Hello Reader,
Got art and intuition?
Art
I hate to sound like I was once a sick puppy, but yes, as faithful readers know, I have a past. And so I was already middle aged, over 35, before I took an excellent lengthy aptitude test as part of my undergraduate class. My dominant job aspect? “Artistic.” I said, “Oh.” Me? Really? Of course I’m not prejudiced anymore against fancy artists but… it took a while to sink in. Apparently I would make a good executive on Mad Men.
Happily, I have since been privileged to go with others to periodically visit an artist, my sensei, Sheri-D Wilson, in her living room as part of making my War of the Worlds poetry manuscript. In mid-winter once, after supper at the Wainwright Hotel, I walked through the starlit snow to see Sheri-D perform at the Canmore Opera House. (A wonderful log building) So I know a little about artists. In fact, during a weekend poetry workshop by Sheri-D, I said I was only now learning to feel right saying “we artists.” A lady then began crying, saying she too was learning to say “we.”
A man
I suppose having an artistic streak explains best-selling writer Michael Korda. I found his book about T.E. Lawrence to be, as a blurb writer wrote, “unputdownable.” I started over halfway in, beginning with Lawrence of Arabia’s postwar year, and read through to the end. Took three hours.
Besides his amazing originality in warfare and statecraft, Lawrence also went on to bring in reforms including (“but not limited to” says my Yankee lawyer) eliminating the taken-for-granted ankle puttees and Prussian collars for the RAF. While working with RAF speed boats, for rescuing planes downed in the water, he innovated a hull design that would be used by the U.S. Patrol Torpedo boats. His small motorboat manual, according to Korda, was excellent in having concision, and being comprehensive, and including extra things such as how to manage during storms. Lawrence’s reforms were quietly accomplished through people he knew of high rank, with no limelight for Lawrence. His own postwar rank? ( Enlisted) Airman second class. (Yes, nearly everybody on base knew who he was)
Apparently Lawrence had an artist’s disregard for conformity. He began the war as a young army lieutenant, and ended as a young lieutenant-colonel. Before the war, of course, he was an archeologist and graduate of Oxford university. Postwar, in his thirties, he translated Homer’s poetry epic, the Odyssey. But not as a poem, as a prose novel: How strange, how delightful. Also strange is how the man who was too poor to afford a boarding school such as Eton ended up a friend to frightfully rich, famous, original people such as George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. For his friendships, and for his life in general, Lawrence had complete disregard for “fame, rank and fortune.”
So was Lawrence socially, then, an artist among artists? Obviously Shaw was one, but not the others I know of, although of course the British education system at the time stressed being well rounded. Churchill, as it happened, not only painted as a hobby but wrote a book on the subject.
(By the way, I have seen one of Churchill’s paintings hanging in the stairwell of the Lieutenant-Governor’s house, back when she lived off Jasper avenue across the asphalt plain from the old provincial museum, the one that has since moved downtown to just off Churchill Square. May I boast? I once held the door open for the lieutenant-governor to enter the museum. I didn’t know I was supposed to let her royal Canadian mountie do that, until she laughingly told me so.)
I wonder: Was Lawrence artistic? I don’t think so: Because I have no knowledge of him using art for self-expression, although maybe his entire unconventional life was a work of art. Perhaps his postwar life as a clerk, and as a mechanic, fulfilled a creative streak in him that I don’t know about.. The main reason that I don’t suppose he was “artistic” is I can scarcely imagine a good artist achieving such exceptional success in war. (Incidentally, Napoleon said a general was no good unless he could look dry eyed at a silent body-strewn battlefield)
Perhaps, then, his amazing originality came not so much from an “artist’s creativity” as from feeling “unfettered by society.” Willing to fearlessly think and see. Like young Patton and Eisenhower scandalizing the military establishment by working on newfangled battle tanks together.
(Patton had to scramble to recover his reputation by writing magazine articles on horse cavalry tactics)
You can achieve a lot if you haven’t had a lifetime of self-training in automatic conformity.
If my speculation is correct, then Lawrence’s social circle was not other artists, but other “originals,” folks who were themselves unfettered. I wonder if they formed a secret club of those who conformed in dress, speech and thought only out of politeness, who would then fondly enjoy relaxing in private with likeminded friends.
Like how if you and I were transported to the 1950’s we would naturally gravitate to relaxing among individuals who believed in equal respect for women and nonwhite races, and enjoying drinks among folks who believed it was OK for males to be verbally skilled and cultured, instead of “strong and silent.” Maybe if I went to live in the year the twin towers fell, I would be dining among those who share our 2020 A.D. belief in the appropriateness of homosexuality, and of gender transitioning, for schoolchildren. Or maybe not.
It was a countryman of Lawrence, the Nobel prize winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell, a man born in the Victorian age, who said you could achieve the freedom of a “licensed lunatic” if only you “made it clear, even to the stupidest, that (in being original) you were not criticizing them.” I can relate, having a life-time of self-training in being nice and polite. Truly, no one angrily says, “Who does he think he is?” Except maybe the very stupidest.
Everyone knows I’m a thinker; no one calls me a nerd,. As for thinking, my new insight on T.E. Lawrence being not an artist but an original has “made my day.” That, and being amused at the idea of a secret club.
Last month in London, I socialized with a chap from Oxford who was born rich middle class, now a multi-millionaire. And even though “I’m just a poor boy, from a poor family” I swear we both felt perfectly normal around each other. Call us club members.
Intuition
As for what club my poetry teacher would belong to, I have no idea. She is certainly intuitive. By this I don’t mean the usual definition that might, maybe, possibly, be “explained” by having a subconscious like a super-computer, putting together teeny tiny unnoticed clues. I suppose a lifetime of being willing to see would aide the inner computer.
No, what I mean is Sheri-D Wilson had access to “an extra perception.” You’re on your own with that one, as I can’t begin to explain her various examples. One thing my sensei could (rarely) do is like what was documented by Robert Masters, a British officer stationed in India, who could speak both Gurkha and English. He once overheard a British Tommy and a Gurkha soldier, each speaking only their own language, having a sensible conversation.
There are things beyond us, oh Horatio.
I’m artistic myself, yet I don’t know if that explains my having a “weird intuition” three times last month while I was in Central London.
(By the way, I just barely beat the virus by flying home February 28, started coughing five days later… but it was only a cold. Praise the Lord.)
In a Bloomsbury used book store I asked a handsome, plainly dressed staff, “Are you a linguistics guy?” We talked. He was from Italy, and yes, he had minored in linguistics.
(I wanted to know why foreign languages have so many syllables; his answer jived with my essay where Doctor Who pronounces “Vincent Van Goff”, archived as Anglicizing, June 2018)
In a diner near my hotel I asked a young lady with an original hairstyle, “Are you a poet?” We talked. (Besides putting poems fortnightly onto my blog, I attend a weekly poetry cafe) Not only was she an active poet, she was just learning to write sestinas. (poems with the hardest rules, harder than a sonnet)
In a Van Gogh exhibit on loan from Holland, in a huge special tent, I found a pretty teenage girl on a bench in the lobby, waiting for her father. I asked, “Are you a Doctor Who fan?” She was excited to answer “Yes!” and told me that part of the TV episode with Vincent Van Gogh was included near the end of the tour. We talked. I told her and her dad about the Who Store being only 30 minutes by tube east of Central London, and about a fan’s “Doctor-and-Vincent” music video on Youtube. I play it often. The dad knew of the band ,Athlete, although I didn’t. Here’s the link.
By “weird intuition,” I mean: Who in the world would suddenly blurt out speculations about perfect strangers—and be right every time?
Sean Crawford
East of Banff,
March,
2020
Footnotes:
~I usually forget that I can figuratively “open my third eye” for about ten seconds at a time. No more, because it blinds me. Some knowledge is too much. Like how a social work student can do the in-class exercise “What I hear you saying is…” and then refuse to do so in the student union building—because who wants to know how very seldom we “get it right” in real life?
~Speaking of smart people, I had a friend who, although from remote Saskatchewan, knew foreign languages, and attended medical school without needing to take the Latin course.
In my essay Blair, Being Smart, archived September 2011, I wrote of how Blair coped with being so brainy.
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