"How many of you are artists? There must be some here, with all this beautiful art around here?" That's how Gordon MacKenzie, a steel sculptor, would begin his talks with schoolchildren. He describes his experience in his book, "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" [1], and I quote:
The pattern of responses never varied.And this story was from well before the passage of 'No Child Left Behind'! But today is not about schools or kids, but about all of us.
First Grade: En masse the children leapt from their chairs, arms waving wildly, eager hands trying to reach the ceiling. Every child was an artist.
Second Grade: About half the kids raised their hands, shoulder high, no higher. The raised hands were still.
Third Grade: At best, 10 kids out of 30 would raise a hand. Tentatively. Self-consciously.
... By time I reached sixth grade, no more than one or two did so and then only ever-so-slightly — guardedly — their eyes glancing from side to side uneasily, betraying a fear of being identified by the group as a “closet artist.”
In Praise of the Arts returns here at First UU after several years' absence and I'm grateful for the energy and efforts of many who organized the art show, hung these banners, put together the wonderful reception last night, and did all the other tasks involved in this two week event. In praising the arts, we praise the possibility that all of us are artists, that we all know what those first graders know. We praise creativity, We praise that gift which we all are born with, that ability to make the world more satisfying and beautiful.
So if we've come to see ourselves as not artistic, or uncreative, how do we summon our creative selves back? How might we recover our innate call to create?
One of our readings today [2] described how, as a child, poet Ruth Stone wrote, or rather didn't write, poetry. The poems just showed up, and they were not meek. These were powerful, thunderous, almost terrifying experiences that barreled through her, and if she was fast enough she could grab the poem and get it down on paper before it rumbled past. The creative force seemed to be outside Ruth, and it came in, or she grabbed it and pulled it in.
Are there any of you who have had those experiences? Maybe not so physical, but still, many of us have experienced a flash of insight, the appearance of a complete creative idea suddenly popping into our consciousness.
I've had only a few occasions in which I've had such an inspiration, where a text, or a creative solution appears nearly whole in my mind's eye. It's as if your muse, or your genius, some entity outside yourself just hands you the work, fully formed or nearly so. In ministry, we might say that 'the Spirit moved though you'. Whatever we call it, when this happens, about all we can do is just say 'thank you', because we are in awe and we are grateful.
The second form of inspiration comes from deep within, and it is born of waiting, and listening. This form is far more familiar to me. As in the May Sarton poem [3], we wait as the phoebe does, nurturing the egg of the life of the idea that emerged from us. We sit with it, we incubate it, we give it silence and time to break out.
Except it is not quite that simple. The waiting time does not mean we sit around doing nothing. We are working. We are often hard at work, in this kind of creativity. But the work has a certain silent quality, in that the better part of this creativity we must do alone. There may be many drafts of the poem, many sketches in the sketchbook, many preliminary renditions, before the final layer is placed on the canvas. This is work! and it emerges slowly, from within. We start with that divine spark, and we blow on it, carefully, we give it our breath, by offering it our stillness and steadfast efforts.
Melissa mentioned Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way [4], as a tool to recovering your creative self. This book has been around a while, and remains a popular resource. There was at one time a study group here at First UU that used The Artist's Way through the twelve-week program.
In the book, Cameron talks of two critical activities for opening up one's creative self -- these are Morning Pages and Artist Dates. The idea of Morning Pages is simply that you commit to write three pages every morning in a journal. The writing can be on anything, you can even write "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over. But you do three pages, and you do it every single day.
The idea of the Artists Dates is that once a week, you set aside two hours or so that is time for just you and your creative self to have fun. Time in solitude, maybe walking, taking in a show or a museum or going to an amusement park, this is recreation in the original meaning of the word: re - creation.
I see these two activities as spiritual practices, things you do regularly in order to move toward fullness and wholeness in your life. What Cameron observes, and what others who have used the Artist's Way have told me, is that people tend to love one of these two practices and hate the other. Some love the routine of the Morning Pages, as they feel productive and grounded by them, but they see the Artist's date as frivolous, a waste of time. Others love the fun of the Artist Date, and see the Morning Pages as a boring, daily grind.
Perhaps these two activities line up with the two ways in which creativity can manifest itself to us. If creativity usually comes from outside ourselves, we may enjoy the stimulation of the Artist's Dates. If our source is within us, the rigor of writing pages may nurture that source of creativity.
Now I suspect that the duality I'm describing here -- that creativity either emerges from an outside source or from within us -- is a false one. It's a helpful fiction as we try to understand our patterns of creating. If we are wise, we understand that our creativity depends on both the interior and exterior sources of creative energy.
And as creatives, we get stuck. There are many ways in which our call to create goes unanswered or gets blocked. We already considered the question of identity with the schoolchildren that MacKenzie talked with. When you identify as an artist, of course you are creative. But it is pretty easy to let other life choices drive us to lose that innate sense of creativity. As I look back on my business career, I realize the times when I was most unhappy were when I found myself in situations where 'creativity' didn't seem to be part of the job description. Money, recognition; these did not fill that gaping hole.
Even if we hold on to that identity as artists and 'creatives', we may still find many things, mostly internal, may block our creativity. Perhaps the biggest block is the fear of being inadequate, of being not good enough, even of being laughed at. It takes courage to create, and it gets even harder when we realize that there is always someone who will find our efforts wanting.
I practice Interplay [5], a kind of group expression in movement, dance, song and story. I introduced some of you to Interplay during our Adult Forum time this morning. Our focus is on the play, being in our bodies, creating, having fun, and not on right or wrong or 'improvement'. In Interplay, we experiment with these various activities we call 'forms'. One form is 'run-walk-stop', which is just that: people running, walking or stopping as they wish. Another form is babbling, where we tell very brief stories to one another about mundane things. We may do dance forms, like 'three-play' where we try to have three people moving and the rest observing, but any observer can jump in at any time. So you get the idea: the forms are very loose, it's play, shaped by the people, and it's just a lot of fun.
At the same time, Interplay can provide a space for people to explore the difficult stories in their lives: a dying father, a lump in a breast, a shooting in a church, a suicidal patient at work. Without the sense of performance, or judgment, people can go to amazingly deep places with movement and story and song. And the results can be profoundly beautiful.
Another block to artistic creativity is our sense of isolation. Not only do we feel we do it alone, we may even feel overly competitive with others artists. Yet much of our creation builds quite directly and honestly on the prior work of others, and that is as it should be. This morning Marcelline explored a variation on the tune used in the hymn we sung earlier, and Mi Sook Yun our guest musician, offered a piece based on the 23rd Psalm. Not long ago I attended a traveling exhibition of the art of Picasso [5] and his American contemporaries. I was surprised at the amount of what to me seemed to be outright copying of image elements among artists like Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. I immediately thought, "this is plagiarism", but no, the copying furthered these artist's exploration of Abstract Expressionism and what followed it. We can actually be more creative when we work in collaborative community with other artists.
These are just a few of the blocks to creativity: loss of identity, fear, isolation, competition. There are many others, as you well know. We can work to overcome our blocks, realizing that overcoming is hard work, the work of a lifetime.
Where does our creative energy actually come from? For many of us, this is a deeply spiritual question. Strong emotions arise when we create. I have on many occasions found myself weeping as I write out a sermon or even practice the beginning piano pieces I can play. There is sweet joy in this! There does seem to be something larger than me that these emotions are connected to; they well up from something deep and divine.
In my own belief system, I see the creative force as the center of everything. Creativity works by evolving the universe through the process of natural selection, and this particular process abides in much more than just the evolution of life. Even our universe may have been selected out of many universes as one compatible with life.
As humans, we evolved and are aware. Research suggests that many of our moral behaviors result from our evolution as a species. So things like altruism and fairness are part of our nature; they help us survive in groups. It may also be that creativity is a selected evolutionary response. So when I create, and offer the fruits of my efforts up into the world, I work in alignment with this larger creative force; and I feel this.
Now that is just my own window into the understanding of what goes on; it too continues to evolve. In any event, it helps me comprehend what drives me to create, and helps to sustain me during the dry spells.
We who create, create because we must. The poet Wendell Berry tells us, in his poem, 1994 [6]:
I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
....
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.
So. We are artists; we create, because we love this world. And perhaps the end of our creation will be life beyond words, life beyond our art.
Notes:
1. Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, 1998, p. 19.
2. Elizabeth Gilbert, on nurturing creativity, TED Talks, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html; text transcribed at http://lateralaction.com/articles/elizabeth-gilbert-creativity-divine-inspiration/
3. Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, 1992.
4. www.interplay.org
5. Whitney Museum, "Picasso and American Art", see http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/past.jsp
6. Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p. 182: "1994, VII", excerpted.
