More Real than Realism

What, you ask, is more real than realism? Perhaps nothing. Or, perhaps plenty. Poetry, for example. Also art, stories, and so many other creative and curatorial initiatives.

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”

— Georgia O’Keeffe (Source: The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

These words from a friend — never met in person, but an intimate, a teacher, and companion sojourner nevertheless — resurfaced for me as I was ruminating on another friend’s brutalist painting of Rosslyn’s boathouse.

Often realism and verisimilitude obscure deeper truths. It takes the curator’s craft, the artist’s alchemy, the storyteller’s scalpel to reveal what might otherwise escape us.

 (Source: Brutalist Boathouse)

The freedom to pursue the real meanings and the deeper truths guides the process of distilling and reassembling.

I inevitably distort history, omitting and abbreviating and emphasizing, distilling the vast landscape of data into vignettes. These accrete gradually, revealing the narrative design of my story.

(Source: Remembering and Recounting)

In the passage above I was referring to memories of The Farm in Cossayuna, the backdrop for many of my earliest childhood recollections and my primary associations with homeness.

I weigh the accuracy of memories with the truths I’m hoping to reveal.

I believe that there are different kinds of accuracy. I am a storyteller, not an historian, and though I strive for verisimilitude, some truths are more effectively preserved and conveyed through stories than history or vaults.

Some days I toil like an archeologist amidst a midden heap of artifacts, rewinding time’s mysteries, deciphering…

Other days I seduce and charm and coerce the artifacts to share longer forgotten truths.

(Source: Remembering and Recounting)

Excavating the truest and most compelling narrative is a journey. An adventure with risks aplenty and distracting rewards scattered along the way.

“Life is not what one lives, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale (Source: Remembering and Recounting)

This continues to resonate for me more than a decade into this protracted and admittedly wayward inquiry. Data points of a life. The narrative that binds them together…

I pendulum between two muses, each jealous of the other, both second guessing, both casting aspersions.

(Source: Chronicler or Artist)

And yet, little by little I’m discovering and sculpting a truth, a tale, that might allow me to let go and set out on a new adventure.

He chooses; he synthesizes; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist.”

— Virginia Woolf (Source: The Art of Biography)

The art of creating. The art of untethering. The art of living our stories.

We are our story. Our stories.

(Source: The Farm Backstory)

So, what is more real than realism? We. Rosslyn. And the adventure we’ve shared.