“It is a very curious thing that my imagination is never more pleasurably active than when my circumstances are at their least pleasant; and that, by contrast, it is never less joyful than when all about me rejoices. My mind, always perverse, cannot submit to present things. It will not enhance but insists on creating. It envisages real objects at best as what they are; it will embellish only imagined objects. If I am to portray spring, it must be winter; if I am to describe a fine landscape, I must be shut up indoors; and, as I have remarked a hundred times, I would paint liberty to the life if I were sent to the Bastille.”
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Many of us probably recognize ourselves in Rousseau’s contradiction. Why is it that we have so little piloting power over the flights of our fancy? Why is it so difficult, even impossible to write about love when we are full of it, but so urgent to render its sweet power when it has abandoned us? Art, which takes the highroads of sublimation, creates a presence where there is a gaping absence, and it does not, as Rousseau rightly points out, simply “enhance” the real or fill in the abyss with sand; rather the artistic impulse strives to create another reality (this one “embellished”) that lives and breathes through our imagination. Rousseau qualifies this habit of the mind as “perverse”, but today we would more readily call it creative. Creativity is a process that bypasses the conscious mind in order to seize it for its own purposes. It operates its ambush for the greater good of the soul. For its survival even.
The genesis of a book can, and often does, sprout from an indignity. Take the case of Confessions; the calumny against Rousseau after the publication of Emile and The Social Contract persuaded him in part to write his extraordinary autobiography. Had his work not been considered subversive, had he not been chased from France and Switzerland, betrayed by friends and enemies alike, he probably would never have bothered writing those five hundred or so pages of self-probing. His project far surpassed his initial impetus, and the moments of apologia are surprisingly few, occurring in earnest only towards the end of the book, when he recounts the misfortunes of exile.
There is suffering, then there is art and the process of transformation from one to the other gets called sublimation (by Special K, plucking from Freud).
I have always abided by this formula, though not intentionally, not exactly. Nevertheless, behind every book I’ve written, lies an indignity, a situation that required redress. Were I an essayist, I would get out my tool-box and fix it straight on; but as a novelist, I must engender rather than mend. With my first novel, I created Remedy, my character who goes about setting straight the problems and contradictions she encounters in her Parisian life, namely by inventing a new language lens through which to see them. There were several indignities which motivated me to write that book not the least of which was a cheap genre called “chick lit” which cashed in on the diary form I had been working on quietly for some time. I wanted to bite back and in doing so, Rousseau’s “perverse” little process came to my aid. In the end I believe I wrote a novel that subverted chick lit tropes but also became something entirely of its own and that I created a character who does not quite resemble any other in contemporary fiction.
But here I am, unable it seems to “submit to present things”; I will, therefore make an effort to give you an update on the Ariège-Aude. Yesterday the Tour de France passed through this mountain retreat at around noon. At nine in the morning people were already camping alongside the road, tables and chairs set up, coffee pots on Bunsen burners, newspapers opened to the sports section. As we drove toward Tarcason-sur-Ariège to pick up our son from summer camp, leaving early to avoid traffic and road blocks, we began to feel the excitement of the event and lamented we would miss the heady spectacle of the world’s greatest cyclists flying by. But we were so excited to see Blaise after a week’s absence that it didn’t really matter. Our family reunited and we returned via Ax-les-Thermes where we soaked our feet in that sulfury, hot water and had a delicious lunch in the garden of a Logis de France hotel. I can’t remember the name of it. The duck was particularly good and served in fig sauce.
Below are some photos of various sights including an extraordinary chapel we discovered on a hike – the Chapel of Saint Paul d’Arnave — next to which sits a small hut containing a miraculous “pierre noire” or black stone, propounded to heal epilepsy. Those suffering from “le haut mal” would spend the night in the hut, head against the black stone, praying throughout. A register of recoveries kept before the Revolution was lost but there have since been two others recorded. I can’t imagine using that stone for a pillow. But as the saying goes: no pain, no gain.