Show, don’t tell

Evelyn Underhill says both the artist and the mystic “have learned to put the emphasis upon the message from without, rather than on their own reaction to and rearrangement of it.”¹ Observe the little things.

! [[ I know of no other Christianity ]]

This reminds me of how Robert Frost writes, and that’s perhaps why I like him so much. Anna Tivel writes like this, Tom Waits too, and so does Sufjan Stevens.

There’s a non-judgmental retelling of the story in these examples. John Keats called it negative capability, the ability to be sympathetic with the subject of the poem, saying: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”² This reminds me of Evelyn Underhill’s answer to [[ What is mysticism? ]] This kind of imagination is also similar to [[ Yūgen ]].

! [[ All I know is a door into the dark ]]

Williams’s poem The Red Wheel Barrow exhibits this well. Mary Oliver says this poem is not a lecture but a moment of attention to the world. The ideas then spring from the images.³ Wolfgang Iser says a literary text that is too expository can be boring for the reader.⁴ The plain showing of the thing allows the reader to be in conversation. Plain language is more intimate, Art is conversation, and most of us dislike being talked at for very long.

!No ideas but in things —William Carlos Williams

!Leave them something to imagine —Laurence Stern

Purifying the senses is about freeing them from “the tyranny of egocentric judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception.”⁵ This is what I practice with my adaptation of the Lynda Barry journal method.