I once had the dubious honor of being locked up in a third world jail for an irregularity in my passport. I was thrown into a stinking cell in absolute darkness. The stench could have stripped paint. Bodies shuffled in the acrid void. A match was lit and held up to my face, one of three brothers who then shared their single blanket and the newspaper sheets that served for a bed.
As dawn broke I noticed another man sitting apart from us. He was curled into an upright fetal ball, sleeping on his feet to avoid the cold floor, arms wrapped around himself protectively. It was a posture that had the stamp of long practice. I asked the brothers about him. One of them explained that he had been here fro many years. He tapped his temple meaningfully.
Each morning some benefactor would drop off some peanuts and an orange for this poor prisoner. He received no visitors. No-one spoke to him. Not even the brothers. He was utterly alone. Over the several days it took to secure my freedom I watched him closely. Initially I was afraid. Then I got curious.
He said nothing, barely moved except to sun himself in the open corridor for the few hours in the day we were allowed out of our cell. He’d perch himself in a corner, trouser legs rolled up, his legs dangling out of the bars that ran down one side of the walk-way. There he would slowly unpack his treasure, meticulously shelling his peanuts and building an artistic cone with the husks. He attended to this in great detail, balancing each shell with delicate precision. Should any shell tumble down he would painstakingly replace it with quiet urgency until the project was complete.
Then he would peel his orange. Each rind was used to decorate the cone. Every last scrap of white pith was removed with infinite delicacy and used to crown his totem. Then he would break open the orange with all the seriousness and ceremony of communion. Each segment was savored as if it were ambrosia. Deep contentment seemed to flood through him as he lingered over every last morsel.
When he was finished he leaned his entire body against the bars as if exhausted with gratitude before extracting a remarkably clean handkerchief from the inner recesses of otherwise filthy clothes and carefully wiped the corners of his mouth. His sacrament was complete for another day.
Folk tend to assume that creativity is about talent and end products. We confuse it with technical ability. It suits us to do this. You can tell yourself that you have not been blessed with such gifts, that unmanifest creativity is not your fault.
Much tougher is the consideration that creativity is a kind of attitude towards life which is precisely our responsibility to cultivate regardless of circumstance. This can be done under the most abject conditions. Creativity in not the same as making things. It is not even a precondition for it. So what stops us from living so unconditionally when there is such freedom to be had?
The reason is that the creative attitude is iconoclastic, it breaks the mold of self construct, prods life’s holy cows, stirs up all the mud from pond’s bottom. Certainty and the confidence that goes with it has to be renounced. Introducing yourself gets complicated.
One of the struts in my own identity was always that I hadn’t an artistic bone in my body. I said so loud and long, enough to begin to get suspicious…. One day, just as a way of getting out of the house, I thought I would make a mosaic in my garden. Not art you understand. But the mosaic had other ideas and became art whether I liked it or not.
Now I had a problem on my hands. People were coming to see it. Someone ratted on me to the local newspaper. Strangers pulled their cars over in the lane to ask how I was getting on. Some little girl in the Post office said ,”look mummy, its the mosaic man.”
It was all too much. I covered it over and went back to being a writer. I was pleased with my new commitment. Then I got depressed. Then I got sick. A spell in hospital under the watchful eye of specialist consultants produced only raised eyebrows. Then I had a dream, a howling banshee screaming at me like a jilted lover, raging abandonment and retribution. Next morning I uncovered the mosaic and resumed my work. Within a few days my illness had disappeared. I wasn’t sick any more… but I was in crisis.
The birth of anything is a brush with death. Creativity’s handmaidens are Chaos and Bewilderment. An end to the log jam comes at a price. Much as it is uncomfortable, the inner blockage can feel like the lesser of two evils compared to the disorientation that attends a deliberate step into an unknown self. And so you stay put, reaching for the comfortable props that in a short while will be cursed as boredom.
The problem is not lack of courage but that the source of the fear is not sufficiently named and is therefor difficult to face. Rilke said it best…
”Every angel is terrible and so I suppress myself and swallow the call note of depth dark sobbing.”
Which brings us to the knife cut of our final undoing, compelled to ask from whence as well as to what end. Something other than ego consciousness is at play and demanding to be taken seriously. Not only will your creation create you back, it will depose you too. To be inspired is literally to breath something in, something unknown, doing I don’t know what…. questioning your place in the grand scheme of things with the eternal reminder that you are not the master of your own house.
