The Creativity Room

I’ve just started reading Joseph Campbell’s “Myths to Live By.” I was really excited to read the following:

“[N]ot only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been – and still are, in fact – the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality and creative powers. With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life-supporting illusions.”

I am a great believer in fictions, myths, make-believe and the power of thought. It is awesome to hear Campbell’s introduction about the importance of myth. Thomas Moore, an author I am very fond of, is also a great fan of myth.

Believing in fictions is vital to so many aspects of our lives – not only our creativity, but also our health, our love, our playfulness and enjoyment of friendship, family and parenthood. I have been so inspired by the examples of people’s healing through belief and imagination – like the woman who was having major surgery and practiced creative visualisations for the days beforehand with unprecedented results: she lost less than a third of the blood usually lost during such surgery. There may be no scientific fact to back it up, but it is becoming more widely accepted that the mind and imagination can have amazing results on the body.

If this can happen in the realm of health and healing (and disease prevention), you can only imagine what happens to us every day through our creative thought and belief in fictions. I think it is absolutely possible to know fact from fiction, to be clear about what is proven, what is true and at the same time to entertain productive beliefs in fictions and to let ourselves be moved by the make-believe.

Practicing this can have so many interesting results in your life: viewing and responding to art, films and books with a deeper, fuller investment and interest; cultivating a soulful relationship with nature spirits and deeper engagement with the places you live, work and play; an open and empathetic listening to others’ stories and experiences; a creative processing of one’s own life experiences; the creation of a stimulating, rich and meaningful environment in which to live your life and so on.

There’s a fine balance to be struck during the artistic process between intention and detachment. Margaret Cameron, who I quoted in my pervious post, said “You must practice with loyalty and disinterest”.

The idea of intention, and loyalty to that intention, is what I was exploring in my last post – finding your voice, your song, your instrument and your tune and having the trust to work with that and share it with others.

The idea of disinterest or detachment helps you to shape your content, to edit it and present it, create something out of it that contains but is infinitely more than your sad little sob story about how hard your life has been / your awesome celebration of how cool you are (etc). As you can imagine, this detachment is vital if you don’t want your work to feel indulgent and embarrassingly confessional to your audience.

Deepak Chopra has an excellent section about detachment in “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,” a short, concise book that is well worth a read.

So what does this mean in practice, this dance of loyalty and disinterest? I would like to illustrate it with a story from my own experience:

In 2002 I co-directed a theatre project with Eva-Maria Gauss in Leipzig, Germany and Christchurch, New Zealand. We were exploring social dimensions of time, quite a philosophical topic that resulted in two fairly philosophical works, both entitled “Dream/Wachsein”.

After that, we decided to take a version of this piece down to the Dunedin Fringe Festival. Eva had returned to Germany and another actor we worked with was unavailable, so with about ten days to devise the piece, I set about with two other actors and created “Birthday“.

We had a lot of research behind us, but no time to generate a lot of material and be careful or systematic about how we created the show. The 35 minute piece we ended up with was quite poetic, with very little text and a simple storyline about child-adult relations and aging.

At some point it suddenly occurred to me that, absolutely subconsciously, with no intention or awareness, I had made a piece of theatre exploring the recent death of my mother, my close relationship with my sister and our relationship with our mother before her death! I was stunned.

Somehow, if you can allow yourself to look the other way, stay open and create partly by following your thoughts and ideas and partly by following your intuition and feelings, what is most important to you will be revealed. You don’t even need to try!

This brings us back to the quote from John Daido Loori in the previous post. Once you have trust and are open to the creative process, your art will just happen and you will need to spend no effort, no thought on whether or not it is important, meaningful, relevant, funny, effective, interesting etc. etc. etc. Delicious!