Artistic Forms and the Delivery of State of Beingness and Place

Through careful contemplation in the trajectory of her writing Willa Cather honed in closer on forms of delivery that are actual artistic miracle. Importantly they also had been for her her destined life directly of the “original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.” They are the same: the miracles, the destiny, what grabbed us, what struck the chord of the song of our lives, what sang our souls even in the desperate hours. When I think back to what spoke to me deeply as a child and what was hugely transitional (like moving from Ohio to the Southwest, and further into the Southwest by myself with my little dogs), was also this kind of destiny and path of discovery to arrive at this moment in emergent clarity. This also came with the first primordial wound at existence, right at Beingness itself from the beginning, and thus the deep dive into tunneling into existence through writing instead of just showing up as oneself in a culture that wouldn’t understand. But the goals of both healing that core wound and writing/creating are the same: Beingness and a different world in the changed Place. It arrives these decades later with the same love and innocence, but also a strength of incorruptibility even as awareness came with looking deeply into it all and seeing what it was with compassion.

The miracles in the artistic creation I have mentioned briefly before: groundedness and different rootedness in actuality of Place—its deeper truths, its reality—deeper than convention as Eudora Welty shows, miraculously delivering truth. The next is forms of delivery that get closer to the state of Being by moving away from ‘situation,’ plot, excessive detail, the ‘furniture,’ it opens the further dimension that it points to: it creates the setting, the atmosphere for it to appear. Willa saw these cultural deliveries in opera, legend, painting, religion, shifting from forcing action from words to the actual effect. There is also what is already potently known of the 'Old World' as in French literature. With these Willa could come closest to the delivery of Being and thus also different Place naturally from the real effects.

Note: Ann Moseley in her Historical Essay for the 2012 The Song of the Lark The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition references "Eudora Welty's assertion that 'fiction depends for its life on place.'"