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Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions’; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: ‘the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life… for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy’.

That’s a quote from Will Durant’s 1926 book The Story of Philosophy, when he writes about Aristotle. And I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

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

This is Episode 10 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about genius, talent and originality but today I want to talk about perfection, another Wall away from Imagination and creativity.

First, there’s the idea that everything comes out perfectly.
Well, I’ve never written a chapter I didn’t have to change. Maybe that’s just me, and every writer I’ve ever known. Maybe there’s a writer out there who’s written a whole chapter without changing a comma. I doubt it.

Also, do you think Frank Gehry’s buildings always go up the way he first designs them? Did George Lucas use his first cut of “Star Wars”? How many times did Elon Musk have to test his Tesla cars before they went on the road? And even then, was that the end of it? Was every Shakespeare play finished when it was finished, perfect? Look at the iPhone. Every year there’s a new one.

Second, there’s the idea that every great work is perfect.

Well, what about all the times Shakespeare performed his plays in the provinces before showing them to the king and queen and court? Do you think he didn’t change a line here, a scene or character there, when the audience in the pit started booing or shouting at the actors on the stage, or flinging rotten fruit or eggs at them? Of course he did.

Another example: Leonardo Da Vinci. Would Da Vinci have called his Saint Anne perfect? He worked on it until his death, that is, over twenty years, consistently changing it.

Back to Shakespeare. When he was creating he had to bear in mind two audiences: the gallery seats, an educated audience who appreciated character development and subtlety, and those in the pit who wanted to see sex, action, fun. Do you think it a coincidence that after nearly every soliloquy, every quiet scene, there’ll be a scene that’s comic, or violent, a sword fight, a murder? Do you think Shakespeare didn’t change a line when one of his friends, the people he acted with, owned a theater with, suggested it? They were giving him advice as creators (actors) as well as creative business people.

Every time he picked up his quill, Shakespeare knew, in the coming months, by the time it was seen by the king and queen, his words, his scenes, maybe even whole acts, would change, countless times. That’s why he was such a great creator. He surrounded himself with great creators, learned his drama craft for ten years before he even started writing, then changed his work as often as he thought it would make his creation better, knowing it was never perfect, only ready when it was ready.

A famous contemporary example: the often told story of Jack Kerouac and his novel “On the Road”. The story goes that he wrote the novel in three weeks. It’s used as a quintessential example of a beat generation creator just spontaneously banging something out in no time, perfect.

Well, it wasn’t, and he didn’t. Yes, he typed one version of it out in three weeks, but he had worked hard on his craft before that. He had reworked “On the Road”, in his head, in his journals for years, and then on the typewriter. Then in the fifties he reworked it again, for about seven years. So, the three weeks of a perfect manuscript really took him about ten years.

Perfection is the enemy of creation. Creation is not immediate, it comes in bits and pieces. In the south of France they have a wonderful expression: “Petit a petit l’oiseau fait son nid.” Bit by bit the bird makes its nest. A nest takes time, effort, and patience.

Nothing comes out perfect, especially at the beginning. You have to go looking for the bits like a bird, and assemble them, piecemeal, into a nest. It’s a messy, rough process. It looks rough and weird at first, but by the end the nest works, practically and aesthetically. This is the joy of creating, when you connect unrelated things in an inspired way. To use Wordsworth, you become surprised by joy, because you experience the connections that make us stop, pause, then think: Wow, that’s a creative way of looking at it.

If immediate perfection comes, it’s from years of practice, years of gathering, from creating other creations, to arrive at the creation that “came out of nowhere”, finished. Picasso was once asked how he could charge so much money for a drawing he did in a few minutes. He responded that it hadn’t taken him a few minutes, that it had taken him 80 years to draw it.

Your focus has to be on growing, mastering your craft, mastering what you create. Theory gets you nowhere. Create. Repeat the messy process to find out the work you want to really get into. You don’t, won’t know, what that is until you’re in it, doing it, lost in it, like Shakespeare. And don’t think you’re only going to have one go at it either. Imagination leads to more imagination. Creativity leads to more creativity. As Maya Angelou once said:

Like electricity, creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productively or destructively. The important thing is to use it. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have.

Hemingway never knew whether he was writing a novel or not. He’d start writing a short story and when it got longer it became a short novel, like “The Old Man and the Sea”. When it got longer again it became a novel. He kept working, kept creating. He didn’t try to create the perfect novel. He wrote. He created. Then he moved onto the next one.

Perfection kills creation. If you think what you’ve created is awful, so what. Nobody ever has to see it, read it, know about it. Let it be awful. If you don’t create, you have nothing. You can’t change a program with no code. You can’t change an un-carved block. You can’t change an empty page.

In the future, you can. You can make your creation better. If you create nothing because you want immediate perfection, then ironically you have nothing to perfect.

Change leads to discovery. You find out what you’re creating by doing, by making mistakes, and a lot of the time, you don’t even realize you’ve progressed.

Five years ago, we were in the truck going down to Carcassonne for groceries, from our retreat in the mountains of southern France. I asked the young Sydney memoirist in the front seat a question.

“How’s your essay collection edit going?”

Her answer was immediate.

“Shit. I’m just so full of self-doubt about the whole damn thing now.”

“Are they all bad?”

“No. One is really strong. Two are pretty good, but the others are really shit.”

“Sounds like you’ve made great progress then.”

“What?”

“Well, last week, when we were coming down you said all of them were shit.”

She stopped looking out the window to stare at me. “Shit, I’d forgotten that.”

The Wall of self-sabotage is the friend of perfection and fear, your natural enemies, negative structures we build inside our own heads. It can shelter you, make you feel safe and comfortable, happy to do nothing. It’s a fantastic wall. And there is not one creator on the planet that has ever escaped self-doubt.

And self doubt usually leads to self-sabotage. We all do it. So many false starts appear because of self-sabotage. It’s just the way it is. But you can’t give up. Self-doubt, limiting belief systems, fatigue, the shadow side, misery, are natural. Everyone gets stuck. The responses are countless. Everyone fails at some stage, but if you can’t accept failure you’ll never come up with a new creation.

The thing is to find solutions. Walls can be circumnavigated, moved through, with love for the work. And a lot of the time we don’t even realize we’ve progressed from where we were, like that Sydney memoirist.

Also, don’t compare your unfinished creation to someone else’s finished masterpiece, or any of your previous finished works. Months, a lot of the time, years of hard work have gone into those masterpieces and creations. Never mind all the changes afterwards, like Kerouac.

Yes, it’s hard not to compare, but it’s only because we can’t sit down and watch Da Vinci paint and repaint and repaint his masterpiece until he’s dead. We can’t see all the pieces of paper Shakespeare threw away as he rewrote scenes, again and again.

So, be gentle with yourself. Nothing is ever completely figured out at the beginning. Everything changes. It’s a process. Instead of pursuing perfection go after excellence instead. Like the Aristotlean thinking I quoted at the beginning. Excellence is an art won by training and habituation… these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. So try to get better at what you love creating.

By doing, again and again and again, the gifts of talent, originality and genius come naturally, organically in the next act of the Imagination.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Greek philosopher by way of an American one, but as usual I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There is no wise man without fault.

Ní bhíonn saoi gan locht.

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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.

That’s a quote from French writer Émile Zola, and I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well with this crazy Corona virus.

This is Episode 9 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about black sheep and difference but today I want to talk about a few Walls that build on each other, genius, talent and originality. In a later episode I’ll talk more about talent, but today I want to talk about these three ideas in an inter-connected way.

“I don’t know if I’m talented enough. I don’t know if I have a gift.”

Christ. The amount of times I’ve heard that one. Even from established creators in their fields. The mind/ego loves this I’m not talented I’m not original I’m not a genius crap. Again more Walls it throws in front of your creation.

In school I was convinced too, convinced I was talented at nothing. I was thrown out of classes, except a few like English. I never got good grades at English when I was younger, but when I was fifteen I wrote a story for a competition a bank held in connection with schools. I mentioned this before when I talked in an earlier episode about family. Anyway, I got third prize. My immediate reaction: they must have made a mistake. The usual imposter syndrome Wall. Then I went up to get my prize. Coming back down I still couldn’t accept it as reality. It was only when a friend started to say well done that I realized, there was no mistake. And that’s when the maybes started slipping in. Maybe I’m alright at writing essays, not school ones, but ones I like writing? I secretly started writing bad poems.

Everyone’s talented at something. Everyone’s gifted, original, at something. Again, artists and writers don’t own creativity. They don’t own Imagination. Some of us think visually, others through sound, others again through movement. However, what makes the difference is some people persist, keep doing that something, whether it’s writing code, novels, movies or painting canvases.

The fear of not being original, of being laughed at, of creating something awful, has crept into the heart of every creator since we first started putting hand prints on the walls of caves or telling stories around open fires, in the same caves.

Fact: Nobody’s original. This podcast is not original. I’m sure there are many like it. “Hamlet”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth” are not original. They were all plays before Shakespeare ever wrote his versions. Take up Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”. Look up Churchill. Nearly every famous quote attributed to the man can be found somewhere else, said a little differently, by someone else, usually by someone who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Look at the footnotes to his quotes.

Mozart in one of his letters says he never aims for originality. Mark Twain, also in a letter, to Hellen Keller, said all ideas come from other “sources” and that we color them differently because of our moral and mental character. He wrote that every great orator re-interprets centuries and the thousands who went before them when they write a speech, like Churchill with the ancients.

Steve Jobs, in a “Wired” interview in 1996, talked about this. He said creation is “connecting things” by creators with “very diverse experiences”, but that most people cut themselves off from these experiences by not being curious.

We all create from the past, what went before us, those sources Twain wrote about. Past is prologue. When I finished the first draft of my Create book I started reading other books on the same wavelength. Why? To see what I’d forgotten to talk about. To inspire me to add and take out things that made no sense. It’s a good thing to be curious. Instead of something to be frightened by we should embrace it, embrace new experiences, books, ideas.

Why? Because nobody has read everything, and every human being has a different way of expressing their “it”, because everybody is different. And new creations nearly always come from breaking with the past, by changing the way something used to be done, to form something new, a new individual clarity. Like Picasso said,

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

Einstein once said he had no real talent, just that he was passionate about being curious, like a child, and that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational one a faithful servant, where we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. At the same time he also supposedly said genius is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent hard work.

This is one of the key things I’ve seen over the years: the people who keep doing the work and evolve with their work, succeed. I’ll get into work more in a later episode, but when I say succeed I don’t just mean from a capitalist perspective. Creators who keep doing the work feel they succeed because they get better at what they love creating. The work makes them better at the work. They don’t let anyone or any amount of frustration stop them. When they see they’re comparing themselves to other people then they know they’re not in their work, but creating a Wall. They know talent is identifying their own talent and then getting into the work, for a lifetime.

You can be talented and never create a body of work. How many creative writing professors, art professors, CEOs have I met who told me the most successful people they ever met, the most creative people, were persistent, dogged hard workers.

The blank page no longer becomes frightening. You’re not the first to look at it. Find historical friends in your creative field. Then look for connections in other fields that inspire you. Oftentimes originality comes from seeing original combinations others never have. But be selective. Only stuff you really love, stuff your soul loves.

A friend of mine sees talent, originality and genius as gifts. She sees a painting as a gift, waiting to be born, not herself, not her being talented, original. Michelangelo liberated his creations from Carrara marble. He never saw what he did as creation, but more as gifts from the stone, gifts he had to set free. The mind/ego disappears and the creation, the gift comes through the creator. In a sense, it wasn’t Michelangelo who created “David”, but “David” who reveals himself to Michelangelo. The talent and originality come out of the creation. I see my books the same way.

Whatever it is you create, they’re all there, waiting, gifts. But, you have to be open to them. You have to switch off the self-sabotage of talent and originality and genius long enough to allow them to present themselves, a lot of the time in bits and pieces.

As I said in a previous episode, Rodin would make thousands of sketches of a model moving before deciding on the pose, “the” moment to sculpt. As with Michelangelo, the sculpture is held within the stone. Just like the chair is in the tree, the painting in the field, what the impressionists called the motif. We, the creators, have to discover these gifts. They’re out there waiting for us to discover them. As Henry Miller once said, everything is out there already, and as intermediaries we have to make use of what’s in the air.

One of the greatest Walls that moves us away from accessing these gifts is this one:

“Oh, I’m not a genius, like Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Rodin.”

Modern society has adopted genius as a noun for an individual. Certain creators are inspired to have many moments of genius, one after another. Mozart had many. Einstein too, although he said he arrived at Relativity by steps, work.

However, Einstein wasn’t a “genius” when it came to his social life. You only have to look at how he treated his wife as an employee or how he treated his sons. He’s not alone. Many famous scientists have had unhealthy personal behavior. Nobody’s a perfect genius.

Mozart was terrible with his money. They say it led him into an early grave. Is Warren Buffet a genius because he made so much money? Could he come up with the theory of Relativity or compose a symphony at the age of eight? What’s the criteria?

But again, what do these creators have in common? Work. They were, are, all passionate about what they love. They’re obsessed by what they love. But then someone says Warren Buffet only does a couple of hours of work a day, but what does he spend the rest of his time doing? Reading journals, financial statements, reports, newspapers, books. To some that seems like a lot of extra work. Not to him. He loves it.

There are no geniuses, only moments of genius. And genius comes with hard work, every day. Every so called “genius” worked consistently, and got better with each new creation they created. The word itself comes from the Latin verb “to bring into being, create, produce”. It’s not the person but what comes into being, the creation itself, the act of creation, which is genius. The ancient Romans saw it another way, that everyone has their own genius, even whole communities, but that genius is a guide. We create the conditions for it to bring creations, gifts, into reality.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a wonderful French novelist and activist and I’m going to end on another Irish proverb. This one literally means:

Deep is the hole of doubt. And of course this is relevant because genius, talent and originality can be deep dark holes when we let them be. So he hole of doubt is deep.

Is doimhain é poll an amhrais.

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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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…for me – writing is less a business than a vocation, a calling. Not so much something you choose as Something that chooses you, not so unlike a drug, really, in that it’s hard to imagine quitting. Whether you’ll actually make money is almost beside the point. Viewing writing as a vocation doesn’t make you special, just different.

Richard Russo in his essay “Getting Good” from his book The Destiny Thief.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. How’s it goin. Howy’re yis all doing out there? Hope yis are all doing well.

This is Episode 8 of my series of episodes on creativity and Imagination, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about Lexical Prisons. Today I want to talk about other Walls, black sheep and difference and how they moves us away from creativity and Imagination.

When you walk out of Plato’s cave (your home, your country, your job, your social group) you become a black sheep. You leave the orthodox, conventional way of living. You’re no longer respectable because you’ve left the standardization of the workplace, education and culture you grew up in be by wasting “valuable” time by “playing”. Grow up, the world says. Who do you think you are leaving?

“A retreat? You’re going on a holiday, to work?”
“There are no shops? What are you going to do there all day? It’s so isolated.”

These are common reactions parents, lovers, spouses, friends, work colleagues have when they find out someone is going to La Muse to create. Why? Because everyone who goes there is a black sheep. When I say how wonderful it is that their family supports their getting away, they nearly all look back at me and laugh, or grow serious. Why? Because villains don’t think a holiday is a holiday when you’re choosing to work, unless you’re getting paid to do your creative work.
When I ask them why they think this is, they nearly all respond the same way.

“They’re jealous because they’re not getting away.”
“Me going away to create makes them think about the things they want to create. They don’t like that at all.”
“They don’t have the courage to create themselves. Otherwise, why would they criticize my needing to do it?”

When was the last time you came across a creator you admire who was conventional, orthodox, “respectable”? This is why the phrase black sheep exists. It’s what the parable of the lost sheep really means in the “Bible”. The shepherd leaves his flock of ninety-nine sheep to find the one that’s “lost”. The parable’s not just about redemption, about bringing a “sinner” back into the fold. It’s about the shepherd, God as Jesus, leaving the ninety-nine behind to search for the sheep who is like Him, free, outside the norm.

Jesus was a black sheep. That’s why He rejoices when He finds the black sheep. The black sheep was lost when she was with the other ninety-nine. The black sheep’s only “found” when she returns, a new creative being. She repents conformity, sameness, group-think, unlike the other, quote, “ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.” The black sheep is different. When you’re the black sheep, you’re not white, literally. You’re the sheep that gets away, doesn’t do what your family and friends want you to do, jumps out of the the enclosure.

In Ireland, so many of our writers had to jump the fence and leave. They were too different. Joyce left for Trieste. He called Ireland “the old sow that eats her farrow.” He had to publish “Ulysses” in Paris. Wilde left for England. Beckett left for Paris, was in the French Résistance and wrote “Waiting for Godot” in French first, not Irish or English. It was first performed in France not Ireland. Shaw left. O’Casey was basically run out of the country by Yeats. He ended up in England. And John McGahern, after publishing his second novel “The Dark”, was banned from teaching as a primary school teacher. He had to leave for England, France and the United States.

Then there are creators like Da Vinci. He was gay, left-handed, illegitimate, vegetarian, distracted most of the time by many different things, mainly his creations, but he jumped out of the enclosure, and now the “Mona Lisa” is considered one of the greatest creations of all time.

Being ostracized by your own generation can often mean being an inspiration to the following ones. It’s okay to be a black sheep, to be weird, to be different. A lot of the time people can’t stand difference. It makes them feel uncomfortable, but when you break out of the pen, joy appears.

Why does someone go out into a garage all day rebuilding a car when they could be inside watching TV with the family? Why does someone go up to their office to write a book about organic farming when they should be sleeping after a day on the farm bringing in the corn harvest? Because they need to create.

If we were all freely doing what we want to do, creating, we wouldn’t need terms like bohémiens or black sheep. And there are many other words like them, depending on what culture or country you’re living in. In France, as I said in a previous episode, they have an expression for the black sheep: “Il fait la poète.” Basically, it means, he’s crazy, “He’s doing the poet.” Or in Ireland, “Oh, he’s an artist. You know, he draws the dole” -unemployment benefit.

There was a New Yorker at La Muse once for two retreats, re-writing a musical. She asked me to read a draft.

“I can’t read it,” I said.
“Oh, you’re too busy?”
“No, it’s just I can’t stand musicals.”
“Oh,” she said, taken aback.
“I could read it, but I won’t like it, no matter how well written it is. I’m your worst reader.”

A lot of people are just not going to like your stuff. Does everyone love “Macbeth”, “Hamlet”, “King Lear”? How many people have actually read them, much less watched them performed?

People like different things. We’re all black sheep. We’re all different. Some people hate tragedies, others thrillers, others comedies or musicals. If you write a wonderful musical with all the best actors, a wonderful director, the best locations, I won’t watch it. Never. I can’t stand them. They drive me crazy. It’s nothing personal, just me. Other people love them. It’s their favorite thing to watch. Am I supposed to see people who love musicals as black sheep in a negative way or do I simply accept that we’re all different with different tastes? It’s like saying you have to fall in love with people from a specific part of a specific country with specific skin color. No. We’re all different. We all like different things.

The ice-cream Ben & Jerry’s was created out of difference. Their unusual types of ice-cream were created taking into consideration Ben’s anosmia, his lack of smell and near lack of taste. Ben kept wanting bigger and bigger chunks in the ice cream to fulfill his need for feel, consistency in food. And now we all get to enjoy ice-creams with a completely different taste sensation.

Most people will never read my three hundred and fifty page novel, irrespective of how good or bad it is. Some people just don’t read novels, even less “literary” novels, and even less, if they’re over two hundred pages. Do I take that personally, or do I just keep writing? I keep writing. The reader, the person who will love my three hundred and fifty page novel, will eventually find the book.

It’s the same with Amazon reviews. I had an American novelist at La Muse who just didn’t get difference. She was pissed that people were one-starring her novel, bringing down her star rating. I tried to explain to her that they’re not her readers, and that they bought the book by mistake. She didn’t want to hear it.

William Blake was basically a pauper when he died, forgotten, save by a few creative friends. He was considered insane by his contemporaries, a real black sheep. It was only with the immense effort of one young biographer called Gilchrist that we even have access to Blake’s beautiful work. Blake found a reader, one, who loved his stuff so much that he pulled him out of obscurity.

It’s okay to be different. It’s okay to get outside your comfort zone. Actually, it’s a tremendous help when you’re trying to create something different, whether it’s an ice-cream or a poem. Think about how boring life is when you’re not pushed to grow, to become a black sheep. How can you create if you’re in a small container? You can only grow to the size of your container. You have to make your container bigger. Then you create larger, more expansive creations. Then you grow as your creations grow.

So, get up on the fence. Then, jump down to the other side, and go off into your wilderness, like Jesus, a Buddha, an Emily Dickinson, a Socrates, a creator.

So thanks for listening. I started with a proverb and I’ll end with again, to remind you, that it’s OK to be a black sheep. As the proverb says,

There tends to be a black sheep even in the whitest flock.

Bíonn caora dhubh ar an tréad is gile.

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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.

That’s a quote from Simone Weil’s essay Human Personality, written in the last year of her short but extraordinary life.

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 7 of my series of episodes on Imagination creativity, based around my book Create.

I used to be in a prison, the prison of Creativity, something I talked about in depth when I explained how Ursula LeGuin made me understand that Creativity has been co-opted by corporations and academia but that Imagination is still available to us as a relatively uncorrupted, or co-opted word. Imagination, which hasn’t been as coopted is one of the ways of breaking out of what I will be talking about today, lexical prisons. So, today I want to talk about lexical prisons, something Weil referred to at the beginning of that quote how “a mind enclosed in language is in prison”.

Last time I spoke about school and education, and how the industrial revolution and a utilitarian, way of educating can be detrimental to the imagination and inspiration of young people, leading them away from creativity instead of potentially opening Doors towards inspiration and enthusiasm.

For example, in this podcast I don’t curse. This is very difficult for me, or at least it was when I first started out, to not curse. Why? Because where I grew up we all curse. Most of my close friends who listen to this podcast are probably thinking, Why isn’t John cursing? That me speaking the way I am, the language I’m using, is not me, that I’m in a kind of prison by not letting myself express myself with curses, which is totally acceptable for Irish males, as that’s our reputation, part of our culture of craic, our maverick, iconoclastic buck the system. And don’t get me wrong. I love listening to the Blindboy podcast, and still curse when I’m having a laugh with friends and family.

So why did I stop? Because when I stepped back to look at my way of communicating I realized I was in a lexical prison. I noticed when I left my country for a long time that I was cursing a lot more than everyone else, but more importantly, the curses were taking up the space where adjectives, nouns, phrases should have been. I’m a writer. I’m all about words, how they’re arranged, which ones are left out, how long the sentence. But when I cursed I didn’t have as much control of what I wanted to express, because words I should have been there were absent. And I saw this as destructive, not creative. It moved me away from creativity, the imagination, using the right word, words, replacing them with expletives. I had placed myself involuntarily into a prison of language, and if we think of words as leading to our destiny, then this lexical awareness becomes even more important. As Gandhi put it:

Our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our character, our character becomes our destiny.

I had been thought to marginalize myself from the more eloquent people in Ireland, the better off, who hardly curse, the kids who were educated at Belvedere College and Trinity, because it wasn’t what they were taught. They didn’t have to curse to feel included with peers because their peers were hardly cursing.

In psychology they have what they call applied psychology, which basically means giving access to marginalized people the tools they need to deal with the anxiety and pain they are in. This access comes with language. For example, how can a person who has anxiety know how to deal with a panic attack if they don’t even have the words to express it? Just those two words, panic and attack, could help so many if they had access to that language. So language is a tool that can help them with the prison of their anxiety, to alleviate the anxiety. First, an individual can accept what happens, or is happening to them, as normal – that we all get panicked at some stage. That’s the first step out of the lexical prison, access to a new language that allows the individual to see they’re not alone. This reduces the suffering. Second, it helps the individual realize that there must be more language out there to help them understand what it is we are going through.

This is why we need to democratize creativity, democratize Imagination, just like we need to democratize psychology, because when we don’t have a language we can’t speak to other people who speak that language in the same way. If we don’t have a language of creation then we can’t speak to people about creating something without thinking we’ve no idea what we’re talking about. As opposed to simply having psychology in the universities and available to people of a certain socio-economic class, it needs to be available to everyone, democratized, applied psychology. We need an applied creativity, applied imagination, just like we need applied psychology. All the people need access, not just the few. The few is not democracy, the few is oligarchy. And oligarchic psychology and oligarchic creativity is simply not healthy for the larger population, only the few.

Which is the whole reason I’m doing this podcast, to democratize creativity and Imagination, even if at times I feel like I’m not using my real voice, by not cursing, because I want to practice what I preach, by using applied creativity, by not allowing the few to have access to expression, just because I came from a different socio-economic class when I was a kid.

I think every one should have access to creative tools, just like everyone should have access to psychological tools. What I am trying to say is that this podcast is my way of creating an applied creativity, just like psychologists create applied psychology, to help everyone, and especially those who don’t have access, to democratize creativity and the Imagination.

Just like with applied psychology, we need adaptive tools to unlearn negative or unhealthy behaviors, what I have called Walls away from creativity and Imagination. We need applied creativity, what I’ve called Doors towards Imagination, to unlearn all our unhealthy artistic behaviors, and lexical prisons are a Wall, just like the many other walls I’ve been talking about.

Again, to further this way of thinking: with awareness, by knowing our creative enemy, our creative enemies, the Walls again, we can reduce a lot of the anxiety about not being a creative person, or for example, feeling like a failure for not creating something perfect on your first attempt. Adaptive tools, adaptive and applied creativity help us recognize when we are falling into a trap, moving towards a Wall.

Another way to look at lexical prisons is to talk about cursing again. Podcasts. They have Parental Advisory labels on them. And this is the beauty of podcasts, people can step outside their lexical prisons and curse as much as they want to, like Blindboy, who I mentioned earlier. He curses a lot, but it doesn’t take away from how eloquent he is. It actually allows him to express himself fully. He lives in Ireland, permanently. It would be inauthentic if he didn’t curse, because of where he comes from. But for me, I’m an immigrant, and because of it I’ve had to look at the way I express myself, because if I say certain words Blindboy says over here in the States, people are disgusted and will judge me. So I’ve used this as away of analyzing my own specific lexical prison and adapted to the culture I’m living in so as not to upset people on the street, because I’m Irish and I’m American. I’m not saying I won’t be cursing in interviews I do later on though. No. Because then I’ll be with people I know, not out in the street, or in a store.

Of course, on TV and syndicated radio it’s the complete opposite. They have to rely on advertisers and foundations to support the salaries of their broadcasters. So people like Blindboy would be muzzled, which would be awful for us, and his creativity. Which is unfortunate because most people aren’t able to talk the way they would with friends and family which means there’s a lack of honesty, a lack of authenticity to their voices because they’re hampered by the language of whatever broadcaster their working for, and then they’re hampered by the political perspective of whoever owns the TV show. So, the words they use are brought under censorship, which is another form of lexical emprisonment. For example, I used to think the people in America were super puritanical, conservative, overly polite, but I was wrong. When you get to know Americans when you’re here, when you listen to them on podcasts, you realize they can be as harsh and forward thinking as anywhere else, but it’s just those voices are not what are seen on the lexically hampered mainstream media.

Our language contributes to our culture. The way we speak, the words we use, and don’t use, condition how we relate to others, how we feel, how we think.

For example, why are words like passion, enthusiasm, madness and inspiration not used more often in a positive way? Because we’ve been taught, consciously or not, to use words like “like” or “interesting”, or phrases such as “I’m on a deadline,” or “I don’t know.” Sentences such as: “Like, I don’t know, like if I like, it’s interesting, like.” What is that sentence actually about, what’s it actually saying? Nothing. That’s what.

Instead of a deadline, can’t we have a due date? Can’t we give birth to a creation, as opposed to dying if we don’t get over some imaginary dead-line? Instead of “I don’t know” can’t we just say how we feel about what we’re responding to? “I don’t understand what you’re saying”, as opposed to the non committal nonsense phrase “I don’t know”. Instead of saying something is “interesting”, can’t we say “That really inspires me.” “That makes me so enthusiastic.” “I’m passionate about…” When people use phrases like these we need to be aware, because they are creating Doors towards creativity and the world of the Imagination, stepping away from the walls of lexical prisons into the world of creation.

Every country has these lexical prisons. In America, they use the word “interesting”, all the time. It’s a language prison because most of the time people are basically saying what you’re saying is not interesting. They’re actually saying, please shut up now. This does not mean something cannot be interesting. It can. But it all depends on the person’s delivery. Are they saying it with enthusiasm, with a positive intention?

In Ireland, we curse a lot. I think it’s because of our servile psyche, but that’s another whole thing. As I said before I had to teach myself not to curse in public. Again, the cursing was a lexical prison, for me. It made me say things in a crude way, without actually saying anything. There were a lot of expletives in my responses but not a lot of substance. As a writer I should be able to express myself with words that show how I feel, the right words.

And a lot of the time we need to get out of our country to experience our lexical prisons, like I did with cursing. Or when I noticed Americans using “interesting” in France, for everything, compared with English English, or Australian, Canadian and New Zealander English, where they hardly used it at all unless something was actually really interesting. Changing our geography, changing where we are can change our perception of the reality we grew up in, where we come from. We get away from the Walls of our lexical ecosystem, out of our lexical habitat, and walk through the Door towards new creative opportunities.

Joyce once wrote “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” Not the most positive thing to say about your country. But Joyce was honest, and created beauty away from the lexical prison he was born into. He did so by escaping, and looking in at the world he came from, from the outside.

So, phrases, ways of speaking, stop us from having opinions. “Oh, that’s interesting,” is not an opinion. Cursing is not an opinion. Sometimes, they’re both giving up, because you put lock yourself inside the walls of your own lexical prison. Words such as “like” do the same thing. It’s filler. “That’s like, the way it is, like.” “You know yourself, like.” It’s noise. It has no substance.

We use to run art expos for a few years at our retreat. People would come from all over the mountains to see the art. They’d drink and have a laugh. But there was one old man, the mayor, who wouldn’t come in. He being a good friend of mine I asked him why he wasn’t coming in. He kind of just looked at me because he didn’t know what to say, this from a fella who is never lost for words. I kept prodding him until he explained that he went into the mine when he was around 14 and that, quote “doesn’t have the right language to be able to express what I’d be looking at. I so not have the right education.” There were tears in his eyes. So obviously, his family, or friends or just some villain had made him think that because he didn’t have the language of creation, that he was not allowed to look at it. He was put in a lexical prison. As he put it, he didn’t have the “intelligence” for it, one of the smartest people I met in those mountains. No matter how I tried I couldn’t get him to come in. No matter how many times I told him “It doesn’t matter what kind of an education you had.

Everyone sees art differently, through their own personal lens. You might hate a painting, I might love it, but you don’t need a degree from a university to say how you feel about something.” He smiled, but refused to go in, stuck inside the Walls of his lexical prison.

Ocean Voung has a bit in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous about this reality of lexical imprisonment where he writes about toxic patriarchal capitalism. He sees American males caught in a lexical prison based on capitalistic violence and war. Expressions such as “You’re killing it.” Or “You’re making a killing.” Or “You blew them up.” Or “I went in there all guns blazing.” And men don’t even realize they’re using this violent language, because it’s so common. Capitalistic success is equated with killing people. Death and destruction of others, capitalizing on them, monetizing them, commodifying them, especially commodifying women’s bodies, is seen as a positive way of using language. It isn’t. It’s a very negative lexical prison.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a wonderful French philosopher, mystic and political activist, but like last time, I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

An eye evades a thing it does not see.

Seachnaíonn súil ní nach bhfeiceann.

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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts, sir!

So that was the opening paragraph from Charles Dicken’s great satiric novel, Hard Times.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. How’s it goin. Howy’re yis all doing out there? Hope yis are all doing well.

This is episode 6 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about how Imagination can encourage us to move away from the Wall of co-opted Creativity, inspired by the wonderful Urusla K LeGuin. Some of you mentioned that my call for “abandoning Creativity” because of first, linguistic reasoning, and secondly ideological ones were too late, which were valid points. Yes, ‘Imagination’ is an abstraction, a conceptualization, an abstract noun rather than a dynamic act, like creativity, but creativity is no longer associated to the same extent Imagination is in contemplating, meditating the images inside you or “picturing oneself”. As I said at the outset of the last episode, I gave examples of how Imagination has been co-opted too, but this is no way to the same degree creativity has. More important again is the way I see it as a lexical prison, an idea I’ll talk more about in the next episode. When I say imprisonment I mean we have to become aware of the conditioning around the words we use in whatever culture we’re living in. Creativity has crossed cultures, but it is far less a meditative act than imagination is, especially in the sense that the Romantics or Blake or LeGuin meant. Imagination is being captured, or trying to be captured by corporations, but it is freer to me, a word that envisions more a part of the act and process of creation. You could say it doesn’t matter what you call it, but it does. I quoted the wonderful Stephane Hessel in the second episode:

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

The machines will gobble words to their ends, but we have to resist them. We have to create a new understanding of our words so we use them to our ends, not the ends of the machines. As a friend just wrote to me from Australia, we have to reclaim the word creativity. But to reclaim it we must first understand what has been turned into, and find a new via media, a new word. To me that’s Imagination, to others it may be something else. What’s important is the realization, that to create is to resist, and to resist is to create, lexical prisons, ideologies created by big pharma, academia, capital.

Today I want to talk about school and education. Because the subject is a large one the episode may run a little longer than the usual 30 minutes or so.

So, facts alone are wanted in life. This is the character of Thomas Gradgrind, a wonderfully satirical Dickensian character, a doubting Thomas in the wrong way, who grinds grades, to use the inventive name Dickens gives him. Gradgrind grinds grades and facts into the heads of children so Imagination can never live there. He is a true villain to these children’s Imagination. Dickens explained the theme of his novel by saying,

“My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else.”

Even though the book was published in 1854, it’s still relevant today. There’s a wonderful oil painting by the Swedish artist Peter Tillberg, done in 1972, which also reflects this uncreative Gradgrind worldview. I’ll put an image of it on my website.

The painting is called “Will You Be Profitable, My Dear?” It depicts 27 students facing us, sitting in uncomfortable wooden desks with almost nondescript faces in a gray and very depressing school room, waiting, to be taught. Trying to imagine any child in that painting being allowed to have a creative imagination is, well, unimaginable. It’s as if the energy has been sucked out of them, out of the whole drab room. And this is where we want to inspire kids? The lights hang down like lost balloons imprisoned in the ceiling. All the pictures on the bulletin board or tacked up there is precise rows, just like the precise, perfect rows of desks. The children seem more like the lights and pictures, imprisoned and tacked into place. What could have been an opportunity to inspire Imagination and inspired learning has become rote facts, as in Dickens’ novel.

How many of us remember our class rooms in straight lines where we sat bored out of our minds most of the time because of all the uninspired facts been dished out to us. Unlike schools like Exeter in New Hampshire, as well as many others, where the collaborative circular table of say the Harkness method is not simply for preschoolers. This image of education is completely different. Instead of all the children facing one person, each one perhaps suffering anxiety over unfinished misunderstood homework, or an impending exam, at the round table we have teachers and students facing each other, inclusive, having a conversation, creatively looking at learning, promoting inquiry and inspiration instead of trying to dismantle it by regurgitating dead facts.

And what happens to children in drills of tables sitting to attention waiting to download facts? Well, like the children in Dickens’ novel, when they don’t have Imagination, they fall into despair.

Gradgrind’s daughter falls into a loveless marriage to a morally bankrupt and ugly banker, while his son Tom turns into a man without any scruples of conscience, a thief who makes an innocent man take the fall for his crime. Witnessing the degradation and downfall of his children, Gradgrind realizes that his own misguided principles have ruined their lives.

In an interview, the Irish writer Alice Taylor, had something to say about children and the Imagination:

The glory of childhood. Children have their own magic. I have my own grandchildren and I can see the older in there eyes about things. It’s great. That children would have time to be children. [We] have to give them time to be children, not to cram their lives with too much activity. I don’t mind them getting bored. I think it’s good for them to be bored. They start exploring then, poking around, and using their imagination. I think that’s our greatest gift, our imagination. As Blake said “Imagination is evidence of the divine.

People are educated to stay in the box. Society’s educational system is based on this broken model, that of the mathematical mind created during the utilitarian Industrial Revolution Dickens so wonderfully satirizes in his novels.

American author, activist and intellectual, Noam Chomsky, in his book based on the great documentary of the same name, Requiem for the American Dream, talks about what he calls the 10 principles of concentration of wealth and power. One of them is Principle #2, “Shape Ideology” and under it, the sub heading of “Education and Indoctrination” where he says the following:

There was an article in the New York Times quoting some doctors who give drugs to children in impoverished areas to try to improve their performance, knowing perfectly well that there’s nothing wrong with the children – there’s something wrong with the society. In fact, the way they put it, we as a society have decided not to modify the society but to modify the children.

The article he refers to was published in the New York Times by Alan Schwarz on October 9, 2012, and it’s called Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School and makes for some disturbing reading, especially a bit where Dr. Ramesh Raghavan says,

“We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families,” and “We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.”

Leading contemporary educational philosophers are asking many questions, one of the most important being: Do Schools Kill Creativity? That’s actually the title of Sir Ken Robinson’s inspiring TedTalk from back in 2009, where his talk makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. People are listening to him too. The video has been viewed over 63 million times. I’ll leave an embed to the video on my site.

There’s a part I love in his talk where he says:

life is not linear; it’s organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college.

His point is that we need to bring a learning revolution to the educational system, not try to put bandages on a heart attack. A whole new system needs to be created, not one that caters to bandaging the many negative symptoms of what is wrong with the old system that even Dickens’ characters lived in. It needs to be more in keeping with what the word school actually means, from the Latin and Greeks roots, “leisure time”, in addition to gymnasium, the training of the body to create a virtuous young person. And of course, Robinson advocates for an educational system based on creativity.

Another wall to creative education is the contemporary advent of helicopter parenting. Today, we’re reacting to situations and parenting based on a 1 to 3% risk of something happening. It’s kind of mad. But why is this? If a kid doesn’t take risks then how can they evolve as creative beings?

When I was a kid jumping ditches and schooling through the fields – isn’t that a wonderful colloquial verb, schooling through the fields? Anyway, when I was scaling trees and chasing cattle I never had my parents running after me wondering whether I was going to be molested or kidnapped. If I hadn’t had that freedom to play and be creative in my day I would never have been able to educate myself away from my parents, with other kids, to overcome the fear of jumping out of a tree or climbing one when I have vertigo. Or to get back up after being nastily fouled playing gaelic football. If my parents were there all the time I would have probably stayed on the ground crying looking for attention instead of getting back up and going after that ball again.

This does not mean there are not inspiring, extraordinarly creative teachers out there. Robinson, in his book “Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education”, mentions many schools and inspirational teachers. An Australian novelist who came to La Muse told me and five other shocked people on retreat once that all of her teachers were inspiring, that all of them had become friends of hers. Myself and the other five creators, in all our years at school and during all our degrees thereafter, could only think of one or two inspiring teachers, three at most. I had one. That’s when we found out about Atlantic College. And Round Square schools, and Steiner schools.

This type of creative teaching, this type of creative learning, is not linear or square. It’s inspired. It’s out of the box. This is inspiration and creation. We need to be planting the seeds of imagination in our children so they move towards Imagination not away from it like Gradgrind’s children, or into drugs because the schools are underfunded in impoverished areas.

Also, another thing, which I’ll address more in a later episode on Failure and Success: fact, if you go to the right schools it’s much easier to get the established jobs. It’s that simple. This is something I used to tell every young creator who came to La Muse. Not to be so hard on themselves. Yes, it’s about getting lucky, but also about who you know. If you went to the right school for writing, or art or building, then you have a much better chance of getting ahead, getting the job. Most young creators are not aware of this and beat themselves up over not being successful, thinking that going to the right schools is some kind of urban myth or conspiracy theory. Well, it’s not. It’s just simple fact, and if creators are aware of it then they know they just have to work harder to get their creations out into the world.

For example, if you’re a highly creative young woman who wants to change women’s rights through political activism your chances of becoming a minister are no way as strong as a student who went to say Sciences Po, The Paris Institute of Political Studies. The school’s alumni include many of the French and international political elite. 7, yes, 7 recent French presidents studied at Sciences Po. 13 French prime ministers studied there. 12 foreign heads of state or government. The same goes if that young woman wants to be a creative executive. There are the six CEO’s of France’s largest companies who went there.

And that’s just France. The private schools like Eton and Harrow in England, which are ironically called “public schools” or Belvedere College in Ireland or the many Ivy League universities here in the states, or as they call them here in the states, “colleges”, all give access – a very important word that, access. They give access to positions of creative power or more importantly, access to the tools for so called creative “success”, economic, social, cultural.
I’m not saying this means you have to go to college, or one of those colleges, but it helps, a lot, even if there are many, many exceptions to the rule.

Ray Bradbury talked to host James Day about his career, back in the early seventies, on the show Day at Night. This is what Bradbury has to say about about college for a writer:

I never went to college — I don’t believe in college for writers. The thing is very dangerous. I believe too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual, and the intellect is a great danger to creativity … because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth — who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.

I’ll embed the youtube interview on my website. It’s wonderful.

Then there’s another American writer, the same one I quoted in my first episode, Kurt Vonnegut:

What I hate about public school systems is that they cut out the arts because they’re not a way to make a living – it is such a human thing to do, and it is the experience of becoming if you make something that wasn’t in the universe before. And that feels so good to human beings, and to cheat kids out of that is criminal. Everybody should be painting now or drawing or whatever, just as they should be singing or taking walks or falling in love or whatever. It’s so human. And not to teach kids how to do this is to cheat them terribly.

That’s a quote taken from part of a wonderful conversation Kurt Vonnegut had back in September of 2005 when he was talking about book A Man Without a Country. Again, I’ll put a link to the audio in the transcript of this episode.

So, I have two degrees, one of them an honors Masters degree. But school never helped me on my path in any helpful way to creating our artists and writers retreat in the south of France. It never helped me write novels. It never helped me create this podcast.

After secondary school, I went to the nearest place I thought you could learn how to write, university. However, Ireland in the nineties was not the place to study creative writing. They had the university of East Anglia in England. They had the whole creative writing cottage industry in America. Ireland? Nothing. Not one course.

What did I do? Studied English, of course. Wouldn’t that help me write? Studying Shakespeare, novelists, poets? No. It was a nightmare. Hermeneutics. Cultural materialism. Post Structuralism. New Historicism. Isms polluted my poor head like Gradgrind’s children. And every time I wrote an essay it had to lean towards that specific lecturer’s political “ism”. It was about as creative as hitting your head off a concrete wall.

When I did my degree in Greek and Roman Civilization, Marcus Aurelius, one of my favorite writers, was never mentioned. Maybe I missed something, but I never even remember a footnote where the man was mentioned. It was only later, fifteen years after my degree, that I discovered his wonderful “Meditations”. Then, the movie “Gladiator” came out. Remember the old king? Yes, he was Marcus Aurelius. That’s when I really realized how incompatible my “education” was with actually educating me about creativity, about what inspires me.

After two honors degrees, I went directly into the service industry where, surprise, surprise, I learned nothing about writing, again.

How many teachers during your whole educational experience really inspired you? I mean someone who took the time to really care and help you understand what it is you’re on this planet for.

I had one, for one semester.

Over the last two decades I’ve asked that same question to a lot of creators and they’ll say anywhere between one and three teachers. I mentioned the lady earlier who went to Atlantic College. She’s an aberration. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if the education she received was the norm?

Some of the writers and artists who go to La Muse are also secondary school teachers. On one retreat we had six teachers from four different continents. Two of them had jobs creating the new curriculum of two different subjects in their country. I asked them if they had watched Ken Robinson’s TedTalks. They didn’t know who he was. I asked them what they thought about the United World Colleges, Round-square schools, Steiner, etc. They hadn’t heard of them either. This scared me. How can there be so much passionate discussion about issues in education that don’t make it into schools? If I, just some guy living in the middle of nowhere in the south of France, seemed to know more than career teachers about what seems like vital stuff in regard to the philosophy of education, and how important creation is for children, it’s no wonder the system isn’t changing. Don’t get me wrong. These teachers were wonderful people and they love what they do, but if they’re the experts and they’re the ones writing the curriculum, well then, that worries me.

But, the problem is not the teachers, it’s the educational system. A recent example would be “The No Child Left Behind” program in the States which seems to leave the majority of kids behind. Because of it over 70% of school districts in America have gotten rid of, or cut back on, their arts programs. Schools teach for testing, not learning. If the system doesn’t empower creative teachers how are they supposed to help motivate children?

We’re squeezing the arts out of the curriculum. In England, the government wants “core subjects”, the Ebacc, sciences, English, maths, a language, geography or history as compulsory for secondary school kids. This decreases access to dance, art, music, drama. In America, there’s the same over-emphasis on “core” science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so called “STEM” subjects.

Ironically, it was only when I arrived in America that I discovered there were whole departments full of lecturers actually teaching creative writing. I was just a little bit frustrated you could say. Why didn’t they have them in Ireland, the home of so many Nobel prize winners in fiction — Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney, not to forget people like Joyce?

Our aptitudes are completely different from those of the person sitting beside us. The educational system doesn’t cater to that. Never mind that, if you get ten people into a room to learn something, all of them will not learn the same way. Isn’t that a creative opportunity, both in how we teach and how we learn, to harness an imaginative way forward.

Also, if you think because you were bad at school then you’re not alone. There are so many creative people where school was not a place they excelled. At school, Rodin was described as the worst pupil. He applied to France’s most prestigious art school, École des Beaux-Arts, but was rejected three times. His uncle called him uneducable.

Then there’s Beethoven. He was awkward with the violin and preferred to play his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him hopeless as a composer. Stephen Spielberg was rejected by the University of Southern California School of Cinema Arts, twice. Louis Pasteur, the father of microbiology, was a mediocre pupil. He preferred fishing and sketching. In 1841, at the Collège Royal de Besançon he failed to get his degree in science with special mathematics. He finally got it in 1842 from Dijon with a bad grade in chemistry. Again, he failed the entrance test for the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1842. He finally succeeded in 1844.

Don’t let education or schooling be a Wall away from Imagination. For the most part education doesn’t teach you creative intelligence, how to create what you want to create. You want to educate yourself in what you want to create? Don’t give up. Learn by doing.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from Dickens and as usual I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means: Heavy is the load of ignorance. Or in English english: Ignorance is a heavy load.

Is trom an t-ualach an t-aineolas.

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Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.