pretend no one will see

She had recently turned seventy, which may have been weighing on her more than she thought. Many friends she would show her work to are dead, she'd noticed lately. “So it’s like, who cares? You have to have someone waiting for you.” And readers? “If I think about them, I can’t write anything. When I write a poem, I have to pretend no one will see it.”

I asked what emotion was most productive for her work—sadness? happiness? “Loneliness,” she answered quickly.

Her best writing comes when, she said, she is “in my nightgown for days, not thinking about anyone else. It takes a couple of days just thrashing through the brambles to get to any type of clearing, and it’s very painful. It’s frustrating, you see all your limitations, but a lot of what is happening is the unconscious is just waiting to see if you if you mean it. I like it once I settle in, but the borders are tough.” Once she passes into the other state, “that’s the best feeling in the world—we’re utterly ourselves and we’re nobody.”

Marie Howe being quoted in The Work of Art: how something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

respectful attention

Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.

Enabling things to un-hide themselves is what human do: it is our distinctive contribution. We are a ‘clearing’, a Lichtung, a sort of open, bright forest glade into which beings can shyly steep forward like a deer from the trees…It would be simplistic to identify the clearing with human consciousness, but this is more or less the idea. We help things to emerge into the light by being conscious of them, and we are conscious of them poetically, which means that we pay respectful attention and allow them to show themselves as they are, rather than bending them to our will.

—Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (Other Press, 2016)