The Philosopher's Attic

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.

yseult communication creativity, silence, Writing

It’s funny how sometimes current topics and themes occur either in everyday life, in your lectures or thoughts. It’s like when someone gets a new car and suddenly you see that type of car everywhere because before you simply didn’t pay proper attention.
The same thing works for topics and thoughts. Recurring themes is probably our brain and subconscious’ way of organising our days and realisations to get things done. Or we could just say that it’s karma’s way of telling you that now is the time to finally get that particular lesson.

Whichever way we want to put it or analyse it, my current topic is communication. And in fact it has been for a while. Out of some silly idea of ‘I don’t always want to write about the same thing’ I’ve waited until I would have something more interesting to write about… but again, no such luck. The last four writing ideas on the back burner have been about communication. So instead of putting this one here as well on a list where it can wait, I am dragging it all out now. Because the wait for a new post is way too long and because I need to get back into some sort of stable writing in general.

Ever since I got married, I’ve been on the receiving end of some of the weirdest questions in existence: relationship advice. While certainly my relationship is one of the most amazing things that just works in my life (yes, mentally, psychologically and physically), I’ve never been particularly comfortable with talking about it. As if it was something out of time or I would jinx it by using it as an example. With the years that changed, simply because I saw how people in other relationships really use a system of powers and pressure that is completely absent from my marriage. It goes to show that when you really don’t want to be an example, you end up being one even more so. Or in other words I really had to say something about the usual relationship mistakes. What a shocker. The girl that waited until the age of 28 to get some action, actually had something to say about relationships. Who knows, I might just make a series out of this.

One thing that always seems to be a present bystander of any relationships are annoyances. The small things that the other does that keep upsetting you, that suddenly are the only thing that you see, hear, smell and yourself can think about. Does your spouse love rearranging the towels in your bathroom once you’re just out of the shower and actually have just finished putting them on the rack? Seriously, as if your way of folding them was so wrong and he needs to be cleaning up behind you. How insulting. How infuriating. How utterly useless and what a loss of time…!

Stop.

That’s right. Stop. That’s the right moment to stop the thoughts that start gathering momentum at the first occurrence, at the second have gained the physical force of an avalanche and at the 10th are reason enough to kick the other out of your home, life and future will.

Our minds and worlds are not permeable to everything and our thoughts and motivations aren’t visible to the outside. All the outside sees are actions. And with the wish to understand that should be infusing every relationship (lover or not), we start conjecturing, constructing and analyzing. And since we already are upset, the only explanation is tainted by annoyance. Only in rare occasions could we think that there was a good explanation to these actions. After all what possible GOOD explanation can there be to the fact of my husband rearranging the towels in our bathroom that were already stowed on a rack and thus per definition the bathroom cleaned up?

Asking would help. Talking about it would help. Breaking the cycle of ‘he’s just not happy with the way I do things. Tough.’ would certainly help. Because if you do, you’d be able to realise that there is no mean thought behind it, but that he likes doing it, that he’s not even realising that he’s doing it and that the way he does it, they DO use less space and dry faster.

Just like our motivations are not painted onto our actions, our partner doesn’t have a priviledged way into our mind or suddenly doted with the gift of telepathy to see what upsets us and what doesn’t. The debt of communication lies always on both sides of the couple. It’s the most important step any relationship can take. And one I’ve not lastly understood thanks to living my relationship over Skype for two years.

Not communicating even the upsetting things is not in any possible way something that ’spares’ your partner. (Even though you can wait to spill it all until a difficult moment has passed for instance.) Not stating what goes wrong only suffocates your relationship under the silence and eventually the annoyance will grow so strong, the cover of silence can’t cover it anymore. Because the key to annoyance is: it can’t be evacuated other than by addressing it.

NB. In case you were wondering… yes, my love does rearrange our towels and it took me a while to realise the level of absent thought behind it and that it was just a way of neatly putting things in our apartment. Doesn’t mean hubby doesn’t like the way I clean or the way I hold our house together OR the way I fold the towels. I still love him. He’s a quirk. But so am I.

yseult communication