The Creativity Room

The more I think, the more I read, the more I teach, the more this idea of authenticity comes to the fore. I touched on it in my posts on “meaningfulness”. It is the most important ingredient, the most important practice, for making art that speaks to and moves its audience and for receiving personal fulfillment from the creative work you do.

Authenticity is described as being faithful to internal rather than external ideas and motivations. It is similar to what Deepak Chopra talks of as being “self-referential”. It means referring to your own inner knowing and your own judgment instead of being ruled by the judgments and ideas of others or of society (which are often perceived rather than directly experienced). The philosophy of authenticity is quite an interesting subject.

This seems simple enough – of course, authenticity will make our work original, fresh and personal – but how do we do it? Over decades of education and socialisation we form the habit of pretense in order to please, amuse and succeed. We categorise our own behaviours and habits and decide never to reveal certain aspects of ourselves.

One of the best tricks to finding this authentic material that lies deep inside us is to not think. I mean to not use that part of the mind that wants to control and that is in charge of the judgments and pretense, that part that has decided not to reveal your deepest truth to anyone.

Every good book on creativity or art concurs in this matter. Learn to bypass the controlling mind. There are many ways to practice this: meditation is one, physical exhaustion is another (which I’ve encountered as a technique in physical theatre), and I suppose sleep deprivation might serve a similar purpose, and drug-taking too. A spell of time alone, in nature or in a deeply spiritual place that speaks to your soul may engender a great sense of peace and trust that allows the controlling mind to recede into the background.

The quickest, easiest method and the one that I employ the most is something more like the surrealist technique of automatic writing. It involves moving as fast through a creative process as you can, never giving yourself time to think and always accepting the first idea that comes out without any time to reconsider, hesitate or censor yourself.

Also vital to expressing your authentic truth is trust. All our control, censorship and pleasing behaviour is, of course, a self-protection mechanism, designed to make us more successful in life. Allowing other truths to emerge and (heaven forbid!) revealing them to a large audience, takes trust. And trust, although innate, also takes practice. It is through experience, I think, that you can build on the trust you already have. Every time you create an authentic piece of work and feel good about speaking your truth, your trust will grow. The paradox is that in order to be able do it, first you have to do it. It’s a chicken and egg situation. But soulful and spiritual practice can also aid hugely. I recommend reading Thomas Moore, especially “The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life.”

Have you ever been audience to an art work that was well intentioned, well executed and interesting but for some reason you found yourself looking at the rest of the audience more than the piece itself, guiltily waiting for the chance to get away?

Maybe you’ve also met people that seem to be talking about something really interesting and important but you find it hard to listen to them?

Sometimes it can be hard to put your finger on, but some art just doesn’t ring true. All the ingredients are there for a great work, but there’s a strange hollowness, a sense of irrelevance or perhaps tedium at the work’s core.

Most artists want to make work that is meaningful. Most people want to live meaningful lives and contribute to other people’s lives in meaningful ways. We know meaning when we see/hear/feel it, but not always how to generate it.

The paradox of meaningfulness is that, a bit like really good, funny comedy, you can’t really set out to be meaningful.

“Hmm, what’s a really meaningful topic I could make a meaningful art work about? How about the plight of a homeless, schizophrenic homosexual suffering from AIDs in the midst of a never-ending civil war somewhere in the third world? …”

There are two basic things wrong with this sort of well-intentioned, earnest plan to create something meaningful:

1. No matter how much research you do, the work, unless it is a documentary and uses the words, images and experiences of the people involved, will never ring true. You are not homeless, oppressed, sick, or whatever it is you think is interesting.

2. The work will most likely suffer from a dreary kind of seriousness and carefulness that comes from a strong respect for the subject matter and the people involved but isn’t at all interesting to an audience. When a black homosexual man suffering oppression because of mental illness makes a film about his own life, you can be sure there will be a lot of irreverent humour, political incorrectness and sweet humanity in the story that is very hard to fake up if you are an outsider trying your darndest to respect someone different from yourself. Even if you are just dealing broadly with a theme, if it isn’t YOUR theme, you’re likely to get a bit lost in seriousness.

Just like your originality, your meaningfulness can only come out of your own experiences, your life, your soul.

We are here to dance to our own music.

Sounds easy enough …

Still, there are some common difficulties in executing this dance: To begin with, as we grow up we learn not to reveal our deepest selves to too many people. We learn not to tell embarrassing stories about our failures. The gift of art is that it gives us metaphor and aesethetics. These two things act as a kind of bridge to support the revelation of ourselves, not entirely naked; clothed in imagination and colour.

Another difficulty we often encounter is that we think we (especially the white, western, urban we) have nothing interesting to talk about. We no longer live in a culture that wants to hear its own stories. We have become accustomed to films that deal with extreme situations – world wars, the holocaust, crime and triumph over extreme adversity. Why would anyone want to hear about the way my mother used to make jam when I was 7 years old?

On top of this, how do I even know what my song is so that I can dance to it?? All the schooling, training and learning we do teaches us to do things a certain way, and to be interested in certain themes, material and stories. To be a true artist, you have to be prepared, time and time again, to embark on a journey into unknown territory, pretty much alone. You have to be on a constant search for self-knowledge and to take the risk of expressing what you find to others.

The key to all this is trust. John Daido Loori, in “The Zen of Creativity” says

If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.

One of my teachers, Margaret Cameron, said it like this “Your work is what is right in your face.”

One thing is for sure: what you find and share on your journey through your self, your life and your art is going to be damn interesting and meaningful to those around you, harbouring secrets in their own souls and struggling to hear and dance to their own music!