Embracing the unknown
On Emily Mason and creating with a sense of openness
I’ve been thinking a lot about the unknown lately, specifically the writers who embrace it. Writers who are open about not being experts, who are uncertain and make space for contradictions. Writers who are skeptical of a single truth or ‘take’ on something. There is, as Renee Gladman has observed, this “pressure to know” when writing. But for Gladman, writing is more like “wandering” and “meandering” —“allowing myself to spiral (get dizzy), to see where I [end] up.” Reading Gladman—and other writers like Kate Briggs, Jenny Boully, Sophie Calle, and Jazmina Barrera—has been a liberating experience, as I find myself less inclined to make clean arguments or force a story. It feels closer to life.
“Not knowing is my mantra,” the artist Emily Mason once said. She never planned her paintings. As a teacher, she encouraged her students to try painting with their non-dominant hand. If we go into creating with less of a predetermined idea and a willingness to learn, we allow for surprise and change. We allow the life to get in.
For the past few years I’ve been spending a lot of time with Emily’s words and art. I was busy editing a monograph on her life and career, which was just published by Rizzoli. It is called “Unknown to Possibility,” a borrowed phrase from a verse by Emily Dickinson (her namesake):
What I can do—I will—
Though it be little as a Daffodil—
That I cannot—must be
Unknown to possibility—
Leaning into the unknown allows for possibility. It also leads to less linear or straightforward expressions. “They do not simplify,” Barbara Stehle writes of Emily Mason’s paintings in the book.
But even as this type of work is not always easy, it isn’t inscrutable either. On the contrary, the unknown becomes luminous. It sheds light.
For further reading on Emily, I wrote an essay for Momus about the experience of putting together the book, which in a way began back in 2017, when I first met Emily and was working on a monograph on her mother, the artist Alice Trumbull Mason. You can also read an excerpt of my introduction for the book in Lit Hub, and an excerpt of the main essay, by Barbara Stehle, in Hyperallergic.
For my New York people, we’ll be hosting a book launch and conversation at Miles McEnery Gallery on Thursday, November 13 at 6:30pm. It would be so nice to see you there!
In the meantime, here are some things I’ve recently loved:
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez—this became one of those books I couldn’t wait to read at the end of my day. I had seen the movie first, and was worried it would overwhelm my reading, but the book is more than the movie—a story about grief, animal-human relationships, but also very much about the joys and pains of writing. It is a novel with the voice of an essay (my favorite).
The rooms of minerals and gemstones at the Yale Peabody Museum. Wow. Crystals are wilder and more beautiful than when they get cut and smoothed over and neatly shaped.
This interview with DJ Waldie about why more people need to love Los Angeles.
From L.A. with love,
Elisa