From the Editor's Skull
The Art / Life Ratio
Dateline: Mayday 2005
A few weeks ago, William Gillespie, the founder and current
proprietor of Spineless Books, arranged to have me visit him in Providence,
Rhode Island,
the permanent home of Brown University and the current (but temporary)
home of Spineless Books. William desired my company, apparently, but he also
wanted
me to see where he was living. For the past several months, he has been
housesitting for Rosemarie and Keith Waldrop, the founders and proprietors
of Burning
Deck Press, one of the foremost “small” presses in existence.
(I put the word ‘small’ in quotation marks, because though Burning
Deck is definitely a member of that class of presses that has relatively
small press runs of what is often labeled avant garde literature, the value
of the work they have presented to the world is anything but insignificant.
For one, the list of authors they have published includes names recognizable
to anyone for whom good literature is one of the necessities of life, Robert
Creeley and Robert Coover, two Bobs who have surnames that begin with ‘C’,
for example. For another, they publish authors from all over the world; Burning
Deck is not a parochial enterprise, by any means. Besides, they make beautiful
books; the pleasure one gets simply by having a Burning Deck book in one’s
hands is large beyond measure.)
After arriving in Providence and seeing the Waldrop house,
I could immediately understand why William found it imperative that I visit,
and I was most grateful
that he had prevailed upon me to do so. First, for a bibliophile like myself,
wandering from room to room was like experiencing a perpetual orgasm. Virtually,
every square inch of wall space was given over to bookshelves crammed with
books. I’ve been privileged to see many fine private libraries, but
the Waldrops’ was second to none. For instance, one room is completely
devoted to poetry. Any and every poetry book I could imagine wanting to read
or own seemed to be there. I began thinking of all the strange and rare books
I’d always wanted to see and then checking to see if it was in the
poetry room. Without fail, the books were there. Plus, they had dozens of
books I had no idea even existed, but was delighted to discover. And that
was just the poetry room. The rest of the house was filled to the brim with
more books than could be absorbed by one person in one lifetime (unless all
one did was read books, that is, and was conversant in several languages:
the upstairs was mostly devoted to books from other countries). The basement
was filled with Burning Deck books, boxes and boxes filled with books representing
over 40 years of dedicated publishing (plus two antique printing presses).
The spaces not given over to books were taken up by Keith’s collages,
or by a CD collection that seemed to contain every classical, jazz, and blues
recording ever made (perhaps I exaggerate, but not much). In other words,
the house was a monument to the arts, a pulsing, throbbing organ of art.
The aura of artistic accomplishment was palpable and inspiring.
What further spiked this sense of inspiration was being
around William. For those of you who have not have the honor and privilege
of hanging out with
the founder of Spineless Books, let me just say that I feel sorry for you
because William is an embodiment of the Muse. Art is provoked and coaxed
into existence by a myriad of forces, but William is the most powerful
force I’ve ever encountered. First, there is simply his example. William
is almost constantly making something, writing something, publishing something,
singing something, drawing something, etc. something. He has more ideas in
a day than most people have in a lifetime. No art form is alien to him: he’s
done them all, it seems. And in quantities that either make you sick with
envy or flattened by awe. Or both at the same time. If you were to ask me
what my artistic goal in life is, I would simply reply: “To be an artist
like William Gillespie.” Second, William is a fierce believer in collaboration.
He is not content to simply make art by himself, he is compelled to compel
others to join him in art-making activity: the Muse as goad. Spend any amount
of time with William and I defy you not to be creative: resistance is futile.
The impetus behind so much of what I’ve done artistically in the past
eight years or so, by myself and in conjunction with others, can be traced
directly to William’s influence. I’ve sometimes been irritated
by William’s persistent urging to do this or that, but in the end,
I am always profoundly grateful for William’s relentless drive to create.
So, there I was: living in an artistic house in the presence
of the most complete artist I’ve ever known and I began thinking about the relationship
between art and life. Or perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be the
relationship between living and making—keying off T. S. Eliot’s
praise of Ezra Pound as il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman, or maker,
as some translations would have it), a line which Eliot stole from Dante
who used the phrase to describe the Provencal poet, Arnaut Daniel). I remembered
reading something about the people of Bali (if memory serves) who were asked
why their culture didn’t have any art. Not that the Balinese didn’t
make beautiful things that we would classify as art, but why they didn’t
seem to have a concept for artistic things, that is, a category that would
allow someone to say, “This is art; this is not art.” And the
answer, as I recall, was something like: “We do everything as well
as we possibly can.” Which I take to mean that everything they made
(and maybe everything they did) was done with an attitude that we would label “artistic.” We
compartmentalize things, and approach life with what I would call the museum
attitude. That is, for us, art is separate from life, something exceptional
that we remove from the everyday and put on display. Art is rare, the exception
to the rule. The Balinese make no such distinction: when everything is done
as well as it can possibly be done, then everything, every artifact, every
tool, every action, every encounter, is (again, what we would call) art.
I realized that what the Balinese and the Waldrops and
William teach us is that we should strive to push the ratio between life
and art as much towards
the art side of the equation as we possibly can, to live . . . artistically.
I only know the Balinese from what I’ve read about them; William, I’ve
experienced first-hand, and when I calculate his art/life ratio, art is tipping
the scales dramatically in its direction. While contemplating all this, I
ran across a quotation from Anne Carson in the Fall 2004 issue of the Paris
Review: “However bad life is, what is important is to make something
interesting out of it.” Exactly. Later, reading one of William’s
many notebooks, one in which he converts a simple “To Do” list
into an artistic object, I found this: “I need something to fill the
hole this notebook has bored in my life. A pet project. A pet print project.
Could even be another notebook. In which I write a webwork with maps on verso,
text on recto. So be it. Just for fun. For fun? How about a collaboration?
. . . What is the point? Sh: don’t ask questions like that. We don’t
know. We need a bone to chew on. There is so much to do . . . Every piece
of my writing deserves to be in a little book. I guess I also need to write
new stuff. New. Stuff. . . . To remain open to desire and beauty. If at all
possible. Mindfulness. . . .”
In the beginning, Spineless Books was—before it became “official,” a
non-profit organization recognized as such by the IRS—a “pet
project,” a way for William to find closure for a particular piece
of writing so that he could move on to the next project. He punctuated his
life by making things, artistic things, and then he made more. With everything
he made, he diminished the distance between his life and his art. And then,
with characteristic generosity, he expanded the mission of Spineless Books
to include other artists, other lives. Spineless Books is one way William
practices “mindfulness,” and I, for one, applaud him for making
this practice public.
The last day I spent in Providence, as these ideas began
coalescing, I told William that I had an idea for a Skull-piece and he urged
me to write it
before I began the long drive back to Cincinnati, because “You’ll
never write it if you don’t do it now.” (Always the goad.) I
knew he might be right about that, but I couldn’t get things going
(too many books left to look at, for one thing), but I assured him it would
get done someday. That day has come. Why? Well, I’m just trying to
do everything as well as it can be done, and this is the best way I could
think of to thank William for what he has done for me, my life, my art. Thanks,
boss.
—Dirk Stratton
