Creative portals that lead to endless inspiration
The art of resurrecting simple truths through story, and how I got to know George Sand
“There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared: twins and old age.”
—George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin)
Everything in the creative world builds, if given the right care.
Through one heroine’s story, we find another source of inspiration, a new question. Sometimes fictional characters nag us or follow us from one story to the next; sometimes essays help us to determine new patterns in the world that feed new perspectives.
Writers, like everyone, go through a cycle: we learn, we gain perspective, we forget, we recognize what we’ve forgotten, and we are introduced to one subject by studying another.
When writing about Victoria Woodhull, I learned about the writer George Sand. From the immersion in one story, I was pulled into another.
Recently, on the anniversary of her death, The Guardian published an article about Sand, calling her “a grandmother of fiction of social exclusion” by her forties. This title was earned through her influence on the Brontë sisters and others.
Woodhull chose to publish translations of Sand’s writing in her newspaper, which was seen as a controversial move. The French author was known, similar to Victoria, as a radical, and the publication reflected her critique of arranged marriages.
Sand wore pants and smoked and centered her fiction and essays around women and the rural poor. In pictures, she looks like a relative of Oscar Wilde (to me) and while this was not the case, Wilde was fond of her work and defended it against attacks that ridiculed her for being silly and offering a philosophy that is “dead.”
Since discovering her, I’ve read some of Sand’s translated work, from Indiana (her critique on marriages norms in the 19th century) and essays, and I personally find her very much alive. Even today. This is from her intro.
“If any one asks me my purpose in writing it, I shall reply that I desired to do a very simple and very touching thing, and that I have not succeeded as I hoped. I have seen, I have felt the beautiful in the simple, but to see and to depict are two different things!
The most that the artist can hope to do is to induce those who have eyes to look with him. Therefore, my friends, look at simple things, look at the sky and the fields and the trees and the peasants, especially at what is good and true in them: you will see them to a slight extent in my book, you will see them much better in nature.”
—George Sand
Sand wrote about everything, it seems, including her romance with composer Frédéric Chopin. She processed her life with radical candor on the page and explored her own spiritual beliefs without worry over convention.
Me being me, perhaps what I find most fascinating about Sand is her invention of a natural spirit or diety, which she explained was both man and woman, representing the interconnectedness of things. She named this divine force Corambé and revisited the spirit in her writing often.
Another “radical” of her day, Sand saw patterns that extended beyond what was defined for her. She exposed basic injustices and noted the beauty of nature with reverence. It makes me think the most basic observations are also the most complex. They have to be, or they wouldn’t be repeatedly trampled by the agendas of certain leaders.
This brings me to a prompt and reflection.
Prompt: Pick a simple truth. Something as simple as the fact that humans breathe oxygen, which is provided by trees. Take that simple truth and begin to write a story or essay that examines how this truth is disregarded and why, then circle back to this truth at the end.
Let me know how it goes.
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