To create anything of beauty, daring, and substance that makes the world see itself afresh — be it a revolutionary law of planetary motion or the Starry Night — is the work of lonely persistence against the tides of convention and conformity, often at the cost of the visionary’s aching ostracism from the status quo they are challenging with their vision. Rilke recognized this when he observed that “works of art are of an infinite loneliness” and Baldwin recognized it in his classic investigation of the creative process, in which he argued that the primary distinction of the artist is the willingness to maintain the state everyone else most zealously avoids: aloneness — not the romantic solitude of the hermit by the silver stream, but the raw existential and creative loneliness Baldwin likened to “the aloneness of birth or death” or “the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control.”
This love-like force — the creative force — is what fuels the perseverance necessary to usher in a new way of seeing or a new way of being. It is the life-force by which visionaries survive the aloneness of their countercultural lives.
That is what jazz legend John Coltrane (September 23, 1926–July 17, 1967) addressed in an extraordinary letter penned in the late spring of 1962, posthumously included in Cuthbert Ormond Simpkins’s excellent 1975 biography Coltrane (public library).
John Coltrane (Courtesy of johncoltrane.com.)
One June morning two years after the release of his epoch-making Giant Steps and five years before his untimely death of cancer, Coltrane opened his mailbox to discover a package from the editor of Downbeat magazine, the premier journal of jazz, containing a gift: a copy of Music and Imagination — a book of the six lectures the great composer and creativity-contemplator Aaron Copland had delivered at Harvard a decade earlier.
Coltrane’s letter of thanks for the gift unspools into one of those rare miracles when something small and seemingly peripheral prompts a sweeping yet succinct formulation of a visionary’s personal philosophy and creative credo — Coltrane’s most direct meditation on what it means to be an artist.
Millennia after Pythagoras’s revolutionary yet limited mathematics of music forked the sonic path of the modern world by laying the structural foundation of the Western canon but failing to account for the intricate unstructured musical styles of the African diaspora and my own native Balkans — a cultural irony, given Pythagoras developed his theory on the island of Samos, a thriving cross-pollinator of the Ancient Greek world perched midway between Africa and the Balkans — Coltrane observes that Copland’s lectures, while erudite and philosophically insightful, speak more to musicians in the Western tradition than they do to jazz musicians. Against Copland’s concern about how difficult it can be for artists to find “a positive philosophy or justification” for their art, Coltrane holds up jazz as living counterpoint — a musical tradition that began as an affirmation of life amid unimaginable hardship, provided a lifeline for those who conceived it and partook of it, and has thrived on the wings of this inherent buoyancy.
Art from The First Book of Jazz by Langston Hughes, 1954
He writes:
It is really easy for us [jazz musicians] to create. We are born with this feeling that just comes out no matter what conditions exist. Otherwise, how could our founding fathers have produced this music in the first place when they surely found themselves (as many of us do today) existing in hostile communities when there was everything to fear and damn few to trust. Any music which could grow and propagate itself as our music has, must have a hell of an affirmative belief inherent in it.
Since we read (and write) about other lives to make sense of our own, he reflects on a biography he has been reading of Van Gogh — an artist who spent his short, revolutionary, tragic life negotiating between his private suffering and the irrepressible affirmative belief that forever changed art. With an eye to Van Gogh, Coltrane writes:
Truth is indestructible… History shows (and it’s the same way today) that the innovator is more often than not met with some degree of condemnation; usually according to the degree of his departure from the prevailing modes of expression or what have you. Change is always so hard to accept.
Vincent van Gogh: The Mulberry Tree, 1889.
In a sentiment evocative of artist Egon Schiele’s observation that visionaries tend to come from the minority and echoing the seventh of Bertrand Russell’s ten commandments of critical thinking — “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” — Coltrane adds:
Innovators always seek to revitalize, extend and reconstruct the status quo in their given fields, wherever it is needed. Quite often they are the rejects, outcasts, sub-citizens, etc. of the very societies to which they bring so much sustenance. Often they are people who endure great personal tragedy in their lives. Whatever the case, whether accepted or rejected, rich or poor, they are forever guided by that great and eternal constant — the creative urge.
This might be the most succinct summation of my creative choice of historical figures to celebrate in Figuring. It is also what Virginia Woolf meant when she wrote of the “shock-receiving capacity” necessary for being an artist, and what Patti Smith meant when, with an eye to Coltrane, she considered the shamanistic channeling at the heart of the creative impulse.
Complement with Coltrane’s contemporary and fellow jazz legend Bill Evans on the creative process, then revisit Walt Whitman on how to keep criticism from sinking your creative confidence.
To put our familiar lives in perspective and jolt us awake to the wonder of so much we have come to take for granted, let us picture this:
It is the 1840s and you, like most of humanity, have never traveled more than a few miles beyond where you were born, have never met a person native to a different country, have never seen a bird native to a different continent or a flower native to a different climate. Like most of humanity, you never will. Photography has just been born, too costly and cumbersome a technology to carry into the world, much less to carry the world to you. If you have had the privilege of setting foot in a library — that is, if you were born with a Y chromosome and very little melanin — you might have leafed through a heavy leather-bound encyclopedia or an herbarium and marveled at life-forms from faraway lands. If you are among the slender portion of our species lucky enough to live near one of the world’s handful of natural history museums and botanical gardens, you might have glimpsed some specimens of exotic plants.
But you are you — whatever degree of privilege chance has conferred upon you at birth, you are curious and you hunger for beauty, enraptured by the artwork that is your only portal to the living wonders of this world.
Passionflower and passionfruit. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Before science made the technologies of image-capture and global travel possible, botanical and natural history illustrators were singular civil servants — artists in the service of their subjects, tasked with capturing and conveying what it is like to be a particular plant or animal living in a particular habitat. Here, each exquisitely rendered specimen seems to say to its remote viewer, aren’t I strange and beautiful and worthy of inclusion in the family of life?
Chirimuya. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Few artists have accomplished this more effectively and enchantingly than Étienne Denisse (1785–1861).
As a young artist at the botanical garden of the natural history museum in Paris, Denisse had attracted the attention of the crown with his uncommonly detailed and scrumptious paintings of plants. He was eventually hired as lithographer for the French royal court, then dispatched to the French Caribbean territories, where he spent many years collecting and studying plants completely novel to European eyes, periodically sending his illustrations back to France. Between 1843 and 1846, two hundred and one astonishing hand-colored lithographic plates based on Denisse’s drawings from life were published as Flore d’Amérique. One of the very few surviving copies has been painstakingly restored and digitized by the wonderland that is the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden in collaboration with the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Hiliconia. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Denisse did for the plants of the Americas what the Dutch engraver Louis Renard had done for the psychedelic fishes of the South Seas a century earlier and what the English marine biologist William Saville Kent would do for the corals of the Great Barrier Reef a generation later. Epochs before our digital voyeurism, before photo albums and air travel, his vibrant illustrations of unseen and unimaginable living wonders became the era’s National Geographic footage and Instagram feeds rolled into one.
Mahogany. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Denisse seems to have had a special fondness for Earth’s very few true blues. Blue-flowering plants, so rare in nature, occupy a sizable portion of his folios — among them the unexpected blossoms of the mahogany tree and the startling butterfly pea with its intensely colored cobalt flowers and their perfect bright-yellow folds that earned the plant the Latin name Clitoria.
Clitoria, or butterfly pea. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Blue bindweed. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
There are plants that are now fixtures of the global palate — the banana, mango, pineapple, cacao, coffee, coconut, various citrus fruit, and the avocado, that gladsome ghost of evolution.
Avocado. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Banana. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Coffee plant. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Cacao. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Mango. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Pineapple. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Coconut. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Citrus. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Citrus. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Some plants, familiar to the tongue, are a startlement to the eye in their native form — the furry paw of the yam, the carnival carousel crown of the papaya tree, the surprising pink morning-glory blossoms of the sweet potato, the upside-down fleshy heart of the cashew’s fruiting body.
Yam. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Papaya. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Sweet potato. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Cashew. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Sugarcane. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
There are plants still exotic to non-native eyes: wondrous cacti; strange plums; the blue flame of the Mexican verbena; the enticing evergreen flowering Tillandsia, which Denisse dubbed “the immortal Creole,” now teetering on the brink of ecological mortality; the scaly chirimuya fruit beloved by the Incas; the colossal thorned heart of its cousin the soursop, which I still remember first encountering in Kauai with gaping disbelief at the otherworldly life-forms of which this planet is capable; the mammoth gramophone blossom of the pelican flower, Aristolochia grandiflora — one of Earth’s largest flowers, with a scent of rotting flesh to attract flies as pollinators; the Averrhoa with its luscious striped fruit reminiscent of a mosque top, named after the 12th-century Islamic astronomer and philosopher Averroes.
Averrhoa. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Soursop. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Mexican verbena. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Pelican flower. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
There is the tender-tongued hibiscus with its exultant petals, believed to cure snakebite; the passionflower with its spectacle of geometry and flower, whose fruit Denisse found “quite good to eat”; the otherworldly epidendrum orchid, which Denisse calls “the butterfly of plants”; the buxom wild squash of the Carolinas.
Wild squash. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Butterfly orchid. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Hibiscus. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Mississippi plum. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Sea grape. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Cactus. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Guaiacum oficinale. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Caladium muculatum. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Wild plum. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Momordica operenlata. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Heliconia. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)
Complement with Denisse’s compatriot and contemporary Charles Antoine Lemaire’s astonishing illustrations of cacti and the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone’s natural history paintings of exotic, endangered, and extinct species, then revisit the heartening story of how two 19th-century teenage sisters fomented one of the greatest triumphs of modern conservation with their forgotten paintings of Australian butterflies.
It is a marvel, though hardly a surprise, that children’s minds are machines for metaphor. We are meaning-making creatures — from the moment we begin trying to make sense of the world, and even as we face the terrifying prospect of its meaninglessness, the familiar becomes our foothold for the unfamiliar; the images that already carry meaning, already invoke felt feeling-tones, become mirrors and magnifying glasses for those that don’t yet. Our entire experience of reality, bent through the lens of our meaning-hungry consciousness, becomes, as Nietzsche memorably put it, “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms.” Out of that moving host, the entire ecosystem of meaning we call art is born.
That is what Jane Hirshfield — a poet capable of compressing a universe of meaning into a mouthful of words, a thinker of uncommon insight into how language concentrates and consecrates reality, and an ordained Buddhist whose contemplative practice animates her creative practice — explores in this lovely animated meditation on the magic of metaphor from my friends at TED-Ed:
A good metaphor… is a way to let you feel and know something differently.
[…]
Metaphors give words a way to go beyond their own meaning. They are handles on the door of what we can know and of what we can imagine. Each door leads to some new house and some new world that only that one handle can open.
What’s amazing is this: By making a handle, you can make a world.
She takes up the subject throughout her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (public library) — which gave us her soulful meditation on how art transforms us — and writes:
Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, alludes to the kinship between metaphor and riddle, calling each a source for the other. Not only does solving a riddle depend on the ability to think metaphorically, all metaphor preserves some flavor of a puzzle. A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle; within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release. Perhaps this is why riddles abound among the earliest poems in many traditions and why spiritual teaching so often partakes of the riddling: it is how the mind instructs itself in a more complex seeing.
Complement with her short, splendid poems “Optimism” and “The Weighing” — both masterpieces of metaphor — then dwell with this living metaphor for the riddle of life.
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