The necessary solitude of creativity

I inquire about the centre of universes and worlds.

I inquire about expression’s birthplace in Void.

-Atharva Veda

We live in a world that is inimical to introverts. Susan Cain wrote a bestselling book about it called “Quiet”. If you feel alone in your need for solitude, please read this book. It changed my life. I finally met myself.

In recent days I have been dealing with yet another artefact of an approach to life that has a universalism about “community” paradigms. In Australia there is the ubiquitous rise of what are called “body corporates” where homes are constructed in clusters that must be governed by a “corporation” of owners. The legislative obligations of each unwitting owner who buys into these arrangements are nothing to be shrugged off. General meetings, corporation budgets, managers, and committees of owners who must become legislative experts to keep up with the legal compliance. It is no place for an introvert.

I live in such a “body corporate”. I have spent the last two weeks looking at budgets, legislation, and meetings with other owners. During this time, I have not written, reflected, or been creative. I have snatched time for my dance invocations and these have been life-saving. They returned me to myself, those waters into which allowed me to simply offer my actions and be free of any attachment to expectations.

People often ask me, what the “problem” is that this invocatory philosophy solves. I say that it is about freedom from an approach to life and Reality as a problem. We live in a web of systems designed to solve problems, mostly of our own creation. And the very systems become the problem. Nowhere is this more evident to me than my recent experience of a legislated group of people masquerading as community. And in these dynamics of groups, people whose intrinsic expression is reflective find themselves invalidated.

Susan Cain writes about our valuing of extroverted, community, team and group dynamics over introversion, contemplation, and solitude. With the advent of social media, the emphasis on extroversion bordering on exhibitionism is the new normal. The dynamics of social media require constant engagement, the constant performative “posting” , often many times a day. As a creative person who needs long periods of solitude and reflection, it is increasingly difficult to find spaces that recognise the expressions of such temperaments.

To be solitudinous is not to be invisible. Or to abhor interaction and engagement. It is the rhythms of that engagement and the contexts that are different. Like many artists, I work from my inner cosmos. To do this, I spend time attending to this cosmos and bringing that attention into action and expression in the world. Contemplative art is something of itself. Not all art is contemplative, nor does it have to be so. But creativity that invites contemplation cannot come from the noisiness of communal domains.

In a recent conversation with someone, she remarked that my work was existential and therefore not for most people. I thought to myself that if ever there was a time where existentialism is inescapable surely it must be now! For me existential questions centre around authenticity, life itself as the expression of that authenticity, and expression as the necessary connection to beauty and freedom. Authenticity is not outward facing. It must be excavated from the waters in our depths. Attending to authenticity is an existential project.

As the lines of the hymn quoted above proposes, expression (of authenticity) comes from Void or the waters beyond our world of meaning and words. To attend is to inquire, to inquire is to dance, to dance is to express, and to express is to live. Life is the expression of yearning, and of the remembrance of something deeper than all our knowing.

In the archetypal story of the ten incarnations of Vishnu or the maintainer of manifest Reality, He takes the form of a Fish as His first incarnation. In this form He rescues sacred knowledge from the depths of the ocean under which it has been hidden by a “demon”. Sacredness is the intimacy with our authenticity that is revealed from within. It has nothing to do with meanings ascribed to us externally. In order to do this we must spend time with ourselves. We must, like Vishnu, become a fish and descend into the waters to retrieve knowledge. The basis of Reality is not outside of us. It is within us.

Contemplation is not a soothing and relaxing activity. In my Body Poetry program, I invite people to bring a creative or artistic work that has pierced their hearts. This work forms the point of departure for them to explore their own creativity. One of the women in the program told me that as she was considering what pierced her heart, she realised that it was an uneasy and often unbearable experience. She used the example of the work of the performance artist Maria Abramovic as an example. For those who are not familiar with confronting work of Abramovic, she tests limits and boundaries, often literally between life and death, thereby revealing truths that we avoid. This is like the knowledge that the demon hides under the waters. Truth is revealed through exertion, sacrifice, creativity, and passion.

Introversion in a creative temperament is not simply the opposite of extroversion. Creativity is the extroversion of interiority as performance. When I offer something in the world, I excavate my authenticity from the waters and exhibit it in the world. I grew up thinking of myself as an extrovert because I was a performer from a young age. It was only when I read Susan Cain’s book in my forties that I realised that one could be a speaker or a performer and still have an essentially solitudinous temperament.

I wish we spoke more about an architecture of interaction where the offerings of those who are reflective find a place. We celebrate the loud and the garrulous, outrage, charisma, or volubility. In the story of my body corporate experience, I found that I had to take a stand on certain matters. There are combative dynamics in the group, and I knew I had to dig deep to encounter these.

Amid these events, I danced my invocation. My studio is like a black box and when I dance it is only lit by lamps honouring the deities of the four directions. In the flickering lamplight, I allowed the dance to bring its teaching to me. I simply attended. The teaching was rich indeed.

An archetypal movement in dance pertains to leaping away from the sudden fanged strike of a snake. As this movement emerged, I explored its many nuances. Then the charging bull appeared. I remembered watching documentaries of rituals where young men had to restrain a bull as part of their coming-of-age ceremonies. The most adept of these young men were not those who stood in the way of the charging bull for that was sure death. Rather it was those who were most agile, who danced with the bull so closely that they and the bull were one, and thus were able to anticipate the bull’s charge and leap out of the way in a lightning move—these were the victors.

What did this have to do with my meeting? Everything. I learnt that I must dance with the dynamics of that event. Rather than charge at the charging bull, I must know when to leap out of the way, sometimes avoiding the rushing beast by millimeters. The dance is not about a firm position. It is always dynamic, in the moment and fluid. I must remain connected with my authenticity, and it will lead the way. Then I am on my own terms.

This is the first piece of writing I have done in two weeks. I feel as ecstatic as I would at the first touch of water on my lips after days of thirst. I can reflect on the interweaving of my dance invocation and my mundane life and how the first illumines the second. Writing is how I express my gratitude to the dance. In the swelling darkness of my studio, the dance feels eternal and infinite. It could unfold forever. No matter how I am when enter the studio, I always leave with a teaching. These last few days I have begun the invocation sometimes with frustration, sometimes with fear, often with grief or doubts. Each time the dance meets me exactly where I am and asks for nothing—neither my stories nor my solutions.

The darkness moves in its own dance, I simply find my place in its choreography in that moment. My Body releases the guidance. On one occasion it was a dancing oracle from my childhood. He reminded me of the ferocity of authenticity, and the Bodily abandon it asks even as it seizes me with unfamiliar beauty. These manifold emergences somehow wove together and rendered me meaningful in a context like the meeting, where, left to myself, I could not construct meaning and purpose.

In some inexplicable way, my dance found its place in that gathering. I am not going to say it was easy. Like the piercing of the arrow, it was uneasy and unbearable. But something moved in that gathering that I feel emanated from the surrender to the dance. People backed what I said and even called out combative dynamics. It felt as if the work was distributed and shared. And community, excavated from depths and not imposed by legislation, flashed now and again in lightning bolts of happenstance. That was enough.

Here I am at 12.46 am in the hours after this meeting and this is my prayer of gratitude to the dance. What changed was something within me. If I had pinned myself on what to solve, I would have relied on a linear effort-reward trajectory robbed of all the poetry of an intoxicated meandering. Somewhere in this reflection is the answer to how dance helps me in my life. It solves nothing, rather it renders me as prayer to my own sentience, unearthed from my depths and offered unconditionally to fall wherever the choreography of Nature takes it. Whether that is helpful to everyone I cannot say, but for me it is what places me at “the centre of universes and worlds”. And if that is not life, then what is!