Corita Kent and Baby Games, learning to look

In My post Baby Games

http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2022/05/baby-games.html

I realized later after writing about playing with my grandson—how much this approach is similar to my writing process.

1)      Starting with a kind of structure or form, such as standard hide n’ seek

2)      A plot twist, baby changes games by putting on a hat

3)      Story spins off into make believe, pretends to hide in plain sight

In fact upon rereading some notes I’d made a couple years ago about activist/artist nun Corita Kent I happened upon this:

Learning By Heart. “Try looking the way the child looks—as if always for the first time—and you will, I promise, feel wider awake.”

In her book Learning by Heart: teachings to free the creative spirit, was published in 1992, six years after her death. The first chapter is devoted—simply but significantly—to “LOOKING.” She starts by conjuring the lofty ghost of her forebear Matisse: “Matisse said that to look at something as though you had never seen it requires great courage.” The passage gives way to a succession of exercises Kent crafted to unlock this fearless perspective. One such exercise taps into the wide-eyed curiosity of kids. She encourages readers to “find a child,” preferably age two or three, and observe their “small journey” through a home that’s familiar to them. “It will be full of pauses, circling, touching, and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape,” she writes.

“It does not matter that this is all familiar territory—the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before. So the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention it deserves,” she continues. “The child is quite right.”

Other assignments instruct us to look long and hard at shadows cast by familiar spaces and forms: “After about five minutes you will probably think you’ve seen everything. But then after 15 or maybe 27 or maybe 58 minutes, it’s like an explosion and you see thousands of things you never knew were there.”

 

Good advice for those planning to write or hoping to create.