trade - framing or carpentry, welding or weaving, cooking or sewing or surveying. Study the soils I say, learn the plants and animals, walk  the streets, listen to the rhythm of your place and the voices of your neighbors." 

"The inner - what is it if not intensified sky?"  - Rainer Maria Rilke

As writers we have to be omnivores, taking it all in and searching for a "detachment,"  as Vivian Gornick writes, "to send it all forth again."

Wallace Stegner wrote, "Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of that voyaging. The more we pose and answer questions the stronger we will become."

To write is to learn to chase ideas. 

Go out and discover. Develop a habit of art.




"If only you could hear at the sound of snow." - Hakuin Ekaku