The strange pull of what you love

What draws me? There is my truth.

July, 2021

LaMonica Curator began her piece Breaking Away a few weeks ago by talking about the necessity of stepping outside familiar norms:

This Sunday’s Reflection considers the art of breaking away—the moment an artist chooses to step outside the familiar and follow their own path. Every era has its pioneers, those who redefine the game or refuse to play it at all. But not all art is about revolution. Sometimes, it’s about the quiet act of making, of shaping something meaningful for yourself.

Following your own path seems like the obvious thing to do, if you want to make art. But making something meaningful for yourself is not easy. A lot of people have a voracious inner critic; they’re products of familial and cultural conditioning, different forms of education. Most have unmet emotional needs. But many would say that if you want your art to have a chance of being a contribution to the wider world, you have to be making it only for yourself. How does this work?

Linda Caroll, in her recent Substack article about William Zinsser’s advice to writers, discusses the subtlety of not writing for your audience at the same time as keeping your audience in mind:

Make no mistake, he didn’t think writers should write for anyone else:

“You write for the process of finding a true story. But you have to respect the reader”

Respecting the reader is not the same as writing for the reader. ….every tiny thing that won’t leave you alone holds a larger truth that readers will recognise in their own lives.

She writes about this larger, recognisable truth as if it’s straightforward, but in my experience it’s anything but. There’s something subtle, perhaps even magical, about the way that the particular can open out and become universal, of value to others. Most of the time you probably can’t see for yourself whether or not you’re managing to achieve this. A teacher of mine used to talk about the importance of sticking only to your own experience; in academic writing, a colleague once pointed out problems with use of ‘we’, when used to refer to a general notion of culture or behaviour. It’s not easy to say how it’s done, but it does seem to be that only by giving form to my own particular do I have any chance of connecting with something universal that might resonate with others.

Commission, 2017

LaMonica Curator used the word ‘singularity’ to talk about outstanding individuals who are seen to have changed the course of art history:

Whether you carve a new way forward or build upon what’s come before, it’s clarity of intention that defines each artist. Art has historically been an act of defiance. Every great movement in history emerged because a singular group—or a singular artist—stood up and declared, "I no longer want to play this game." Some followed their instincts toward their singularity, often at great personal cost, unrecognized and unrewarded in their lifetimes.

I’d like to use the word ‘singularity’ slightly differently here. Rather than referring to an exceptional individual, I’d like to use it as a way of thinking about each human as distinct, as a one-of-a-kind emergence from their own unique set of conditions and contexts; even though, as an open, dynamic system, they are at the same time also made up of much larger systems of language, culture and biology. The person as an emergent singularity is not the context-free, individualist conception of cognitive psychology in the 1950s. As a dynamic system, a human being is constantly interacting with multiple other systems and being produced by these systems, at the same time as having evolved from specific initial conditions, being webbed into their own particular network of systems, and having a unique trajectory through time.

As embedded, biological wholes, individual humans are self-organising. Despite the reality of all the open flows continually passing through them, they’re somehow nonetheless constantly affirming and remaking a sense of their own boundary, their own sense of themselves as a discrete entity, both at an unconscious/biological level, and at the level of consciousness (conflict between these two levels being a subject for another time…).

Understanding singularity in this way can be helpful in relation to the idea of making or writing from your own idiosyncratic position. Though I know that my art will later be shared with an audience, understanding at the time of making it that I am, in a neutral, unspecial way, the only person who can see things quite as I do, and express them in the way that I do, helps me to understand that my perspective has validity.

Thinking of yourself as a unique emergence irrevocably webbed into a much greater whole is not a very prevalent idea in European and North American cultures. Carl Jung, in ‘Psychology and the East’, talked about problems he saw arising when the Western ego came into contact with Eastern philosophical ideas such as Atman/Brahman. Atman is the individual, human soul, conceived of as a tiny speck in the vast universal whole that is Brahman. He suggested that a Hindu brought up with these ideas would understand themselves to be an individual spark within the huge energy of the cosmos, whereas when the Western ego came into contact with this idea, it was more likely to see itself expanding to fill the universe, which is quite a different thing.

It helps me to connect to my own source when I know myself to be a fluid singularity. The fluidity is important, because it guards me against trying to fix myself to a style, create a coherent body of work, or try to become known for a specific way of doing things. I’m a one-off, not quite the same as any other human, with my own perspective to contribute to the wider world. But in order to use this understanding properly I have to resist the cultural grooming of my ego; ideas such as giftedness, specialness, brilliance, individual talent, and, of course, constant comparison.

July, 2016

I’m an idiosyncrasy. My idiosyncratic nature is inherently rough, imperfect and only partly under my control. It isn’t interested in my confused ego-imperatives, or in what anyone else is doing. I have enough on my plate just trying to work out what it’s truly drawn to:

It is not your business to determine how good [your work] is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. [my italics]

Martha Graham¹

Teasing apart my urges is a job in itself. There are ego-impulses, survival-impulses, unmet needs-impulses; fantasies of grandeur, obsessive determination, existential pressures and more. But underneath all of this, if I think of myself as a biological system, things become a little easier.

I keep coming back to one of the simplest of biological systems, the slime mould². There are different types of slime mould, but the basic idea is that they are single-celled organisms with no brain. However, when food supplies become scarce, the single-celled organisms join together and become a single body, which is then able to detect and move towards food sources. This conglomerate organism has no central brain, but it’s nonetheless able to move away from scarcity in the direction of nourishment; like a flock of birds or a bee-hive, which are also both made up of individual organisms, but are somehow also able to function as a single whole, despite having no central brain or director.

As biological systems, below the level of consciousness, humans also function in this way. Biologically a human is a conglomerate of cells and systems that are focussed on trying to keep the whole alive in the most efficient way possible. My conglomerate knows what’s going to make me flourish, and it knows what’s slowly eroding me. It sent messages through my flesh for decades that tried to draw my attention to the fact that working long hours, having to front up to groups of demanding students, constantly working with my mind, were not the direction of my flourishing. But it’s complicated, because as the deep impulse towards flourishing tried to whisper to me of space, art and music, a louder survival impulse shouted over it that all of this working for a living had to be done otherwise I would die of starvation.

In the end the wisdom towards flourishing won, having worked out that it could make me stop listening to the fear of starvation by making me too tired to continue. And then, after letting me rest for a while, it sent me the cabbage to show me the way back to art.

Tracking the urges that motivate me is now more subtle. I’ve understood the need for space, art and music. My task now is to try to pick up subtle hints about what is truly speaking to me, at a level below conscious intention and desire.

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange power of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.

Rumi

What I’m drawn towards at this deep, almost imperceptible level, is my bedrock, my personal truth.

There will never be another embodied consciousness on this earth who sees and feels and makes sense and gives rise to creative products or ideas exactly in the way that I do. This doesn’t mean that I’m special. Everyone is special, in this sense; everyone is a spark of cosmic energy, unique unto themselves. It helps me to see my singularity in perspective when I understand that every human is similarly singular, and to see all of us in relation to a much greater whole. There’s no need to stand out, or be rewarded with recognition. There’s enough to do just trying to dig down in search of the true ‘urges that motivate me’, and working out how to give voice to what I find.

October 2016

1. Originally a conversation between Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille, this is the full quote as usually presented:

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Maria Popova gives a bit more information about the conversation here .

Personally I would take issue with the end of the last sentence about ‘being more alive that the others’, but apparently this is what she said.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold