The Quality of Being

I can certainly understand how someone would really like your piece. It does have a quality of reaching out, and it is written with a good deal of confidence in the voice -- it doesn't seem at all uncertain of itself. And the key idea of the transformation at the end is twisty and insightful and a surprise.

But what is the *quality* of that twisty, clever, surprising turn at the end?

Based on my own experience writing stuff, I have this intuition that along with everything that it carries with it, each idea has a sort of a *quality* to it, a basic something about it that causes it to be perceived in a certain way. Its Zeitgeist maybe or its atman. I haven't got a good way of defining it. But it seems to me that because of this *quality*, each idea has an affinity for a certain way that it wishes to be handled.

One time I went to a big-time traveling exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts of Monet's paintings. One of the things I noticed particularly was a series of paintings of the same haystack in the same field. I forget exactly, it's been a long time, but maybe six or eight of them, not very big, maybe letter size. All painted from the same place, the same field and haystack, nothing added or taken away from any of them. The only difference was the time of day at which each was painted, resulting in a change in palette of the field, the haystack and the sky. The question that occurred to me was why had Monet done this? He kept going back to this same spot, painting the same haystack. What was he trying to get at? What was he curious about? Was it the haystack's atman, was it the light and the turning of the earth, or was it that he had boinked a milkmaid in that particular haystack when he was fifteen and now he was eighty?

Perhaps, for a painter, this thing I'm talking about, this *quality*, also relates to any given subject for a painting, and perhaps this *quality* inherent in each subject has a particular affinity for a certain kind of treatment and sometimes you have to fool around and try different stuff to figure out what that affinity might be.

And why, in the first place, choose this idea or that subject to fool around with instead of the one over there?

If you've taken their money, then that's the basis for the selection, for the one that pays the piper calls the tune, but if you're working on spec, as they say, with only yourself to answer to, then the question is there, though it doesn't seem often to be addressed.

And then, of course, as soon as you do start to think about it, you are confronted with the first corollary: Do you choose the subject or does the subject choose you? Or is some sort of compromise involved?

And I guess that's what keeps it interesting.

Well, for some of us.