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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.

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Whenever there is inspiration, which translates as “in spirit,” and enthusiasm, which means “in God,” there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.

That’s a quote I’ve often repeated to people from the German author and teacher Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth.

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 28 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Acceptance and Change, but today I want to get into talking about inspiration and rituals. 

So what exactly is inspiration and how are we supposed to get inspired? Well, first perhaps we need to look at the word itself, inspiration, like Tolle did in that quote I read at the beginning. To get more academic first. Here’s what The Oxford English Dictionary says of the noun inspiration is:

the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative; the quality of being inspired, especially when evident in something; a person or thing that inspires; a sudden brilliant, creative, or timely idea; the divine influence believed to have led to the writing of the Bible; the drawing in of breath; inhalation; an act of breathing in; an inhalation.

So whatever we that noun meant, there’s probably a few more things we need to understand about it. Literally, from the Latin, inspiration means “to breathe into” from the verb inspirare.

So, breath is life and the creative life comes through inspiration. Carl Jung writes about this in his autobiography when he remembers carving wood in the 1920s. Here’s a bit of what he wrote:

Only while I was doing this work did the unconscious supply me with a name. It called the figure Atmavictu – ‘the breath of life.’ It was a further development of that fearful tree of my childhood dream, which was now revealed as the ‘breath of life,’ the creative impulse.

The artist, the creator breathes in the inspiration. The “breath of life” then goes into a wood carving, musical instrument or invention or onto the page or canvas. From a biblical sense you could say God breathed life into the world, into worlds.

This kind of talk about inspiration makes some writers and artists I’ve met want to thump their head off a wall. A lot of the time they see inspiration as anything but a magical process, calling it only part or even irrelevant to the creative process. As William Faulkner once said:

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.

You can go online and find countless writers, articles and creative people commenting in much the same vein, saying that the creative process is almost mechanical, like a mechanic greasing your car (E.B. White) or an engineer thinking about an engineering problem (Doris Lessing).

So, yes, getting to that inspired point is work. But if it is then that means we can all get there, no? Or couldn’t it be both at the same time, work as well as allowing inspiration or “spirit” to come into us?

Stendhal says something along the same lines:

Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of my life I totally wasted waiting for inspiration.

Of course this is easier said than done. The mental walls of procrastination enjoy waiting instead of working.

American writer Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how frustrating this process can be. Instead of using the word inspiration though, she replaces it with “genius”:

… my creative process is — I’m not the pipeline! I’m a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?

So, to get inspired we need to make time, find space, be consistent, and have the intention to find inspiration by working. Only then does inspiration come, when we’re not expecting it, but in a timeframe when we’ve decided to work. Also, if we put in the work it will come to us when we aren’t working, when walking as I talked about for Nietsche and others, or daydreaming, or doing yoga. But if we haven’t opened ourselves to the work daily, or consistently then those flashes of inspiration can’t come as often when we’re not in front of the canvas, or computer or blank page.

So,  why do we not talk about inspiration more? A physicist who came to La Muse – again to anyone coming to the podcast on this episode, that’s the retreat myself and my wife Kerry ran for nearly twenty years in the south of France. Anyway, one summer this physicist told me people don’t talk about inspiration because we’ve become so bogged down in science, not what he called ‘the spirit of science’. He went on to say how all the great physicists and scientists he knew about were some of the most inspired creators, but that science took ownership of them when they were dead, forgetting the imaginative leaps they’d had to take to arrive at new creations. I still remember him smiling and saying we should all be as inspired as Einstein and quote “live life as if everything is a miracle.” 

The miraculous is suspicious to the academic, the scientist, but whether they trust in it or not, inspiration exists, like quarks. And like a quark, every time you look at it, it disappears. You can be an agnostic, an atheist, an evangelist, but the thing to understand — inspiration exists. From my experience, and the experiences of the majority of the creators I’ve met, that ineffable flow is there, and the last thing you want to do is analyze it. It’s there, it’s beautiful, and it serves a purpose.

The problem arises when people start to try to quantify it. It’s never quantifiable. That’s why when you ask creators how they came up with what they created they kind of look at you and say, “Well, it just went there”, or “That’s what seemed right”, or “That’s where it fit”. They’ll tell you a part of where it came from, what event or moment inspired it, where they came up with it, but not exactly where it came from. This is why a lot of creators are resistant to even the word inspiration, like Faulkner earlier, as they don’t like to question their process, where their inspiration comes from. They get uncomfortable. A lot of the time they think it’ll take away the magic, the mystery of the process, jinx their creative flow.

Where did the painting, idea, song, line, invention, business idea come from? There’s no answer that seems compatible with everyone accept that it comes from somewhere, that little voice, that lightbulb moment. You never know where it’s coming from, accept that it comes from within you, and not by thinking about it, but by being “in the zone”, or meditating on it. Then it appears. 

So, what’s your word for inspiration? The unconscious, the numinous, “thinking”, meditating, contemplating? Countless creators have been inspired by the Muses, God, the Unconscious, Mother Earth. The noun doesn’t matter. What matters is that we know what it is. The word I use to describe it is inspiration. To you it could be Mind, a Higher Power, the Universe, quantum mechanics, unicorns. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s yours. 

For Blake it was the “holy spirt” — again that word spirit. As he put it: 

I myself do nothing. The holy spirt accomplishes all through me.

For Brahms, the word was God. Oscar Wilde looked to the stars: 

We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The spiritual, the ineffable, in contemporary society has been co-opted, like the word “creativity”, which I talked about in earlier episodes. It’s been co-opted by part-time yogis, meditation experts and motivational coaches, to mention a few. They talk about spirit and spirituality as something special, precious, unattainable. To me, real spirit and spirituality is found in inspiration. We have to reclaim this word of spirit, inspiration, because when someone says to me “I was inspired to…” invent, write, build, cook, crochet, then I know I’m listening to something deeper than thoughts, deeper than emotions. I’m listening to someone who’s inspired, and I love being around inspired people. They make me want to create even more. They energize me with their inspiration, literally and figuratively.

I could be walking in the woods when a chapter idea comes to me, or cooking for my family when I realize what a character is supposed to do. It’s a joyful experience, as if a weight gets lifted, a sigh of relief inside. Oftentimes I’ll actually take a deep breath and sigh, and smile. Then I grab a notebook before it disappears. 

It can also just come in the most bizarre ways. I talked about the wonderful Stephane Hessel in one of my first episodes, Why Create and What is a Creator? when talking about how important it is to create. I want to repeat again today, that quote of his:

To create is to resist; to resist is to create.

 I was in resistance to inspiration when it came to writing. After being told the story of my good friend’s father, his concentration camp experiences, uncles in the resistance and much more I told her that’d make a wonderful story. She looked at me and said I should write it. I resisted. Said I’d stopped writing. Then I got home that evening after driving for hours and found Hessel’s Time For Outrage in our mailbox. I had completely forgotten about it, thinking it was lost in the post, as I’d ordered it months before. Another story about a Jewish survivor and that quote again, talking about resistance and creation. I was resisting. So I gave in and start writing the story that eventually became a novel inspired by both their lives. 

As soon as you want inspiration it will not come. It can’t be forced. You do the work, follow your process and rituals and it will come. To open to inspiration, we have to train our minds to shut up, to encourage our emotions to remember, and open our in-sides to the love of doing what we need to do. 

We have to get out of our minds (thoughts) to get to the heart (emotions) of what it is we love (inspiration) to create. This is not a want, it’s a need. A want is the mind again. A need is what we love. 

Spirit’s the suggestive voice, far quieter than thoughts, and even more powerful than emotions. Indeed, as Tolle said at the beginning, this is what inspiration means: “in spirito”, in spirit, when the spirit or soul speaks from inside you. It doesn’t talk to us inside our head. It comes from a deeper, quieter place on the in-side of us which we “hear” in our head.

Usually like this: “It just came into my head,” or “It suddenly hit me that…,” or “It was like it came out of a dream,” or “It came to me out of the blue,” or “It suddenly dawned on me.”

Great creators open the door into what they “hear”, into their spirit, through their creations. Simply think of van Gogh, Tolstoy, any of the Buddhist poets and artists, Rumi, St. John of the Cross, the list goes on and on. They all speak of spirit, write of it, try to paint it.

So, we don’t know where inspiration comes from, but there’s nothing like reading back over something you’ve written to wonder: “Where the hell did that come from?” “Did I write that?” That’s when you know you were inspired.

Another thing: inspiration is not all of creation. It’s a starting point. It can connect great pieces of work. Help close them. When I talked about the description of the dancer ‘lost’ in the dance in episode 17 – The Dancer and the Dance and Doing What you Love – I was trying to capture that passionate, disconnected, out-of-the-world mental state of being when one, a creator, is caught up in the creative process, a rising in some creators to something close to the religiously ecstatic, like the Whirling Dervishes in dance. Those are the magical moments in the act of creation – unforgettable when they happen, like being struck by lightning. But this could only be the prefatory shape, the beginnings. When the imaginative fire cools and the coldness of thought has to reassess, question where this creation is going, how to clarify it, make it whole. As an Australian friend reminded recently by quoting Yeats’ gravestone epitaph:  

Cast a cold Eye 

On Life, on Death.

Horseman pass by.

Or another analogy he used, the small locked gate of C S Lewis which leads through the Wall into the garden of the Rose, the Imagination. 

Mozart, in one of his letters, talked about this kind of fire when talking about growth and inspiration. He wrote about when his “soul is on fire with inspiration”. You mightn’t form the whole thing in your head at once like Mozart, but the idea of the fire of inspiration being something that grows inside is very important. Like a garden, you plant the seed, and the plant eventually flowers as it’s nourished. It just takes time to blossom, from inside. And the best way to nurture our inspiration? Through rituals.

No. You don’t need to sacrifice an animal. But maybe you need to sacrifice something. You do need to have non-negotiable things, which means you need to have rituals, routines.

Of course, routine is not exciting. It’s repetitive, and repetition breeds frustration. It’s boring. But if you want inspiration to appear, you have to appear first. To be able to be bored. You can’t just expect to get inspired. So, the second question to ask after understanding your word for inspiration is what is your creative routine?

If you don’t have one then you need to create one. It means being predictable. Get yourself into your office, your studio, your shed at the same time, or for the same amount of time, or on the same day, consistently. 

For example, some composers get into composing by starting with a Bach piece. Some writers start transposing notebooks into the computer. Others start where they left off the day before: Hemingway, Steinbeck. Hemingway also stood and wrote, then got his stuff typed out. Again this is another habit or ritual to get him into his daily work. Thomas Edison, before he went to bed every night had the ritual of asking advice from his subconscious, the question he was trying to answer that day, before he went to sleep. Why? Because he’d have his answer the following morning.

Engage the esoteric. Switch from your left to right brain by lighting a candle, or repeating a mantra. Have a literal invocation, as Homer did to the Muses. Rituals and routines work. They allow inspiration to show up, to flow, and afterwards to make sense and art, a creation, out of inspiration.

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

An empty sack does not stand.

Ní sheasaíonn sac folamh

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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The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

That’s a quote from Albert Einstein’s book The World As I See It.

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 27 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Acceptance and Change, but today I want to get into talking about emotions, feelings and emotional memory. 

Emotions exist inside my body. I feel them coming up inside of me. We all know this, but are we aware of how emotional a creation we don’t even think about can make us on a daily basis.

An example. There was an old woman in our village in France. She was ninety-three at the time. Anyway, one winter morning we were talking about the lavoir in our village. A lavoir is a stone shed with a slate roof and a stream going through it in a village, where she and the other women of the village used to have to wash their clothes. She told me how the washing machine was a “benediction” when it appeared. Her face lit up when she talked about it, sighing. The thing about it that though is she never knew Alva J. Fisher, the man from Chicago who invented it. But I’m sure she would have kissed him. With tears in her eyes she told me how the washing machine changed life for women like her. She no longer had to haul her dirty washing to the “lavoir” where the women knelt in snow and sun to hand scrub their clothes clean. She described how she used to have to break the ice in winter to clean her clothes. To her, many decades later, this man Fisher’s creation was a very emotional thing, a miracle. So, when we create, we have to remember that when we put something out into the world that we will not always know the kind of emotional effects it’s having on other people. This is a good thing to remember the next time you’re frustrated with a lack of recognition for what you do. In that moment somebody could be experiencing positive emotions because of what you created without you ever knowing it. 

So, it’s important to understand this idea: that when we create we give emotional resonance to what we create. We affect people out in the world emotionally, a lot of the time without ever having met them. 

I think that’s pretty beautiful.

But even before that there’s our own emotional perspective. Because when you get a feeling or feelings about something, inside you, and these feelings evolve into an emotion, which combined with action and inspiration then we make a new creation. 

Emotions can be the enemy too though. If you allow them to be. P.D. James once said that all fiction is largely autobiographical and that much autobiography is fiction. Creative material can come from your own life, the facts, the observations, suffering you feel and see around you. Tennessee Williams makes this even clearer, saying what we create should be “emotionally autobiographical.” It’s the feeling of what we’ve experienced which is important, not the exact visual memory of it, which should inspire us. 

When I look at a van Gogh, a Picasso, I feel something. When I went to see Michelangelo’s “David”, I felt something. I wasn’t simply looking at a piece of art, I was experiencing it. Why is that? Because the creator infused feeling into their work. I don’t like Picasso’s work, it makes me feel uncomfortable. That’s just me. Other people love him. The point though: he makes you feel something. Again, how is that?

There’s a cliché in art and writing that goes something like this: “No tears in the writing, no tears in the reading.” Substitute the word “writing” with any creative act. “No tears in the painting, no tears in the looking/seeing” — what happened when I went to see/feel those artworks I mentioned above, for the first time. There’s an emotional resonance in the work, what creators mean when they say they “put themselves into the work”.

It can take years to create something, but the dedication eventually pays off if we stick with it. The emotion comes when someone’s life is effected by using your cure, by enjoying your building, by using your machine, by loving your words. People who create life-saving cures, sustainable architecture, evolving technology, books draw from almost the same emotional recall. They remember a family member or friend who died from an illness, a house that was unlivable, washing clothes in a stream, having no access to books. This inspires them to create a solution. Which then benefits others.

I’m not saying you have to go into these emotional memories and relive them all the time, but what I am saying is they’re useful when trying to understand what it is that inspires you to create. By relaxing, meditating on these emotional memories, we can feel what part of life inspires us, and whatever inspires us nearly always helps us to create.

I never completely understood this until I went away on a retreat to write a novel. I was walking on the beach to clear myself out after writing all morning, when it suddenly came to me that one of the characters was going to die. The realization made me stop. I looked out to sea, and without realizing it at first, tears started to roll down my face. No, I thought, she can’t die, how sad. It was then that I realized, I’m crying. This is what I mean by emotional memory. I had put myself in the place of the character so much, that when she was about to die, it was as if it was someone I really knew was dying. 

The Russian theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski used this in his work, or “system”, with actors when they worked to create roles. He called it “affective memory”. This became more famous when further developed by Lee Strasberg, with Method acting. They both believed actors needed to bring their personality, their emotions, to the stage when creating characters. Creators can use this in their work by using what Strasberg called “emotional recall” or “sense memory”. 

For example, what were your physical sensations during emotional events in your life? You can use these to infuse into characters in plays or novels, or document in non-fiction, or to inspire you to change things, to create things that solve problems, like the man who created the washing machine. Maybe it was his mother kneeling down in the winter to crack the ice to wash the clothes that inspired him later on to create the washing machine? Who knows? But a lot of the time this is the cause, the inspiration, to be of service to others, to help create something that helps us to suffer less in some way.

You don’t have to get lost in the emotions, simply recall the events so you can understand your characters, your story, your subject in a painting, the thing you need to create, from sadness, frustration, anger or love, compassion and joy.  Creators do this every day when they create. Empathy can be drawn upon, to be drawn.

I quoted Ray Bradbury when I was talking about education in episode 6 and I want to quote him again now when he said, “If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” And to add to this Renoir, the painter, not his son the filmmaker when he said: “Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.” So great art comes from emotion, from feeling, something ineffable, but there because we feel it, and that’s why we look at an amazing painting, as Renoir once said, because it makes you want to walk into it, because it makes you feel so much.

Towards the end of his life Tolstoy wrote his text What is Art? where he famously got into ripping into Shakespeare and while he was at it, Beethoven too, when he was going on about “good art”. He gets into the same thing I’ve been talking about, at base, empathy, not just some confection to enjoyed, more an important fundamental of life, of living. Without it we lose one of the most important forms of communication. In chapter five of his What is Art? He dives into feeling

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others… And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.

And then later on in chapter 15 he has this to say:

The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s – as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist – not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

We enter into a world where the creator infects the viewer, the reader, the creative. It’s this infectiousness that enters into us when we witness a great work of art, why we want to walk into the canvas as Renoir put it. And Tolstoy is against many understandings of what art’s activity is. Union. He prefers to call it a union among humans. They’re joined together by the same feelings. And this communion is fundamental helping us all evolve in a healthy way.  It’s a way of connecting back to the past, to past lives, worlds, cultures, so that it’s a kind immortal connection, or sharing. He says we transmit all we’ve experienced but also all we’ve felt from others down the millenia. As he says back in chapter 5:

Thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others. If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts…

Tolstoy talks about three conditions of infectiousness in art but in the end it’s the last one he talked about, sincerity, as the most important feeling to feel when trying to express oneself in art. He says vanity or covetousness is why “upper class-art” has no power. Because it lacks this feeling of sincerity. Quality, he says, comes from sincerity, no matter what the subject matter.

So, if we’re to listen to people like Tolstoy, or Bradbury, or Renoir, then we have to go inside, to where sincerity rests, to shed, like an onion, the outer skin, the facade, to go further in with each layer, and observe the tears come with the release whether standing on a beach with a character, or in front of an easel with a paintbrush.

We have to let the words, the lines, the sounds transpose our emotional experience into something. Is it visual, audible? Words are not important. It’s the feelings you feel as you write, draw, sing. What are the feelings inside you? Transport them onto the page, the chords you’re plucking, the dance you’re dancing. It could be a doodle, a few words. What matters is that you put it down, to communicate how you’re feeling. This is where catharsis comes in, you release the feeling, the emotions, repressed or on the surface, into your creation. The drama, and the drama of our own lives and others effects the body, cleansing it of emotions which can lead to a feeling of renewal, restoration. The Greek word katharsis actually means “purification” or “cleansing” or “clarification”. 

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

The people encounter one another, but the hills never meet (nor the mountains).

Castar na daoine ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na cnoic ná na sléibhte

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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What worked for you on Tuesday will work on Thursday, a claim that cannot always be made when what you hold in your hand is a paintbrush or a camera or a pen. What was exactly right for your last painting will be completely wrong for this one. Creative people love to claim they know what works, but in reality all they know is what worked. Fortunes are lost and hearts broken in that shift of tense.

That’s a quote from the essay “Getting Good” by the American novelist Richard Russo’s book The Destiny Thief.

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 26 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Awareness, Sacredness and Distractions, but today I want to talk about Acceptance and Change.  And this one will not be as long as recent ones either because there’s a simplicity and a humility that I want to get at today, because I’m not sure these two things of Acceptance and Change are addressed very often in reference to the Imagination, not because they’re so ineffable as say what I talked about in the last episode, awareness, but because they’re so blatant, so in front of us all the time, every day, that often it’s hard to see what’s right in front of us, much like the elephant in the room, where we can see parts of changes in our lives, the trunk one time, the legs another, the tail another, but never enough humility to understand, to see the whole animal, the animal as a whole, to see change as a whole and the necessary presence, or need of the presence of acceptance in our lives to deal with change, and to transition from change into acceptance and from there transition into creativity.

Years ago there was an established poet at La Muse. For any of you coming to this podcast for the first time La Muse is a writers and artists retreat I co-founded with my wife in the south of France almost twenty years ago. Anyway, I was talking to this established poet and another writer about setting up a creative writing program in Ireland, because at the time there were none and I thought that should be encourage to change. I suggested approaching universities or colleges not associated with the arts, as they would probably be more receptive to do something new. The writer became excited about the idea. Seeing his excitement, I said I would be happy to help, such as giving a lecture on retreats, the people I’ve met, maybe something about how to create. 

He got very enthusiastic and was about to say something when the established poet said, “And what would you talk about, John, cleaning toilets and making beds?” He then laughed out loud. This is the kind of humor that made Joyce call Ireland a sow that eats its own farrow, in that the harsh cliché is that one must always be bringing someone else down to size, what they call slagging in Ireland, and what I learned later from Australians is called tall poppy syndrome there. Basically it’s really demeaning someone a lot of the time because of one’s own insecurities. 

Anyway, the other writer, an American, went red, and after an uncomfortable silence asked me to help him move the desk in his room. In his room, I went to lift his desk. He stopped me and said he had only asked me to help him so that he could apologize for the rudeness of the Irish poet. I told him it was ok, that it wasn’t the first time someone “established” treated me like a receptionist, chauffeur, cleaner, etc. 

“How do you put up with that kind of treatment?” he said.

“I don’t. I just accept them the way they are. Years ago it used to make me very angry, but now, what are you going to do? They have their set idea of who I am, who you are, who they are themselves, their worldview, and I can’t change that.”

People might define me, you, as one thing, but I think that’s ridiculous, because all people are vast. They have many different parts. Yes, I can do a little electricity now. I repair old windows, put tiles onto roofs. I even cut down trees for wood, build old stone walls, optimize websites. If you’d told me I would be able to do any of those things twenty years ago in New York I would have laughed at you. Why? Because I used to think the same way as that poet. That a person is one dimensional. I thought, I’m a writer. Everything else is secondary. But it’s not. Being a husband is not secondary. A father can’t be secondary. We are many things. We are vast. When we accept that, we create a life, not play a role. We create ourselves.

An even better personal example: we couldn’t find a place to go create, to meet other writers and artists. So, we transformed the drudge of working the nine to five and having no time to create, into something. It took a while, but La Muse was created nearly twenty years ago. It wasn’t easy, but it was created, in the beginning out of anger that space was not available to us, but then, out of acceptance. We accepted the reality and then went out to change it, like the oft quoted phrase of Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world.

I’ll never be a Mozart, a Shakespeare. I don’t care. Why? I’m happy being me.  I can only be me. Life gets easier with acceptance. Ask yourself a question the next time you’re worrying about all those creators better than you: Do you really want to be better than them, their equal? Isn’t it enough to just be you? Isn’t it enough to create what you love, because if you deny what you love, are you not denying your life?

There’s a Latin phrase Marcus Aurelius uses a lot, “Amor fati”, which basically means accept, or love your fate. If you accept your fate, what life has given you, then you can create something from it. You can use your discontentment and loss as a positive, to create. You can transform it, move it into form. Then you can trans-form pain into something profound.

The facts of your life can also give you the very reason for your life. The events, the situations you’ve found yourself in, happened irrespective of your choices most of the time. So, why not accept them, so you can use them? 

Yes, you can’t change what happened but you can accept change. If you accept it, you can simply use what has happened to you to transform it into something beautiful, to create from that place, which will make you joyful at the same time.

Acceptance is easier when you can accept change. When you create, you change, as does the creation. That’s the process. 

Yes, we have no time. Or so we’re consistently told. But why not accept that idea and you know what then we do have time, even if we are being made to work more and more. We can change our lives for the better, even though change is stressful.

In 1974, William Bridges, an American literature lecturer, did just that. He left his job, set up group workshops about change, or more specifically what he calls transitions, in our society. Out of these workshops grew his book “Transitions,” which to date has sold over half a million copies. 

Bridges writes how dealing with transitions in life: marriage, divorce, birth, death, moving, career changes, retirement, is difficult, but that it can be made easier if we stop and see where and how we are processing the change in our life. He saw each individual experiencing change in three stages: first as an ending, then a stage of confusion and suffering, followed by a new beginning. Because Western culture gives us hardly any rituals to represent these stages, people just try to skip from an ending to a new beginning. 

Another important point Bridges makes is the distinction between change and transition, transition being “the personal side of change.” He says society often confuses them making us think that transition is just another word for change when actually a change is “situational” and a transition is “psychological”. Examples of a change are moving to a different city, getting a new boss, your mother dying, your son being born. They are external changes in your life. Transitions are how you deal with those changes inside. 

The creative process can help facilitate transitions. It can help keep the energy moving in body, mind and spirit. By creating we can give both expression and reflection to what we are experiencing, whatever transitions they are.

Creation will not come immediately. It takes time. You have to “transition” into it, not change everything immediately, give up your job, leave your family. To become a creator you start by accepting that change is difficult, that there are stages, that it is situational and psychological, and with awareness and acceptance you will create what you need to create, with patience and time.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American writer, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. And I’m giving you this one because I think it’s a great one to remind us to be humble, to have humility in the face of the difficulties of what we’re so often presented with, and that to accept, to really accept change, we often need to bow our head in humility to it in order to not resist life’s suffering. Literally, this one means: 

The heaviest ear of grain bends its head the lowest.

Is í an dias is troime is ísle a chromas a cheann

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. 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.