Open the door

As a story-teller, you open a door.  You open the door to the imagination.  What does this mean? 

A physical change happens to the brain when one listens to or reads a story.  As Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and The Magical Child, says:

"In Storytelling, the stimulus of words brings about the production of inner images, an extraordinary creative play involving the entire brain.  Each new story requires a whole new set of neural connections and reorganizations of visual activity within--a major challenge for the brain."

So, when we tell our stories, we are providing exercise for the readers' and the listeners' brains.  We are opening new pathways of understanding within their brains.

The figure in the doorway:  that's you, the story-teller.  But it is also you, the reader and the listener.

Ring of Fire

Cynthia, in her blog, Sorting the Pieces, recently shared:

In A Moveable Feast , Hemingway wrote, "Write the truest sentence you know."  It worked pretty well for him, and it's advice I've always tried to follow.  It's both a cliche' and yet another paradox that the more personal one gets, the more universal one becomes.  It's also how we connect to one another. 

I would like to take a stab at illustrating what she says about the personal becoming universal.

Sometimes, in order to write "the truest sentence you know," you have to go through fire.   I can remember my mother frequently saying of someone she admired that he or she would "go through fire" for someone.  In the film, On Golden Pond, Ethel tells her daughter, Chelsea that Norman would go through fire for either of them.  This trial by fire is one of the most heroic gestures you can make. 

Today, I was reading the Norse myth of Sigurd and Brynhild, and, because I'm always trying to think of ways of explaining what it means to be a writer, I thought the myth said something about writing the truth.  This is how the myth goes:

Brynhild, a Valkyrie, disobeyed Odin and was punished by being put to sleep within a circle of fire until some man would wake her.  Sigurd forces his horse through the flames for Brynhild.  She awakes and gives herself to him because he has proved his valor in reaching her.  Then Brynhild is left by Sigurd in the circle of fire again.

Later, Sigurd swears brotherhood with a king named Gunnar.  Gunnar's mother, wanting Sigurd for her daughter, Gudrum, gives Sigurd a potion to make him forget Brynhild.  Sigurd marries Gudrum. 

Then Sigurd by magic takes on the appearance of Gunnar and rescues Brynhild.  Sigurd must do this because Gunnar does not have the courage to go through the fire himself.  Sigurd and Brynhild spend three nights together, but Sigurd places a sword between them in the bed.  Sigurd returns and takes his real identity again.  Brynhild marries the real Gunnar, thinking Gunnar heroic and Sigurd faithless. 

However, Brynhild discovers the truth and gets revenge by having Sigurd slain.  She lies, telling Gunnar that Sigurd broke his oath to the king by sleeping with her after, in the guise of Gunnar, he rescued her from the circle of flames.  After Sigurd is killed, Brynhild, in her grief, tells her husband that she lied, that she and Sigurd had not really slept together.  Then she kills herself.

This story, I think, says a lot about being a writer and telling the truth as a writer.  First, in order to get to the truth, we usually have to go through an ordeal.  In this case, the ordeal is fire.  Fire is purifying and transformative, but we often fear transformation.  Nevertheless, the determined writer forces his horse through the flames.

You, the writer, are Sigurd, going through the fire to awaken your love, your writer's heart.  As writers, we must awaken what lies in the center of the flames.  We must awaken the truth.  Only the truth can transform us and, as Cynthia says, connect us to one another.

Second, once the task of rescuing the truth is accomplished, the writer's task isn't over.  The writer, prone to life's betrayals, can "forget" that truth; the writer can still lose the prize.  The writer's creative life can die. 

So you have to keep going into the fire again and again.  Each time you are transformed and renewed.  You awaken your love again and again.

But you have to go through the fire as yourself, not as anyone else--not in the guise of a "King."  Psychologists tell us that the king in many myths and tales is your ego.  If you go dressed as a "King"  you may fall prey to the King's expections, the king's cowardice, and the King's pride.  Fire, like all forces of nature, can be both transformative and destructive. 

After Sigurd's death, he is burned upon the pyre, consumed.  The ring of fire that burns within can be destructive to us if we enter falsely.  Not only that, the treasure within the ring of fire can self-destruct.

And what of poor Gudrum?  She, too, lost her love.  She lost him because he didn't enter the flames as his "true" self.

Writing can be enjoyable, but writing the truest sentence you know is can also be an ordeal. 

 Photo credit from Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

Visit "Sorting the Pieces"  http://journals.aol.com/sistercdr/Sortingthepieces/ 

The Monster Within

The Minotaur is a monster. 

We all house a Minotaur within our consciousness. 

This is a brief account of the Minotaur in mythology:

The Minotaur was part bull, part man.  He was the offspring of Queen Pasiphae and a bull. 

The Queen's husband, King Minos had prayed for a bull to sacrifice to Poseidon.  When the bull appeared, it was so marvellous that the King didn't want to kill it.  This angered Poseidon, so he made Pasiphae fall passionately in love with the bull. 

To satisfy her passion, Pasiphae enlisted the help of Daedalus, who constructed a hollow model of a beautiful heifer to attract the bull.  Pasiphae positioned herself in the model and in this way had intercourse with the bull, later giving birth to the Minotaur.  The angry king ordered Daedalus to construct the labyrinth.  There, in the center of the Labyrinth, the king imprisoned the Minotaur.

The king sacrificed seven boys and seven girls to the Minotaur every year.  One year, Theseus implored Ariadne, Minos's daughter, to tell him how to escape the Labyrinth.  Ariadne loved Theseus, so she gave him a ball of twine, which he could use to later find his way out.  Theseus reached the center of the Labyrinth, wrestled with the Minotaur and killed it.  Then Theseus led the children out of the Labyrinth to safety.

As author and teacher Douglas Thorpe points out, the Minotaur is a beast, like William Blake's Tyger, to be both feared and admired:

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? and what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil ? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

But what does all this mean for the writer? 

It is the writer's task to recognize the Minotaur within.  The angry Minotaur is filled with wrath and violence, because he has been exiled.  Exiled from the unity we seek, fragmented by pain, sadness, and loss, we who write must meet the monster in the depths of our imagination, and we must come to understand what it is we see.  "All of the rage that burns within awaits creative transformation," Thorpe tells us.  He says:

Minotaur becomes a symbol for the wrath that can consume us if we fail to find a way to acknowledge and use it.  "Minotaur" takes its place inside [our work]. 

We need to recognize the Minotaur (or the Tyger) within.  And it is the sound of the Minotaur that writers must whisper inside readers' ears.

Photo credit from Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

Leaving Signs

The following story illustrates one role for the writer:

A king had a broad maze with many intricate windings built around his palace.  Whoever wanted to look upon him had to go through this maze where every step might lead into unending confusion.  Those who dared enter because of their great love for the king were of two kinds.  The one thought only of fighting their way forward bit by bit, the others left signs at the most puzzling twists and turns to encourage later comers to proceed on their way, without however making the way any easier.

The king stands for your ego consciousness or your center.  The maze is your journey through life.  The first group are those who struggle without looking back or talking about what they encountered. 

Writers are the second sort of people.  The "signs" they leave behind are their writings.  Their writings help the later comers (readers) proceed though the maze of life.  The writings help later comers to find their ego consciousness, their center, their soul.

Story "The Maze" from Martin Buber, The Tales of the Hasidim, New York:  Schocken Books, 1991.

Labyrinth

In a conversation with the French poet and art historian Claude-Henri Rocquet, Mircea Eliade discussed his insights about the labyrinth:

Claude-Henri Rocquet:  You have often compared life--your life--to a labyrinth.  What would you say, today, about the meaning of that labyrinth?

Mircea Eliade:  A labyrinth is a defense, sometimes a magical defense, built to guard a center, a treasure, a meaning.  Entering it can be a rite of initiation, as we see in the Theseus myth.  That symbolism is the model of all existence, which passes through many ordeals in order to journey toward its own center, toward itself, toward atman, as the Hindus call it.  There have been occasions when I have been aware of emerging from a labyrinth, or of coming across the thread.  I was feeling hopeless, oppressed, lost.  Of course I didn't actually say to myself, "I am lost in the labyrinth."  And yet, in the end, I did very much have the feeling of having emerged from a labyrinth as a victor.  Everyone has had that experience.  But one must also add that life is not just one labyrinth.  The trial, the ordeal, recurs.

Claude-Henri Rocquet:  Have you reached your center?

Mircea Eliade:  Several times I have felt certain I was touching it, and in so doing I learned a great deal, I recognized myself.  And then I lost myself again.  That is our condition:  we are neither angels nor pure heroes.  Once the center has been reached, we are enriched, our consciousness is broadened and deepened, so that everything becomes clear, meaningful; but life goes on:  another labyrinth, other encounters, other kinds of trials, on another level.

From Mircea Eliade:  Ordeal by Labyrinth.  Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet.  U of Chicago Press, 1978.

Exile

This is a journal entry from the writings of Mircea Eliade.  He kept a journal between 1945 and 1969.  This entry was written 1 January 1960:

Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca.  Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey.  The path toward Ithaca, toward the center.  I had known all that for a long time.  What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies).  But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center).  That means:  seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life.

The image of oneself as an exile is useful on many levels.  Spiritual teachings suggest that we are exiled from our original unity, a unity symbolized by the Garden of Eden and also the cosmic egg.  I think in our "modern," technological age, we can come to feel we are exiles in our own lives.  We have lost many of the rituals and ceremonies that once bound us to the greater whole of the earth and the universe.  So we often find ourselves searching.  This search can be lonely and painful.  But even so, there are meanings we are meant to glean.  Even in the "depressions," even in "the dry periods of everyday life."

I think it's intriguing that Mircea Eliade wrote this entry on the first day of the new year.  I think I want to read this entry every year on January 1st from now on.

Entry excerpted from No Souvenirs:  Journal 1957-1969, Mircea Eliade.  (Harper, 1977).

http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm 

To Be Understood

I found this quote on April's Yoni Blog:

"A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others." -- Leo Rosten

April said it was true for her, and it is also true for me.

"Beautiful Pauses"

I recently shared stanza one of Sarton's "The Beautiful Pauses" with Vicky, a new friend with whom I have been discussing the creative life.

Stanza one of "The Beautiful Pauses" by May Sarton reads:

Angels, beautiful pauses in the whirlwind,

Be with us through the seasons of unease;

Within the clamorous traffic of the mind,

Through all these clouded and tumultuous days,

Remind us of your great unclouded ways.

It is the wink of time, crude repetition,

That whirls us round and blurs our anxious vision,

But centered in its beam, your own nunc stans

Still pivots and sets free the sacred dance.

'Philosophers and theologians have spoken of the `nunc stans', the abiding now, the instant that knows no temporal articulation, where distinctions between now, earlier and later have fallen away or have not arisen. All of us know, I believe, poignant moments that have this timeless quality: unique and matchless, complete in themselves and somehow containing all there is in experience.'  

H. LOEWALD, 'Comments on Religious Experience', in Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual, New Haven 1978

When I write, I sometimes feel as though I have entered nunc stans, the abiding now.  As you see, according to H. Loewald, it is a condition in which you are complete in yourself "and somehow containing all there is in experience." 

Fragments

"And I think having a broken past, having so many fragments, leads to broken writing.  I think that's the work we do all our lives:  bringing together the fragments and trying to make some cohesive wholeness out of them."  --Diane Glancy (AWP Writers Chronicle.  Sept. 2004)

Photo of Diane Glancy from Writers Chronicle.

 I like what Glancy says about the writing process.  It describes much of my own experience with writing.   The process of writing isn't so different than the way we live our lives, ultimately.  We need every now and then to knit up the loose ends of our lives before they unravel.  We need every now and then to make wholeness our goal.

When we write, we weave the loose ends of our stories together into one fabric.  The writing may seem broken and splintered at first.  You may have to discover how the pieces should fit, what kind of pattern wants to be created.  It is a process that can take a long time. 

 

Listen

[The Story] sings to me

And calls my name from somewhere up there

Over there, from somewhere here,

From the depths of our minds. 

--Yup' ik Eskimo Song

One of the greatest influences in my thinking about story-telling has been Native American Literature, which I have been reading and teaching for more than 10 years.  When I first read Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, many years ago now, I was struck most profoundly by the character Thomas Builds-the-Fire, a young "shaman" who is the repository for his tribe's histories, memories, and stories.  Thomas's name says it all--his stories build the fire for his tribe, fire for warmth, for action, for transformation.  Thomas saw story-telling as a calling, a purpose, a responsibility.

After encountering the character Thomas, I began to wonder if, as a writer, I might share his philosophy, at least a little.  A culture needs its story-tellers to entertain, inspire, inform, and transform the people.  So then I began to think of story-telling as a possible calling for me.  This new perspective took me out of my ego-centered thinking ("Look what a good story I wrote") to a higher purpose.  And in addition I began to feel a connection to all story-tellers, past, present, and future.  As though I might be a part of something very important, very big.  Much bigger than myself or any success I might have with telling stories.

In my research, I later found that many Native American story-tellers believe that stories "call" their tellers.  Geri Keams, a Navajo, suggests that the story-teller has to "find an inner alliance with the collective wisdom of the story."  She said:  "We connect with the call of the story.  There is a great respect for the Spirit that comes from outside of ourselves, that comes and gives life and meaning to the stories.  So what we feel inside, and what the stories are, and where the stories come from, does not come from us alone."

Keams's statement leaves me much to think about.  Regarding my own work--if the stories come from something outside of myself and are not mine alone, then where do the stories come from and to whom do they belong?  To whom have they belonged in the past?

I realize that Keams is talking about teaching stories that have been passed down by her ancestors for generations.  Yet I also have a feeling that my stories, personal as they are, are part of something larger than my own experience.  Might there be some "collective wisdom" connected with my stories?  Might my stories also function as teaching stories?  Might they tell readers something about the experience of being alive, of being human? 

Also among Native American story-tellers is the belief that the story itself has a "voice."  Said Joseph Bruchac:  "There is a kind of voice that the story has on its own, and as a teller, you both speak and answer that voice--you answer its call."  Obviously, each written story has its own voice or style.  However, I began to think that unwritten stories also have a voice, and it's a matter of listening for it.  The voice will tell you how the story needs to be written.  Since reading what Keams, Bruchac, and other Native American story-tellers have had to say about a story's "call," I have tried hard to listen for voices as I approach the writing of my own stories, to listen for how each story wants to be presented.

I don't pretend to know how it all works.  I just know there's a truth in all of this somewhere for me.  I know that although I cannot explain where the "call" or the "voice" come from, both are real for me.  And for right now, that's enough.

Quotes from an article by Suzanne Jasper.

 

A room of one's own

I believe it was Virginia Woolf who said that in order to write, one must have a room of one's own.  I have found this to be literally true for me.  From the earliest days of my writing, I found I needed to have my own space and solitude in which to work.  This picture is of the windowsill in my writing studio, which I've made into a kind of altar.  The little white figure is what I call my "Writing Shaman."  My husband made it for me out of clay.  I have several of these writing shamans,  The shell-decorated box has a bird's nest on top of it.  I put eggs and sometimes skulls and bones into the nests.  Behind the nest is a Christmas card from a favorite professor at East Carolina University.  If you look carefully, you will see cobwebs.  I'm not a very good housekeeper.  I'd rather be reading or writing.

I Entered In

The following poem is by Saint John of the Cross.  I am very much drawn to ecstatic spiritual poetry because it seems to be a wonderful description of the creative act, which is like entering in the realm of the unknown, the unknowable.  When the writing is going well, it is like a moment of transcendence.

I entered in, I know not where,

And I remained, though knowing naught,

Transcending knowledge with my thought.

Of when I entered I know naught,

But when I saw that I was there

(Though where it was I did not care)

Strange things I learned, with greatness fraught.

Yet what I heard I'll not declare.

But there I stayed, though knowing naught,

Transcending knowledge with my thought.

Of peace and piety interwound

This perfect science had been wrought,

Within the solitude profound

A straight and narrow path it taught,

Such secret wisdom there I found

That there I stammered, saying naught,

But topped all knowledge with my thought.

So borne aloft, so drunken-reeling

So rapt was I, so swept away,

Within the scope of sense or feeling

My sense or feeling could not stay.

And in my soul I felt, revealing,

A sense that, though its sense was naught,

Transcended knowledge with my thought.

The man who truly there has come

Of his own self must shed the guise:

Of all he knew before the sun

Seems far beneath that wondrous prize:

And in this lore he grows so wise

That he remains, though knowing naught,

Transcending knowledge with his thought.

The farther that I climbed the height

The less I seemed to understand

The cloud so tenebrous and grand

That there illuminates the night.

For he who understands that sight

Remains for aye, though knowing naught,

Transcending knowledge with his thought.

This wisdom without understanding

Is of so absolute a force

No wise man of whatever standing

Can ever stand against its course,

Unless they tap its wondrous source

To know so much, though knowing naught,

They pass all knowedge with their thought, ...

Why I think this poem is applicable to the creative process: 

1--It is something you ENTER, not something you do.

2--If you bring too much KNOWLEDGE to the process, you can kill your creative source.  Somehow, you must TRANSCEND what you know, or think you know.

3--If you transcend knowledge, you will discover STRANGE THINGS, wonderful things, that have been trapped in your unconscious.  There in your unconscious, you will find SECRET WISDOM that will inform your writing.

4--To come to this place of secret wisdom, you must shed your GUISE.  You can't pretend to be another person (or another writer!).  You have to shed the faces you put on in your daily life and write from your center, your true self.

5--The truths that you tell will be an ABSOLUTE FORCE that others are waiting and needing to hear.

*Note--Of course writing is a recursive process.  At points knowledge is useful, during the editing phase for instance when we shape our poems or narratives and correct mistakes.  Most writers go back and forth between these acts of creating and shaping/correcting.

.

 

Do I Contradict Myself?

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman

In a previous post, I ask the question, "Who Am I?"

I may also ask, "What kind of writer am I?"   

Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones warns us about thinking that our words are "permanent and solid and stamp us forever."  Just as we must embrace change and duality in ourselves as humans, we must accept change and duality in ourselves as writers.  We are not the words we write; we cannot let them freeze us.  Goldberg reveals:

The ability to put something down--to tell how you feel about an old husband, an old shoe, or the memory of a cheese sandwich on a gray morning in Miami--that moment you can finally align how you feel inside with the words you write; at that moment you are free because you are not fighting those things inside.  You have accepted them, become one with them.

Goldberg then tells something that happened to her:

I have a poem entitled "No Hope"--it's a long poem.  I always think of it as joyous because in my ability to write of desperation and emptiness I felt alive again and unafraid.  However, when I read it, people comment, "How sad."  I try to explain, but no one listens.

 Goldberg  reminds us:  The power is always in the act of writing.  Come back to that again and again and again.  Don't get caught in the admiration for your poems [or anything that you write].  ...we constantly need new insights, visions.  We don't exist in any solid form.  There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever.  Don't identify too strongly with your work.  Stay fluid behind those black-and-white words.  They are not you.  They were a great moment going through you.  A moment you were awake enough to write down and capture.

We all, as Whitman professed, contain multitudes.  We strive for inner unity and for the authentic "I"; yet, to settle on one way of being is to destroy ourselves.   We should be in a constant state of becoming, as human beings, as writers. 

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.
Walt Whitman

Awakening

The terms "character change" and "epiphany" have been used so long that their concept has become hidden from we who write stories.  Sometimes, we need to look at the terms a new way.  Henri Tracol puts it this way:  Man is born a seeker.  Equipped as he is by nature for vibrating to a vast range of impressions, is he not predestined to an endless wondering?  Bound by necessity to select from these impressions those suitable for conscious assimilation--and thereby to approach a genuine perception of his own identity--is he not singled out for continuous self-interrogation?  Such is his true vocation, his birthright.  He may forget it, deny it, bury it in the depths of his unconscious being; he may go astray, misuse this hidden gift and increase his own alienation from reality; he may even try to convince himself that he has reached, once and for all, the shores of eternal Truth.  No matter; this secret call is still alive, prompting him from within to try, and to try increasingly, to realize the significance of his presence here on earth.  For he is here to awake, to remember and to search, again and still again.

It occurs to me that this is the road we take our characters down.  Some characters embrace the search, others fight it, some awaken, others remain asleep, but they are all trying to realize their significance.  Our stories won't tie up the characters' lives a neat bow because, just like us--the authors-- they are meant to search "again and still again."

When a character has an epiphany, that character becomes awake.  Writes Tracol: Whenever a man awakes, he awakes from the false assumption that he has always been awake, and therefore the master of his thoughts, feelings, and actions.  In that moment, he realizes--and this is the shadow side of recognition--how deeply ignorant he is of himself, how narrowly dependent on the web of relationships by which he exists, how helplessly at the mercy of any suggestion that happens to act upon him at a given moment.  He may also awake--if only for a flash--to the light of a higher consciousness, which will grant him a glimpse of the world of hidden potentialities to which he essentially belongs, help him transcend his own limitations, and open the way to inner transformation.  The choices are limitless, for we all sleep in our worlds of false assumptions. 

Feeling lost, we may even dig ourselves deeper into our comfortable places, like humans in The Matrix.  But the world of safety doesn't last, nor is it meant to.  And we are never so alive as in that moment when we first awaken:  to love, to horror, to recognition, to pain.  That is the moment of epiphany--the experience of being truly alive before we have a chance to lie to ourselves again.  It is the fleeting moment of having the experience of being truly alive.  That's what writers want to capture, I think.  Tracol writes:  Whenever a man awakes and remembers his purpose, he awakes to a fleeting miracle, and at the same time to an unanswerable riddle.  He realizes, at moments, that in order for him to awake he was foredoomed to sleep; in order for him to remember, he was foredoomed to forget. ...If a man were to stay still forever and merge into eternity, there would be little sense in his remaining here on earth.  Such is the human condition.  And it is our task, as writers, to capture the human condition. 

Our characters must be, like ourselves, flawed and must remain flawed.  They are allowed just a fleeting glimpse of what it might be to achieve perfection, or to know their purpose, or to know what life is all about.  That glimpse is epiphany

From Search.  Ed. Jean Sulzberger, 1979

 

Who Am I?

This is a copy of a painting I have on the wall of my writing studio:  "John Deth" by Edward Burra.  The painting is an Hommage to the poet Conrad Aiken.  The painting has a different effect on me every time I look at it.  Today, it makes me think of the inner journey.  By this I mean both the author's and the characters' inner journey.  Ravi Ravindra writes:

     The struggle to know who I am, in truth and in spirit, is the spiritual quest.  The movement in myself from the mask to the face, from the personality to the person, from the performing actor to the ruler of the inner chamber, is the spiritual journey.  To live, work, and suffer on this shore in faithfulness to the whispers from the other shore is the spiritual life.  To keep the flame of spiritual yearning alive is to be radically open to the present and to refuse to settle for comforting religious dogma, philosophic certainties, and social sanctions.

     Who am I?  Out of fear and out of desire, I betray myself.

This is what I feel when the writing is going well--afraid, yet desirous of this fear.  The resulting tension between these two states of being gives you the cutting edge, helping you to tear through artiface and get to the truth, to say what the reader needs to know.  Ravindra warns that too often we cling to the herd for comfort.  Together we weave varied garments to cover our nakedness.  We guard the secret of our nothingness with anxious agility lest we should be discovered. 

I have seen a number of writers do this--write with "anxious agility," trying to impress, all the while hiding the inner darkness--yearnings, fears, longings--that would give the writing its significance.  I have written with "anxious agility," too. 

Who are the people in Burra's picture?  Who do they conceive themselves to be as they dance with death?  Who am I?  Ravindra writes. He says the answer does not ask for an enumeration of scientific facts:  it expresses a certain restlessness, groping, and exploration.  It is the beginning of a movement towards light, towards seeing things clearly, as a whole.  It is the refusal to remain ihe dark--fragmented and on the surface of myself.  It is a state of searching for meaning, comprehensiveness, and depth.  It is the desire to wake up. 

     It is, in essence, bringing your characters to epiphany.  But you have to take them into the darkness first.  Without sleep, there is no waking.  Without death, there can be no life.

Ravi Ravindra, Pilgrim Without Boundaries.   Morning Light Press, 2003.

 

 

Rebirth of the Twins

 Metaphorically, the twins have to do with unity.  Once a single entity, they have become two.  But vestiges of the original oneness remain.  In the immortal world, they are one again.  I believe that when I write, I am searching for the oneness that is represented by the twins.  

Sitting with pain

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

This is a stanza from a poem posted by April on her yoni blog from a book called The Invitation.  I am thinking about what it means to sit with pain without trying to obliterate it.  I think in real life situations this is a challenge.  I don't like to see those I love hurting; I don't like hurting.  But I think maybe when we write sometimes that's what we're doing, sitting still with pain until it speaks to us and tells us what to say.

Photo credit:  "Mother and Daughter, Davenport, Iowa" by Alec Soth, printed in The New Yorker, March 29, 2004

Alec Soth's website:  http://www.alecsoth.com/index.html 

Seeking

The word "seek" is etymologically related, not to "see," as might appear to be the case, but to "sagacious."  What is needed is not simply seeing but a quality of discernment regarding what is seen, a piercing insight that looks deeper than mere surface appearances.  --Natalie Baan

For me, being a writer also means being a seeker.  This means finding the clear path to my creativity, which is the same as finding a clear path to my "self." 

Life's troubles, like the devil, can waylay you as you try to walk the path.  The path is the way,  in other words, freedom.  The Chinese call this concept tao.  They were well aware how easy it is to lose one's path.  Lao-tzu wrote, "Heaven and earth are ruthless.  To them the ten thousand things are but strawdogs.  Life imposes its troubles on us and is indifferent to our longings and fears." 

As a writer I want to aspire to be a sage, one who understands the tao of things and is not unduly disturbed.  I don't want to become entangled with everything I meet and become untrue to myself. Chuang-tzu says of people who are untrue to themselves:  "Day after day they use their minds in strife.  Their little fears are mean and trembly; their great fears are stunned and overwhelming." 

I want to become a person true to myself, my path.  "The 'True Person'of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu lives fully in the world without being overwhelmed by its frenzy and muddle.  He is impervious to the social pressures bearing down on him.  'He can commit an error and not regret it, meet with success and not make a show.'"

 Lao-tzu says the way of the sage is like water, which "benefits the ten thousand creatures; yet itself does not scramble, but is content with the places that all men disdain." 

Can the way of the writer, then, be like water?  A flowing and nourishing act?  That is how I would like writing to be for me.

Everything is a pitfall for the unwary and the faithless.  And nothing is a pitfall for the courageous seeker who just shakes it off like a bear. --Shri Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari

Ideas about tao taken from Stephen Batchelor's "The Devil in the Way."

Salvation

Ariande Thread

Moyers: Thesus says to Ariadne, "I'll love you forever if you can show me a way to come out of the labyrinth." So she gives him a ball of string, which he unwinds as he goes into the labyrinth, and then follows to find the way out. ...

Campbell: That's all you need--an Ariadne thread.

Moyers: Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string.

Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth.

When you write, your characters are searching for the Ariadne thread.  In the kind of writing I do, I am also searching for the Ariande thread.  My characters and I find the thread together.

In A Dark Time

This poem by Theodore Roethke embodies what I have been doing in my own writing lately.   Each character is going through a dark time and needs to find a new way of seeing.  It is the same idea Joseph Campbell is talking about when he says:  ...at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation.  The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come.  At the darkest moment comes the light.  Power of Myth

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke

The Heart

Mind was apotheosized, and Heart--with all its troublesome immaterial loose ends--was devalued as we plunged headlong into the age of scientific enlightenment.  Together with the Industrial Revolution, it was a time that provided new metaphors of the universe as Newton's "clockwork machine" and of the human being as "cog" in the almighty machine.  --Gail Godwin, Heart.

http://www.gailgodwin.com/ 

If a person...doesn't listen to the demands of his own heart, he's going to risk a schizophrenic crackup.  Such a person has put himself off center.  He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it's not the one the body's interested in at all.  The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought  to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be striving for. ...So we are separated from our source.  In a sense, because of our minds, we actually are separated, and the problem is to reunite that broken cord.  --Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Many times I have heard or read words to the effect that head work is superior to heart work, that logic is superior to intuition.  It's not my intent to argue that one is better than the other.  It is the myth of Icarus that tells us it's best to fly the middle way, or be lost.  But sometimes I do feel a need to defend the heart.  I shouldn't have to--look at what an organ it is!  Far from the sugary, sentimentalized image we see all the time, this is an amazing part of the human machine.  Heart work, whether the physical task of pumping blood or the intuitive task of looking after our inner wellness, is HARD work.  The work we associate with the heart:  forgiveness, kindness, generosity...these are not easy.  Heart work is hard work.  We shouldn't let the work of the heart be denegrated, put on a lower level of importance than head work.  I mean, come on, the heart could beat up the brain with one aorta  tied behind its back!  In physical comparison, the brain is a listless couch potato compared to this buff, efficient engine. But we know it isn't physical strength that matters, in the final analysis--so we will acknowledge that head work is at least as hard as heart work.  It's only right.

Addendum:  The utterances of the heart--unlike those of the discriminating intellect--always relate to the whole.  The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only to the gentle breath of a premonitory mood, which does not drown the song but listens.  What the heart hears are the great things that span our whole lives, the experiences which we do nothing to arrange but which we ourselves suffer.  --C. G. Jung, The Symbolic Life