Ten Letters - Part 9

On the train to work the next day, i started reading Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet- ten letters written in reply to 19 year old aspiring poet Franz Kapus who was about to enter the German military. Kapus sought Rilke’s advice on his poems. Instead of receiving assessments, over the span of 5 years Kapus exchanges with Rilke centered on 'what it is to be an artist'. Rilke consistently urged Kapus to go inside rather than outside for enlightenment.

To answer Kapus's question 'how do you know if you're a writer?' Rilke replied, "There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse..."

people don't like to venture inside. it's uncomfortable to sit in solitude and ponder the meaning(less) of life. they'd rather sit in the subway keep themselves busy playing candy crush, texting someone, or reading about a poet's call for solitude rather than sit in solitude. At its worst, solitude without meaning or discovery or candy crush is loneliness... look at any subway train and you can see how silicon valley has monetized the human drive to avoid loneliness through distraction.

i stopped thinking dark thoughts and continued following Rilke's line of ideas on how to nurture writing and creativity.... "Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for hims the answer to, the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness.... to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer. Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."

after reading such passages, i thought about writers and architects who mined their solitude for creativity. thoreau kept one chair for solitude, two for friendship and 3 for society in his hut by Walden. He would go for long walks in the woods by himself and keep a journal from which his passages for his books was based. architects like corbusier and aalto made a routine of painting to gestate ideas in solitude. they tapped into the unconscious to guide their work in the material world. lou kahn distilled this mysterious process in his quote, "A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable."

Depriving a musician of his most important sense, hearing, would seem cruel and insurmountable. You hear of people who’ve lost sight but gained heightened awareness in hearing such as andrea bocelli, stevie wonder and ray charles... but rarely do you hear of deafness augmenting one’s abilities for music. Yet somehow, Beethoven’s deafness forced him to create all his late works in solitude. it is music composed from within... from a place where no sounds could be heard. One could imagine music composed in such solitude demands solitude for comprehension. As my train reached its destination, I realized HKC’s history of meditation and approach to reach higher and higher levels of solitude in listening to and playing music was particularly well suited to his understanding of Beethoven. The paradox is that HKC continually makes musical discoveries in Beethoven’s music in solitude, but then shares his revelations with the public in his performances and teachings.