The visit
It’s strange, sitting here after so long being simply aware of this place as a concept. Like meeting a famous person who you’ve heard and thought about for so long that they acquired a fixed, glossy surface in your mind only for that imagined surface to be broken and swept away by actual experience. It’s the same now. The same with Taliesin.
Pushing back his chair, the elderly man stood up with an effort and went to the low window that looked over the fields to the south. The early morning mist hid distant landscape from view; the colors and shapes of the trees became grayer, less detailed, more insubstantial the further they were from the house. Like memory, he thought, half remembered thoughts floating into his mind.
He forced his thoughts back to the present. Think about what you’re experiencing, he told himself. Be aware of being aware. That way you lay down long term memories of the moment, like making a pencil sketch. Inaccurate, incomplete, perhaps – but entirely one’s own and a lifelong trigger to vivid memory.
Turning, he surveyed the small room in which he had spent the night. Like all else at Taliesin, it was overwhelming in two senses: the powerful, unique way that Wright had designed it, enforcing horizontal planes and awareness as well as the knowledge that that was all as he had intended it, in its original setting. Wright had touched and used this table, these floors and walls, run his hand over the unfinished rocks of this fireplace.
He turned back to the cold Wisconsin landscape. It would be good to walk through it, to feel the chill of the fog laden early morning air on his skin and in his lungs, to experience strange, wonderful buildings appearing and vanishing as he moved. But not yet. There was nothing to sketch, nothing to catch hold of in the view and his feelings on seeing it; he needed a more delicate instrument than a pencil. Something that could record what was behind as well as before his eyes. Words.
There is a common misconception about artists, he thought: that the elegance of their work is achieved rapidly, in a single creative session, emerging in its final form from the union of mind and hand. In reality, he knew that even the most experienced and talented of artists work through many iterations of testing, adjustment, erasure, and repetition. The delicacy of the landscape before him called for a faster, reversible means of editing and that could only be words on a screen. Writing on paper, reminding him of past mistakes, would be slow and distracting. A word processing program was ideal.
Word processing. He disliked the term as well as the technology. You might as well call the human mind an idea processor. A thought refiner? A concept distillery?
Becoming aware that his thoughts were wandering, an increasingly common habit, he returned to the low table and tapped a couple of keys. After a few seconds the laptop awoke and he opened the writing software. The blank screen filled his vision, a white drift of space with the mocking, blinking cursor in the top left corner.
What is the phrase about nature disliking a vacuum? Horror vacui. That’s it. The hatred, the fear of nothingness. The fear every artist feels upon confronting another fresh canvas, a blank screen, an empty studio. Like facing an opponent before battle. Creation is simply a struggle against death, to prolong life beyond our physical existence. Would software filling the page with random text make it easier to write? Perhaps. He’d never tried that. Then again artificial intelligence might fill a page with better ideas than he could ever have in a first draft and make the problem worse.
Stop it. There was a book he had read once; what was it? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That was it. By Robert Pirsig (where had that name sprung from). As a student he had found it so impressive that he laboriously typed out pages of quotations on a manual typewriter, keeping them for inspiration. But not the passage he now recalled: that of a writing tutor trying to inspire a student who was unable to think of a subject. Describe a street, the tutor suggested, but the student could find no ideas. Write about a house in that street … still nothing. Write about a room in that house. Nothing. A window in the front wall of that room in that house – and then the ideas burst forth. What people might have seen through that window, how it had been made, the damage caused by a storm ten years before, the mark made where a bird had died after colliding with a car driven awau by the daughter of the house owner after telling him she was leaving to live with her lover.
What better start than where he was at that moment. He began to type.
“It’s strange, sitting here after so long being simply aware of this place as a concept.”