a permanent message

"Bednarik: You had some profound influences on your early writing, Rimbaud and Rilke and Whitman, and claim the first section of “Suite to Fathers” was actually intended to shed yourself of Rilke’s influence.

Harrison: But you never can. You never can. There’s a marvelous book, Edleman’s Neural Darwinism, that I read for The Beast God Forgot to Invent. When you lay down those maps—if you read Rilke or even Neruda—you lay them down permanently. These people are so powerful as writers that you’ve permanently affected the structure of your brain by reading them, and you can’t get rid of them. It’s just like reading Dostoevsky. That happens rarely in one life—at best, say a dozen people who overwhelm you with the immensity of their work. But you’re laying down, in your twelve billion neurons, a permanent message.

Bednarik: You mentioned that the unwritten poem is a force within the artist.

Harrison: The biggest force within an artist, I think, is this restlessness for the work that’s just over the lip of consciousness. You’re waiting. You know that old thing Wallace Stevens said, “Images collect in pools,” which turns out to be somewhat accurate in terms of brain structure. It’s a storage aspect. You’ve stuffed all these images which are filtering down to this pool and when it gets full—then whether consciously or not consciously—you’re prodded to begin. Fascinating idea. Not my idea at all, though I’m not sure where it comes from, but that kind of excess that burbles over."

above taken from a wonderful interview with Jim Harrison.

Posted by jeff pitcher at March 29, 2005 08:17 AM

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