A Pattern Formed

‘You have spoken of “first patterns” — of images without existence save in the soul of the carver, but which transmutes into matter, making them visible.  So that, long before such a carver’s shapes can be seen, and so obtain their formal reality, they are there already, as forms within his soul.  And this same “first pattern” — this shape — is, to a hair, what old philosophers called “the idea”.’

So says the intellectual priest-become-abbot, Narziss, to the lover-vagrant-artist, Goldmund, in Herman Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund. Goldmund has achieved one great work, a rendering in wood of St. John the Disciple in the likeness of his Childhood friend, Narziss. Another work remains — his Eve, which seeks to capture the ecstasy of love and the agony of death in the face of a woman and which he suffers love, life, and death to see. In the space between the moment of his first pattern and the work’s form fall the years.

I have a head full of first patterns and books full of their first pencilled dawnings and I often wonder about the multitude of visions and half-formed works and words that artists and poets leave behind when they die. Where did they come from? Where do they go? Even if only in the head, these images and thoughts have substance and become the stuff of days; though invisible, they are as real and as substantive as the ground on which we tread. Do they float forever; find a new face somewhere, a new head to fill, or do they, in turn, cease to be in that final gasp for air?

I first read Narziss and Goldmund thirty-some years ago and subsequently forgot the story. I am re-reading it now and nearing the end, and I do not know if Goldmund ever realises his Eve. And if he doesn’t, what matter — for him has she not already been seen? Over and over again? We tend to think of a ‘finished’ work (a poem, a painting, a sculpture) as just that — finished. But to the artist, the poet, I wonder if ever they are, or if rather the work is more in the way of a punctuation — not an end itself but part of the grammar of striving to see. Artists rework their work; poets their words. In this is the search not for one thing, one great work, but for all things… so voracious the heart, so greedy the eye.