Josiah Seth Pervis

“So it wasn’t even a monotonous task, because the effort of thinking which accompanied it spread towards countless types of thoughts which spread each one, towards countless types of actions that might each serve to make countless things, and making each of these things was implicit in making the shell grow, turn after turn . . . ”

Italo Calvino, The Spiral, from The Complete Cosmicomics

Form? I didn’t have any

I picked up Cosmicomics a few years ago. It is a collection of strange stories almost entirely unrelated to each other other than the narrator, named Qwfwq (I just read it as “Q” in my head). In one of these stories, Qwfwq takes on the perspective of a mollusc with the task of making a shell.

In every layer of explanation, carefully worded and then reworded over and over again, Qwfwq begins to convey a sense of the growing personality and lived experience of this simple creature. Qwfwq pivots from introspective thoughts to outward observations and back again, over and over. The reader sees how vulnerable and nimble each strand of experience is to the mollusc’s sense of the world and how his span of awareness grows with each inward and outward turn. Always back and forth, the cycles of perception move like powerful currents, strengthened by tumbling bouts of curiosity and anxiety.

In the outward observations of Qwfwq, he becomes aware (by sensing slight changes in the water around him) of other creatures like himself. He suddenly finds that he is in love, whatever that may be, with another mollusc, like himself but different. He becomes sure of his new love for this other mollusc, but the current then turns inward: how will she know him, this one mollusc, a small sedentary individual among the endless sea of molluscdom?

“It was then that I began to secrete calcareous matter . . . Now it’s no use my piling up words, trying to explain the novelty of this intention I had: the first word I said is more than enough: make, I wanted to make . . . So I began to make the first thing that occurred to me, and it was a shell.”

Turn after turn

What the mollusc reflects for us in his creative act is the inexplicable necessity of making as a life in response to the world around us. There is no impetus, not even the thought, for making anything before he recognizes his own life, the mollusc he loves, and then his life again (the cycle of inward, outward, inward). We can read it backwards and say it was this or that particular end goal which drove him to begin making the shell, but to do so would miss the very moment of necessity. What matters for the mollusc is that his whole life has lead him not to a conclusion, but to a new action: that he should make and that he should make a shell.

This connection between the life and the act of making is neither entirely automated or willfully directed, but continues inseparably linked together from its beginning. In the narrative, we later see how every thought and emotion end up as a unique layer imprinted on the mollusc’s shell, a beautiful and living testament to its silly little life with all its ups and downs. It is only because the mollusc’s making is a singular and all encompassing act that such work becomes truly effortless. What life the mollusc lives, and it is a very small but perceptive life, he lives directly into his making of the shell. It is the one act he does that he does not allow, and in fact is not able to allow, to become distracted from its singular and mysterious purpose because it is the life of the mollusc, and thus, in a sense, is the mollusc.

This is not to say, artistically, we are free from a critical eye on what we make because we cannot control how our lives end up in what we make. That denies life to making. If we pay no critical attention to the outward value that our making implies, we will never truly appreciate others in their making. The life of making (and the making of life) is powered by the cycle of both inward and outward attention. Criticism and comparison is a necessary part of this cycle. If the inward attention of the creative act is not directed outwards, the process dies. If outward attention to the world is never responded to inwardly, the process dies. So much art remains toothless out of a denial of a healthy balance between inward and outward attentions in the creative act. That cycle is a discipline and a habit that builds awareness and transforms the effort.

There is another way in which we can stall the cycle in making, one which, I often find myself tripping on when I think about making music, mollusc shell, or otherwise. The mollusc presents his craft tangibly and simply, without pretensions or even aspirations; or rather, with pretensions and aspirations printed tangibly and simply, layer after layer. I tend to hide from my pretensions and my aspirations, thinking that in the act of hiding I both humble myself and exclude the possibility of disappointing myself from them when they are not fruitful. In this mindset, I think I can hide some aspect of myself from the work I do. To the critical eye, there is a tangible difference between a thing made with the vulnerability of a whole life behind it and a thing made with an artificial life behind it. In my attempt to hide what I do not like in myself, I create an artificial version of myself and hide behind that. This is an exhausting and complicated task. This puppet then makes something vicariously and badly, simply because I have declined to risk getting my hands dirty for the sake of my pride and my fear: my pride in what work I currently have control over and my fear that this is not enough.

The point of the cycle of making is that I am not enough for what ends I hope for my creative work. I am enough to show up for the process and I am enough to grow and be shaped by it, which in turn, shapes the ends of the work. I simply make more work for myself when I switch what the creative process calls for: materials for product. Again, this does not deny a hopeful and/or critical eye to the end goal as part of the process (an outward turn is always necessary), but simply affirms the essential role of both materials and maker to be refined by the cycle of making in both its inward and outward turns. In this sense, maker and materials are inextricably linked. The reality is, at least to the mollusc, that the true materials and work of making is only taken from the whole life continuously. Everything else is incidental.

The eyes that finally opened to us

The great irony of the entire story is that no other mollusc, not even Qwfwq himself, can actually appreciate the visual beauty of the shell he so self-consciously makes. He can tell, from some strange sensory experience of the water, the existence of the other molluscs around him. But they are eye-less creatures. Only an eye can take in the image of his particular shell. This is the supposed error and, to raise the drama of this precocious clam, the great tragedy of making the shell.

In a larger sense, like the mollusc, maybe we also make something hidden to us like the shell, but somehow vaguely interactive and rooted in our individual lives. Like tree rings colored by seasons, maybe lines add up to the years of our lives through some simultaneously effortful and effortless act, not so much recording what has happened in them, but marking what shape we occupied in the world around us through the years, season by season. Not made of any one physical thing, maybe this unseen “shell” is not the less tangible for it: memories, relationships, and places full of personal meaning to us can stand out as clear borderlines in the general shapes. However we might try, we cannot genuinely force any form on our “shell.” I think we can, though, if only in desperate moments, become more aware of the lines being laid as they are laid, like watching the shape of clouds shift on a windless day or, and maybe more accurately, like watching a tended garden grow, and appreciate a glimpse of a beautiful unity to our own or others’ lives.

Like our mollusc, we will also inevitably find ourselves in a panic of pride and fear about what we make and, consequently, what something we have no proper sense to appreciate looks like. But the shape of even our small lives extend outwards in ways that neither we nor anyone else have the ability to appreciate. Others close to us may see glimpses, but what larger beauty and purpose of shape lies even beyond their sight? Whose eyes, then, is this beauty and purpose for?

For the time being, it is enough to simply exhale and maybe consider more honestly how the cycles of making of those around us and ourselves, if we are engaged in that process, might take shape for a greater beauty and purpose than we can recognize.

-Josiah