For the last six weeks or so I have been taking a class on the art of the commonplace through the CiRCE Institute. In truth, I have kept various forms of commonplace books over the years, off and on since high school. They have morphed and changed over the years, and until I began this course I would not have even considered them all in the same category. I thought that if I took a class on commonplace keeping I would finally know how to do it the “right” way and would finally find some consistency in my practice.
Instead, I discovered that I was already well on my way to an established practice of commonplacing, if only I would release my ideas about what makes a “real” commonplace book and by what measure I would consider myself having “arrived” at this ideal. With this newfound freedom, and the adoption of a ring-bound book that didn’t require I make all the setup decisions before starting on the first page, I began again.
Perhaps what surprised me the most in this new beginning is that it didn’t start with a quote, but with a song. For those of you who are not familiar with commonplace books, they are typically repositories of wisdom collected into a journal. Often, they are full of handwritten quotes copied from other sources. Commonplace books have gone by many names and have existed from antiquity, becoming especially popular among the Medievals. I have on my shelf previous commonplace books filled with quotes, organized by index to varying degrees of success. In my attempts to do things “right” I had missed the point: the commonplace book is an invitation into the shared experience and wisdom of humanity, an invitation into a fuller humanity than I can experience for myself in my own time and place alone. I find this invitation in the books that I read, and also in the music I listen to, and the art I enjoy. I began to wonder… could art and music be included in my commonplace book as well?
My resounding answer is YES! And my certainty was found on the heels of a chamber music concert by Brooklyn Rider. The concert was amazing; I could have listened without knowing anything about the pieces and been filled with delight. Instead, I listened and read the show notes and in the process realized that I did not possess the copiousness to grasp the full beauty of the program. They began with a piece by Caroline Shaw, a composer I already love. I would have been satisfied with that piece alone. Then they continued with a piece by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, whom I’d never heard of. The piece had five movements, including "Around the Fire,” a traditional Yiddish song woven through with echoes of Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, followed by “Riding with Death” based on a Basquiat painting by the same name. The concert concluded with Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, which was based on a poem by the same name written by Matthias Claudius.
I left the concert both humbled and hungry to better understand how these songs came to be suffused so profoundly with beauty and wisdom beyond the composers’ years. Starting with Golijov’s Cavalgando Com a Morte (Riding with Death), I looked up the Basquiat painting and discovered that it was based on a sketch by Leonardo DaVinci as he contemplated the relationship between Envy and Virtue. I looked up the poem by Matthias Claudius on which Schubert’s Death and the Maiden is based and found it reminded me of Death in The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. In looking up Gaiman’s inspiration for a gentle Death, I found that he based the character on an ancient Egyptian poem, which was hauntingly beautiful in its entirety. In trying to find the poem by Mattias Claudius, I discovered that death and the maiden was a common motif in 16th century artwork, and stumbled across a painting by Hans Baldung (aptly titled “Death and the Maiden”) that Eliana and I saw in Vienna last summer, a painting so striking we both remembered it clearly.
Each song, each painting, each poem had sprung from what had come before, and the flourishing we see above ground as art is stabilized by a tangle of roots anchored in the soil of humanity.
Part of what we love about art is that we come away different for having encountered it. Art shapes us and transforms us, in part, because it taps into humanity's shared experience, and is built of the experiences passed down from previous generations. This experiential knowledge is often poetic* and pre-analytic, reminiscent of the way we have explored our world from childhood.
*This does not refer to a knowledge of poetry, but instead to the knowledge a person has through an immediate sensory-emotional experience of things… It nurtures wonder because it results from an immediate encounter with reality; thus, it precedes analytical or critical examination. Though precritical, it constitutes real knowledge - consider how a boy on a Kansas farm knows something essential about horses without ever studying the mineral composition of hooves, or how a girl delights in the banter of Twelfth Night in performance before examining doubling in English class, or how someone lovingly knows the storied constellations of the night sky before learning about astrometric binary stars. As Dennis Quinn writes in “Education by the Muses,” education that begins with wonder and poetic knowledge “introduce[s] the young to reality through delight. It is a total education including the heart, the memory and passions and imagination, as well as the body and intelligence.”
(As Brian Williams so eloquently states in the inaugural issue of Principia.)
I think we lose our way in trying to analyze and dissect, classify and sort our world into disintegrate components. We identify more with our analytical thoughts than with our whole being, turning faith into intellectual assent instead of incarnational participation. We prioritize the rational over the relational and sever communion from community, the body from the Body. Though we do not forsake meeting together, in the most shallow reading of the phrase, we do violence when we dismember the body of Christ, treating as separate what should be whole. We do this within our communities and we do this within ourselves, and I think art can help us recover lost poetic knowledge and remember what is commonplace to us all.
A Delight: Florilegium
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…” Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Perhaps this quote should inhabit my commonplace book. There are, after all, a plethora of names by which the commonplace has been known over the millennia. My favorite of these is Florilegium, from the Latin flores, meaning flowers, and legere, to collect, gather, read, choose. A florilegium is literally a collection of flowers, a bouquet, a gathering of beautiful things and wisdom of the great authors of the past that you want to become commonplace within your own being, settling deep within your memory, heart, and life.
For just as bees know how to extract honey from flowers, which to men are agreeable only for their fragrance and color, even so here also those who look for something more than pleasure and enjoyment in such writers may derive profit for their souls. Now, then, altogether after the manner of bees must we use these writings, for the bees do not visit all the flowers without discrimination, nor indeed do they seek to carry away entire those upon which they light, but rather, having taken so much as is adapted to their needs, they let the rest go.
~ St. Basil the Great (Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature)
Christopher Perrin has a delightful podcast episode on the monastic tradition of florilegia. I especially appreciate the way he draws parallels between the practices of keeping a florilegium and lectio divina.
A Practice: Commonplace Keeping
I’d like to invite you to join me in this practice of keeping a commonplace book. You don’t need anything fancy, just a blank book and something to write with. It can be as simple as a spiral notebook, or as lovely as a Moleskine notebook, with blank, lined, or grid pages - whatever you prefer or have on hand. As you are reading whatever it is that you like to read and come across something worthy of remembering, pondering, or shaping who you are, add it to your commonplace book. I like to include the book, author, and page number along with the quote. Lots of people have lots of ideas about how to structure a commonplace book, as a quick YouTube search will show you. If you want to know what I’ve come to prefer, I’d love to have a commonplace chat over coffee sometime! But mostly I encourage you not to make it too complicated, and just to start a record of what you come across that makes the world, and your presence in it, more beautiful by the way it is shaping you. I think you’ll find the world a more delightful place to inhabit, just by noticing and keeping the beautiful wisdom of others.