So the other day I got the paper version of The Angel at Our Table submitted to the journal who’s interested. Yahoo! But, I wanted to share with you what, right at the tail end, would grab a reader. It’s sort of a no-brainer except that it wasn’t until the last few moments that I followed my own advice…start with an anecdote that has emotional pull for the reader . First the paper synopsis…
Synopsis: While promoting my novel, The Drifts, the press asks me: where does the book come from? Family stories, I answer, often told to me while my aunts and I made brown cake, informed the book. That word ‘inform’ has provoked questions. The questions led me into a deeper engagement with Walter Benjamin’s understanding of Paul Klee’s watercolour, Angelus Novus. Klee and Benjamin describe the debris pile at the feet of the angel as the wreckage of a storm—the storm of progress. That debris pile is composed of aura and trace. Trace might be thought of as the way that auratic impulses organize themselves as they attach to sensations, objects, thoughts and language. It is the site of art creation. It is where the progression from Art to Food and Food to Art happens. In a state of melancholy, brooding reifies experience into a vessel of aura and trace. Trace, then, informs the novel by nourishing the craft, skill and content of artwork—with empathy.
Then, here’s the start of the paper:
Article Text:
‘Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seems to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it.’ — Proust, Finding Time Again
Art is Food
In the U.S., more than 150 years ago now, but well after the forced removal of the Cherokee nation from Georgia in the late 1830s, my great x 4- grandmother came down from the Ozarks Mountains in Southeastern Missouri and Northeastern Arkansas. Her family had been marched, along with thousands of others, halfway across the continent headed towards re-settlement in Oklahoma; some died, some fled. This grandmother of mine, now a very aged photograph, must have been a young girl when she escaped from the ‘Trail of Tears’ and up into the mountains. There, foraging for roots and game, she and the people with her survived until it was safe to come down. The soldiers had gone home, dust had settled and memories had faded. Her people and their descendents eventually ended up in a little town out there, Brown’s Community, that later became Bay. When grandma came down from the mountain, she brought Brown Cake with her—or so the story goes.
The arts are as nourishing as Brown Cake. This nourishment feeds form to what is left over from our histories and experiences: the memories, the escapes—and so on. This paper is an attempt to articulate how this nourishment, and thus art’s emergence, happens….
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What do you think? Effective? Does it work?
