This month’s O! Magazine is finally worth its cover price for an article on writing. Impossible to find among the effusive, bold-faced red of the Table of  Contents, which blubber on about adventures in adult sex education, how to dress 10 pounds slimmer, and whether baby carrots are safe to eat, novelist Jim Shepard’s article “Castles in the Mind” was a scrumptuous read. Ostensibly about the uses of imagination, it is really about writing and writers–writers as people who never let go of our innate ability to become, and stay, engaged.

Also a teacher at Williams College, Shepard underscores the writer’s shamanistic side. Writing forces us to step over to the “other side,” and into the unknown.

Grace Paley’s nice way of putting it is that we don’t write about what we know; we write about what we don’t know about what we know. Tobias Wolff’s version is that every time you write you’re stepping off into darkness and hoping for some light.

If that’s true, and we don’t know what we’re doing at first, then at least for a little while when we’re trying to compose something, we need to remember to cut ourselves some slack. There’ll be plenty of time for brutality later, when revising the mess we made. But we need to be allowed to make that mess in the first place. When we shut ourselves down prematurely, it’s as if we came across a child happily playing in the sandbox and asked what she was making, and when she said she didn’t know, we told her, “Then get out of the sandbox. If you don’t know what you’re making, you have no business in there.” Or if she answered, “I’m making a castle,” we responded, “Oh, a castle. That’s original. No one’s ever made a castle before.”

That girl in the sandbox has every right to respond, “I don’t know if it’s original. I won’t know until I’ve made it.”

We need to do everything we can, when writing, to stay in touch with pleasure. With fun. With the passionate engagement that we all manage, as children. Not only because that will keep us going, but also because it will generate the freedom and the energy that allows us to exhilarate ourselves, and so exhilarate others.

Alongside Shepard’s article is an interview with Toni Morrison, who says, “I start out with an image, even if I don’t know yet how to use it.”

As if this weren’t enough, just hours after reading this article, I listened to a lecture by philosopher and apologist Peter Kreeft, who says that C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narniabegan with an image and burst into life when Aslan came bounding into the spotlight of Lewis’s imagination. The point is not only that inspiration must be honored and respected. It is that the writer or artist must never let go of her respect for the Muses, and must never cease honoring them through practical means. We mustn’t let our freedom of mind and spirit be compromised.

paradise lost

Seeing Shepard’s image of the girl in the sandbox in my mind’s eye, I was also reminded of a conversation I had with my young daughters yesterday. They were chattering on in the backseat of the car about their 11- and 12-year-old friends spending their summer shopping, tanning by the pool, and otherwise doing what their affluent mothers do all summer, too. “They don’t read books,” Sage complained, “they don’t paint and draw.”

“They don’t catch tadpoles and frogs!” Juniper interjected, “They don’t like to get dirty!” Giggles erupted in the backseat.

“Can you see Ashley catching crawdads?!” Their classmate, 11-year-old Ashley, wears Chanel sunglasses and carries a cute little Gucci purse.

Heat slithered up at us from the blacktop parking lot as we threw the car doors open. Cicadas throbbed their beat. I remembered my own childhood, the hours I spent outside in trees, under the shade of my grandmother’s Crape Myrtle, reading in the porch swing, lying on the chenille bedspread, book in hand, the old GE tabletop fan humming along at 80 mph. I had hour upon uninterrupted hour with books, with paint and chalk, with blank pieces of paper and fine-lined ones. With my dad’s old portable Smith-Corona typewriter, writing the Great American Novel. With my tiny, red and gold colored notebook, writing poetry.

I felt sorry for my children’s classmates, for the neighborhood children who, like their parents, don’t come home from jobs and day care until almost 7:00 p.m., eat hurried meals, rush through evenings full of activities–soccer, dance, swim lessons, sleepovers, television, back-and-forth between divorced parents, full up with American culture where CASH IS KING! LIMITED TIME OFFER! ACT NOW!

I realized that I can write, in part, because I was left to myself for long hours in childhood, given the freedom to meander through the library and check out books to my heart’s content, given paints and crisp white paper, given my dad’s old portable Smith-Corona typewriter and a typing book and showed how I could teach myself how to type. It never occurred to me, or to any of us back then, to spend hours in front of the television, because there were no daytime television shows, no HBO, no Showtime, no DVDs or video games.

With all these things available today, what is in short supply is time. If we don’t have long, leisurely, undulating hours for basking in our God-given light, neither will our kids. I won’t be surprised if we find ourselves unable to produce many great writers in this generation, or if the world’s best writers don’t come from cultures where cash is not king and where the children are not being MTV’d, Twittered, and Facebooked to death.

There’s a new exhibit of Native American art at our local art museum. We went last week and spent hours gazing at art in all sorts of media–watercolor, pencil, ink, pottery, textiles. At some pieces, we laughed out loud; at others we giggled nervously, and at others we gasped with delight. It was a feast for the eyes and soul, a reminder of just how much we need these thumbprints of the human spirit.

My son’s girlfriend, a senior at university and a Native American herself, works at this art museum and has learned a lot through her classes and work. I love being around people like her because I learn from what they’ve learned; and I love to learn. At a display of pottery made by Pueblo Indian Maria Martinez, she told us a story about Maria she’d learned in art class.

Maria specialized in making black-on-black pottery similar to that made by the ancient Pueblo peoples. As Maria became better known, demand for her work increased. Each piece fetched a nice price, so soon other Pueblo Indians began to replicate Maria’s work and sell the pottery to tourists and art collectors.

When the white folks figured out what was going on, they began to demand that Maria sign her pottery, which she did. The other women would then bring their pottery to Maria to have their pots signed, so that all could share in the bounty produced by Maria’s name.

Standing there in the museum’s chilly air, looking at Maria’s flawless work, I wondered at her. How different a spirit she had than is typical among white folks, indeed among any folks these days or any day who seek to hold on to what they think is theirs, to possess and be possessed by, to hoard what there is not enough of. I was reminded of Nobel Prize winner N. Scott Momaday’s concern that the “removal of the spiritual matrix of the traditional life, the theft of the sacred” would eventually ruin not only Native American culture, but America as a nation. One effect of the loss of a spiritual True North, he said, was that people would lose traditional cultural principles such as those the Plains Indians lived by: bravery, fortitude, generosity, and virtue.

Momaday, like Martinez, knew that doing one’s art well required more than the courage, resolve, and fortitude to merely practice one’s art with regularity. “Writing is a way of expressing your spirit,” he said, “so there’s much more to it than the question of material success. You are out to save your soul after all, and be the best thing that you can be in your whole being.”

“I would like to live my life according to those four things. I would like to do it in my writing, as well as in my other activities. That’s what I believe. I tell students, writing is the expression of your spirit, but you must live by certain ideals, and they must inform not only your writing, but the way in which you  have breakfast with your mate, as well.”

As Momaday said and Martinez exemplified, it is not enough to simply become  our best selves, to live our best selves; generosity is required. Virtue must be applied, for “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).

Our trip to the museum to wallow in art reminded me to keep a loose hold on my own spirit, on what I call my work, ”my writing.”

It, like my very life, is not really my own.

Today is the one-year anniversary of The Third Eve. I’m grateful for every single one of the community of bloggers I’ve come to know and love through the simple act of writing. You’ve enriched my life and enlightened me; thank you.

quaternity

I started blogging because I had gotten out of the habit of writing. It seems that, having been published, I suddenly realized that I could be published and that the writing of books might be endless and meaningless. I also noticed some of my long-time friends and colleagues who write burning out as writers. I feared that writing might become for me what it was to them, a chore. All this, combined with real-life demands, stressors, and griefs, led to a long winter during which I did little else but suffer deep down inside.

During that sabbatical, I continued to read and to try and grow as a person. Something I read-probably Jung-started me thinking about four, the number of completion in numerous spiritual traditions. I kept thinking about how the Christian Trinity is three: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Three, an incomplete number. Why, I wondered, would God use a doctrine of incompletion? A trinity couldn’t be complete.

Then one day I realized that the Fall happened, in effect, to God too. Humanity’s separation from our source, by whatever name one wants to call it, was a loss not only to the separated, but also to the source from whom we were separated. And so, as the Christian Myth goes, we needed our Bridegroom to fetch us back, even at the price of His own life. The most ancient stories, myths, and fables are replete with tales of the descent into the underworld and subsequent apotheosis of the hero, who returns to the land of the living with whatever treasure will save his people.

The thing is that not only did we need our Bridegroom to fetch us, but he needed us to be fetched. No Bride, no Bridegroom. We are the fourth member of the godhead, the Eve who completes the picture. Mary, the second Eve, represents all that we should be but are not, until we Become. And so I thought of The Third Eve, the metaphor of ultimate completion.

writing as love

My goal became to write regularly about the art and discipline of becoming whole. Becoming a real writer is much the same as becoming a real person: it takes inspiration and work. Most of us repress the habits that lead to wholeness, thus resisting our very selves. We lead lives of quiet desperation because we never realize our Selves. And yet we use the same energetic habits that might have propelled us forward in our journey to accomplish other, less meaningful ends, instead.

Repression is the act of shutting our inner eyes in order to avoid the suffering of discipline. Repression always calls forth a compensatory activity of the unconscious which will, through the back door, force upon us the very thing we are trying to repress. The alternative is conscious discipline: trying to plan, direct or curb our acts, or renouncing them altogether, should that be required. Such losses can be borne and are eminently human, if we will but muster the courage to go down the lonely path. Most of us will not.

The point of becoming conscious, of working on ourselves so that we’re aware of ourselves, is to allow what has been repressed to emerge so that we can consciously experience it. Once we’re awake to it, we may have to restrain its destructive aspects and put it under our conscious discipline. This is hard work, and every power in the world seems poised to thwart the pilgrim attempting to become, and remain, conscious.

Because of the difficulty inherent in becoming conscious, the first thing we often try to do when gripped by an unconscious force is to try and repress it. If we can’t manage to repress this force, then the next thing we try to do is act it out. But this is messy, because we act out on other people, and then we have to take responsibility for our actions anyway. A more helpful choice is to take the emotion we feel inward for reflection, so that we will better understand ourselves. Understanding that our reactions are entirely our own, belonging to us and not anyone else’s fault helps us to make our best conscious decision in the moment. Such decisions are based on an awareness that a force is active within us. We can choose to allow that force to influence us by using it creatively, or we may choose to sidestep the force and take actions not based on the emotional force, but based on principle. Or we may choose some combination of these; but the actions of a conscious person are consciously arrived at.

To illustrate, I’ll return to last year, during the time in my life when I wasn’t writing. The fact that I wasn’t writing didn’t nullify my creative energy; neither did it dispel the habit energy required for dedicated, serious writing. What I did with my writer’s energy was to spend the same amount of time I might have spent writing in a different world: I gamed with my children. We spent hours playing role-playing games and also watching various television series. The year before that, we spent an entire year going through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and Children (RCIA and RCIC) in the Catholic church, studying religious doctrines. And the year before that, we worked on inner healing for some recently-adopted family members who needed help. And the year before that, we built a house. And the years before that, we made ourselves get out of bed every day and be awake marriage partners and parents in spite of the pain of having lost our child.

My point is that every 12-month period of my non-writing adult life, I spent hours of nearly every day doing some discipline that required time, attention, motivation, and reflection-the same disciplines required of the writer. I had arrived at the next step of my personal journey and I had recoiled from it, refusing to go deeper. Instead, I went deeper into other activities that were sometimes good and worthy, and other times worthless and leading nowhere. I avoided the suffering of the lonely, even monastic, writer, experiencing instead the suffering of meaninglessness and self-abandonment.

refusing the call

One year, my friend Faye became convinced that the next leg of her hero’s journey required her to sleep for five years. This is the command that God kept giving: sleep for five years. She had come out of an adult lifetime of clinical depression and was bubbling over with energy and ability: why sleep? She knew that sleeping, for her, meant going down into the depths of the unconscious, doing the belly of the whale. But she refused to do it. She finished her degree, she puttered around at teaching yoga and Bible studies. She decided she was a healer and began to see clients even though she was not trained for it, much. She went on cruises, she taught Sunday School, she shopped, and she had lunches with friends. She did everything but what she had been called to do, which was to go down into the depths of her self and sleep for five years. Sleep is dreaming, and sleep is healing; it is the underworld and it is the unconscious.

When I saw what my friend became by refusing her call, I felt disturbed. I wondered at her refusal, even though I understood why someone who had been paralyzed by depression might react against ”sleep” by doing everything under the sun except live a solitary life and court the Real Self in its native land, the unconscious. I caught myself having strong feelings about her refusal, through them conveniently side-stepping responsibility for my own refusals. I became very much afraid of refusing my own call, and saw that I had, in fact, already been refusing it through unmitigated middle-aged developmental suffering, which had kept me from the real suffering required by my own solitary path. And so it was that choosing to face the blank page and write my 1500-2000 words a day became an act of obedience, and ultimately of love, for the one person I hated most in this world, which was me. Choosing to answer the call to write such humble offerings in a medium I did not respect, and which seemed worthless to a “real writer,” whose Holy Grail is Publication (Hallowed Be Thy Name), felt like failure. But it acted like God.

novitiate

Happy anniversary to me. I went into a tomb, I was swallowed by a great whale, I was shipwrecked and cast into the tossing waves of the sea, and cast ashore outside the thick, high walls of a cloister. Today marks the first day of my novitiate, for I am committed to three acts a day for the next year: prayerfully invoking the mercy and aid of God, writing daily, and honoring the ancestors through reading. The book in my hand, the keyboard, and the blank page will be the leather belt, the sandals, and the the prayer rope of the novice.

What, I wonder, are your emblems of Becoming? To what novitiate are you called, friend? To what have you closed your eyes, so as to avoid the suffering of μοναχός, monachos, the monk, literally, the alone one? You’ve heard the voice of your Bridegroom, calling, “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come along!” (Song of Solomon 2:10). How did you respond? To what daily habits have you fled to avoid the suffering of loneliness?  To what postulancy are you called in the coming year?

How, and with what, will you answer?

Today concludes a four-part series on a two-day writing workshop given by Richard Tarnas at Pacifica Graduate Institute last year.

The hardest part of the day

The hardest part of the day for the writer is that point near the beginning where you know you need to say something. The page is blank. The screen is blank. There is tremendous resistance to putting anything down; you are like Sisyphus only you can’t see the boulder or the mountain. This is where it takes a brave, self-reliant, determined act of will, or gumption, to write. It takes a choice to not do one more procrastinating thing that you must do. Just push into it; just make the mistake, get into and write the first sentence that you may not even use in the long run. Just go ahead and write it. Write the awkward sentence, the convoluted paragraph. As you’re writing, something happens after a certain amount of time has passed, and the argument begins to unfold; boldness has a certain type of grace to it. The angels come to help; clarity and creative energy start to flow.

Begin it now

In a quote often misattributed to Goethe, William Hutchinson Murray wrote:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

Faith only grows in darkness; it is the seed that requires the coldness and darkness of being underground that grows.

If you are young, do not rush into print

Get a lot of criticism from leaders in your field, if you think your first work is going to be really great. Let enough help and wisdom from others come to you before you publish. You want what you publish to be something you can be proud of ten years from now, without too much immaturity or inflation. We need a combination of rigor and imagination. If you can walk that tightrope, great creative work will come through.

Tarnas mentioned Taylor Mali’s, “The Impotence of Proofreading,” to illustrate (what else?) the importance of proofreading–and a good editor!

Note to conservative parents: Mali uses a variety of sexual puns to hilarious effect in this poem, but you may not want your kids around while you’re listening to it.

is it good?

How do you know something is really good? Because it is elevating. You know it’s good because you have read so much other work that is great.  You are elevated by being with great works over and over again; this helps form your aesthetic judgment. You forge your judgment through wise reading in your field and in the larger cultural tradition; also you find those among your colleagues, friends, and community whom you trust to be discerning and to tell you the truth about your writing. Often it is not the best thing to give your work immediately to someone who deeply loves you, who is close to you and who can’t tell you the worth of your work.

A lot of writing comes as a result of someone else’s writing; the other person’s writing is a catalyst for you. Hillman reads widely and responds through writing to that. He writes impassioned and even irritated responses to what he reads. He once went a few years without writing and told a friend, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write again, because I’m not angry about anything.” Derivative means when you ape or copy another writer, not when you write originally as the result of what you read that serves as your springboard.

What role does structure play?

James Hillman wrote one of his books on scraps of paper, little notes, etc. Tarnas gets his books in bits and pieces, too, and many other writers do. Bertrand Russell wrote 3000 words and didn’t edit it; but there is some superficiality and maybe a bit of arrogance to that.

Follow your nose, your sixth sense, your playful spirit, your personal interests; go to the point of least resistance; that’s where the creative spring will push through. Often you will end with a structure that is radically different from what you imagined.

Don’t try to solve all the problems of the overall structure of your book or essay at the beginning; don’t think you’ve got to figure it all out at the beginning. It will unfold in ways that you can’t anticipate. Just pay attention to what wants to come through now, at the given moment.

Hold your structure flexibly, loosely. It will likely change with the unfolding of your book. The beauty of creativity is that on some level, the book is already completed and you’re finding your way to it. It will have solved problems that you cannot anticipate at the beginning or in the middle of it. Just go with it and trust that it will unfold. Often this means writing a sentence, a paragraph, even a whole chapter, and later you will say, “Oh! That’s where that goes!” It will be like a missing puzzle piece fitting in. There is a trust in the creative unconscious.

Writing the mundane

When you’re writing in the later part of the day, you will do different kinds of writing such as email or other correspondence. Make every bit of writing you do count. Email is a more challenging medium because it is so flat, and so difficult to convey what you mean to say. People regularly think that their email sounds friendlier than it is; there is a great deal of research showing that email is not effective in terms of communication. You have to work even more to contextualize your words and make them explicitly clear in terms of feeling tone. Pay attention to making sure that it says what you want to say as well as you can, as clearly and as precisely as possible. That discipline will make your daily writing easier, because you have been sharpening the sword.

go where the energy is

In the moment of writing, go with where the energy is. Your delight in saying something, what unfolds most readily in you is a good place to begin. It primes the pump, it gets the waters flowing. If you leave what you actually feel like doing as a writer, but then some super-ego inside you says no, you should be doing this other thing or a harder part of the task, then that could leave you stymied for hours. You may lose the magic moment of when something wanted to be said to you. This is a writer’s version of Joseph Campbell’s following your bliss. It is a kind of delight or pleasurable energy, even quite subtle. Inspiration can’t be called up on demand; the muses are extremely unpredictable. When they are present and available, don’t say, “I’d love to, but I want to do this first,” or “I’d love to, but I want to go  do this instead, watch this program or go to this party.” Pay attention to that inner calling, your inner bliss. That’s why it’s also important to have your notebook at hand. The original force of creativity is at hand, so that’s when you need to write it down. You will also lose what you could have gotten had you actually written your thought down and attended to it. Something about writing it down draws forth more from that place. It’s quite a process, something like making love, like a caress. Caress the detail, the divine detail (Navokoff).

Elevate your own sense of taste by reading deeply.

The most local can convey the most universal truths; remember Faulkner.