Dear reader,
“Too many of us live in fragments…”
I am sharing another excerpt from Toehold today. It’s about reclaiming the creative self. I hope that you enjoy it.
But first, I want to thank everyone who responded so supportively to last week’s post. Whether it was providing encouraging words about my writing, sharing the post, or buying or donating, I felt very comforted. Thank you!
Tenebrous (adj.) “full of darkness,” late 15c., from Old French tenebrous “dark, gloomy”… from Latin tenebrosus “dark,” from tenebrae “darkness”[i].
To tenebrize is to live or pass your time in darkness[ii].
Too many of us live in fragments, with our selves split into pieces. The public self – the one that works and takes the kids to football practice – gets to live in the harsh glare of the sun. This self has to be ‘on’ most of the time because this self is answerable to the demands of the material world.
Other parts of the self might duck in and out of the light-filled optics of the public gaze, depending on how holistic your lifestyle allows you to be or how often and badly you allow yourself to get drunk. Some people, at no fault of their own, don’t have a great deal of agency over parts of their lives and may have conditions imposed upon them that are hostile to their living authentically. Abusive partners, micromanaging bosses, poor workplace culture, social security bureaucracies all force people into survival mode where it is just not safe to show an authentic self. And even good jobs can be demanding, even the healthiest of relationships require some compromises, and even beloved children can need a parent to be a grown-up, perhaps when that parent wants to curl up like a child themselves.
Commitments and obligations haul that public self out into the spotlight to tap-dance its way through the minefield of everyday life and its demands; the other parts of self are shoved into the shadows. And some may even be smuggled into the dark, where no one knows that they are there.
The creative self is often one part of the whole self who has to live in the dark place of our lives, perhaps because it has been neglected and shoved aside and perhaps because it has been wounded and chased out of the light.
But it never disappears.
Being creative is an innate human quality; your creative self can’t disappear. It can be neglected of nourishment in the shape of confidence, experience, or training but there are traits that underpin it – imagination, a need to make sense of life, a need to express, a storytelling or story-hearing ability that stretches back to our caveman ancestors. These cannot disappear. Your creative self may have retreated into the dark, it may be hard to see its outlines or to discern its movements, but it is there.
This should be a comfort. But it is also a burden. The creative self never stops yearning to rejoin the whole, never stops whispering its secrets out of the shadows. You will hear it stir back there in the dark, feel its eyes on the back of your head, sense its need to creep forward.
So how to begin reaching out to it, to reclaiming it? For people who have had to neglect their creative side, for one reason or another, perhaps for years, this can feel like a hard thing to do. Some people just may not know how to even get started.
For a start, there can be so much to unlearn. Past criticisms or uncomfortable experiences of early attempts to be creative can come back to haunt us, distracting us from the making of actual work. A particularly toxic influence at work in our lives is the attitude that society has towards artists. We can see this demonstrated in tabloid columns denouncing publicly funded art projects as a ridiculous waste of money, or in the defunding of arts funding programs or university courses by our neoliberal governments, or even in the casual remarks of people around us. “Those crazy artists…” may sound like an offhand and harmless throwaway remark the first few thousand times we hear it. But to hear artists always described as crazy, or wild, or volatile, or suffering, or febrile, or impractical speaks to an attitude that society has towards the people who make the arts their vocation. It is hard for artists to hear this all the time, but it is also quietly toxic for everyone else to hear as well. Every time we say or hear this stuff, we are coaching ourselves, reinforcing a societal belief that creative activity is somehow beyond the pale and not worthy of serious attention. It’s no wonder that so many of us bear the hidden knowledge of our creative selves like a guilty secret.
So, this has to be unlearnt. This is where the company of others can be a boon – book clubs, art classes, film appreciation societies, public lectures, or online fan communities serve to normalise and encourage an unembarrassed love of the arts.
But how do you get started on making creative work of your own? Where do you dive in? What can you do that is suitable or relevant when all you have is a shy self that is used to the dark? What, in this world full of shiny things and eye-popping spectacles, can your under-fed self, hidden in the darkness, offer up?
That darkness. Start there.
If your creative self has been languishing in the shadows while you turned your attention to other demands then, to start with, it can feel small and numb and perhaps disorientated when you start to reclaim it. But the dark which has sheltered but also caged it, far from being a void of experience or stories, is a dynamic spiritual space. Your stay in that space and then your journey out of it is important for you to explore and honour. Rebecca Solnit wrote "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go."[iii]
Another quote from another great writer: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote in one of her letters. And it is this search for oneself that is enough. More than enough: it is compelling. Our insane society has sent the better parts of too many of us into that inner dark world. There are others out there, with lanterns, looking for something. Perhaps a glimmer from your own lantern can light the way or at least send a shimmer of comfort.
Our society sees creative acts as frivolous, a cute hobby at best and a waste of time and energy at worst. Our business community has mad fantasies about commodifying and formulating creativity into a method that can be taught and switched on and off like software; indeed, there is a whole industry of consultants who claim to be able to do this for a fee. Of course, conventional business and management practice makes this impossible. In the meantime, while the suited ones get around to figuring this out, actual creativity is disregarded or denigrated. And both are equally poisonous; even consistent neglect is a form of denigration.
So, into the dark fragments of ourselves go. But this is where it pays to remember that a relative of the word ‘tenebrous’ is ‘temerity’. They share the same family tree, share DNA - the same Proto Indo-European root word ‘teme’ which means “dark”. Temerity comes to us from the Latin temeritatem which has a meaning of blind chance or recklessness. The Etymonline website says that “The connecting notion (between tenebrize and temerity) is ‘blindly, without foreseeing.”
It’s harsh to experience your split self as hurt or a burden; I won’t deny that. But alongside any desperation you feel, perhaps see yourself as having temerity. If you were curious enough to read this then you probably had the temerity to keep in touch with that hidden self, to keep a line open into the dark, to keep a lantern shining. Every time you make creative work, even if it’s interrupted or not very good, then you have kept that hidden self alive and expectant of more. Even reading this and thinking about it is an act of temerity.
Have the temerity to experiment with what your nascent creative practice might look like. Prize temerity over success. You try a pottery class, and it turns out that you make stuff like a kindergartener? So what? What you lack in pottery skills you have made up for in psychological muscle if you congratulate yourself for having a go rather than berating yourself for not being instantly great at something.
Go blindly. Be content to go without foreseeing what will be a ‘success’ or not. Go with your lantern or just go blindly into that dark, stretching your hand ahead. At some point you will feel another hand stretched out to touch yours; grab the hand of your hidden self and start to lead it back into the light.
[i] Tenebrous – etymonline.com
[ii] “To TENEBRIZE is to live or pass your time in darkness”. - Tweet from Haggard Hawk
[iii] A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
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I can never read this too often. Working in the dark. I’m fascinated with the themes of darkness and light.
For some time, I’ve been working on a book, piece by piece, about a man who’s lost himself. This reminds me to get back to that book.