Madeleine L'Engle Herself

by Madeleine L'engle

  Section II

  CO-CREATORS WITH GOD

  Inspiration and the Creative Process

  It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation, uses precisely the same tools and rules as the artist.

  CREATION IS GOD’S PROVINCE

  The only reason I can find for all the shouting about how God created is that it allows some people to stop thinking, to settle back into the safety of their rut, to stop thinking about what it is really all about.

  What it is really about is that creation is God’s. It is el who has made us, and not we ourselves. To argue about how God made us is to argue about non-essentials. As far as I am concerned, it doesn’t matter a whit how God created. The important thing is that creation is God’s, and that we are part of it, and being part of creation is for us to be co-creators with el in the continuing joy of new creation.

  That is a great calling, and when we argue about how God created us, we forget our vocation, and the tempter rejoices. I’m all for genuine scientific research, but when we argue about how, rather than if, or why, we miss the point. In a world where fewer and fewer people believe in God at all, where life is for so many an unimportant accident with no meaning, where we are born only to slip back into annihilation, we need to stop arguing and affirm the goodness of creation, and the power of love which holds us all.

  GOD’S ARTISTRY

  It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation, uses precisely the same tools and rules as the artist; he works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them; so that we, in turn, may hear the grass growing; see a face springing to life in love and laughter; feel another human hand or the velvet of a puppy’s ear; taste food prepared and offered in love; smell—oh, so many things: food, sewers, each other, flowers, books, new-mown grass, dirt…

  Here, in the offerings of creation, the oblations of story and song, are our glimpses of truth.

  GOD’S TIME

  Kairos. Real time. God’s time. That time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards, because kairos has nothing to do with chronological time. In kairos we are completely unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time. The saint in contemplation, lost (discovered) to self in the mind of God is in kairos. The artist at work is in kairos. The child at play, totally thrown outside himself in the game, be it building a sand castle or making a daisy chain, is in kairos. In kairos we become what we are called to be as human beings, co-creators with God, touching on the wonder of creation. This calling should not be limited to artists—or saints—but it is a fearful calling.

  TWO ASPECTS OF POWER

  In so-called “primitive” societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana. Power always has both of these aspects, as the storyteller knows. The sex drive can make love and babies, and it can lead to divorce and murder. The power lines which give us our electricity are mana when we touch a switch in the dark and the room is lit. They are taboo when a fireman on an aluminum ladder slips and his ladder touches a power line and he is electrocuted. It is this double aspect of power which the artist must be brave enough to explore. Sound can ennoble and inspire, as in the case of a Beethoven symphony. A director friend of mine used subliminal sound during the production of a murder play, and on the opening night so many people fainted that he had to cut off the sound which had such a terrifying effect even though it was not consciously heard. A painting of a nude body can glorify the wonder of incarnation or it can titillate and degrade.

  This extraordinary power, when it is in the hands of a great genius, is linked with the power which brought the galaxies into being and orchestrated the music of the spheres.

  THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

  I’m not going to define the creative impulse. I don’t think it’s definable. There are educationalists who think it can be taught like the new math and who write learned treatises on methods of teaching it. The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught.

  A FRUITFUL VACATION

  I am often asked how I came to write A Wrinkle in Time. Even with all the hindsight of which I am capable I can’t quite explain it. It was during a time of transition. We had sold the store, were leaving the safe, small world of the village, and going back to the city and the theatre. While we were on our ten-week camping trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again, we drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs Whatsit. Mrs Who. Mrs Which. I turned around to the children and said, “Hey, kids, listen to these three great names that just popped into my mind; I’ll have to write a book about them.”

  “WHAT IF?”

  The writer of science fiction—as all other fiction—draws on present knowledge and past history, and says: What if?

  The what if always springs from what is known. The writer understands that it may take the mavericks rather than the beautiful people to overcome great odds because every work of art is the discovery of a new planet, and it may well be a hostile one. How dare the water say “What if?” and “Yes, but?” and see visions which threaten the status quo and do heretical things like Bach’s putting the thumb under rather than over the other fingers on the keyboard and explore the vast, underwater bulk of man’s mind in the great, unwieldly volumes of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, and plumb the depths of human agony in Crime and Punishment, or the wild paintings of Hieronymous Bosch?

  MY BOOKS KNOW MORE THAN I DO

  The fact that Wrinkle is deeply embedded in both theology and physics had little to do with me, and this puts me in my proper place as a servant struggling (never completely succeeding) to be faithful to the work, the work which slowly and gently tries to teach me some of what it knows. Sometimes it is years after a book is published that I discover what some of it meant. For instance, when I made the villain in Wrinkle a disembodied brain, IT, that was just how the villain happened to look; I wasn’t consciously realizing that the brain, when it is disengaged from the heart, turns vicious. (Conversely, the heart, when it is disengaged from the brain, can become sentimental and untruthful.)

  It is nothing short of miraculous that I am so often given, during the composition of a story, just what I need at the very moment that I need it. Why did I blunder into the discovery of physics just as I was ready to write Wrinkle? Why did the names Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which come as we were driving along in the station wagon with our children?

  GIFTS FROM THE IMAGINATION

  Scientists and artists both know that visions and inspiration come when least expected. Often we will worry over a problem, brooding fruitlessly, and when we have let it go, suddenly the answer will be there, just when we have stopped looking for it. Sometimes when I am walking my dog at the end of the day, and my mind and body are tired, I will simply walk without thinking, letting my mind roam free. And then I am often given unexpected and beautiful gifts. And sometimes I am given horrors.

  As a storyteller I have been trained to think of every possibility that can happen to my characters, and this training seeps off the page into what is happening in my own life, and the lives of my family and friends. And so, as I can imagine all the good things, so can I imagine the terrible. And, if I am open to the good things, I am also, as a consequence, open to the bad.

  DEATH AND REBIRTH

  With each book you write you die, and you’re born again. That’s why I hate to be in between books. I feel unborn. I feel embryonic. All of our lives are a series of deaths and births.

  As you die to these things, you don
’t lose them. With each new birth, you have as part of you all of the rest of you. That’s the amazing thing. As I die to my books, I don’t lose them. With each new book I write, I have as part of me what I have learned in the books that go before. So there is this constant birthing process.

  The great act of creativity is always followed by a sadness. Some women after childbirth suffer badly from postpartum depression because each birthing is followed by a preparation, a period of preparation for rebirth.

  THE ACT OF CREATING

  We will not have the courage…to keep our child’s creativity, unless we are willing to be truly “grownup.” Creativity opens us to revelation, and when our high creativity is lowered to two percent, so is our capacity to see angels, to walk on water, to talk with unicorns. In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind. Something almost always happens to startle us during the act of creating, but not unless we let go our adult intellectual control and become as open as little children. This means not to set aside or discard the intellect but to understand that it is not to become a dictator, for when it does we are closed off from revelation.

  CREATIVITY SETS US FREE

  In the creative act we can experience the same freedom we know in dreams. This happens as I write a story. I am bound by neither time nor space. I know those distant galaxies to which Meg Murry went with Charles Wallace and Calvin. I live in seventeenth-century Portugal with Mariana Alcoforado. But this freedom comes only when, as in a dream, I do not feel that I have to dictate and control what happens. I dream, sometimes, that I am in a beautiful white city I have never seen in “real” life, but I believe in it. I also believe in the planet Uriel, with its beautiful flying creatures, and also in that other planet where are found the unicorn hatching-grounds.

  When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

  UNDERSTANDING AS A CHILD

  In the act of creation our logical, prove-it-to-me minds relax; we begin to understand anew all that we understood as children, when we saw wee folk under the leaves or walked down the stairs without touching. But this understanding is—or should be—greater than the child’s because we understand in the light of all that we have learned and experienced in growing up.

  George Eliot says, “If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.”

  Despite this wadding, the artist in the moment of creation does hear the tiny beating of the squirrel heart and does indeed die to self on the other side of silence, where he retains the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns. The great artists never lose this quality which the world would limit to children.

  THE UNION OF MIND AND HEART

  In prayer and in the creative process, the mind and the heart, the intellect and the intuition, the conscious and the subconscious stop fighting each other as they so often do and collaborate. As two people do who know each other, who love each other. And if the love of two people is a gift, a totally unmerited gift, so is the union of mind and heart. When we try to control our lives totally with the self we think we know, self-awareness is inhibited.

  THE REQUIREMENT OF FAITH

  In a lecture at Wheaton I quoted the Anglican theologian, H. A. Williams, “The opposite of sin can only be faith, and never virtue.”

  The creative process has a lot to do with faith and nothing to do with virtue, which may explain why so many artists are far from virtuous; are, indeed, great sinners. And yet, at the moment of creation, they must have complete faith, faith in their vision, faith in their work

  Again, the degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.

  A ten-year-old boy asked me of A Wrinkle in Time, “Do you believe all that?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Of course I do.”

  The artist, like the child, is a good believer. The depth and strength of the belief is reflected in the work; if the artist does not believe, then no one else will; no amount of technique will make the responder see truth in something the artist knows to be phony.

  THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE

  The moment of inspiration does not come to someone who lolls around expecting the gift to be free. It is no giveaway. It is the pearl for which we have to pay a great price, the price of intense loneliness, the price of that vulnerability which often allows us to be hurt; the less readily understandable price of hurting those we love, even though in less radical ways than Gauguin’s. And I am not sure it’s a choice. If we’re given a gift—and the size of the gift, great or small, is irrelevant—then most of us must serve it, like it or not. I say most of us because I have seen people of great talent who have done nothing with it and who mutter about getting down to work “when there’s time.”

  FROM CHAOS TO PATTERN

  It is not the subject that makes art religious or sacrilegious, but the impulse behind it. You sometimes get an artist who is spoken through despite his own professed atheism, because it’s the creative impulse to look at the seeming chaos of the universe and then to express this chaos in terms of pattern and of order and of love and—perhaps most important of all—of joy.

  WALKING IN THE LIGHT

  We are to be children of the light, and we are meant to walk in the light, and we have been groping along in the darkness. The creative act helps us to emerge into the light, that awful light which the disciples saw on the Mount of Transfiguration, and which the Hebrew children saw on the face of Moses when he had been talking with God on Mount Sinai.

  “DIVINE MADNESS”

  One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking. The creator, and the mystic, have tended more towards Platonism than Aristotelianism, and tend to be willing to accept Plato’s “divine madness,” with its four aspects of prophecy, healing, artistic creativity, and love.

  These divine madnesses have been nearly lost in this century, and so we’ve lived almost entirely in the pragmatic, Cartesian world. I wonder if Descartes knew what he was doing when he wrote his famous I think, therefore I am, and subsequently, if not consequently, we began even more than before to equate ourselves with our conscious minds. Cogito, ergo sum nudges us on to depend solely on intellectual control, and if we insist on intellectual control we have to let go our archaic understanding and our high creativity, because keeping them means going along with all kinds of things we can’t control.

  CREATIVITY IS DISCOVERY

  Creativity is an act of discovering. The very small child, the baby, is still unselfconscious enough to take joy in discovering himself: he discovers his fingers; he gives them his complete, unselfconscious concentration. Self-conscious adults have done great damage by their misunderstanding—for instance, their attitude towards the child discovering his genitals. Unless the child has been taught corruption incredibly early, this is an unselfconscious discovery of himself, a humble joy of discovery, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to self-conscious autoeroticism. We, as adults, often fall into perversity in other areas of discovery: i.e., some modern (and not so modern) art in all forms, where the artist is concentrating more on himself than on his painting or music or story. I would venture a guess that an artist concentrating wholly unselfconsciously, wholly thrown into his work, is incapable of producing pornography. All perversion is self-gratification. In true love, the lover’s p
leasure comes in giving himself wholly to the loved one. When we try to give ourselves to ourselves, that is not only perversion, it is ultimately suicide.

  TAKE BREAKS

  We need to do things which are going to reawaken our creativity. On our vacations I frequently spend a lot of time writing. But on a cruise, for example, I also spend time up on deck—particularly at night when all the lights are out except the one running light and I can lie on the upper deck and there’s nothing there but the stars. And on a freighter they show movies in the dining room, and I usually go to them whether they’re lousy or not, just to get a break, to get away from work.

  THE ART OF LISTENING

  I think we begin to tune into our creative subconscious by reading and by reading attentively, by listening to what we read and by listening to other people. Very often when talking to other people we will catch ourselves thinking about what we’re going to say next instead of really listening. It’s something I don’t think any of us is immune from. But then you have to try to shut yourself out and hear what is underneath, what the person is saying—which is often far more important than what is actually said.