It was a composition notebook with curved corners and a cover speckled like a cow. Mostly filled with notes from English class or play rehearsal. But tucked between parts of speech and stage blocking were painful truths I had nowhere else to put. Intense voicings that saddened the one friend I let read them. I didn’t have words like processing or trauma, but some part of me instinctively chose to put on paper what I could not hold in my tender body. It would be over a decade before anyone called me poet, but even at 15 I had tapped into the transmutational power of deep expression.
When I read what I wrote, at the time and a lifetime later, it’s not sadness I feel. It’s relief. Spaciousness. Almost, perhaps, peace.
One of the ways I can tell when an artwork is complete, especially one that began as emotional processing, is a felt-glimpse of peace, however fleeting.
Like the quiet of a crisp mountain morning.
Or the vastness of a starry desert sky.
One of the reasons I am still alive today with some semblance of sanity is that power. The peace that comes from bringing these pieces of the Mystery forth. The digestive power of creativity.
Our brilliant design
Anyone who has been in a class or conversation with me for long enough has heard my theory for why humans exist, how our facilities evolved so we could reflect life back to life through our unique expressions of beauty. And the other side of this, the deliciously selfish internal alchemy of this makeup, is how much our creative mechanism is a key component of our subtle metabolism.
Researchers have been exploring the link between creativity and madness for some time. The idea that art can make us feel better is not new. But in this particularly maddening time, it feels important to highlight how the entire artmaking process - feeling, conceptualization, experimentation, development of themes, resolution, and sharing the work - is a potent tool of transformation.
The capacity to feel deeply is one of the great gifts of being human. How we sense through perception organs and biochemical processes, and how our behavior is influenced through these sensory experiences. How we store the debris of emotional activation or allow it to move, like stagnant or flowing water.
If we do not channel the intense charge generated by our feelings engine into something productive, eventually it causes an implosion or overflows its bounds in a swath of destruction.
Everything that lives pulses with a cyclical rhythm. Inhale and exhale, receive and release, eat and excrete, experience and create. We are designed to imbibe inspiration, and participate in expiration, each of our creations a little death that feeds the life to come, as we play our part in the cycle.
Creating beyond war
In a previous poem here I spoke to the longing to create beauty being interrupted by the anguish in the world. I think it might be more honest to say that beauty can be a response to the anguish in the world.
When a river is dammed, the entire riparian topography is affected. Some plants and animals dehydrate or starve, others are drowned. The landscape can become unrecognizable and even hostile to creatures that were supported by the waters when they were free-flowing.
When our emotions are dammed, our entire life’s topography is affected. Some vital aspects of our wellbeing diminish, sometimes we are flooded with congealed rage or gloominous despair. Our inner landscape can become unrecognizable to ourselves and hostile to what once brought us sustenance and joy.
Art-making is a way of releasing the flow, sometimes a single stone, sometimes a total undamning. Creative practice is the enzyme helping us digest rough food, the pickaxe helping us bring down the wall. The more we engage with it, the more fluid our emotions become, the more facility we have to meet the rocks and rot that might hamper us.
The more I learn about intergenerational trauma and its role in perpetuating war-consciousness and fear, the more convinced I feel that our current confluence of crises are the legacy of undigested anguish. This is an old understanding, teachers like Sobonfu Somé and Martín Prechtel have been saying this for a long time. The skill of digesting has and will continue to play a critical role in our species’ ability to survive these times.
Learning how to grieve, process, let go, move on, and serve the life to come are some of the practices that will enable humanity to outlive capitalism. Making art is part of how we will remake ourselves into creatures more in alignment with the generative cycles of life.
The key is to find the particular process that supports us in any given moment. For me, writing is a reliable faucet most days. But some I need color and form, to tell a story in image and brushstroke. Or a full-chested melody in alto vibrato. Some days it’s as simple as moving my body in rhythm to another’s recorded song.
The sane-making comes in various forms, and part of meeting my muse is listening for which door she awaits me behind in that moment. But it’s always a matter of letting myself feel, honestly, humbly, and choosing to be available for the art spirit to find me.
It is rarely accompanied by a conscious decision to process a specific emotion. I’m not usually trying to heal something in particular. In fact, when I am immersed in creating it’s not individuated like that at all. It’s only after the completion of the practice session or the artwork that I might understand which pains or ecstasies I was masticating.
What we get to strive for is to tell the truth through stories of word and paint and meal and clay and pixel and body. On our own and with each other. Sometimes all we’ll find is mud, or spiked barricades, or vast numbness. But if we keep showing up, letting ourselves feel, practicing curiosity, and exhaling from the depths, then sometimes we will work vital pieces until they clarify and come out as beauty.
We make meaning as bees make honey, collecting nectar both bitter and nutritious, gathering pollen from every petal we brush, churning it in our bright bowels, until all that remains is food. Holding up a world latticed by our expressions. When I say all humans are artists, or at least, we are meant to be, it is not hyperbole, not exaggeration. It is as simple as saying the sun sheds heat and light in the process of gas combustion. We are no less or more than miniature stars.