Your daily creative prompt
Welcome to day 5 of my Advent Calendar emails.
This morsel is not so sweet, and perhaps a bit hard to swallow. But I am including it because it is an important call to action and creatively evocative.
Some of you may have read Ben Okri’s excellent column in The Guardian recently: Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days.
I am taking its subtitle as both a point of reflection and a creative provocation:
“Write as if these are the last days.”
How would you write as if the history of your civilisation – or even your species – was coming to an end?
Why would you write? In the hopes of inspiring meaningful action to avert that end? To assuage your own fears? To leave a record for a succeeding civilisation?
In response to climate change, and climate change denialism amongst too many of our leaders, Okri writes:
“I have found it necessary to develop an attitude and a mode of writing that I refer to as existential creativity. This is the creativity at the end of time.”
Okri defines this “existential creativity”:
“How do I define it? It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted… It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose.”
So, what singular purpose could your creative practice – writing, art, performance, design, cooking, hairdressing, whatever – have during this time?
Tomorrow, a somewhat gentler prompt awaits you.
Meredith