On Style, Styles, and Third Forms

[This text is new. I started it yesterday and finished just now. It may become a part of the book - some kind of summing up - but doesn't have to.]

There are artists who pay special attention to their style, and rarely (if ever) depart from it, claiming that what they perceive in the object of their creative effort should be given faithful expression as it presents itself to them, that is, giving emphasis to what for them is most important in the studied object, and to the degree it is important (paying, so to say, all the dues). For them the questions of style and object are intertwined – object is a pretext to the exercise in style, yet once it has been chosen all considerations are put aside save for that of how to approach the object, what to ‘make of’ it (what to make it into).

There's another kind, too. These are the artists, who, so to speak, try their hand in different styles and mediums in order to define themselves through the differences between them, probing their own limitations by exploring the limits of their mastery and comprehension of their mediums, modes, and styles. What is similar in every piece of art they make, regardless of the medium and convention, is their self expressed in them. I myself belong to this group. Not because I chose this approach, but because I found myself in this position while trying to define my existential situation (my predicament). I don’t know to what extent the former approach may be seen as that of quest for self. The latter certainly is nothing else.

I discovered that in all my fields of activity there was some possibility of self-expression and self-definition (if not self-fulfillment), and that in each of them different stylistic norms (rules of decorum) prevailed. I was pretty much sure that this possibility could be utilized in full not so much as a result of thorough knowledge of that social (or professional) sphere in which one found oneself, but as a result of knowledge of one’s self (or, at least, to the same degree). In other words, in order to expertly express oneself in a given society, one needs first to have mastery over one’s character, and one’s body, at least in that sphere which is inessential to it, though not inconspicuous (quite the opposite – it shows itself distinctly as the background of all the changing activities that one engages in there).

And here, morally and technically speaking, there are two approaches, or modes of action, one can take. One (which is often looked at with suspicion as egotistic) is to treat every social and professional context as opportunity to self-expression and self-fulfillment, and to consciously learn all about that context which enables it, as well as about all that doesn’t serve one’s self-expression there (to learn to discern between the one and the other). It also involves considerable amount of self-examination – comparing one’s responses to the environment and its tasks with one’s intentions, deciding which aspects of one’s self should, and which shouldn’t find their expression in a given context (which fit there, and which don’t). In a word, lot of premeditation, and meditation at large.

The other approach says that self-expression comes naturally, if one simply engages wholeheartedly, or at least honestly, in one’s intended activities, and tries to carry out the tasks at hand with full comprehension and to the best of one’s abilities; that if only one puts all his resources into the work, that part of his self will inevitably show itself in full and exemplify the whole person, or at least the whole of that in the person which can be shown without a breach of decorum (without overkill).

And here’s a seeming paradox: those who concentrate on their object are the true subscribers to the ‘self-expressionist’ stance, for they would never sacrifice their style to venture into another field, while those who claim to seek self-expression above all, are often the most meticulous students of their medium, wholly engrossed in their objects, often more drawn to them than to their self they supposedly attempt to define and express: because they don’t know who they are, they put a lot of effort in probing the nature of their object and the problems it poses in hope to find some clues to their identity (why they were attracted to it in the first place).

I only recently realized that what brought me to study these different approaches to art is that the difference between them is the same as that which on a larger scale exists between the artist and the professional man. That the self-questing artist is in a sense the artist ‘squared’, or the other way round: the professional man ‘square-rooted’ – the professional man at a loss, in quest for profession, for calling. I felt that in order to develop successfully as an artist, I needed some profession. Not just for the obvious fact, that one needs to sustain oneself during the preparatory stage and the creatively blank periods, not to be forced to perform at one’s worse (one can live almost on anything), but also because I needed to hook on to social reality somehow, which I am always apt to lose touch with. I also hoped (naively) that a sufficiently absorbing and challenging profession would channel and exhaust my creativity and give me satisfaction, while sparing me the anxiety and restlessness of working under the strain of earning my livelihood.

But here I found myself at the crossroads, or to put it more aptly, in between the ever-forking routes of action and the ever-separate fields of activity. Somehow I didn’t fit anywhere. My ‘watching self’ (my shadow self, my sakshin*) never consented to throw itself in the whirl of action and impressions. It always withdrew. So, once I admitted that this is where I stood, I set about defining my predicament – to what extent there was something wrong with me, and to what extent there was something wrong with social and economical structures in which I existed. I got down to grinding down the ‘conceptual grid’ my upbringing furnished me with and all emotional mechanisms that governed my decisions and my behaviour.

And so began my quest for self in which I found myself repeatedly drawn to the questions of form, style, and modes of expression, as I searched for the ones to suit me. And here, as in the field of professional activity, I soon noticed my inclinations drove me to the spheres in between, to the mixed modes, the third forms, because I was never satisfied with the established ones (even as a child). I soon discovered that this sphere has a long and noble tradition (though its practitioners are sometimes notorious among the subscribers of the 'pure' art). There I met Bruno and Nietzsche, Picasso, Schoenberg and Čiurlionis, Bert Brecht and Tadeusz Kantor, Gurdjieff and Steiner, Stefan Themerson, Józef Jarema, but also my old companions Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (yes, yes, they not only employed different genres but hybridized them as well**). I saw I had to add my own reflections and innovations, invent my own codes and keys, myths and symbols, terms and templates (as is customary among the practitioners of this ‘third path’).

In this (like in everything I put my mind to) I've been striving not to resolve the mentioned dichotomy (as I think it is impossible, and even if it was, would not be desirable), but to bridge it by devising a form or style that would embrace both approaches, that would enable one both to describe and express and analyze (or at least systematically expound), to be true both to one’s feelings and to reason. But most of all, I've been searching for a style that would enable me to 'break the news', to be fresh and at the same time artistic - a style in which intensity of content would match the craftsmanship of form***. I’m not sure now, though, if it’s possible to develop such a style, or, if it was, if that wouldn’t render literature (art in general) somehow incomprehensible, and inefficient.

Yet I'll be able to answer this question only when I closed this project of “fordmaking”. At the moment I’m still in the mud, and there were times I nearly got drowned.

* Somehow I can’t help myself from considering it the real self, the self, or the Self.
** See e.g. Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth and Walter Hooper’s C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide.
I learned also that August Strindberg was a gifted and innovative painter (thanks to Mr Andrzej Kobos and his periodical "The Scrolls", see: Imitując szczególny sposób stwarzania przez naturę; also: Strindberg's dreamscapes).
*** Of the writers I know of only two achieved that: John Cowper Powys and Faulkner. Perhaps I could include Gombrowicz, if it wasn't for the fact that at his most intensive and most masterly he was mainly critical (maybe with the exception of Kosmos). Hardy, Gertrude Stein and D.H. Lawrence sometimes come close to it (the last two usually fall victim to their conceptions - formal and psychological or philosophical respectively).