I heard of an amusing experiment when LSD was first around. Four bridge players were given light doses of LSD, with the understanding that they would then play bridge. When the cards had been dealt and picked up, all they did was look at them. There was no playing of the game. It was esthetic arrest, an example of sacred space. The cards were of no use except for esthetic rapture. The object, formerly in certain relevant situations in the life of secular enjoyment, suddenly becomes a thing-in-itself, a final thing.
In action, it makes a difference whether all you are trying to do is to act or whether you are trying to act competently. It helps a great deal to know what the hell you’re doing. What are you going to do well? Are you going to be a painter, a Picasso? Is this where your life achievement is? That is a real sacrifice of life.
Whatever choice you make, there is a period of learning and analyzing, when you are not in action, the body is not in performance. Anyone who has taught somebody a skill has seen this stage, where the student is analyzing and trying to do it, but really not in it. Then, finally, the person is able to give expression to what he or she is intending to express.
My first and strongest experience of this was once when Jean came to Esalen with me and was going to give classes in dance. She got this bunch of people who were not interested in technique, but wanted to dance. What they called creative work was going out, opening their arms, and breathing at the ocean. It was not worth being with them even to see what was going on.
There is nothing esthetic about a bunch of ballet people doing their bar exercises. Then they move into dance and are still thinking about the rules, and their work is contrived. But then, finally, the rules melt and natural spontaneity takes over again. There is an old standard saying about the arts: “You need to learn all the rules, and then forget them.” That is to say, let them melt back into pure action.
When young people who’ve not had the schooling I’ve had decide they’re going in for writing, editing, or something like that, I’ve noticed they don’t really have the full equipment. Working on my books, I’ve hired intelligent young people to help me with the editorial aspects, only to discover they can’t read German, they can’t read French., they don’t know this, they don’t know that. It makes me realize what all those years of schooling gave me. The fantastic amount of work that’s all under the water. One sees only the tip of the iceberg.
In writing a book, you are moving along on the wave of your inspiration and intuition, and then you come to a difficult passage, an area you have to cover in order to get from here to there, and your momentum stops. That’s when you have to bring in the rules.
Also, in athletics, after you practice and practice, there is a lot you can then do spontaneously. But at certain points, you have to act according to rules for moving the body that are not yet spontaneous to you. I think of pole vaulting or the high hurdles: the time that has to be spent just on the technical posture. Or playing golf: how are you going to hold that club? There is no spontaneity when you are thinking all these things. When that is all absorbed, then you have a stronger propulsion than you had before you were forced to break it all up.
I don’t think it is proper at all to take the position that C. P. Snow has: namely, that the science—the knowledge, the mathematical side of life—runs in an opposite direction to the life of spontaneous humanistic action. They supplement each other. In literature, for instance, writing sonnets: it takes a lot of practice to make that kind of structure become something that just pours out, but when it does pour out, it is possible to say things that cannot be said without the sonnet form. Form and expression are very close together.
If you are going to act on the basis of what you know, you cannot just hold onto your knowledge. You have to translate it into a movement. This is the whole thing in the arts. The student studies, studies, studies—learning the techniques, the rules, what it is he must strive for—and when he gets used to doing all of that, then he can move.
The creative act is
not hanging on, but yielding
to new creative movement.
Think, for instance, of someone studying the piano. There is nothing worse than having somebody in the neighborhood studying the piano, practicing their exercises. There’s nothing at all beautiful about them. Their function is to give you facility. Then presently there comes a point when you have the facility, it happens automatically, and you do not have to think, “do… re…me…fa….” Although analysis facilitates competent action, your spontaneity of action is inhibited when you are constantly thinking of the rules. This is true for everything. The one who attempts to be an artist and has not learned the craft is never going to be an artist.
If you find you are trying,
go back to school.
You’re not ready yet.
There is a big difference between art as therapy, where the person is trying to become human, and art as art, where the art carries the person past humanity into new spheres. The difference is that, in therapy, the technique and the art object are of no importance, since all you are trying to do is turn a person who’s off the track into someone who is on the track. The therapeutic operation in the art is to bring the person back to his own self, to turn him into a harmonized human being again. But art comes from harmonized human beings—“Art is a harmony parallel to nature.” And if the person is not parallel to nature yet, then art is just a therapy to bring him or her to that point. Therapeutic art is trying to “catch up,” you might say. It is no art for anybody but the person who’s doing it.
* * *
Highly stylized dance, like ballet and Indian dance, is a wonderful example of this thing we are talking about: what has to be learned to manipulate the body, all those exercises, eliminates dance fora while. In Hindu dance, the whole body is taken apart: there are certain things the eyes do, certain things the hands do, and so on. Then it is put back together again, and what you get is a transformation of nature in art. It is nothing to look at until you see a dancer who really can do it, and then, my god, another nature comes in on another plane.
The dance
is the highest symbol
of life itself.
In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying, dancing into the air. His very gestures are of enchantment.… He feels himself to be a god, going about in ecstasy, exalted, like the gods beheld in his dreams.…He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art. In a paroxysm of intoxication the creative power of all nature has come to light in him as the highest rapture of the one that is All. Nature, with its true voice undissembled cries out to us: “Be as I am! I, the primordial ever-creating mother amidst the ceaseless flux of appearances, ever impelling into existence, eternally finding in these transformations satisfaction.”—Nietzsche142
Art is the set of wings
to carry you out of
your own entanglement.
Spengler makes an interesting distinction between what he calls “art as ornament” and “art as imitation.” The prime example of art as ornament is architecture, where a structure is timeless once it is achieved: there it sits. The opposite, art as imitation, would be the dance: if you do not see a particular performance, you’ll never see that dance again. It is something of a life moment. It’s an idea that has meant a lot to me in realizing the different problems of various artists. One of the sad things about a dancer’s career is that such great moments are of an essence, and anybody who was not there missed it. For instance, what about Pavlova? If you didn’t see that particular performance, it’s gone.
I have lived close to the dance world ever since my marriage to Jean. She had the idea of dance being a part of her life, so that when dance in the high style was no longer possible, she was able to handle it: always her life, not her art, was the number one thing. Jean has had an elegant career, and she has had a husband who was willing to see it happen. She was taken into M
artha Graham’s group just when we were married, and that was a marvelous group of wonderful dancers: Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Jane Dudley, Jean. Believe me, they were all first-rate dancers.
The big shift that the dancer has to make in later years is that the dance is no longer to be thought of as something in the way of a performance or an exhibition, but rather, like a bird singing, just for itself, and only to the distance the body feels it would be lovely to go. Out of that will come a life, because you are in the center of action of your psyche’s need and joy, and that will radiate into the rest of what you are doing. The whole world will join the dance.
All we really want to do is dance.
Sacred Dance is for the gods, not for an audience. This is one of the things that comes up when you try to put folk dance on the stage. It’s for the joy of the people doing the dance, and it just does not work any other way. The fact that dance was cut out of our religions way back in the late Middle Ages has turned dance into a purely secular thing.
I’m working on the posthumous papers of a young man who went to India to study dance. He was one of Jean’s students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and he became so fascinated with Indian dance that he went to India. He was a young Jew, who had been studying to be a rabbi, and his family was in great distress when he went over there, not only to dance, but to study the dance of Śiva, an alien god. Being a religiously oriented person, he was fascinated by the religious implications of the dance: the god is the dancer, and you have to become the god to worship the god, to find that god in yourself. What he recognized was the total difference in implication between dancing for an audience and dancing for the god. When you are alone and in your own place, you are dancing for the god and identifying with it. This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the one you are capable of becoming.
The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because art really is a worship.
* * *
There are two approaches to choosing a profession. One is to study the statistics on the number of jobs that are going to be available in this or that cate-gory in the next ten years and base your life on that. That’s following the rim of the wheel. The other, is to ask yourself, “What do I want to do?” If you do that, then you are up against your decision. But if you say, “I am going to do what I want to do,” and if you stay with it, then something will happen. You may not have a job, but you will have a life, and it will be interesting.
In the wheel of fortune,
wisdom points to the center.
Youth points to the rim.
I have known dozens of artists, and most of them, unless they become commercial artists, live without knowing where their life is going or how it is going to be. You should see what kids in dance go through, and there are no jobs. If you really want to know what it is like in a profession where there are no jobs, go to an actors’ school. It is disheartening to see those young people come in full-of-beans and, boy, do they get it.
The normal situation is that, perhaps for years, you work away at your art, your life vocation, your life-fulfilling field of action, and there’s no money in it. You have to live though, so you get a job, which may be a low-degree activity relative to what you are interested in. You could, for instance, teach people the art you are operating in yourself. So, let’s say you have a teaching job, and you also have sacred space and time to perform your own work. Your art is what I would call your work. Your employment is your job.
Then, you are doing so well in your job that your employer wants to move you into a higher position. You’ll have to give more to the job than before, and you will receive a higher salary, but your new commit-ments will cut down on your free time. My advice is: don’t accept the promotion. Don’t accept anything that piles more on you than what you must do to earn your base income, because you are developing, not in your job, but in your artistic work. You can see on campuses all the time what happens with promotions: you move up, up, up, until you are in administration, and it uses up everything you’ve got. The artist must build a structure, not in the way of being of service to society, but in the way of discovering the dynamism of the interior.
To do that, to keep up with your responsibilities and your fitness and still nurture your creative aspect, you must put a hermetically sealed retort, so that there is no intrusion, around a certain number of hours each day—however many you can honestly afford—and that time must be inviolate. You can allow yourself a few more hours than you think you deserve, but you must make certain you have enough energy and time left over to attend to whatever you have to take care of.
It’s like doing your exercises: you set aside a time when you’re going to exercise, and that is a holy time. With your art, you should do the same: give a certain number of hours a day to your art, and make it consis-tent. Then, whether you’re writing or not, sit there for those hours: it’s a meditation on communication and expression, the two factors in the art work. What will happen, ideally, is that gradually—and it might not be this week or next or even this year—as your given responsibilities drop off, there will be an expansion of the time available to you for the practice of your art. The point I’m making is that your work—that is, your art—and your job must not contaminate each other.
* * *
The creative adventure is always reckless. That goes even for the simple thing I do in writing a book. Friedrich Schiller, a German poet in Goethe’s time, wrote an interesting letter to a young writer who had writer’s block—that’s refusal of the call in a writer. Schiller said in the letter, “Your problem is that you bring in the critical factor before the lyric factor has had a chance to express itself.” In poetry, for example, we spend our youth studying Shakespeare and Milton, and then, when we start to write our own pitiful little poem, we think, “Oh, my god.”
When writing,
don’t criticize the words coming out.
Just let them come.
Let go of the critical factor:
Will I make money? Am I wasting time?
My writing is of a very different kind from anything I have heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I’m writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can’t write unless that happens. It is like putting it into some kind of meat grinder that grinds it into a new thing and yet does not do violence to the material. It’s very exciting when it comes together that way.
I don’t write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works. Usually, with mythology, you are almost cheating, because it is all in shape anyhow. All the elementary ideas are there. You only have to recognize them, and the work cooks. It’s the damnedest thing: you are going along, and suddenly you find you have said things you did not know you were saying, because it is all right there.
When I’m writing, I think of the whole academic world: I know how they think about this material, and it is not the same way that I think about it. I just have to say, “Let the guillotine come down. You are still going to have this message.” I always feel as if I am going through the Clashing Rocks, and they are just about to close, but I manage to get through before I let that thought overcome me. It’s a very strange process: actually holding that door open and getting the sentences out. Do not think about the negative side. There will be negatives that are going to come down, but you have to hold the door open if you are going to do any-thing that has not been done before. You have to suspend all criticism to do your work. In writing, you have to do this all the time in order to get th
e sentence out. Suspending criticism is killing the dragon Thou Shalt. Kill him.
Get the writing out first.
Forget the critic and just write.
Afterward, you can bring in
the critical factor and prune.
If you have trouble because you are thinking, “Who is ever going to see this?”—then think of someone you know who would resonate to your statement and write for that person. It is a great facilitator to have a specific person in mind, until you no longer need an audience. Think of little children, for example, with their tiny eyes looking up at you. Talk to them. Write to them. In a book, you will often see a sincere dedication to the person for whom the book was written. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for instance, was written for one specific little girl. When I started writing, I thought of my students at Sarah Lawrence, the actual people with whom I was dealing. I knew their thinking and the kinds of words that spoke to them.
The two things, then, that I’d say are necessary for breaking through what’s called writer’s block are, first, to have a person to whom you are addressing yourself and, second, to set aside a couple of hours a day when, as it were, you’re writing letters of love to that person.
Writer’s block results from
too much head. Cut off your head.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 21
