During the course of promoting my recent novel "The Same River Twice" (an activity that I have railed against in my two previous posts, and have just furthered by repeated the book's title, as one is told always to do), I eventually learned something (non-commercial) about my own writing practice that I am grateful to be aware of. As some of you may know, I have had two parallel careers, one as a writer and one as an editor at "Art In America" (where I worked for 33 years), and while this arrangement began before I published even my first book, and was meant as a "day job" / "real job" sort of thing, I now see (from having to think up things to tell interviewers) that the art world gave me what is probably the most important tool in my writer's toolbox. It taught me how to see.
Because sight is such a rapacious sense, taking in a flood of imagery every moment your eyes are open, most people think that seeing is instinctive--something you are born knowing how to do and need never learn. Not so. Having edited literally thousands upon thousands of reviews of art exhibitions, not to mention innumerable longer articles about artists, I discovered, to my dismay, that there is really only about a ten percent overlap (at most) between those who know how to write and those who know how to see. That being the case, while I was at the magazine, I found it was much wiser to pick out the ones who could see and teach them to write (which I now do in a special seminar at Yale Graduate School of Art) than vice versa. The reason? It is much harder to teach most people who are good with words to see than it is to teach the visually alert to write (no easy task either.) This is because all words carry with them the weight of their previous usage, so that when you look at something you are much more likely to use words as a template to characterize the object of your consideration than you are to see it silently and freshly. You see, for example, a "horse" rather than, say, a Clydesdale with an incipient eye infection and a bit of blue ribbon stuck in its mane. So, first I taught myself to see, then did my best to pass that habit along to my writers.
No matter what it is you are looking at, whether it be a medium-value work of art or a street corner in Paris, the first thing you must do is purge your mind completely of words. Everything you are looking at is nameless and is the first of its kind you have ever encountered. Then, still empty of words, you look. For a long time. Gradually, you will then see how the constituent parts of what you are looking at fit together (or don't), and some time after that you will be able to see what you are looking at whole, as it is. Then you can begin letting words back into your mind again, and this time they will be the right words. This process, which I first learned from looking at art, works just as well with anything else. In my case, I like to travel and, when I visit an unfamiliar city, usually spend ca. 16 hours a day in the streets (which I love), going to every possible quarter of the city in question, getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, and above all looking at everything as if I had never seen anything resembling it before. This may sound like an obvious or routine technique, but it's not--not for a long time. But it becomes so. And in this way I have discovered the most amazing things, usually of a "criminal" nature. Who runs the pickpocketing operations in Paris's Bastille neighborhood, what major NY museum was working freely with a multi-million-dollar money laundering group (narco-dollars from Latin America) though this has never come to public notice, and many, many similar things. I was flattered by the Sunday New York Times critic who complimented me on my persuasiveness in making the reader believe (in "The Same River Twice") that an ordinary independent fashion designer could get caught up in an international smuggling ring and come out ahead, but the truth is that this is something I observed--it actually happened, just as similar things happen every moment of every day--and I just used the incident as a small jumping off point in the novel from which to explore any number of other things I was interested in. The fact is that most people find it inconvenient to see anything that doesn't correspond to their preconceptions because it is likely to interrupt their daily routine and keep them from getting done what they want to get done. So they become *literally blind to them*. I could cite dozens of examples from my own experience. People who refuse to see what's around them are very quick to describe something they don't *want* to see as "impossible," "totally implausible," "grossly exaggerated," or "ridiculous." But, most often, they are wrong.
Vive le flaneur.