Johnny and I approached life with a sense of shared exploration. We became specialists in extremity, seekers of myth and magic, diviners of the truth. Yet in many ways we were polar opposites. He was light, I was dark. He was open, I was closed. His stellar, outward trajectory was the antithesis of my earthly, obsidian intensity. I was the thankless living to his grateful dead, the Berlin Wall to his Doors Of Perception.
Our most significant philosophical disagreement was, characteristically, conducted on a grand scale. He insisted on the notion of the fundamental commonality of everything. He dreamed of the beauty of transcendence, the corrosion of difference and the white landscapes of infinity. I could never see the world in those terms. His blissed-out melange was, to me, a fruitless mixing of colours that resulted only in a brownish-grey sludge.
Twenty years later, still pondering philosophy, creativity and identity, I find myself observing an online discussion on meditation and mindfulness. It’s interesting, but I’m having trouble relating my own rather limited level of experience to what’s being said. Then there’s a shift sideways towards flow, the zone and creativity. Whiskey expresses something that pulls together many of my recurring thoughts of recent years:
“… creativity is essentially an overwhelming presence of awareness, and may very well be mindfulness, and could be a form of meditation, or it could be more like lucid dreaming (outside of dreaming – as in, lucid wakefulness), or it could be the state attained through the creative mind, which seems to be on a whole different level of consciousness altogether.”
To which I find myself responding intuitively, with little conscious analysis:
“Yes, yes, yes. And can we throw the word ‘otherness’ in there somehow as well? Creativity as an approaching of the divine via a process of lucid mindfulness that allows us to appreciate, however briefly and superficially, the intrinsic strangeness of everything other than oneself.”
Suddenly I’m back in the Rosemary Branch, with the beer-sodden and ash-stained carpet swirling around me. It’s then, yet it’s now. Johnny, on the other side of the table, speaks our common language – Blake – and asks me why I persist in closing myself up, till I see all things thro’ narrow chinks of my cavern. With the benefit of two further decades of innocence and experience, I gather my thoughts and take a deep breath…
We’re all looking for meaning in life, one way or another. I’ve come to the conclusion that meaning comes from creativity. Creativity in its broadest sense: the bees in the garden gathering pollen to make honey, friends and family making relationships and babies, businesses concocting fascinating products, singers pulling together words and melodies, painters filling canvases with dreams and desires.
Creativity can be solid and tangible, but it can also be abstract and ethereal. An idea is as much of a creation as an iPhone. In fact, an iPhone is an idea; one hundred thousand iPhones are considerably less interesting. The joy, the beauty, the hope, is in the singularity. It’s in the fact that one thing is not like another. And the source of that sense of singularity, strangeness, otherness, is the divine.
I like that word: divine. It can be breathed languidly, conveying a shallow, ephemeral joy, or it can be spoken with reverence and weight. As a noun or adjective it has an overwhelmingly spiritual connotation, yet as a verb it seems more pragmatic. To divine something is to discover or perceive it. At first sight that looks like an entirely different meaning, but I’m coming to realise that it’s part of the same process.
To discover something is to encounter its essence, which the dictionary describes as “the basic, real, and invariable nature of a thing or its significant individual feature or features”. Its true identity, in other words: what makes it different to everything else. It strikes me that art – creativity – is the process of divining and defining uniqueness. It’s fine to make connections between things, but ultimately those things are separate.
Does that sound too bleak? I see it as strength, as infinite richness. Too abstract? We all encounter art on a daily basis, in one form or another. Too solipsistic? I can’t dispute that: all I am is all I am. Too esoteric and religious? Even Wild Billy Childish, purveyor of fine garage rock ‘n’ roll songs about beating his father up, declares his solidarity with “every living artist who dares to draw God on this planet.”
Much has happened since we last met, Johnny. The wall has fallen, yet still I chase its ghost, believing in this Other divinity that stems from separation. You would throw the switch and enlighten us all, whereas I doubt the ability of the world to withstand the gaze of a god whose eyes are twin suns. From my cavern perspective, I still believe that the darkness in the spaces between us is where the creator dwells.
Hg,
It’s a privilege to have earned a small place in this insightful writing. I, too, find the shores of creativity and identity to be among the most fascinating places to wander, even if I am always left with the enormity of the mystery. There seems to be little to complain about if not knowing all the answers means that we have all the freedom in the world to be creative, and if meaning comes from creativity, then there is really nothing impossible, is there?
Thanks for the inspiration, Whiskey. You can see a small, faint echo of some of these ideas in the previous post, but your summary propelled them forward at warp speed.
Now I’m considering how this ties in with my long-term affinity with existentialism: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
I don’t mean this in that rhetorically disposable way many questions are asked, even with the same words in the same order: if we are to create our own meaning, then meaning is, by definition, artificial, so why should we continue trying?
Truth be told, I’m a little lost on this question. There’s no greater sensibility to leaving the world than staying, so at the very least, an inclination to survive keeps me going. But if the most we can hope for is to revel in the possibilities of our creative efforts (in your quite useful, broad notion), that’s kind of just a dressed-up hedonism…or no?
Daniel – I’ve been pondering your question and can’t formulate any kind of satisfying reply. Which, as Whiskey implies, is inevitable – the enormity of the mystery. Yes, you’re right. No, you’re wrong.
Only pedantry can save me now… “Artificial” sounds like a pejorative, but if we say “man-made” instead it becomes more neutral and then where’s the harm in that? What if we do create our own meaning?
And as for hedonism, it’s an extreme. Sadness and happiness, pain and pleasure, they’re dualities. I prefer contentment, which is the synthesis of this dichotomy – the ability to exist in either realm.
And now I must go and re-read your fuller response…
I’m tiring enough from the enormity of the mystery to long for contentment, but a part of me feels like it’s selling out. Sometimes, though, I just realize that I could compound this muddy footing by living in Darfur, or a decrepit tenement, or have been brutalized in some fashion. I enjoy the luxury of missing out on all manner of suffering that would distract me from these worries.