1 August 2013
Thursday
The other day I received a response from someone
who thought they were being helpful. I appreciate the effort, the
response missed me entirely.
This is understandable. Nearly our whole culture
is focused entirely too much on the linearity of the left side of the
brain. It seems to come naturally by way of our exposure to
education, maturation, socialization and maybe a few too many other
forms of -tions.
Consider this song by Supertramp;
Songwriters:
R Davies, R Hodgson
When
I was young
It
seemed that life was so wonderful
A
miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And
all the birds in the trees
Well
they'd be singing so happily
Joyfully,
playfully watching me
But
then they send me away
To
teach me how to be sensible
Logical,
responsible, practical
And
then they showed me a world
Where
I could be so dependable
Clinical,
intellectual, cynical
There
are times when all the world's asleep
The
questions run too deep for such a simple man
Won't
you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I
know it sounds absurd but please tell me who I am
I say, "Now
what would you say for they calling you a radical
Liberal,
fanatical, criminal?
"
Won't
you sign up your name?
We'd
like to feel you're
Acceptable,
respectable, presentable, a vegetable
Oh,
ch-ch-check it out yeah
At
night when all the world's asleep
The
questions run so deep for such a simple man
Won't
you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I
know it sounds absurd but please tell me who I am
Who
I am, who I am, who I am
'Coz
I'm feeling so illogica
l
D-d-digital
Oh,
oh, oh, oh
Unbelievable
B-b-bloody
marvelous
This
is not much of a foreign concept, most children are natively right
brain oriented at birth, the linear, logical aspects usually must be
learned. This what schools tend to focus on. As the song portends, as
we become more indoctrinated in the ways of culture through the
educational process we become more predictable, trustable, lesslikely
to bear watching.
Notice
in the song the words names used to encourage the individual to
maintain to the new expected norm,
radical
Liberal, fanatical, criminal. Names
meant to send shivers up the spine. No one wants to be one of those.
For
some reason I never lost touch with that right brained sense of me as
a child. Throughout grade school I was never a star pupil, I always
found the material to be boring, the teacher to be stodgy and many of
my peers in the classroom to be frankly, suck ups, who could be
pedantic trying to curry the teacher's favor in return for a good
grade.some of whom had gone over to the other side, bragging how
their parents gave them a dollar for every A received in school.
There was something about those “successful” ones, nobody wanted
to be like them.
So
the world outside the window always intrigued me. I was lucky, the
school was sited in a woods. When the clock dragged its second sweep
hand too slowly round the circumference, making me wonder if the
gears weren't solidifying in the works, there was always a squirrel
out side darting hither and yon as if unable to make up its mind,
occasionally shaking its tail as if to inquire when was I coming out
side.it was growing impatient to play. Mrs. Newton
Miller
Euwell merged into one mindless blob of sameness, all bent on
following their mandate to teach us something or we were to sustain
their wrath if we didn't. I never understood the correlation between
corporeal punishment , or the threat of corporeal punishment and
learning. Mostly it seemed like bullying to me.
We
were always told to stand up for ourselves on the playground. But
somehow doing so with the teacher was forbidden, and those teachers
knew it. One of the best teachers I had was Mrs. Sakamoto from the
island of Oahu, the state of Hawaii. It was sixth grade, school had
been moved to a new building sited in a treeless, open field. There
were no squirrels for entertainment outside the window. That woman
was engaging. We learned about Hawaii, the iron grip of education
relaxed. In one year my reading level was beyond the grade reading
book, so those few of us were given a pass to the library for reading
hour, best thing that could ever be done for me. My measured reading
level went beyond the twelfth grade. In math we outstripped the sixth
grade math book so the math coordinator for the school district came
in twice a week to instruct us in base two, base seven, hexadecimal,
basic geometry, basic trigonometry, and whatever else we could glom
onto.
Learning
was fun, for the most part suffering the teachers was abysmal.
With
that I leave you with an excerpt from my dissertation, written a few
years ago, to demonstrate how these ideas stayed with me down through
the years.
Autobiographical
Connections
I
have been aware that when I am in the creative form that there seems
to be so much more of what I experience as myself than at other
times. This is not to say that my physical dimensions change, rather
that the fullness of my being, the essence of who I am, assumes
larger dimensions. This larger sense of myself is palpable. There is
a sense of watching a series of events unfold in a way that is just
perfect. There is no thought of racing ahead to a preconceived
expectation; there is a sense of knowing that everything is going to
find its rightful conclusion.
I
know that, when I set about to make photographs and pay attention to
the image, I see in my mind that the adjusting of the variables that
make photography work just seems to flow with ease. The speed of the
film, its inherent characteristics at receiving an image, the factors
that shutter speed and aperture influence the image are all familiar
and do not get in the way or need to be pondered.
Some
people view the creative process as difficult or strange. Often the
methods the creative person uses to access the creative moment are
very different from the behaviors that people most often use in the
company of one another. Often the results are so different from what
is expected that the product appears bizarre or out of the ordinary.
The creative process is often very far from the usual activities of
daily life that, in comparison with the mundane routine, it may
appear to be quite strange. There are two forms of difficulty that
arise related to being creative. One is to voluntarily step away from
the commonly accepted behaviors that everyday life in a social system
demands of its participants. This can be difficult as doing so one
separates one’s self from affiliation with the group. This is often
necessary as the group mindset is not very conducive to creative
thought and expression. The second difficulty is that, if/when one
chooses to step aside from that acculturated acceptable way of doing
things, there are some internal awareness changes that have to happen
for the creative process to become available.
Even
though I have an idea as to the mechanics of what is going on with
the inhibition that is being felt internally and from others, I am
even more curious as to the nature of this creative urge. What is it?
Why is the giving of one’s self over to the creative process so
demanding? What is it about the creative process that is so
appealing? There are so many questions. This study focuses on
experiencing the movement of creativity from the point of view of
persons reporting their internal awareness of being in the creative
process.
As
I have observed this situation over the years, I have noticed that
much research is from the perspective of viewing creativity as an
object, separate from the person. Yet from my experience creativity
is an act, a verb, it is not a noun. Creativity is a way of being, a
way of conducting oneself within the constantly unfolding present
moment. For that reason I would like to study the experience of
creatively being.
There
is a quote from Franz Kafka in The Great Wall of China. It states:
You
do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and
listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite
still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be
unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
(Kafka, 1968, p. 980)
I
find that as a child I was able to accomplish this way of being with
very little effort on my part. It seemed as if this was a natural way
of existing in the world and with the world. With age and the
expectations of school, I learned to think my way through my daily
existence. I found that most people and certainly my teachers
expected me to figure, name things, and make sense of, in a linear
manner, everything with which I came into contact. While this may be
acceptable for schooling, it precluded my being able to participate
creatively in my engaging of the world. Often I would sit in a
classroom, bored silly with the activities going on, yearning for an
opportunity to be with the world and to participate with it, rather
than learning how to dominate it and manipulate it.
I
can remember those wonderful, glorious moments when as a child I was
completely lost in some aspect of what I was doing. In these moments
my individual sense of being a persona had drained away, there were
no linear thoughts of causation, no naming of things and finding a
dualistic set of understandings. I would become so involved in a
project that I was turning my attention to, as to lose track of time,
physicality, and my position in respect to other people.
I
have often identified myself as being an art form. An art form can be
both a verb and a noun. As a verb an art form is always evolving. It
is never finished, but continually responding to its environment,
usually at the hands of the artist. An art form can be static as
well, stopped in a moment of time and for a brief moment to become a
noun. The more dynamic, verb way of being an art form is constantly
evolving, changing, shifting, taking on different dimensions and
qualities as the artist continues to interact with the self. I often
see myself as the more dynamic version, a series of changes that grow
and develop out of what was previously present before.
What
draws my attention is that the usual, standard way of knowing myself,
the way that most of us do on a daily basis completely fades away
during my experiences with the creative process. Not only are the
usual markers not important, but the lack of need for them has a
liberating feeling to it. There is no fear that I have lost my
boundaries, or that I might disappear without the old ways of knowing
myself. The sense of time falls away and I am timeless in a timeless
world. Things move and evolve as each moment unfolds out of itself.
Not that there are a discreet set of moments strung together like
popcorn on a string, but that the moment exists right now and it is
constantly changing, in a state of flux, like watching the image
through a kaleidoscope. I am left with an awareness that is fixed on
that which has me enthralled, whether it is visual, aural, or
tactilely oriented.
I
have found that when I participate with the world in a creative way,
that I feel a sense of gratitude that works in both directions. I
feel gratitude for the world and that I am in it. This has a sense of
separation to it in that I am grateful over here for something over
there. I also sense that I am grateful for the world that I see in
the same way that I can look at a part of my body and be grateful for
that as a part of myself. In that way I am being an essential part of
the world when I appreciate it, I am that functioning part that
notices and appreciates the whole as itself.
Many
people have studied creativity as a thing, from the point of view of
construing it as a noun. Some have even studied the attributes of
those who are highly creative. I have not yet been able to find any
studies of what the experience is from a subjective perspective of
being within that act of expressing creativity as it moves through
us. I want to know what the sense of creativity is as a verb being
experienced. I have noticed this action moving through me and taking
over my experience in those moments that I have experienced the
creative impulse. I am interested in finding out if the experience I
know is similar to that of others and if so in what manner?
There
is a human awareness to being creative. These experiences, which I
open up to allow, become real in both a felt sense and in the
physical space around me. I am not so interested in the remains of
that creative pulse left behind as in paintings, poems or even less
lasting acts as performance art. I want to know what the experience
is of being in that creative moment as it unfolds.
In
summary, the term experience can be used both as a noun and a
transitive verb. This study predominantly depends on the
action-oriented version of the word. In seeking to understand what
the individual undergoes and gains from being aware of participating
in a creative event, the active understanding of the word experience
is necessarily at the root of the study. Therefore, the use of the
word experience is the transitive verb definition, which is process
oriented, describes a personal knowledge, utilizes feeling and
sensation, and examines the effect on the individual.
•_•_•_•_•
I
also found that most teachers do not like creative individuals in
their classrooms as they are considered too disruptive. These
teachers put a heavier premium on maintaining control over the
students than allowing them to go about learning in their own best way. In order to be creative the
individual needs to have some familiarity with right brain
functioning. Too much analysis and linearity is an anathama to
creativity, it can augment the creative bloom but it can easily
smoother it.
Back
to my respondent the other day: of course I cannot expect everything
to go as I would like, but most of the other residents here have
similar concerns. Every meal I eat I have to remind myself that the
food service contract was recently awarded to a lower bidder than the
last holder of the contract. Cheaply as possible stands out in big
terms every day. Those who forgot how wonderful life could be or who
have not experienced it in a while might be forgiven. I never signed
on for such treatment. I didn't buy into this form of minimal
existance, I just got ill with a disabling disease. I have all of my
mental acuity's I am not so easily lead as many others whom I have
seen here. Just because one can pulla fast one on some people doesn't
mean that al of us are so compliant. I know what good food is, I used
to buy and cook it. I am only not able to stand and walk, which
includes a lot of activities of daily living. So I askwhat about that
means I have to live the rest of my life at the lowest common
denominator? Is this the way we collectively want to treat everyone
who can no longer take care of themselves? I am here by way of the
National Health care policy, which insists that I own nothing or hold
any financial instruments valued at more than $2000. Everything I
have ever worked for has been taken from me. Is this how we as a
people look after those who no fault of their own require help.
Through
this all I see those who learned the lessons of their schooling
verywell, reduce everything to dollars and cents before evaluating
anything. Have no feelings, do not allowthat unruly part of your
humanity muck up your decisions. The almighty dollar must be kept
sacrosanct. That critical, reasonable , cynical world is at stake.
Everything could come crashing down. It is so sad when one considers
some of the studies that havefound that there is enough food to go
around, the world over, the only thing that keeps the present world
in play is scarcity, most of it man made (like say DeBeers and
diamonds in South Africa, look into the recent diamond strike in the
Canadian Northwest by a recent graduate with a geology degree) Those
that have inhibit the gain of others using whatever forms available,
we all pay the price, some more than others. The linear thinkers are
running the world, and not to well either. The logical argument
seduces with the linear simplicity of logic, which inhibits nature,
excludes any right brained feeling, or “fuzzy”thinking. Come live
with me for a few weeks under these conditions, I wouldn't be
surprised if a change of thinking occurs. That is why I titled this
blog “From Behind These Eyes”, to report the real experience of
what it is like living under these conditions. By age accident or
illness all of us end up here eventually. Once someone ends up here
all of your abilities to effect a change have left. Now is the time
for doing before its too late for you too.
John
