"You string words together like beads to tell a story."
—Anne Lamott
Let us contemplate parts and wholes. The progression of many into one. It’s human nature to assemble. What do we form when we do?
In his collection of essays on art and being, German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin welcomes us into his library—a pile of books yet unpacked, promises of greatness:
I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that.
Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among the volumes that are seeing daylight again.
From Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations
When does a pile of books become a library? When are they organized? When they are touched and loved?
“The way my walls are made, stone upon stone, is like growth,” sculptor Andy Goldsworthy writes of his art. Goldsworthy repositions rocks and stone in walls, cairns, and arches, shapes that amplify and slink into their surroundings. “I think the main difference between a design process and a sculptural process is that the latter is close to how things grow.”
When does a pile of stone become a wall? For Goldsworthy, this transference occurs when the sculptural process begins; the first brick of a wall is a wall. For Benjamin, similarly, the distinction doesn’t exist. His boxes of books are a library.
We are likely to agree with either or both. It is the power of gestalt, the human tendency to make out of many ones.
“Graft” by Roxy Paine, 2009. Over 35 individual steel pieces have been welded together to form a fabricated tree 45 ft high. Learn more. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.This mental assembly of things occurs with both physical and abstract entities.
Anne Lamott’s beloved writing guide Bird by Bird, published twenty-five years ago and widely read today, suggests the nature of writing—and creating—should be done through placement of one piece after another:
[S]omehow in the face of it all, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story.
We see this piecemeal assembly of work and creativity in the creation of John Steinbeck, who—famously, twice—chronicled his writing process in creating The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. Steinbeck stings together words, pages, and himself.
His method for tracking piecemeal work on East of Eden, which Steinbeck wrote fifteen years later, differed. During the course of writing this novel Steinbeck wrote letters to his friend and publisher, Pascal Covici. This method of engaging another rather than writing to himself altogether changed Steinbeck’s writing demeanor. Read more here.
In his journal kept while writing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck tracks his daily progress in an attempt to map the actual working days and hours of a novel, omitting not one day, not one state of being. It gives us a rare glimpse of an author producing—his book and himself—“bird by bird.”
My nerves are very bad, awful in fact. I lust to get back into it. Maybe I was silly to think I could write so long a book without stopping. I can’t. Or rather, couldn’t. I’ll try to go on now. Hope to lose some of the frantic quality in my mind now.
From John Steinbeck’s Working Days
Unlike Goldsworthy and Benjamin, Steinbeck does not recognize that his day-by-day bricklaying has become a novel. He uses phrases like “the work” and “my story.” He calls it a “book,” but only in the future tense: something it will become. When he is halfway done, Steinbeck notes “the story which will be so much greater than I am,” and by the end of the next month, he uses the phrase “the hardest, most complete work of my life” but, again, in a subjective future tense.
On the last page of the diary, October 26, 1939, Steinbeck closes with “Finished today. I hope to God it’s good.”
Steinbeck is reluctant to name the work even with a completed stack of pages before him.
Gestalt means “unified whole” and comes from theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. These theories “describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied.”
Navigating from a brick to a wall or a book to a library, even pages to a novel, is a cognitive, psychological step we make, even if when we make that leap, it differs.
What if we get even more abstract, however, like Alan Lightman does when he contemplates the stardust that forms all humans? Lightman asks: when does the summation of atoms become a human?
Is she human when she is loved?
It is a fundamental tension of humanity: after the edge of material and before the wellspring of being, there is a chasm.
“Our initial review of the four great Levels of Being can be summed up as follows.
‘Man’ can be written m + x + y + z
‘Animal’ can be written m + x + y
‘Plant’ can be written m + x
‘Mineral’ can be written m
[…] The extraordinary thing about modern ‘life sciences’ is that they hardly ever deal with life as such, the factor x, but devote infinite attention to the study and analysis of the physicochemical body that is life’s carrier. It may well be that modern science has no method for coming to grips with ‘life and such.'”
There’s no mark that equals hair, there’s no mark that equals skin or anything else. It’s a little bit like an architect choosing a brick. The brick doesn’t determine anything about what kind of building will be built from it. You stack up the bricks one way and you make a gas station, or you stack up the bricks another way and you can build a cathedral. Both of them will be very different experiences, but it wasn’t the brick that determined the nature of that experience.
Perhaps no artist allowed us to float between a human whole and its pieces better than American portraitist Chuck Close.
Regardless, to ignore his influence on portraiture is short-sighted. Read more on Close here and here.
The passages included are excerpts from his interview on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross.
Through grid scaling, Close made the whole and its pieces simultaneously visible. A complete, detailed human face with every detail intact, not a face at all, just the summation of parts.
I believe a person’s face is a road map to their life, and embedded in the imagery is a great deal of evidence if you want to decode it. If a person has laughed their whole life, they’ll have laugh lines… It’s not necessary for me to have them laughing or crying or anything in order to have people be able to read them.
Like these portraits, we are formed of pieces, and those pieces coalesce into our concepts of being.
We shore up our fragments and say, “I.”
In his Replicate series, Paine also replicates natural structures that form and grow using carbon copies of themselves. The meticulous relationship between parts and whole, the original and offspring, and repetitive forms in nature are all explored in Paine's work. Learn more. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.In art, politics, socio-economic systems, religion, science, the basic family unit, and most of all, in our concept of self, we are asked to move fluidly between the parts and the whole. To embrace all in value and meaning.
I struggle to care, prioritize, discern, and assemble in this enormous complexity. With all this change, how can we, the assemblage of atoms, ever feel genuinely whole? Full. Complete. Done?
There is poetry. A prism of knowledge, poetry strips language, images, and metaphors of meaning and returns them to us, able to reassemble as needed.
Poetry allows us to visualize the invisible.
With her characteristic grasp of the finite and the infinite, poet Mary Oliver delivers us a robust, inclusive concept of the sea:
I go down to the edge of the sea,
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened blue mussels,
[..]
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.
From Mary Oliver’s “Breakage”
Goldsworthy’s walls break down; Nazis burn Benjamin’s Library; Close’s portraits are dissembled visually by a few steps toward the canvas. All things fall apart; all things grow and decay.
While you can, while it lasts, read the whole story, piece by piece.