‘Life unexamined is not worth living.’ So, I have had a go at it, with more, I trust, of Chaucer’s grateful happiness than Dante’s tremulous hope of future bliss, but also with a certain amount of fear and trembling, as St Paul recommended (‘Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.’) and some depth and earnestness. Has it produced salvation – a salvation of fulfilment rather than transcendence?
Ruskin declares that ‘To think clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion – all in one’, but to his ‘clarity’ and Melville’s ‘depth’, I think we need to add breadth of vision and this is where Heeks and Ipsy can help us more than Hegel or Heidegger. They accept their inescapable limitations and the existence of forces beyond their control. [Footnote: the phrase ‘forces beyond our control’ may sound scary to us, but we needn’t be alarmed. Sun, rain, growth of crops, our own growth from egg to maturity are all ‘beyond our control’. We are largely ‘beyond our control’.] They’re pretty confident that the universe knows what it’s doing, and that they’re best off sitting back, chilling with the lilies of the field and the Chinese wu wei philosophers, (‘Achievement is the beginning of failure,’ murmurs Zhuangzi drowsily. They purr serene assent.) perhaps with one ear cocked just in case to the heroic declamations of Melville and Ruskin; curled up, letting it be, relaxed. Breadth of vision – the coalescent imagination which recognises the unity of all things – is not achieved by frantically chasing down every path in the labyrinth of creation. It is achieved by letting the universe come to you.
This acceptance, this Fiat mihi, is, of course, the same process essential to creativity and to a philosophical or religious recognition of reality. (This has often been acknowledged. R.S. Thomas: ‘Poetry is religion. Religion is poetry.’ Blake: ‘The Religeons of all Nations are derived from each nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius’. Blake’s question, ‘Do you paint, Sir, in fear and trembling?’ implicitly links art and salvation. Creativity is evidently rather more than an interesting career option or amiable hobby.) How could they be different? The process by which we understand the world must obviously be that by which we try to re-present and co-create it.
At this juncture (as so often) Coleridge is essential:
‘Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the imagination.’
Coleridge’s biographer, Richard Holmes, explains this perfectly as “the engagement between the conscious forward drive of intellectual effort (‘propulsion’) and the drifting backwards into unconscious materials (‘yielding to the current’), constantly repeated in a natural diastolic movement like breathing or heartbeat. This is how creativity actually works: a mental (ultimately spiritual) rhythm which arises from the primary physical conditions of the natural world.”
This is indeed how imagination works, both the ‘primary’ perception of the universe and the ‘secondary’ business of artistic creativity. Lewis Hyde, who studies the dynamics of literary creativity in his book The Gift, writes, “An essential portion of any artist’s labour is not so much creation as invocation … creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.” We must invoke the Muse; she will not help us unbidden. But when we have made the initial effort (whatever our haecceity or culture decrees) she, responding, will pour into us the inspiration we have emptied ourselves to receive. [Footnote: whether we believe that the ultimate source of the art is our unconscious or subconscious, or one of the Nine Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, is likely to be decided by our Zeitgeist much like our preference for wearing jeans or togas, and of equal unimportance. The inspiration is triggered by us, comes from somewhere unreachable through us and into the work at hand. The taxonomy of the mechanics doesn’t matter. The work we need to do remains the same. ‘For us there is only the trying,’ as Eliot puts it; and, equally, the not-trying.
Banal as it is, the best analogy I can think of comes from golf. Suppose you have a long putt over a ridge that runs across the green. If you are too cautious, the ball will fail to crest the slope and roll back down to your embarrassed feet. If you put too much effort in, the ball will fly over the ridge, race down the other side past the hole through the fringe of rough and into the lake. You need instead to exert just enough power to top the ridge, and then trust gravity and the contours to carry the ball naturally down to the cup. In both art and religion we need to find the narrow path between diffidence and egotism.] Our imaginative acceptance of the world follows the same pattern. We have to make the effort – nothing will come of nothing. It is by the affirmation of our haecceity that we achieve the egolessness we need in our creativity; it is by the exercise of our consciousness that we attain that child-like innocence that was destroyed by our consciousness abroad in society. (This is the struggle Henry Vaughan faced in Childhood – ‘How do I study now’ – to recapture effortless innocence). The Ancient Mariner had to pray before he was free of the albatross. His awareness alone was not enough – the effort of physicalisation was required. In the medieval tale, because Peredur did not ask the question, the Fisher King was not healed and the land remained waste.
Before we can receive the peace and understanding prayer or meditation can give, we must commit ourselves to it, get in the right frame of mind, tell the beads, say ‘OM’, make the sign whatever it may be. Faith is required so that the will can operate the mechanism and open the floodgates of grace.
But the effort alone will produce only thin, egotistical stuff. The systole needs its diastole.
It is a wave-motion of effort and relinquishment, and the richness comes in the backwash.
Genesis reminds us that God himself needed to pause. The Seventh Day was ‘a vital part of the creative process rather than simply an end of it’, explains Diarmaid MacCulloch, which is why its observance was enshrined in the Ten Commandments. God, like the water-insect and the rest of us, needs reculer pour mieux sauter.
Creativity and spirituality are both, it seems, questions of discovery rather than invention. ‘The artist does not seek. He finds,’ says Picasso gnomically. Whether our response is a ‘Eureka!’ with Archimedes, or silence upon a peak in Darien with stout Cortez, it is not our cleverness but the thing discovered that is the wonder.
The ‘three kinds of thinking’ I identified earlier show the same dynamic: the conscious effortful cogitation, the given inspiration, and the rare moments when the two seem simultaneous. “All the thinking in the world does not bring us to a thought,” says Goethe; “we must be right by nature, so that good thoughts may come before us like free children of God and say ‘Here we are.’” But, as his works amply demonstrate, he put in plenty of effort to get ‘right by nature’ and prepare a welcome for God’s free children.
I suspect, as Richard Holmes implies, that this systole and diastole process of pulse and pause (for which the perfect name would indeed be ‘Will and Grace’, were that not already in use in a rather different context) is a mechanism at the core of pretty much everything the cosmos does. Heart-beat, breathing, the pulse of nerves all over my body, the pulse of the placenta feeding the child; the pelvic contractions that brought us into the light; the copulation that preceded them. Our guts follow too, and the light falling on this kitchen table, whether it be the peaks and troughs of a wave, or the pulse and pause of a stream of photons, repeats the pattern. In one version of Hindu cosmology, the universe itself is eternally expanding and contracting with the breath of Brahma – a notion entirely consistent with current Western ‘Big Bang’ theories.
But these are mildly whimsical speculations – hypotheses, perhaps, to be tested another time; their solution, anyway, always unknowable.
Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,
Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.
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