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I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.

That’s a response from the writer Vladimir Nabokov from a July 1962 interview from Strong Opinions, published in 1973. 

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there? Hope all is well.

This is Episode 33 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.  Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to the differentiation between Walls and Doors towards and away from the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about community and feedback, but today I want to talk about audience and representation.

So, right from the start I want to make something very clear: Yes, look to the work first. To become a master of our work we have to focus on the work, not how many followers we have. We are not important, the work is. Jesus was important, but his message was more important. Hemingway was a character, but his characters are what inspire me. Not his life story, but their life stories. This is encapsulated by the the Italian author Elena Ferrante. Elena Ferrante is the name she uses, not her real name. She’s written about half a dozen novels, but the most well known are her series of novels set in Naples. If you haven’t seen the HBO series you have to. It’s wonderful. Anyway, Ferrante says books, once they’re written, don’t need their authors. Because of this she has consistently  requested anonymity as a precondition to having her books published, to be free. In an interview she gave to The Paris Review in 2015 she explains this form of liberation by saying that when a book is complete, and makes its way out into the world, without her, that it allows her to see something new about her writing, as if she’d released the words from herself. 

Of course most writers or creators can’t literally afford this position. But again, to use the monetary language, what has the cost of this been? Today, technology has accelerated everything, but at the same time it’s also allowed everyone access to getting their work out there. It would be terrible if the majority of what is put on line were to become rushed too. Which gets back to what I talked about in episode 19 about mentors, where we are literally taught to take our time, to learn our craft.

As I said in other episodes I know creators who create for their own joy, their own meditative practice. This is wonderful. Nobody, villains, crazy makers, are not stopping her from creating. However, a lot of the time the reason they are in the basement or out in their garage creating and not sharing it with the rest of the world is because they have been conditioned to feel that their creations are not important when of course they are. 

Some maths. There will be 9 billion people on the planet soon. Are you trying to tell me there are not at least 90,000 people – 0.00001% – of the people out there who wouldn’t be into what you create? A friend of mine, a really great musician, is a successful businessman and a really good human being, but if he ever goes off in businessman script he’s treated with suspicion, confusion and sadly, laughter at times. Just because he hasn’t made as much money from his music means it isn’t valuable, but the little bit of time he puts into music is what give him the energy to focus a lot on making money through business. This is why he sees music, playing his guitars, as really valuable, even if nobody ever hears his songs, or hears him play.

Again this gets back to my basic tenet from one of my very first episodes: Everyone is creative. We should not feel uncomfortable when someone shows us a part of themselves that doesn’t fit into a singular role. We are all many things, not one. We need to encourage each other to be creative, not discourage each other because of capitalist or systemic conditioning. The more we create, the more kind we become because the more fulfilled we feel. Isn’t it logical to encourage that in everyone, not go silent when someone shares the fact that they’ve created something? Remember, 9 billion people out there. Just because you don’t love what someone you meet has created doesn’t mean there are not at least 90,000 others out there that think it’s amazing!

I don’t hate anything. When I was an angry you man, I did. It simply takes too much of my energy, but if there is one thing I could hate, it would be social media, optimization, advertising. However, when you run a small business you have to think of your audience, a website, social media, advertising. I learned this the hard way when we started La Muse. We thought people would come because we were offering such a wonderful place to create. They didn’t. We had to show people we existed. And yes, that meant a website. So I learned how to build one. Then how to optimize the site so people actually saw it when they put in keywords. Then we had to be on social media for people to see what was really going on behind that professional website, the people photos, that it was actually real. So, when I think of selling one of my novels the same business mentality starts to work, but not when I’m creating the novel. This is an important distinction.

Vladimir Nabokov was once asked what kind of an audience he created for. His response was creators shouldn’t care about their audience, saying the best audience you have is the one that looks back at you in the shaving mirror every morning. 

Again, worry about audience after the work is done. Yes, do your research before starting, but not to fit into any idea of what you have to create. If we think of the reader/viewer/consumer during the process of creating we will be creating for someone else, not creating for ourselves for first. 

Thinking about what an audience thinks creates pressure, stress, which stops your creative flow. Nabokov actually stopped writing for years after his first book of poetry came out. The negative reviews hurt him that much. One of the most confident stylistic writers there’s been. His inspiration dried up because of what someone else thought.

Thinking of the reader/viewer/consumer during the process also makes you copy, instead of creating. If you keep thinking of your audience you’ll start to create stuff an audience already likes, becoming derivative, instead of creative or inspired. Hey, it may make money, but will it give you satisfaction. It’s important to know your perspective, but also the limits of your field, your genre, but not to allow them to water down your creation.

Your audience will find you, eventually. Even if it’s when you’re dead. At least if you’re into what you’re doing, love what you’re doing, it won’t matter.

However, when the work is done, you can’t expect someone to swoop into your office or garret and offer to publish your book, or give you seed money for your business venture. No. You have to push it out into the world. 

How your product — because that is what it is now — is consumed, read, or viewed when it does go out into the world is for the most part outside your control too. People will make their decisions, opinions, based on their own natures and backgrounds, most of which will have little relation to your reality. They will see things in what you have created that you don’t. At times, they will totally misconstrue what it is you were trying to create. 

Also, there are as many different consumers on the planet as there are people: Irish, French, American, Asian, white, brown, black, old, young, healthy, weak. Educated. Not educated. And, they’re all at certain emotional stages in their lives. Read a book like “Catcher in the Rye” when you’re twenty. Then read it again when you’re forty-four. I’ve done it. It’s a different book each time. Why? Because I’m a different person each time. Read a novel with a divorce as the central part of the story when you’re happily married, and then again when you’re divorced. The effect will be completely different, because you, the consumer, will be different. 

This is very logical, common sense, but as creators we automatically forget this when our creation becomes a product. Readers change. Viewers change. We consume reality differently, depending on who we are right now. This is important to know, to think about, important to accept and be ready for.

When someone dislikes your book, your painting, your cure, it could be because it reminds them of something they find hard to deal with. It may be something they’re not ready to experience, or that they simply hate detective novels, or love them, or hate Macs and love Windows.

Another thing, a lot of creators think self-promotion is a dirty word. Egocentric. Well, it’s not. You don’t have to sell out. You simply need to be accessible. As a creator you have to tell yourself monetary reward is good. It’s a relationship which should be positive. Others are not going to “take care of it” for us. If we allow the emotional baggage of work, parents, peers to tell us we should be living in garrets or on the street then we’re sabotaging ourselves. It’s good to get paid to create, but not to create to get paid.

The rich (business people) and poor (artists/writers, etc.) binary association is incorrect, something I talked about back in episode 11. People love binary relationships because they allow for negative and positive. In reality we connect with our creations even more by not accepting these associations, by embracing community, inter-connectiveness, collaboration, as opposed to us and them.

Poetry is a classic example. Poetry = poverty. This is one of the great staples of conditioned negative reinforcement. Ask the poet Rupi Kaur whether it’s true. Her first collection “Milk and Honey,” has sold over two and half million copies. Her second book, “Sun and Her Flowers,” reached the top three on Amazon’s bestseller list, along with Oprah Winfrey and Dan Brown. How? She represented herself, which eventually translated to sales.

I knew an artist in New York twenty years ago. He had his own gallery down in the Lower East Side. His art, in my opinion, was okay. I wondered how the hell he managed to find the money to rent the space. I asked him how many paintings he sold a month. He said, “All of them.” 

“How do you do that?” I asked. “Do that many people really come in here?” 

“No”, he said. “I put out flyers when I want people to come. I print off five thousand, then I go and put them in every coffee shop, bar and restaurant on Manhattan. In Brooklyn too.”

When he had a show he usually had twenty-five paintings. The way he saw it, if only ten percent of people actually piked up his flyer that meant 500 people would know. If only 25 percent actually came to the show that meant 125 people. And if only half the people wanted to buy a painting then he would sell everything. He sells everything every time. He also had patrons. Even with the patrons he still spends three days walking the streets of New York, to represent himself.

How many times did I hear this at our retreat: “I’m a (insert the type of creator), not a businesswoman.” I respond: “Yes, but you are in the business of (insert the creations).”

So, yes, creation in the right jobs can get you money, and getting well known can make you money. However, the kind of creation most people talk about, artistic creation, usually leads to minimum wage.  Even well known creators can have a hard time of it making money. What can we expect when the internet means so much content out there is free? It’s natural then that free intellectual property means less opportunity to make money. But if you’re not even on the internet, then how can you make any recompense? 

A few questions: Do you have a website? Do you have an Instagram account? If you only have those two things then you have places where people can find you. If you keep putting up content that you love and they’re interested in it as an audience, then they’ll keep coming back for more, and you’ll keep posting it. That way, people can find out about you, when you’re busy creating other work.

But, as with your creator community, you have to create a reader/viewer/consumer community. That’s why you’ll see all the ways of connecting with me at the end of each episode, at the bottom of my website, etc. I’m Irish. We don’t like drawing attention to ourselves, even if people think we’re outgoing. But I know that stuff has to be there, so that people can connect with me. It’s logical. How I use that is my decision.

So what do you show, represent online? Whatever you want. A lot of social media people say people love it when you represent your process. An artist painting their painting. A car being built. If that’s what you’re into, all the better. It seems to be what people enjoy. 

But if you’re not into taking selfies with your novel or crochet then go back to the question again: What do you love? Take photos of that. Write about that. Talk about that. How can you be selling out if you’re representing what you love? 

Also, if you advertise to one hundred people, on average, one or two people will respond. Why is this important? Because then you know it’s not because what you created is sh*t, it’s that only one or two people in every one hundred are actually going to respond to your add. This way you don’t get discouraged, because you know it’s not you, it’s just the way things are. It’s the facts of advertising.

Shift your mindset. You create something, it’s your property. If it’s a book or idea, it’s your intellectual property. Change the language. Power lies in words. If we use the wrong words we create a negative reality, devoid of the healthy, positive opportunities.

And opportunities aren’t as impractical as you think. Some more maths: To hit the “New York Times Bestseller” list, you need to sell 9,000 books in the first week. Again, there are over 7 billion people on the planet. If only a fractional percent of them love your stuff then you’ve got 70,000 people who’ll buy your book, painting, car, product. 

Rupi Kaur chose to succeed by giving her creations the opportunity to succeed, by putting them on Instagram. That artist is still in the East Village, but he has someone else putting out his flyers now. 

So, a few things:

• Put your work out there, share it with others.

• Meet up with other creators in real life, not just on the Internet.

• Don’t be afraid to make money off your creations. Enjoy it.

• Keep creating, you can only get better.

• Keep a damn e-mail list.

• Give credit when you refer to other creator’s work, and help others.

• And lastly, when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and need help then, as Amanda Palmer says, Ask for help!

I’m not going to get into talking about crowdfunding and Patreon or pay what you want or all the other many things out there to connect with your audience, a community. In the end, that’s up to you to look into. I’m just saying do the basics if you can, because in the end its gratifying, satisfying when someone, even if it is just one or two people who tell you well done.

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb.  This one means: Molann an obair an fear The work praises the man.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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“It has nothing to do with me.” 

“But it must hurt you?” 

“Why would it? It has nothing to do with me.”

That’s a back and forth the writer and academic Umberto Eco had when being interviewed about critics and criticism, on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there? Hope all is well.

This is Episode 32 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.  Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to the differentiation between Walls and Doors towards and away from the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about voice and vocation, but today I want to talk about feedback and community. 

It’s hard to share something you’ve created. It’s personal. It’s like saying, Here, this is something from inside me, from my tripes, as they say in France, from my emotional guts. And when someone doesn’t understand, get, or like what you’ve put out in front of you, on a page, canvas, it’s hard to hear negative feedback because it’s your inner life, something important to you. 

And at the end of the day it’s exactly what Eco said in that conversation I quoted, “Why would you let the criticism hurt you? It has nothing to do with you.” It’s like the Dude says in the Cohen Brother’s movie The Big Lebowski: 

Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

I could talk about criticism and negativity again, about trolls and crazy makers, but I covered that more in depth back in episode 12. Right now, I want to talk about what I think is a solution, a Door towards creation, that is, community.

Community comes from a latin word which means “shared in common”.  So how do you know who your people are? They share a common need and love for the same things as you. Which means you have to find your people. Peers. Mentors. They will give you insights, encouragement, support, kindness, gentleness when you’re down. Community helps you with the inevitable wall of rejection and failure. Your creative identity and sense of purpose will be transformed because you will inspire and validate each other.

Not every creator wants to make money from what they create, but every creator enjoys being around other creators who love what they love doing. Some of your community will create without every trying or even thinking of capitalizing on it. Some will create to make money. Whichever it is, community helps, and all the more if you want to make money from your creations, because other creators in your field will help you move forward with that too.

For example, do you live in the middle of nowhere? Then create a group online and go meet them, once a month. La Muse, again, the retreat I founded with my wife Kerry nearly 20 years ago, is in the middle of nowhere. People go there from all over the world. It doesn’t matter where you are. If it’s a mountain retreat like La Muse, with walking trails all over the place and silence, then you’ll find people on the same wavelength as you because they have the same loves. They don’t want to be in an urban setting. They like trees. They like France. To find your people, sometimes you have to leave where you are. 

Shakespeare had a community. They helped him make his work better in the provinces before the king ever got a chance to see one of his plays. He acted with these people, owned a business with them (The Globe Theater), took money at the door from creatives, before he ever wrote a play. He had friends to support his creations. His plays didn’t just drop down from the sky on his desk fully formed. He got experience by creating with a very supportive creative community.

The French New Wave, the American Beat Generation, the Bloomsbury Group, the American Folk music revival, the Impressionists, the Scandinavian Dogme 95. These are just a few examples of many communities that helped each other, inspired each other to create great works. These artists, creators, filmmakers, writers, didn’t come out of a vacuum. They had community that created conversation, dialogue, feedback and inspiration and enthusiasm.

Cafes, universities, cities. And now, conferences, book festivals, courses, book groups, workshops. These places can bless you with your people. And there are countless meet up groups online.

The saying, “You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” Here the fleas are beneficial. Whether you’re into creating business plans or novels, people on the same wavelength will help you enjoy being a creator in your field because you are surrounded by people doing the same thing. By simply hanging around with people in the same field as you you feel more comfortable, more inspired to create even more. Simply having another creator in the neighborhood, across the river from you, in the next town, makes you aware of your own creation, spurs you on to create even more, because it’s normalized, naturally encouraged. 

An example: nearly very retreat at La Muse someone pulls an all-nighter writing and is exhausted for two days. They would have gotten the same work done in two days. Now they miss out on the next day’s work, and feel depressed. When they realize this, there is always another creator on retreat to help them through it. It could be something as simple as, “Oh, I did that last week.” Or, “I used to do that all the time.” It starts a dialogue, and usually both people learn something from it. 

Community also helps with the process of withdrawing from the world. It doesn’t seem so bizarre when you have another ten people from all over the world across the corridor, above you, beside you, doing the same thing. It doesn’t seem weird to write every day if you meet three other writers in a coffee shop to talk about writing, agents, characters, life as a creator. It doesn’t seem weird any more when you meet other creators at car shows, business conferences, gallery openings, wool stores.

So, if you want to get inspired, find other creators on the same  inspirational path, because a pilgrimage can become boring and uninspiring without other pilgrims. Find your people. Get feedback before you send a creation out into the world. Find your beta readers. Find your mentors. They’ll make you look better by helping to make your creations better.

I just talked about retreats, and I also talked about it more in Episode 24. However, if you can’t get enough done on a retreat then maybe find community in a course or program near where you live. You don’t have to abandon your family, but you will need their support.

 For example, in writing it could be a low-residency MFA. That way you can still do your 40 hour a week job but advance your creative passion by going away twice a year for a week or so to be around mentors and people, other writers on the same wavelength trying to do the same thing. As friends have told me, an MFA is not for business, or making connections, unless you go to a very established program, and even then it’s not always a given. Contacts, connections in those programs is to meet people, a community who will inspire you to write, to create, people who will be there when that nasty Walls eventually rise in front of you, as they always do, the negative voice that says: You’re no good at this, and you never will be. Stop. Now. 

The important thing is one, that you learn from your mistakes, but two, you also learn from other people’s mistakes. Much of the same problems in one person’s creation can be seen in another’s too. With community we learn to grow, together. At the very least you learn to eradicate the most common mistakes from your work, things it may have taken you years to discover on your own. I am a classic example of this. As I said in an earlier episode I never went to an MFA. I didn’t even know what they were back in Ireland, because they didn’t exist there. So, it’s been a long two decades of making many of the same mistakes over and over to get to the realization of, Oh, ok, right, I’m not going to do that again. And it’s not just the mistakes either. With community we can see the positive aspects of other people’s creations. We can go, Why the hell didn’t I think of that? Why can’t I do that with a book of mine? Rejection, criticism is no longer an enemy then. It becomes a learning tool. We all make the same mistakes, but not always at the same time, so it’s important to see someone else make mistakes so you don’t, or for them to see you make mistakes for them to learn. 

Another thing: Look for feedback, but only from people you trust. It’s not personal. If you get feedback it means someone is taking your creation seriously. You’re inspiring them to respond, or react. 

You feed your community — other creators and creatives — your work, so that they can give you back constructive criticism. Not criticism. Constructive criticism. You don’t want creative negators in your community. You want people you can trust. When they give you feedback, let it be what a Norwegian writer on retreat at La Muse once called a “critical sandwich”. If you’re going to give negative criticism, at the very least point out all the positive things first, then get to the meat, the center of the sandwich, the actual point you want to get across. And when you end, remind them again about all the positive things you got from their work. If they’re a mansplainer it won’t matter what kind of a sandwich you give them, they’ll only see your effort to help, as negative.

As I said, you can’t function in a vacuum. You have to see how you’re doing. Ask your peers. Creators, after a retreat at La Muse, often create a creative community to talk about their music, writing, surfing, cooking, from anywhere to a cafe to a kitchen or book group. As John Donne once wrote, no man is an island. As opposed to being a creator, you become a co-creator. A lot of writers on retreat end up reading each others work — beta readers. They’ll go back to Maine or Dublin or Melbourne and create a writers group that meets once a month, to listen, read and give feedback. 

Stephen King, one of the last people you would think needs beta readers, has his wife Tabitha and many others. He knows they will find flaws in what he thinks is perfect, because none of us are perfect. 

Tolstoy rewrote the beginning of “War and Peace” fifteen times, over the period of a year, until he got it where he wanted it. Of course, his wife, Sofya, who re-copied out everything for him, was there as his first beta reader.

Community is one thing, but people you spend nearly every day with is completely different. You “commune” with them in a different way. And oftentimes it is these people who empower you to embrace your creative community. When I said in an earlier episode that I go on retreats to write I don’t do it on my own. My wife encourages me, literally “gives me the heart”, to go. She tells me I need to leave, now. She does this out of love because she can, as they say in Ireland, see it on me, the need to create.

She’s supported me so much that I can voice these words, these ideas. Who do you think is minding our kids right now as I speak this? When I went to my office to write my Create book she was with our kids, homeschooling all three of them. She sees life as a whole, as a co-creative venture, and our children as the most creative thing she’s ever done. She was a magazine editor in New York and wrote for “The New York Times”. She used to write poetry. Now she creates wonderful  meals, rooms, renovates with me, crochets, gardens, and nurtures our children. She says she will return to her writing and I know she will. As she puts it, right now she’s writing in her head.

When my novels were getting rejected by editors, she encouraged me to keep writing. When I don’t want to write, she encourages me to go to the office. She was the first person to tell me: “John, you don’t need to be published to be a writer. You write. You keep doing it. You’re a writer. Why do you need the world to tell you what you know you are already?”

You will need someone to share it all with. Why? Because life, especially a creative life can get lonely. And you want someone there to talk to about your loneliness, hopefully as much as you listen to them talk about theirs. I’m not saying it’s easy to find someone, and I’ve seen a lot of people choose the wrong partner and swim around in misery but if not a partner then friends, a community, your people.

For the most part, it is women who suffer the burden of not being able to create. I met women every retreat who had finally created space-time to get back to creating, writing again, painting again. Why is this? Because like my wife they see the twenty years it takes to create a human being, “to get them up on their feet” as one woman once told me, as the most important creation there is. Only when their kids are gone to college do they feel comfortable, free to leave. Cleaning, teaching, feeding, counseling, encouraging, driving, and loving: that’s full-time creation.

Sometimes a woman in her thirties with small kids will go to La Muse. How is that possible? Because the father has encouraged her to go. So, there are encouraging husbands, but no way as many as there are encouraging wives. I know. I saw who went to La Muse for the last twenty years.

Don’t believe me? What about Marie Curie, Cleopatra, Simone de Beauvoir, Eleanor Roosevelt, Coretta Scott King, Rachel Robinson, Yoko Ono, June Carter Cash? There are so many. These women are wonderful creators in their own rights. But they were not just wives. They were also great creators who encouraged and supported their lovers and spouses to create. Indeed, would those men have been as “great” without them?

Encouragement is one thing, humor is another. If you find the person or people who encourage you most, then they’ll probably make you laugh the most too, especially when things are very difficult, when it all seems like a farce. Everything today has gotten super serious, from gender to climate change to nuclear proliferation to pandemics. It’s hard right now. 

And what’s the thing that can keep us from going crazy? Having a good laugh. By laughing at how ridiculous it all is, this world, at how ridiculous we are in the privacy of our brains, then we release stress and anxiety. When we laugh with others, and laugh at ourself then we relieve tension. Everyone talks about how important it is to cry, to allow feelings and emotions to come up and out of us. It’s also important to cry with laughter.  I find that there’s a lot of seriousness when I get out of Ireland. I think the Irish are famous for craic, not because they drink so much, but because they know how to laugh at themselves and with others.  For the most part they don’t take themselves too seriously. They had a colonizer for nearly 800 years being serious with them. How are they supposed to take things so serious after that? 

Mediocrity and malice can’t fight humor. When we laugh at the stupidity of political or cultural pretentiousness then we release ourselves from it. We free ourselves from the seriousness of it all but at the same time comment on it, without someone killing us for it, as Shaw put it. If we don’t laugh at political fools then how will we ever get them out of office. If we don’t laugh at the fools we encounter in whatever creative world we work in then we won’t be able to deal with them, or continue our work because it will all be too serious and morose. 

Even here away from La Muse I have friends who encourage me by email to continue doing this podcast. They are few, but a Longfellow once said somewhere, Friends are like books, I’d rather have one or two great ones than a library of bad ones!

So who are your creator friends and mentors. Who encourages you? Who makes you laugh? Who allows you to play? Hang around with them more. Create a community.

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb.  This one means: 

There is no strength without unity.

Ní neart go cur le chéile.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.

That’s a quote from a James Baldwin anthology The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, from the essay The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity. 

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there? Hope all is well.

This is Episode 31 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.  Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to the differentiation between Walls and Doors towards and away from the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about play and humor, but today I want to talk about voice and the idea of vocation. 

So if I’m going to get into voice I feel like I need to get into the literal first, that is, my Irish voice. The thing is, if you were to ask Irish people about my accent they’d probably say I sound like an Irish fella speaking like a yank. The truth though is I’ve been gone from Ireland nearly as long as I lived there now so it’s bound to have had an effect on my voice. Especially when you consider the fact of being in France for nearly twenty years speaking southern mountain French. Serving on the municipal council meetings meant not understanding anything for the first two to three years or so, what with the bureaurcratic acronyms, mad Occitanie accent, and the fact that I had atrocious French back then. Connected to all this is the fact of where I was born, on the borders of Meath and Dublin, two of the most urban and rural counties in Ireland, sitting right beside one another, and then the fact that I went to Louth to school, which is a place nearer to northern Ireland than southern Ireland. The Meath, Dub, and Drogheda accents turned my voice into that of a cameleon. When I first listened to it on my first episode it sounded very like what I associate a Dublin accent to be, a kind of lazy unease, almost bordering, pardon the pun, on a mumble, as opposed to a Meath or Drogheda accent, but in end it doesn’t sound like a very strong Irish accent anymore, to me. Which is another part of this. Others think me very Irish even though I see my voice as a watered down one, and thereby ascribe associtions to it when my experience of different locales makes me feel completely like more of a mongrel, Irish, French and now American. But you can’t hear that in a voice. 

Anyway, I ramble on about this to draw attention to the fact that even in the sound of our voice is our voice, with different associations for ourselves and others. Someone like James Joyce or Brendan Behan was able to represent that Dublin voice onto the page. So how we sound when we speak gives us a certain presence just like my voice gives you associations about me linked to Irishness. Voice is hard to get away from, and there are many subtleties that can create very nuanced presences. For example, I try in my novels to transfer that voice to the page when I can, because it’s distinctive, and a reflection of where I come from and who I partly am. So voice is a root, literally, one where you can use your cultural, familial roots as a way to color or populate your creations, in your songs, your books, your videos.

From another angle though: we’ve all heard what I now think has become a pretty tired question: How do I find my creative voice? How do I find my creative voice? Which is usually followed by scrolling through blogposts with optimized words of five or ten or whatever amount of tips on how to hook into or connect with your original voice. Well, as I said in a previous episode on difference, we all arrive at this in different ways and of course we all have different voices, and in real life oftentimes different ones for different people, so it’s often very hard to comprehend or recognize our own specific voice or what we’re actually talking about when we talk about voice, what Baldwin named “your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.”

As I always do I want to start by investigating the word itself a little first because many things come out of it. For example, in grammar even a verb has a voice. It describes the relationship between active and passive states. You can have a passive voice, a middle one or an active one. Subjects, us, in the real world alternate our voice, like I said earlier, to the situation.

But there’s a big difference between voice and vocation, or how society often demeans vocation, by calling what we love doing: an avocation, or hobby. Personally, I think avocation demeans vocation, your voice. And this is normal. It’s simply something society does the minute you try to express, to use your voice. It wants you to think your imagination and creations are avocations, not part of a vocation. This goes back to what I talked about in many of the previous episodes on walls and especially in my long earlier episode on captialism and the imagination, how it tries to value your creation from capitalistic, individualistic perspectives. But in reality, irrespective of financial gain, we have to find our voice by passing through that low wall into the garden of imagination by first becoming an apprentice then journeyman, and finally honing our creations until we’ve become a master. Again, these are stages and nomenclature I talked about before in episode 19, Mentors and how Talent Borrows and Genius Steals.

But getting back to the word itself, vocation. In Ireland when we use the word it usually means someone in the family is going into the priesthood. As most people know, Ireland is mostly Catholic, so it makes sense. Of course it’s not used in the context much any more because hardly anyone goes into the priesthood in Ireland now. 

However, from a broader Christian ideology Christianity would see each individual created with talents which they harness to create a living, and from an even bigger perspective that love itself is the vocation of all Christians, especially when committed to the common good of all. So, vocation has a positive religious connotation on a few levels in Christianity but it can also be reflected in other religions too.

Buddhism sees pain, suffering, as life. Life is suffering being a tenet of Buddhism, where we find our vocation like Christianity, through love, but also through joy, compassion, and equanimity. Which brings me back to Baldwin. In the opening quote he spoke of this pain, again and again. Pain. Not to allow pain to beat us down. To use it. To understand that pain is what we all have in common, that we’re not as individualistic as modern society would have us think and that we have to come to “some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.” This is voice. This is vocation.

Society says we’re all apart, when quite simply we’re not. This is something I’ll explore more in the next episode, that we basically need each other. But we’re taught through junk morals, junk ethics, blue screens and social media that we are the exact opposite, divided, alone. We’re not. It’s a lie. And the lies lead to disconnection from each other so that the ego is no longer balanced, so that we lose touch with our voices and vocations amidst all the noise.

So, how do you figure out the difference between that loud voice creating all the noise and the quiet little inspirational one? Mostly, the loud one will be telling you how sh*t you are at creating. The quiet one, it’ll be saying to drill a hole here, take out that chapter, put the color blue in there. Yes, I know. This is an oversimplification. But, simple things can be very complex, and very helpful. 

So, is the voice telling you to stop creating what you’re doing because you’re useless? Okay, by now you know from listening to earlier episodes that that’s natural. It’s simply a wall your mind/ego creates to stop you doing the work. When you listen to that voice you block out the other quieter voice, the unconscious, the Mind with a capital M, the heart.

What’s inside you has to come out. If it doesn’t then it’s being suppressed, and suppression is unhealthy. But, it’s difficult to listen to the quiet voice inside you when all around you the louder ones outside of you, are constantly vying for your attention. So that idea again of “finding your voice”: it takes practice, work, and hardship to find your voice, the quiet one, the little powerful one. That’s your real voice, your inner creator speaking to you. Emotional scars can be healed, by listening to that quiet voice. If we create from there with the emotional memory I talked about in episode 27, with time and repetition, we will create something beautiful.

The great documentaries of Adam Curtis show this contemporary malaise I mentioned, this strangeness and rigidity of individualism, which has failed us, in that the very compassion Baldwin  referred to disappears for conspiracy facts and conspiracy theories as alternative realities to the pain. This pain Baldwin talks of can also be found in many other creators. For example, Beethoven. In a letter known as the Heiligenstadt Testament  – Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations – Beethoven wrote about this difficulty of vocation and voice, in October of 1802. The letter was supposed to be read after his death. He was 32 years old at the time and had just finished his 2^nd symphony:

Born with a passionate and excitable temperament, keenly susceptible to the pleasures of society, I was yet obliged early in life to isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude. If I at any time resolved to surmount all this, oh! how cruelly was I again repelled by the experience, sadder than ever, of my defective hearing! — and yet I found it impossible to say to others: Speak louder; shout! for I am deaf! Alas! how could I proclaim the deficiency of a sense which ought to have been more perfect with me than with other men,–a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, to an extent, indeed, that few of my profession ever enjoyed! Alas, I cannot do this! Forgive me therefore when you see me withdraw from you with whom I would so gladly mingle. My misfortune is doubly severe from causing me to be misunderstood. No longer can I enjoy recreation in social intercourse, refined conversation, or mutual outpourings of thought. Completely isolated, I only enter society when compelled to do so. I must live like an exile. In company I am assailed by the most painful apprehensions, from the dread of being exposed to the risk of my condition being observed… What humiliation when any one beside me heard a flute in the far distance, while I heard nothing, or when others heard a shepherd singing, and I still heard nothing! Such things brought me to the verge of desperation, and wellnigh caused me to put an end to my life. Art! art alone, deterred me. Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?

So, what I suppose I’ve been trying to say through this whole episode is that it’s hard. We suffer. It’s painful to find our voice. And equally painful to find a vocation. And we all suffer when we try to create something, no matter how amazing the creation or creator is or was. Beethoven did. Baldwin did. Van Gogh did – simply read his wonderful letters. And it’s suffering that they transformed into art. By showing up to create every day they learned to listen more and more to that little voice inside them and like a muscle, the more they used it, the stronger it got, using the pain, the hardships to create something beautiful for themselves and ultimately for all the rest of us.

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb.  This one means: 

What pains the heart must be washed away with tears.

An rud a ghoilleas ar an gcroí caithfidh an t-súil é a shilleas.

I love that one because it shows the Irish working at a deeper level than English. What touches the heart has to drain the eye, which is even more literal. What pain we put into our hearts has to be drained out of it. In its constructions Irish is not as detached as English when it comes to emotions, the classic I’m sorry in English becomes “Sorrow is on me”, in Irish. Tá brón orm.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

So that’s supposed to be a quote from George Bernard Shaw. I don’t know where I came across it first but it has a Wildean way about it that I’ve found  hard to get out of my head. I couldn’t find where it came from, what play, or article but it’s not important. What is important is that it gets into what I want talk about today. 

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 30 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.  Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to Walls and Doors to the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about spirituality and creation, but today I want to talk about play, and a little bit about humor.

When I talked about inspiration I talked about how it’s usually the starting point for any creation, and that thereafter we hone our inspiration into a fully formed creation. But before inspiration, or for inspiration to occur, for spirit to engage the imagination, we not only need ritual, we also need play, we need fun, we need humor, we need playfulness. 

Why? Because the genesis of nearly all imaginative leaps, nearly all creative leaps, is when we start to play. As I said before, for Nietszhe that was walking like so many other creators. For others it’s painting before they write, or listening to music before they start composing or sitting in a bath like Dali, or dancing, or singing or simply doodling in all its forms. Then, something comes out of the playfulness and we become inspired.

The word play usually conjures up an image of a sandbox, with toddlers, buckets and shovels. Then there’s the theatrical perspective of the player on the stage, the theater of play, play as theater. But there are other forms of play. For example, in Hinduism, there’s a word, “Lila” or “Leela”, which means “divine play”. So Lila is when we channel the godlike, again what I talked about in the last episode when I talked about spirituality – so Lila channels the godlike, when the dancer (Shiva) and the prankster (Krishna), in a spontaneous movement instead of a mind-making effort play.

This is not telling the body what to do. We simply do, whatever comes. The twirling dervish is a great example of this. They dance, turning and turning, to forget the mind, and become one with inspiration, flow, God, Brahman, freedom, play. So, play is freedom. Freeing your mind, an art, the greatest art, when inspiration flowers, when it flowers with freedom, with play. 

This is why a lot of creators have practices to clean their brain out before they get started creating. They literally get all the negative trash (usual defeatist thoughts) out of their head. Some people do it by journaling, or doodling, others hike, meditate or dance. To use the theatrical idea again, they become the player on the stage, but the stage is the field they love creating in. What’s important is become the player, to let the play take you over, so that you can arrive at those magical moments of flow and inspiration I talked about in previous episodes.

Probably best that I give an example. Once, when I was walking in the woods with my boys I started talking to them about a short movie they were making. It was based on the story of a mad French priest from a hundred years ago who amassed a huge fortune and had countless stories spun about his life because nobody knew where he got all the money or why he had such big connections with the Vatican. Anyway, my boys were making a short stop motion movie about his life for a film festival and I asked them how it was going. They started laughing. And I wondered what for? They went on to explain to me that the “bad guys” were going to break into the priests house dressed as ninjas but with Star Wars swords and fight the priest to the death for his treasure. I was like, what the hell are they on about? This is for a serious adult film festival that they got a dispensation to be allowed to enter the competition because they were only twelve at the time. What? I said. You can’t have bloody light sabers. And what the hell do you mean they have to try to kill the priest. And the priest has a huge machete type sword? I went on. And of course, they didn’t listen to me. And in my head I thought, Well, that’s that idea rubbished. They’re not going to get  anywhere with that movie.  Fast forward 6 months later and we’re at the film festival and I’m watching these two 12 year olds climb up onto the stage to applause after winning the festival ahead of all the adults and professionals from film schools and production companies. And why? Why did they win? Play. Their riff on the priest’s life was fun, actually hilarious, and above all, playful. Playfulness was in every scene. I had a French film critic who told me afterwards that every scene was so inspired, so fun, and that he hadn’t seen such a playful short in years. Playful. Exactly. There I was being serious, too serious. Not encouraging my wonderfully creative boys, who were full of play and humor, but actually trying to stymie them with my jaded, serious adult attitude. Those light sabers and ninjas were the very scenes that got the biggest laughs, from me – and everyone else. 

So play and humor are wonderful doors to creativity, to the imagination. But why? Because it reminds us not to take everything so seriously. Otherwise we might as well jump out the window. If we’re too serious we can drop into mental health problems or rigid stereotypes. For example, nothing makes me happier than seeing my little girl smiling as she reads the novels of Rick Riordan or JK Rowling. And those worlds she enters into, they were created by creators being playful, having fun doing what they do, and crafting that playfulness and inspiration into a creation. And anyway, if life is, as the Buddha puts it, that it’s suffering, then isn’t laughter and play, other than meditation et al., one of the great ways of dealing with it, to laugh at the absurdity of what we are living in?

Play. From another angle, it’s importance. Think about Google. They didn’t call their online app store  the App Store. They called it Google Play. This isn’t happenstance. They know how important the word is, how it infers so much positive meaning for people. From a capitalistic perspective Google have capitalized on the word. They sell apps to us by making us think it’s a playful thing to do. And as I said back in the last episode in the Walls section of this podcast, when I talked about Capitalism, Success and Encouragement, what we have here again is the commodification of creativity. And of course, Google are not alone. There’s also PlayStation, WiiPlay, Xperia Play, not to mention all the various sports and games uses. This idea also transfers wonderfully into luxury products where the ads are all so serious. Because seriousness sells to seriousness. The serious businessman or woman who is a capitalistic success has to be sold Mercedes and ridiculously priced watches and craft alcohols, and craft lifestyles in a serious way. That’s why the ads are all so serious, so sophisticated, so bloody laughably boring, to me anyway, because they are selling seriousness to serious people. And this is a different form of play, acting. Playacting. Not playing. They’re acting the part of a successful person. They’re acting the part instead of playing. They play a part instead of playing. And the part they’re playing , the serious adult, means you have to have the right costume, the right props, the right capitalistic monologues on success while sipping the same craft alcohols, all purchased for serious amounts of money.

So again, it’s the idea of play as fun, and laughter, as an expression of emotional play that I find most inspiring. Why? Because we can harness free play, or what Carl Jung called the “free child” to have fun, to be playful, free to be imaginative and creative. Jung said people can over-identify with their own persona, becoming a stereotype. Ambition, expectations of society, and being sold artificial seriousness can turn us into stereotypes, rob us of our freedom.  His “free child” is the opposite to the “Would you ever go and grow up!” rubbish we all have to hear at some stage or at many times of our lives. Being playful is frowned upon. Because we’re supposed to be serious all the time, to be a real adult. Which gets me back to the idea of the child again. The free child is the exact opposite of the serious adult, the imprisoned adult you could almost say.  The irony here is that you can have very serious adults in suits who are actual emotional toddlers – we’ve nearly all met some version of this type of individual in the work place – because they take everything so seriously. And of course they will never be the ones to imagine new ideas because of that very seriousness. If they can’t joke and have a laugh, have some fun with what they are doing then how the hell are they supposed to create anything meaningful that changes and inspires people to buy their invention, their creation, not their serious object or product.  So again, we have this idea of Capitalism versus Imagination, versus creativity, when we have the serious adult versus the playful free child, the destructive child versus the free child. This is why we have corporate tantrums. These specific “adults”, and I’m not saying all individuals working a serious job are like this, but these specific “adults” can’t stand even listening to someone let their free child roam. They can’s stand someone being playful or funny. It makes them jealous, because they’re lost in seriousness, because they’ve lost complete touch with their free child. So, they’ll try to belittle or demean the creative free child. Because we all had a free child when we were young. But when we go into the work force and universities we’re told to give up childish things, when ironically, it is these very childish things that inspire and create anything. And this is why so many creators are so playful, because they never let go of their free child. They could be 75 and they’re still having fun and being playful. Again, as with the serious suit, we all know the playful old man or woman who still sees the world playfully. They play, they create, and they have fun doing it, so they repeat it, and their inspiration to be around, a joy to communicate with.

My boys and girl are forever creating, “playing”. Drawing. Cutting up paper. Singing. Dancing. Creating houses, space craft, making films, igloos, now that we’re here in Maine, little rock villages by the stream at the bottom of our valley when we were in the mountains back in France. Actually, creating little villages out of little rocks was also what helped Carl Jung make breakthroughs in his work. 

There’s a lovely story about Jung. He used to create when he hit emotional and professional road blocks in his life. When visitors from all over the world would be sitting down talking over a meal, Jung would disappear. They would search for him and find him down by the water creating little streams from the land into the lake with the children of the visitors with a twig. Why? He preferred playing to talking. He preferred his free child to than the serious adult.

Play was essential to Jung’s life work. He didn’t consider his books as his only creative outlet. Indeed, the very thing that inspired his books were his moments creating other worlds playing — in sculpting, mandalas, woodcarving, building towers and little streams with children. For Albert Einstein, play’s defining characteristic was what he called in Ideas and Opinions, “combinatory play” usually arrived at with the playing of his violin in between trying to solve mathematical conundrums. In part of a 1945 letter responding to a survey of the processes of famous scientists, Einstein had this to say:

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.

There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

When I was a kid you always found kids outside playing in the street, in the fields. You spontaneously played a soccer game. You didn’t have to have a set place to do it, with adult supervision. And it was a blessing. We didn’t have adults telling us how to behave. We had to learn how to socialize, to create  our own rules and how to make up when we fought or bickered. Today we’re afraid to have our kids walk down the street to get a newspaper without a parent in tow, what many call helicopter parenting. How can a child be playful if the serious adult is always around? It makes no sense.

Play has gone inside, to video games and other devices that tell us all about the latest child abduction or school shooting. What does this mean? We don’t take risks. We don’t know how to organize ourselves autonomously. We forget or don’t even know how to play. Why are so many young people anxious, depressed, suffering from self-harm, getting autoimmune diseases? Fear. They’re even afraid of getting dirty, which has only gotten worse with this pandemic.

Myself and my brother used to come home covered in dirt, flithy at the end of a day. Germs? We never heard a word about them. When we failed to score a goal we didn’t have Mammy or Daddy in the background to shout us on and say we’re wonderful. You failed. So what? You learned to try harder. You challenged yourself. You learned not to let it get you down. Eventually you scored a goal, on your own steam, after learning to deal with being let down. We learned how to deal with other kids when there was a fight, a conflict. You learned to negotiate, instead of telling an adult. How are we supposed to interact with others, ourselves, if we’re not free to play and learn from play?

You don’t have to go anywhere. There’s no road. You get to discover it. This is the fun of creation. It’s playful. The creators having the most fun, the ones immersed in their work, in flow, create the most work and the greatest work. Joy, inspiration, comes when you forget the rules. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know the rules of your field. No. It simply means you have to play with them, after you’ve learned them. Children love creation, accept it naturally, understand it intuitively. We are conditioned to forget this wonderful understanding as we grow into adults. So forget seriousness and embrace your free child. Laugh at the seriousness so as to have fun with creating. Create from freedom not the prison of seriousness.

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb.  Literally, this one means: 

Youth doesn’t care where it sets its foot.

Is cum leis an óige cá leagann sí a cos.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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I think the chanciest thing is to put spirituality in art. Because people don’t understand it. Writers don’t know what to do with it. They’re scared of it, so they ignore it. But if there’s going to be any universal consciousness-raising, you have to deal with it, even though people will ridicule you.

That’s a quote from the 94 year old Los Angeles artist Betye Saar interviewed back in September 15, 2020 for the NYT and I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 29 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.  Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to Walls and Doors to the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about inspiration and rituals, but today I want to be chancy like the quote said and talk about spirituality and the imagination, how an awareness of “spirit” can help us understand creativity on a different level, and perhaps help heal emotional scars, or what Betye said in the same article which got me to write her quotes into my notebook from the newspaper:

Beauty is a form of spirituality. Once you start making something with your hands, the healing starts. I call this creative grieving.

This is going to be a much longer episode than usual because there’s a lot to cover so please bear with as I ramble through these ideas. It’s also the reason I didn’t get into talking about spirit more when I talked about inspiration, because there is a lot I want to get through. 

So where to start? Well, where I usually start, with the word itself. The word spirit, just as with the word inspiration when I talked about it in the last episode, makes everything complicated, which I personally think is ridiculous. For thousands of years we’ve used the word spirit, but in the last fifty or so years it’s become a dirty word. Just think of Blake, the Romantics, nearly every creative movement. They talk of spirit, or soul. One thing we are definitely not allowed to talk about amidst all this present day divisiveness is spirit, or the even dirtier version, “spirituality”. 

Spirituality means different things to different people, but we all get that subtle sense that there are other aspects to this life, a feeling that something else is going on, that there’s more to be discovered, as science is always saying. We have a sixth sense about this other creative world, what some call a world of spirit, which is basically what science does when it uses senses, or tools that go beyond our senses, like microscopes and telescopes. Inevitably spirituality is the same as science in the search for the unknown, equally as exciting, in that we’re only at the very, very beginning of understanding who we are on this tiny, tiny planet in the middle of a universe, in a space amidst multiverses.

Universes of space. Liminal spaces, literal and figurative spaces. These are all spiritual spaces. We only have to look at contemporary theoretical physics to understand that things are not the way they seem to be, which could be partial definition of spirituality, trying to understand that things are not the way they seem to be. 

For example, with quantum gravity we have to change the way we think about space itself. It gives a whole new idea of space, and so of spaces.We also have to change the way we think about time. And this is difficult. To look at the world through a different lens. The obvious world is not always real. The small and large loose their obviousness, especially when we try to see things like quarks. Like how bizarre, how magical and mystical is it to think that we now know that space can stretch? It can move. This jumps into the world of spirituality, into a liminal world. How can space move? It’s space. But it can. It waves, like the sea. Just like light it’s made of little pieces, bricks, photons. It’s not what you thought. Our idea of reality has changed. It’s more creative than we thought. Bits of space now move. They interact. What does that say about our imaginations? Do they interact? Do we literally inspire each other? Space and time are no longer obvious, no longer familiar. The imagination is never obvious but always familiar because it comes to us out of nowhere, out of spacelessness.

But getting back to what I quoted before on the idea of illness and healing:

Beauty is a form of spirituality. Once you start making something with your hands, the healing starts. I call this creative grieving.

Rumi, St. John of the Cross and many others have written of a union with god and how this union can heal. Also, T.S. Eliot, has something interesting to say about it in his lectures from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. He spoke about how illness can inspire the birth of mystical poetry through what he called incubation, an unconscious osmosis of existent ideas, and secondly, by removing the usual reservations or Walls to inspiration and what he called “mystical experience” and: 

an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing — though, in contrast to the claims sometimes made for the latter, the material has obviously been incubating within the poet, and cannot be suspected of being a present form a friendly or impertinent demon. What one writes in this way may succeed in standing the examination of a more normal state of mind; it gives me the impression, as I have said, of having undergone a long incubation, though we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on. To me it seems that at these moments, which are characterised by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative: that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers — which tend to re-form very quickly. Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure, than a sudden relief from an intolerable burden.

He goes on to say that this disturbance in the daily habits results in an

 incantation, an outburst of words which we hardly recognise as our own (because of the effortlessness), is a very different thing from mystical illumination. The latter is a vision which may be accompanied by the realisation that you will never be able to communicate it to anyone else, or even by the realisation that when it is past you will not be able to recall it to yourself; the former is not a vision but a motion terminating in an arrangement of words on paper.

Julia Cameron in her well known book The Artist’s Way talks about this too when she explains how to get over what she calls a “creative injury.” The book is famous as a path, or way back into being creative, having helped thousands of people get back into creation, by being practical, some of which I referenced when I talked about notebooks and automatic writing, or journaling. To her there’s no quick fix. Her idea of discovery, or recovery is a process, which she teaches, one which has a stage by stage practice, where defiance at first is followed by frustration and anger, then grief. Then the resistance comes in an emotional rollercoaster of peaks and troughs, expansions and contractions, from elation to defensiveness, where the ego has to eventually surrender into consistency, into a daily meditative practice of creativity, a withdrawing from the world, a detachment from the world, but not in a negative way, but in a withdrawing to oneself, through the Door towards creativity, not away from it, by channelling creative focus back into ourselves.

Alongside her idea of creative healing what I found most interesting is her take on the meditative, spiritual aspect of creativity. She sees are a spiritual transaction, artists as visionaries who practice a faith in the invisible that others don’t see, and by practicing our creative practice. It’s never too late she says, because it doesn’t matter if it’s a career or a hobby. Or whatever our ego says the act is, silly, egotistical, selfish. Because creating is an expression of our true nature, a blossoming of our true nature, turning your creativity over to the only god she can believe in, the god of creativity and allow it that force to work through her, to just show up and write down what she hears, equating it to eavesdropping as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel. Then the idea of being in the mood to create disappears. You simply create. As Neil Gaiman said when addressing the 2012 graduating class of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia: “You make good art.” Every time the emotional rollercoaster of the ego arrives to try to put you in despair of how bad what you’re inventing is then you just say: I’m making art. And when you make mistakes as Gaiman puts it:

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.

Which kind of reflects the quote I cited when I was talking about failure, from Beckett: 

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Creating no longer becomes a war with the ego when you let the force of creativity in, when you trust in that inner enthusiasm, from the Greek meaning, the god within, that inner god. When you trust this spiritual process your mind doesn’t explode into Walls, into negativity, into inaction, into blocks. Is it good? Who cares. Is it bad? Who cares. It’s not your business. Your business is not doing the work, your business is letting the work come, because it’s not coming from you, it’s coming from the god within, that fun feeling, that joyful feeling of creation, that playfulness. When I talked about inspiration I talked about this “in spirit”, but today I think it’s important to look at the spiritual even more, as a kind of devine engine we simply have to trust, when we let go of the self-conscious creator and let The Creator come through us. It frees you, into being a part of a universal ecosystem, into the flow of an electrical sea of creativity not a creator bobbing, apart, on the top. 

This is why when someone like author Marianne Williamson comes along and runs for president of the United Stares because she trusts oneness, kindness and love, she’s seen as kooky and borderline crazy, but if you actually listen to her speak you realize she’s not talking about fairies and unicorns as many would say, but has policies, and talks about things like love, when others don’t even mention it. When did love become stupid to talk about in public? When did spirit and spirituality become a problem when it’s talking about things we can all agree on, kindness, love, and maybe even oneness when we realize we’re all in the same planet. Realistically, we’re inherently spiritual beings because we all have this inherent need to be good. If you think of the people in your life, you think of doing good for them, not evil, unless you’re in the sociopathic minority that is. Where’s our humility to this gone? What’s wrong with meditating, praying a bit, taking deep breathes every now and again? Doesn’t that seem like something that would help you get creative, become more imaginative, to meditate, breathe, pray, all these so called spiritual activities? Isn’t spirituality simply a trust in this inextricable connection between human beings grounded in love and goodness and kindness and represented by different people in Nature and God and Gods in our tiny planet? If we could all go sit up on the moon and look back at this little planet like Edgar Mitchell did maybe we’d all see the world as creatively as he did, as imaginatively as he did. In a People magazine article in April 1974 he had this to say: 

…there is a spectrum of consciousness available to human beings. At one end is material consciousness. At the other end is what we call ‘field’ consciousness, where a person is at one with the universe, perceiving the universe. Just by looking at our planet on the way back I saw or felt a field consciousness state. You don’t have to dwell in such states long to accept them as reality. It is not faith, but knowledge.

We don’t have to dwell in these spiritual states as Mitchell put it. We simply have to try to be aware of it and go to that place when we can to be in touch with our creative selves, our spirits, again, inspiration, where in spirito comes from. Again, what Mitchell called “knowledge”. Something Julia Cameron the American author and teacher of The Artists’ Way, sees as the very heart of creativity, something experiential, a mystical union, where belief is ultimately rendered obsolete, because creativity becomes a spiritual knowing, not an epistemological or rational knowing. It doesn’t matter any more what it is, because you’re just in it, trusting it, en-joy, in joying it.

And you know, I’m not here to ask you about what your life purpose is, even if it is an empowering question as opposed to the disempowering ones like: Why am I not painting? Why didn’t I get a show at a big gallery? Who’s to blame for my lack of capitalistic success?  No. I’m simply trying to go a bit deeper into what inspiration is, because most answers to creative problems come from nudges, dreams, intuitions – the spiritual world – if we ask ourselves the right questions, with sincerity. If you ask with sincerity the universe, spirit – all those inspirational words you name as that ineffable spring – if you ask the right questions with sincerity, the universe will answer.

Of course creative spiritual communion could come from running, playing the violin, listening to Gregorian chants. It’s existential. You’re being creative with your body, by interacting, but it’s more than the body, because there’s feeling. Some people get spiritual, into the flow state, by dancing. Again that episode I did on the Dancer and the Dance gets into this more. Or writing, or painting, or building or making something. When we make, we make something because we enjoy spiritual communion at times. We enjoy the silence of creation. Again, this could be called flow, in the groove, but what I’m trying to get at is that it can be expressed through the word spirituality without it being something annoying, suspicious, too religious. Again, we have to reclaim words that have been demeaned.

Another thing, intellectual arguments of atheism are very often very bleak, and extraordinarily and ironically dogmatic because they treat their ideas as dark certainties. I suppose another way of naming atheism would be rationalism. Spirituality and imagination or creativity, is silly in these worldview. For example, how can we calculate the limitless? Atheism’s dogma simply means no faith. It’s gospel is theological fundamentalism. If you don’t agree with us that there is no faith, if you don’t believe in our faith in a lack of faith then you’re a crazy non-believer. Again, this is the idea of separation, that we’re all separated from each other, that we’re rugged individualists, which is an illusion, for if we didn’t have other people we wouldn’t exist. I suppose another aspect of it all would be to look at all the books on consciousness coming out all the time. Why is that? Somebody has to be buying them all? Are we all just too embarrassed to talk about these books? Are we not all intrinsically absorbed by consciousness?

To me it doesn’t matter what kind of spiritual perspective you have, whether it’s religion or some form of mental health regime. Whatever keeps you happy and kind and loving to other people as much as you can works. All religions, whether it’s the I Ching, Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, The Bible have the mystical aspects in them irrespective of dogma. The principles are always the same: loving kindness, prayer and or meditation, steps to relive suffering. In Catholicism we have Aquinas, Augustine, St. Therese of Avila and Lisieux. So many. 

What are the principles of creation then, like the principles of religions? Maybe the same thing, to be kind to ourselves when we suffer through trying to start or finish a project. The most important thing is whatever keeps you relatively happy and as kind as possible to others, which is a very Christian thing but also a very humanist and rationalist ethic too whether employed by people like Marcus Aurelius or other modern day stoics. The problem arrives when we don’t have access to all this. Growing up in the background I grew up in it simply wasn’t there. There were no books, no music, and the national broadcasts didn’t start up until the afternoon. The internet didn’t exist, as it still doesn’t for many in the world. How do we learn to create our own system if we’re not mentored or educated about all the different systems?

Spirituality is not a system. It sits outside the systems, and so becomes another type of lexical prison. We don’t have the words any more the way we used to, to talk about spirit. Science has taken over the modern language to a large perspective. In Ireland, we barely have any of the words and phrases and ideas the Celtic druids used, so how can we “talk”, how can we understand the Celts, ancient Ireland, any more. The native Americans, or sorry, the actual Americans, not like me, coming here and becoming one – they have this language still, but it’s not being supported, encouraged, and this is terrible, because their language is tied to their spirituality. 

People who over intellectualize reality are what the French playwright Ionesco called “demi-intellectuals.” It’s as if they’re playing musical chairs with words, not looking at the ridiculousness, or what Ionesco would have called the absurd or bathetic nature of existence. So when an intellectual looks at a word like “spirit” the immediate stance is a dogmatic perspective, that anyone using that word, or the word “spirituality”, are unscientific, and somehow connected to charlatanism.

In the works of the novelist Ben Okri he has characters do extraordinary things. They talk to their ancestors, as they do back in Nigeria, where he was born. So the extraordinary is seen as ordinary. Some tried to call him New Age or magic realism, and one critic said his writing was spiritual realism, in a negative fashion. But, I see those two words as positive, as a pretty cool way of actually describing a lot of works.

Look at Shakespeare. His work is full of spirits. There’s Banquo’s spirit in Macbeth shaking his gory locks and disappearing, after freaking Macbeth out. Then there’s Hamlet’s father’s spirit who never stops monologuing about what was done to him, and there’s the  fortune telling spirit in Henry VI, Part 2, and Richard the 3^rd’s victims the murdered princes. And then there’s Tolstoy. His wonderful story Three Hermits has monks running across the water. He has them doing many extraordinary things. Both Shakespeare and Tolstoy are showing the world as certain people see it. They are giving us a whole world, not parts of it, like with naturalism. And they’re not giving us magic realism like Marquez, where there is an actual physical manifestation of the other world, like an angel with wings in a pigsty. When people talk of spirit, when characters like Macbeth and the Bishop in Three Hermits see extraordinary things it is only because it’s extraordinary to us, not to the people and characters seeing them. To them they are real, as real as me talking into this microphone. It’s like my dog Homer. He can smell a sausage hundreds of feet away, he can hear animals hundreds of feet away that I can’t even hear a couple of feet away. Does that mean what he perceives is any less real? To me, it’s extraordinary what he can hear, what he can smell. But to him, it’s ordinary. All Shakespeare’s spirits are real to the characters in his plays, extraordinary, and because of time we see them as ordinary extraordinary creations too. 

Yes, there are many New Age charlatans out there plain their trade in spirituality, but there are also many charlatans in science too. Scientism is what the botanist Rupert Sheldrake calls people who advocate a mechanistic natural science, a new orthodoxy. Like Goethe, who was a botanist too, as well as a poet, he sees science as holistic, integrated with direct experience and understanding. It doesn’t involve breaking everything down into pieces and denying the evidence of one’s senses and harmony of the whole.

Just because we don’t see a ghost like Shakespeare’s characters, or other “forms” as Plato used to call them, or entities, or whatever word you want to use, doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or aren’t seen by others. Like my dog. Or quantum physicists. Or mediums. I have senses my dog doesn’t have, and he has senses I don’t have. Humans are the same. Certain people can sense things more than other humans, depending on what senses are heightened. Some can have a sixth sense, or whatever we want to call it. The point is that creativity is not tied specifically to one way of telling a story, one way of understanding a painting, a landscape, a problem. As I said in an earlier episode, we’re all different, and it’s because of that difference that we have such a wide range of creative works, because different people experience and create out of their own experiences of the world.

For example, in Brazil they actually have a philosophy called Spiritism. The West never talks about it. Even in France, when it was a French educator, Hippolyte Rivail, now known by his pen name Allan Kardec, who founded it in the 19th century. Spiritism, a spiritualistic philosophy, is to quote: 

the nature, origin, and destiny of spirits, and their relation with the corporeal world. 

People who are into this call themselves Spiritists and call Kardec a codifier, because everything that he wrote, didn’t come from him, but from the spirits mediums he talked to. His book, or the book he codified is a fascinating read. Basically it, or the spirits, it’s called the Spirits Book, says all beings, and yes, that includes you and me, all have spirits that are immortal. We get into these bodies and for a while, incarnations, to learn lessons, and to evolve, intellectually, morally, which means altogether, spiritually. 

Of course, as in Ghost, or the Exorcist all these spirits are not all kosher. They can also fill certain mediums they talk to with negative rubbish. So, I suppose you could call it a religion but spiritists don’t seem to see it like that. Maybe I’m wrong.  

The important thing here though is to ask the question: had you ever heard of Spiritism? I hadn’t. It’s in 35 countries and has influenced social movements, healing centers, charity institutions and hospitals involving millions. When the blockbusters Avatar and Iron Man came out in cinemas and took over the box office all over the world, in Brazil there were two Brazilian films taking in just as much money, one was about a medium, Chico Xavier, and the other was a film based on a book Chico Xavier channeled. The film is an adaptation of the 1944 book of the same name, said to be dictated by the spirit Andre Luiz. I find all this fascinating.

The global research firm YouGov lists, quote, “being more spiritual” as one of Americans’ top 10 New Year’s resolutions for 2020, and the icon used to illustrate that aspiration is a person meditating — not praying. More than a quarter of Americans now say they are spiritual, but not religious, according to the Pew Research Center. So it would seem the word spirit, and spirituality, is trying to make a creative comeback, and be taken back from the tinfoil hat world of aliens and unicorns.

For me, spirituality is connected to creation because it speaks to our interior lives. I talked about this interior life more in earlier episodes when I talked about emotions, feelings and emotional memory, awareness, acceptance, and change and recently when I talked about inspiration. But recently, according to scientists at Yale and Columbia universities in 2018 there is actually a “spiritual part of the brain” — an area they call the “neurobiological home” of spirituality which ties in with this emergence of a rising interest in secular spirituality. The reality is that as opposed to rewarding capitalistic privilege people are turning more and more to other  more interior ways, as opposed to exteriors and exterior accomplishments. People no longer inherit the religion of their families but seem to be embracing an and or idea of spirituality as a way of being in the world. 

Spirituality so, like creativity, is where we consistently come back to looking inside, re-centering so we can imagine beyond ourselves. It’s hard to find time for this inside world, which speaks to what I talked about before, trying to find rituals to get to your creative space. Before, church used to be the creative spiritual practice we used to have. Now we need to have personal spiritual churches of the inside so we can create from what we love. We have to carve out that space. This is why the younger generation is so passionate about other areas, and a lot of these are creative spaces, and probably explains why there’s such a huge interest in creativity, because it’s a way of replacing or filling the void left by a lack of spiritual inspiration from churches. Curiosity for the spiritual is everywhere especially amidst “nones”, people who identify themselves as having no religion.

So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that creativity and the imagination is not simply the mind, or body but a combination of mind, body and spirit. To create, we have to connect the inside with the outside. Separation, to use a Buddhist tenet, is an illusion. And because the capitalistic worldview wants us only to look to the outside we grow up with this false understanding of who we really are and how creativity can help and heal. We are not simply body, or mind, or spirit, but all 3 together. The trick is to try and marshal all 3 together so as to create something authentic. Sincerity. Authenticity. These are holistic tenets of the imagination, of creativity. Without them we might as well be writing on the wind. Creation can only come when we’re creating from an holistic perspective, not a separate one. And how do we create holistically? By understanding that spirituality is very much a part of the process of the imagination even if we’ve been thought to think it’s the absolute opposite.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American artist, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb.  Literally, this one means: 

Every gospel makes money.

Deireadh gach soiscéal an t-airgead.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.