Yearning and creative intelligence
Photo: Geoffrey Dunn
Question from my group class on Yearning this morning:
How is it possible to hold all the feelings of Yearning? What about jealousy? How do we express these “bad” feelings beauteously?
My answer:
We hold all the sensations of Yearning without judgement. We express this beauteously because that is the nature of ritual dance. Dance as ritual is not about curating Reality, it is about expressing Reality as it is. This does not condone or reject any dimension of Reality. Because it is in inhabiting the fullness of Reality through the artistic expression of dance that we have an intelligence about the whole movement of Reality.
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My experience as an artist in these times is one of living in the margins. This may be presented as a romantic or martyrdom story, it is neither. The assumption that to be an artist is congruent with poverty and suffering is legitimised mostly because of the loss of the value of artistic intelligence.
The movement from artisan and body-centred making towards intellect and analysis is not as modern as many of us assume. In India, the movement is at least as old as the advent of the philosopher Adi Shankara (509–477 BCE). However even intellectual traditions continued to centralise ritual, which became mini versions of the older dance and performance ritual traditions.
Once upon a time it is possible that Apsaras or the ancient dancer-priestesses were honoured and valued. The depth and sophistication of Rasa philosophy as the knowledge system that centralised artistic practice as intelligence, suggests that there was a recognition of this kind of intelligence as important. Artistic practice was not just loosely understood as creativity, nor was it virtuosity or mastery. It was a constellation of an optimum level of effort (as opposed to maximum or virtuosity), consciousness, ritual, artform, and innate temperament or inclination.
In our times the divorce between the arts, and paradigms that offer value to our understanding of reality, intensifies in economics-driven models of value. Either artists are superfluous to a narrative that determines the value of goods and services, or they are considered ivory-tower dwellers, remote from the urgent concerns of day-to-day life.
Today, even the word artist is held with suspicion. People are intimidated by artistry because it implies mastery of an artform. They feel excluded from what they see as an artist’s club, the members of which are seen to be removed from the banality of day to day lives.
Perhaps people may feel resentment, or a sense of Yearning. Perhaps we Yearn for the freedom to be liberated from the banal and cannot bear to see some people managing to express their liberation. So, it may justify the poverty and marginalisation of those who dare to be artists—after all they are not “suffering” the ordinariness of life like the rest of us.
I spent some years earning my living not as an artist, and I heard many of these sentiments firsthand. Someone once asked me, “Who is more important—an artist or a cancer specialist?” In questions such as these lie the fear and contempt of artistic intelligence.
In truth, a ritual artistic practice would teach us to ask the questions that can liberate us, because it holds an intelligence beyond the paradigmatic ways in which we curate Reality—hierarchies, comparisons, and linear cause-effect models. In many philosophical traditions, knowing which questions to ask of Reality is more important than the answers.
And these questions do not emerge from the human villages we already inhabit, but from the forests that lie outside the boundaries of the villages. Where the Apsaras dance. Where the ancient forest Goddesses roam—elusively and quietly.
It requires a completely different body to sense Reality beyond the narratives of our villages. It requires eyes that can see through smokescreens, ears that can hear choicelessly within and without, noses that scent the elusive Divine within and without, a sense of touch that enjoys the everyday kiss of the wind on our faces, and the attention that tastes the essence of Reality within the multi-dimensional experience of every moment.
But wait, this is not just a self-absorbed transformation, but an expression of beauty and creativity to bring joy and beauty to the world. It does not require "performance" in the sense we understand it now. Rather we offer, and the nature of an artistic practice is always an expressed and manifest offering.
How to speak of the value of this body and its expression in times when we want measurement at all levels? How to propose that the most urgent and radical intelligence we need is in the most intimate and beauteous expression of our multi-sensorial bodies? How to propose that there is an intelligence that offers a way of inhabiting Reality without curating it? How to find a seat at the table of valued discourses in our times for an intelligence that holds a space that of is not of any of those discourses?
It would be considered frivolous to propose artistic or creative intelligence as the answer to the big questions of our times—this was implied in the comparison between a cancer specialist and an artist. We are consumed by what we see as the urgent issues of our human village—climate change, political polarities, inequality, violence. The list is endless. There is no energy to look up from the clamour of these issues and consider that the asnwer might lie outside the village.
Artistic practices are also annexed to service the identified threats. So long as they fit in at the lowest step of the ladder of valued knowledge systems, they are graced with some attention. We pay lip service to creativity and, rather than recognise it as a specific intelligence, we reduce it into non-existence by saying that any approach can be creative.
And yet the Yearning that impels so many of us, continues to smoulder amid the clamour. For some reason, many ancient ritual traditions had the wisdom to turn to this Yearning as the invocation that rendered Reality meaningful. They turned to that which was most intimate, for the knowledge of the universal and cosmic. From this turning emerged astrology, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, architecture, city planning and so many of the roots of our current knowledge systems. But the turning itself was ritual and artistic. That intelligence was the basis of all other discourses. There was a seamless flow between multiple ways of narrating Reality because what held them together was the intelligence in the deepest recesses of our intimate Yearning.
The ancient seer as Kavi/dancer/priest/philosopher suggested that the unifying energy of reality is not external, but in the poetic and beauteous invocation of our own sensations. We hold in our bodies the body and consciousness of the cosmos—this becomes material in ritual dance. Dance connects our pulsation to the throbbing heartbeat of an intelligent and living cosmos. Once you taste this intelligence, there is no doubt about the immanence of consciousness in every manifestation around us—stones, rivers, mountains, stars, planets, and galaxies. It is this intelligence that allows us to hold the multiplicity of Reality without curation.
The urgent issues of our village are also Reality. However, the answers we look for may emerge from an intelligence that can hold nonduality, nonlinearity and multi-dimensionality. This is not to be found within our current villages. It is offered in the wilds outside the village boundaries, in hidden caves where dancers and artists gather to express Reality as beauty, archetypes and sensation.
Anyone can find the caves. We just need to leave our villages on a full moon night, find the courage to brave the animals of the dark, and to navigate the long tunnel to the centre of the cave where the dancers gather.
When we find the energy to move beyond what we already know, then we find ourselves in the presence of the Apsaras. And we move, and are moved by, the revelation of the intimate roots of Reality in our own Yearning.