Telling the Story

One for the writers.

"Telling the Story" means, in this series I'm writing on faith, how our stories intersect with the Gospel. But that task is beyond me, so I'll just write what I know.

Creating something from nothing:
1. Write what you know.

I just glanced at the digital clock on my computer. It read 11:11 and I made a wish. I won't tell you the wish---it won't come true if I tell you!---but I will suggest that it had something to do with  pleading and begging for help in the effort of creating something from nothing. It's the same wish I've made for the last 100 years.
 
I recently watched a wonderful talk by Amy Tan entitled, Where does creativity hide? She has good, solid, methodical advice. How do we create, you wonder? How, out of nothing, does something come? By miracles, she says. And God's will, serendipity, luck, fate, coincidence, and accidents.

2. Miracles and God's will.

Last week I was walking.

There were a whole lot of stories and words and thoughts and ideas and justifications and explanations and memories and concerns going through my mind when I came, after an hour of walking, to the wall along the rocky cove.

I stopped and for a moment the stories, words, thoughts, ideas, justifications, explanations, memories and concerns stopped too. Along the top of the wall there was a series of stone sculptures. Each with its own message: very simple and quirky and harmonious and gentle. (The sculptures are pictured here). It had the startling effect of coming upon a cave painting after crossing a desert alone for five years. Suddenly there was a message. Here was language, someone whispering to me. Here was language at its most startling and perfect.

It was language and it was telling me to please be quiet and, for once, just listen.

3. Listen.

A friend writes: courage. It takes courage. Most of the world, I believe, does not like the messy dark enclaves of creation---the birthing, the drama, the agony. Most of the world is perfectly happy to sequester the imagination away and be done with it. (My son is three and has, we are discovering, quite an imagination. This is a mother's dream, you think. But even I have noted certain unexpected  emotions within. Yesterday, as usual dressed as a pirate in silk Chinese Pajamas and a big black hat, carrying a piece of cardboard he found on the street and claiming it was his fish, with pink-painted  fingernails, my son flopped down in the sand under the slide among all the Upper East Side carefully-dressed children and lay there supine, singing. I thought, Where will this go? Will he have a life of rejection for his outlandish ways? Would it not be easier, I thought even then, to be a banker in a suit?)

The messy dark enclaves of creation; courage. Why did I go to Africa? I've been wondering lately. Partly because of this: here is a place on earth where the realm of imagination has not yet been banished. Here, because it is dark at night, and because people without education believe in spirits, and because people without medicine must pray desperately to God---here the imagination still roams. It can be quite scary and spooky and exhilarating and dangerous. 

4. Courage

Annie Ernaux writes of her jealousy of another woman in her book The Possession: "This woman filled my head, my chest, and my gut; she was always with me, she took control of my emotions. At the same time, her omnipresence gave my life a new intensity. It produced stirrings that I had never felt before, release a kind of energy, powers of imagination I didn't know I had; it held me in a state of constant feverish activity.
    "I was, in both sense of the word, possessed.

    "This state kept my daily troubles and cares at bay. In a way, it placed me outside the grip of life's usual mediocrity..."

We have felt this way, in one way or another: an intensity of feeling, a possession. It can be anger or pain or joy. The intensity brings us outside the grip of life's usual mediocrity.

Outside the grip of life's usual mediocrity. It is ultimately irresponsible, and can be an addictive way to live. It is ultimately destructive, but sometimes necessary too.

5. Possession

There is such imbalance in the world. The weather is disturbed. Tons of money is going to war and not so much is going to education. People can't connect, despite so much technology that connects us. You know the rote: it's always something. Maybe, like the Navajo, we can restore some harmony and balance by chanting the world back to health. Maybe to find balance we need more space for darkness, imagination, contemplation, and, ironically, wildness.

6. Balance

I just made all of this up, but it came out pretty good.

Comments

[Kol]

Love the pics. Have you read "Your Life As Art" by Robert Fritz? it's a great one about living life with the blank-slate creativity you describe... a little bit self-helpy, almost, but a lot of really great thinking and concepts in there.