I’m trying it and it’s a funny thing—to “be” a creative writer.

Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish as John Keats and Fanny Brawne

It’s a weird kind of love-hate relationship with the world—we creative-writer-types walk around seeking out the interesting, the beautiful, the meaningful, honoring and loving the world, I think, with our attentions—but then what happens? We shut the doors to that same world, and often to the people in it, in order to build some crude replica of emotion and sense with those little, slippery, seducing, and ultimately unfit things called words. And this receding becomes sacred and necessary somehow—so necessary for me that I’ve cut back on other cherished pastimes and cut whole relationships out of my life to make room for it—all for what? Some time to stare out the window and jot down some notes. It’s not easy to justify.

So, last Sunday at the Naro’s FirstLook Film Forum, watching Jane Campion’s new film Bright Star, the love story of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Wishaw), I may have been the only one to let burst a full-blown laugh when wannabe-poet Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’ benefactor, explains to the neighboring Brawne family that (and I paraphrase) ‘if it looks like we’re lying around doing nothing, we are most likely working.’ Yes, that’s about right. The writing life is hard to justify.

In the film, Keats does a better job. He describes the experience of poetry as sensual: you don’t jump in a lake to swim directly to the shore, he says, you jump in the lake to luxuriate in the lake. And Bright Star, a stunning film that weaves Keats’ poetry with images so lovely they are worthy of it, is just such a luxuriating experience, one that challenges, too, my separate, dual-world model of living and creating.

Brawne and Keats

Through Brawne and Keats’ all-consuming romance, we see that maybe there is not so clear a distinction between art and the world we experience and, in particular, not so clear a distinction between art and the experience of being in love. Falling in love and composing a poem do cover a lot of the same emotional ground: the experiences are both sensual; both animate the imagination; both often invoke doubt and insecurity; both are exhilarating, exhausting, and sometimes excruciating. We see this tumult in Keats and Brawne—and their passion for each other is tied up in their respective artistic production; when Keats is intermittently away from Brawne, she finds herself in the throes of doubt, and she ceases to sew her exquisite fashions or function at all until she receives a letter from him. Keats, even when living next door, complains to his benefactor that he cannot concentrate on his poetry unless Brawne is within sight. The night before he flies to Italy and to his death, Keats describes their love as something attached to reality, but separate, a world marked by its beauty and its otherness, a description that could aptly apply to poetry or art. As represented in the film, then, Keats and Brawne live the beauty, they live the emotional heart of a poem—there is no need to close any doors here; art and experience meld into one thing.

Okay, so here’s the part where I try my hand at justifying my stance at the window, the writing life. The first lines Brawne reads of Keats’ poetry, the lines that spark her interest in him, are from his poem “A Thing of Beauty,” which follows: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: / Its lovliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness.” The interesting word here, for me, is “thing,” and the problematic word is “forever.” It seems that it’s through the thing-of-art, the pages of letters and poems (and this film and others), that Keats and Brawne’s romance lives on. The love itself, the true, in-the-moment thing, the true beauty-experience is lost. The pain of this loss, I think, explains why artists have to shut themselves away from the world sometimes. The pain of this loss explains why we have to tell those we love to leave us alone, to leave us altogether sometimes—because, as Keats must have known so well, we have not figured out how to last forever and must forge forward in the creation of beautiful things, however inferior, that might.

While Bright Star might fall a little shy of the experience of actually falling in love, especially as Keats would have it, Jane Campion and her cast have got this recreation thing down—viewing the film is a lasting beauty-experience in and of itself, one that we can relive again and again.

Bright Star will run at the Naro Oct 8 through 15.