Encountering true art

True art, according to Ford, is never created but always encountered.

Kenneth Slawenski, J.D. Salinger: A Life

Slave Market with the Disappearing
Bust of Voltaire

The Ford in the above equation is Raymond Ford, a character in the J.D. Salinger short story "The Inverted Forest." Real people have said similar things. Elsewhere in that story Ford says, "A poet doesn't invent his poetry — he finds it ..."

This is an interesting idea, and I believe a true one, at least up to a point.

Speaking of invention, we might say that everything necessary to make a light bulb had been there all along. Thomas Edison simply found a way to put it all together. Yet doing that did require some creativity. If it was easy, as the saying goes, anybody could do it.

So it is with poetry, fiction, music, fine art, etc. It is all there in our world — the words, the ideas, the images, the musical notes, the colors, etc. — just waiting to be encountered and put to use in certain ways. Yet only certain people seem capable of doing this. If we don't call these people creative, then what do we call them?

Last Thursday I revisited the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. So unique, so original, so outlandish are Dali's paintings that it is impossible to imagine anyone else creating them. And creating does seem like the proper word after all.