Why silence and creativity go together

Posted by yseult on Feb 20, 2010 in Communication | 3 comments

Silence and creativity are linked and if we manage to free the one with the aid of the other, we might not just become better artists or better ‘creators’, but also we might achieve better understanding of ourselves and the people we are hoping to reach.

One of my twitter contacts – Masafumi Matsumoto – is following the Artist’s Way at the moment and his insights on his blog on this experience are pretty revealing and a great read.
This week, he has issued a challenge to everyone who’s reading him and following him, to simply ‘not read’. One of the exercises of The Artist’s Way is to abstain yourself from reading for a week and observe the effect on your own creativity.
Now, the Artist’s Way is something that has become very popular in the mid-80ies and the synthesiser of this method Julia Cameron has opened the creative pathways for a lot of people with her method (which incidentally came from years and years of teaching courses with the same aim. In that the book differs a lot from other ’self-help’ or ’self-teaching’ books on writing, creativity, and artistic expression.) and with the rise of chatter of our everyday online and social life oversounding our creative selves from our, is as relevant as ever.

When I came across the Artist’s Way a couple of years ago, I struggled greatly with the ‘reading abstinence’ as an assignment. This was before the internet became more a means of communication and exchange, and still was a tool for research and the occasional replacement for a physical written letter.
Reading is an integral step in the construction of our shared social and personal realities. The universe we construct around ourselves and within us are made up of various kinds of building stones: reading is an integral part of the cement that link those stones. It’s not just the dialogical nature – explained best in Gadamer’s method in Wahrheit und Methode – of every text, but much more the witnessing a thought outside the confines of our own mind that hold these said building stones together. Without it, they become a wall that keeps us within our own reality and soon cannot be overcome by any argument or realisation. Or to say it differently: instead of stepping onto those building stones and looking ahead, we step down and dig ourselves into the ground and the building stones just become a wall keeping our gaze from the horizon.

While I still hold the above, coming back to the Artist’s Way – thanks to mma323 – and that famous week of reading abstinence I see the profound truth in Cameron’s exercise that I failed to before.
Because today I deeply feel that the overall chatter that surrounds us today has increased and continues to increase still. It’s suggested to us by a whole set of social pressures that we need to be efficient, constantly online, constantly reachable and constantly ’there’ or something is wrong with us. That pressure of efficiency then pushes us to fill every little minute between greater actions such as work or shopping etc. will said chatter. A quick check on your email here, a quick read through the latest headlines there and the small moment that could have served in silence to recollect ourselves and our thoughts is gone. This immediateness and the contraction of distances between people make for a rise in stress that can be remedied fairly easily. (Fairly easily, because recent studies concerning the peer pressure through Facebook et al. suggest that leaving the chatter for a while can actually harm your social contacts.)

But for what? In the Artist’s way, the goal is clear: to free your creative spirits and pathways, free yourself to write, draw, paint, express and in the end find yourself again. Web 2.0, where the emphasis lies on the exchange and the us, makes this even more important. Whereas our exchange on the web is based on the basic structure of ‘I transmit’ – ‘You comment’ – ‘We discuss/exchange etc.’, the Artist’s Way emphasieses a return to the ‘I do’ – ‘I create’.
In a way it goes back to the first step, before you share. Redefining ‘what’ you transmit on the Web and through the new media. Without that the content of what you want to share becomes vacant, empty and we then immediately start to fill it up with nonsensical self-production. We all do it. All the time.

So, maybe the lesson here isn’t just: stop reading, stop using this or that service, but rather: think about what you share and don’t lose yourself in it.

A reading abstinence certainly helps to get a clear idea of what we all consume on a regular basis. It also serves to give value back to what we really end up reading rather than being intellectually bulimic with our everyday intake of the written word. Because in the same way bulimia is disproportionate and leaves you without healthy nutrition, so is and overuse of the new means of the transmission of knowledge and opinion in the digital age.

Creating patches of silence in our lives will not only open up creative influences, but it will also give back value to our interactions and that in turn will lead us to a better understanding of each other, because only when we have the feeling that people are actually listening to what we have to say and not just quickly taking notice of it, can we assume the true basis of exchange and mutual understanding.