The Habit of Art

This morning's first craft talk was by Claire Davis. Here's my review.

You have to make a habit of art. No, you have to make a habit of art. That's what Professor Greg ( ) told Claire Davis's college writing class. Do you understand? he would ask them, getting frustrated when they barely paid attention, did the minimum work for the assignments or when half of them didn't bother to show up. Of course, they'd say. But we didn't, Claire tells us.

She has written the talk in the same way that she writes her fiction, revealing reality to us as if we've never actually experienced it for ourselves. And we realize as she's speaking that maybe we haven't. In a breathy voice that is almost sing-song, Ms. Davis takes us on a sensory experience of words. The word is smarter than we are, she quotes ( ).

Habit, she tells us, has some unpleasant connotations. Let us make it a ritual, whatever ritual it is that gets us to sit down with pen and paper or computer screen and keyboard and put words down, make images into words, tell a story.

Find the community of like-minded souls, artists, creative people and discuss things with them. Connect with the most primeval source of inspiration: the world. But maybe, she tells us, it's not any of these things that is what is meant by the habit of art. Maybe it is being fully present, in the moment, experiencing life, noticing the way the world smells and sounds and tastes and feels and how every color is absorbed into our eyes and passes into our minds. Be in the moment. Maybe that's what the habit of art is--living fully.

She suggests that we must get past the distractions that call to us in a world where our attention is being pulled in dozens of different directions every minute of every day. They are excuses. We all have them. But the writing is the thing.

She describes going out into her garden and absorbing it with her senses. While she speaks I am there, where roses grow around her door and because she doesn't have the heart to trim the vines, she has to duck as she goes out of the house and her screen door never completely closes. I am there with the green and green and silver of the leaves. I am standing in her back yard looking out past a field of grass toward the mountains. I am breathing the air of a place I've never been, never seen.

I know exactly what she means when she says, "What if this experience is here all the time, not just at that one moment? What if we just don't notice?" She compares the experience of imagining deeply to Zen. The habit of art is an evolutionary necessity, she tells us, and I believe her as if this message is written into my genetic code. You will never imagine deeply enough, she says, if you only see the surface of things.

I don't remember having gotten teary at a craft talk before. But, well... I know exactly what she means.