Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for attending this week’s special Soul Shelter convocation. Now allow me to find my notes. … Ah, here they are.

(Shuffling papers)

Well, before we proceed I must tell you that the view from this podium is lovely. You all look just swell in your evening attire.  Please thank your servers, they’re doing a fine job, aren’t they?

(Applause)

Now for tonight’s introduction:

As regular readers well know, a recurring subject on Soul Shelter is one we refer to somewhat dramatically as Technology versus the Soul. Tonight we convene to formally acknowledge the emergence of an organism which embodies this conflict splendidly.

This organism, already amongst us but hitherto nameless, now bears a title thanks to Mr. Dalton Conley and his new book Elsewhere U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.

This organism Mr. Conley dubs The Intravidual .

Prophesied more than a decade ago by Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies (1998), the characteristics of the Intravidual and the sociological implications of its existence are familiar to us by now. Here’s how Birkerts described them:

We will establish a wide lateral interaction, dealing via screen with more and more people at the same time that our sustained face-to-face encounters diminish. It will be harder and harder — we know this already — to step free of our mediating devices. There will be people who never in their lives have the experience that was, until our time, the norm — who will never stand in isolated silence among trees and stones, out of shouting distance of any other person, with no communication implement, forced to confront the slow, grainy momentum of time passing.

Most of us recall an era of Individualism. We were born in one. We were subject to the laws of time as we waited on the mail, traveled to a friend’s home, or bided the dark hours when the world’s transmissions took a pause. We were subject to ourselves: solitude and privacy were almost unavoidable. We chose and savored them or had them thrust upon us and learned to make the most of them.

Many of us kept journals or diaries, recording and reflecting in sacred secrecy. If we wished, we could clasp the covers shut with tiny locks.

In contrast, today’s Intravidual blogs his thoughts for the world (it is not the purpose of a blog to cultivate privacy). One doesn’t tuck a blog away in a drawer and allow its recorded contemplations to fructify in the soul. The Intravidual clicks “Publish,” watches pixels flash into form, and eagerly awaits comments.

We used to send messages to friends by post, endorsing our salutations with the slow intaglio of the hand and creasing the papers with care. The Intravidual defaults to e-mail (perhaps customized with colored fonts).

We used to relate voice-to-voice by telephone or face-to-face over coffee. The Intravidual defaults to text messages, or connects briefly by voice-mail to alert his correspondents to incoming e-mails. Quickness is crucial, for the Intravidual must maintain countless simultaneous connections to Intraviduals elsewhere and everywhere.

The Intravidual is determined and defined by the efficiency of his gadgets, by his light-speed inclusion in a conversation, an argument, a realm of professed opinion chattering at every hour and encompassing everywhere. The Intravidual exists in a sphere of selves, a sphere that in Mr. Conley’s terms lies perpetually elsewhere– that is, never right here right now. Through his gadgets the Intravidual channels his work directly into his home, once a private space. Fiber optics allow him to constantly import the world and export himself.

Where is nature in this new Intravidualistic order? Where is time, whose constraints once fostered privacy, silence, solitude, which things in turn begat the illuminations of art, religion, and philosophy through the ages?

Faced with what we are becoming, it’s important to recall what we have been. Dictionaries are helpful:

Individual / adj. & n. adj. 1 single 2 particular; special; not general 3 having a distinct character 4 characteristic of a particular person 5 designed for use by one person. n. 1 a single member of a class 2 a single human being as distinct from a family or group 3 colloq. a person (From Middle English = indivisible).

Individual, you might say, is soul. Poet John Keats (1795-1821) described a soul as an Intelligence that has acquired an Identity of its own.

What do we mean by “soul” here at Soul Shelter? I like Birkerts’ definition:

My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that awareness we carry of ourselves as mysterious creatures at large in the universe. The soul is that part of us that smelts meaning and tries to derive a sense of purpose from experience. … Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectedness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public. We feel it, or feel through it, when we are in sacral spaces, when we love, when we respond to natural or artistic beauty.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Intravidual is here. Long live the individual and the soul.*

This concludes our special convocation.

*Some handy tips for cultivating anti-Intravidualism: 1) Try keeping an offline journal, for your eyes only 2) Set a time for powering on, and limit time spent online 3) Write a letter the old-fashioned way 4) Invite a friend for a face-to-face visit, or meet for conversation over coffee 5) Take a walk (longer the better, no connective devices allowed) 6) Read books.

(Thanks to reader Steve for pointing us to Conley’s book.)

(This post appears courtesy of the Soul Shelter archives.)

You may also enjoy:

“Soul School”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“Why Multitasking Slows Productivity — and What To Do About It”

“Six Ways to Stretch Time”

“The Hazards of Career, the Rewards of Vocation“

The Creativity/Inspiration genre can be problematic, tending toward cheery but chicken-soup-style platitudes at one extreme, and falsely authoritative (read: unhelpful) advice at the other.

To my tastes, the most useful and invigorating compendium for artists and creatives would instruct but never pander, inspire but never coddle. I’d prefer confessional—and therefore comforting—bluntness like Annie Dillard’s in The Writing Life:

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

I’d mix this with the high incitements of Thoreau’s Walden:

Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

And I’d toss in some Henry James…

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

…and some Rilke …

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us… if there are dangers, we must try to love them.

… and then we’d be talking. (Brenda Ueland’s classic If You Want to Write comes close to the mark, as I recall. And then maybe…ahem…this blog skirts the ideal territory too.)

But as it happens, I recently had cause for great delight in my (belated) discovery of The Creative Habit, renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp’s professed “practical guide” to jumpstarting and maintaining creativity. With its storied insights, prodigious good sense, razor wit, and occasional exalted utterance, The Creative Habit embodies my elusive ideal in many ways.

The essential basis of the book is the following assertion:

In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

The de-romanticism here is potentially helpful in itself. Other books of the genre have likewise labored to strip away the highfalutin hang-ups that encumber creative flow (e.g., It’s gotta spring perfect from the soul! Or: I’ve gotta feel the thunderbolt of inspiration!), but too often they end up sounding purely utilitarian or mercenary.

The creative type, meanwhile, tends to fancy herself more practitioner than professional—more artist than industrialist. She needs to preserve the sanctity in her dedication or it’s all for naught.

Tharp’s graceful style in The Creative Habit (co-created by Mark Reiter) serves artist and practitioner well, striking just the right balance between the necessarily stern pragmatism of a creative coach and the knowing sensitivity—even near religiousness—of a dancer.

There’s a difference between a work’s beginning and starting to work.

Now there’s a truth that’s blunt, affirmative, semi-mystical, and indispensably useful all at once.

Throughout, Tharp forgoes pandering, as when she obliterates one of the most common excuses made by would-be creatives who balk at beginning:

Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.

Neither does she coddle. She goads the reader to get down to work, not by appeasing some finicky inspiration-membrane but more simply by cutting out distractions (movies, multitasking, numbers, background music), building a tolerance for solitude, and learning to recognize the creative boon of limited resources (here she touches beautifully upon the theme of resistance, which I explored a few weeks back).

No deprivation, no inspiration… Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.

But I don’t want to make this book sound like a scourge, for beyond such coldwater splashes, The Creative Habit is that thing most precious and rare to its genre: a perennial resource replete with dependable, practicable exercises. Each chapter’s impressive mélange of philosophy, historical anecdote, personal biography, analogy, and secrets shared is followed by a mini-workbook mindfully designed to help one hone a skill, harness a memory, awaken ideas, or escape from a rut.

In these exercises, and in overall scope, The Creative Habit is overwhelmingly enlivening.

Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom: ‘Why do I have to obey the rules?’ ‘Why can’t I be different?’ ‘Why can’t I do it my way?’

For those who have yet to begin, Tharp will help you get started. For those already underway, she will supply counsel in spades.

Either way, The Creative Habit is a treasure for creative thinkers looking to make the long haul.

(Thanks to Soul Shelter reader Daniel for recommending this book.)

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“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory”

“Here’s to Success Finding How to Succeed Books”

“Eavesdrop on These Inspiring Conversations”

“The Merit of Mistakes”

“Soul School”

“Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel”

Thanks to my twelve-year-old son’s craving for action flicks, in the past week I saw two extraordinary movies: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Despite mind-numbing chains of battles and explosions (Transformers was essentially a two-hour-long fight scene), I found both movies, in their own ways, to be strangely soul-affirming.

Wait! Don’t give up on me yet, there’s some explaining to do.

In terms of story and pacing, Transformers was, well, awful. Watching it was like listening to mindless, high volume, fast-tempo disco music for two hours nonstop. While the kids stayed riveted to the screen, I got bored and my wife went to sleep, despite the racket.

But! The movie’s effects, or rather the virtual worlds it created, were absolutely mind-boggling.

In one scene, for example, two giant robots battle atop one of Egypt’s great pyramids as viewers take in the action from aboard a helicopter circling crazily above. Watching the pyramid crumble as the battle crescendos is breathtaking – it looks completely and perfectly realistic.

This marriage of computers and animated photo realism is astounding, a huge leap from just a few short years ago. The use of digital technology to tell beautiful lies (or at least visually spectacular lies) has reached new heights. Bravo to the people who make this possible.

Last night we watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. This Hasbro-sponsored vehicle, squarely aimed at jumpstarting the toy giant’s line of action figures, is surprisingly good: well plotted and paced, with a clever, sequel-inducing ending ensuring that in coming years kids will continue to clamor for toys featured in G.I. Joe II, III, and IV.

And once again, the effects — or rather the landscapes, seascapes, deserts, and icescapes portrayed — are dazzling in their depth, realism, and detail. It seems filmmakers have reached the point where they can literally create full-motion digitized worlds, limited only by their imaginations.

I’m eager to view this digital re-creation as some sort of soul-crushing form of techno-culture. But I cannot. It’s entertainment, and while excessively focused on ridiculous super-warriors fighting with outlandish weapons, it’s also thrilling, and beautiful. Surely at some point more film digimeisters will, like Miyazaki Hayao, turn their formidable talents to creating new worlds and fresh story forms not driven by relentless action and violence.

Maybe my aversion to techno-culture has been softened by the rapid digitization of an art form closer to home.

As a proudly amateur musician, I’ve been inspired in past months by an amazing piece of software that helps users practice, learn, and perform by creating digitized “virtual” accompaniments.

The results this software produces, like the movies my son favors, are extraordinarily realistic. For example, this past weekend I recorded a tune with six instruments (live, no overdubs): trumpet, guitar, keyboards, strings, bass, and drums. In this two-minute clip (MP3 weighing about 2.6M), every instrument — except one — is computer-generated. Can you guess which instrument is not digital? (Hint: it’s the one least expertly played).

So I’ve rethought my stance on techno-culture, at least where the arts are concerned, and now embrace my music-dedicated laptop almost daily.

With respect to person-to-person communications and work, though, I still believe that protecting the soul against the deadening effects of techno-culture remains one of the defining issues of our time.

Which makes it a good time to announce my sabbatical from posting at Soul Shelter.

Here’s why I’m going to take a rest from the writing: First, I’m in the home stretch of completing a doctorate in business administration (DBA). My theme is entrepreneurship, specifically business models, and even more specifically, international business model portability (why some business models transfer overseas more readily than others).

Here’s the challenge: Writing each of my Soul Shelter posts takes me takes me a solid four hours, plus extra hours agonizing about writing the post, or about not writing the post. Then there’s monitoring the blog, responding to comments, plus lots of related e-mail reading/writing. It all takes a lot of time, and a sizable chunk of mental bandwidth.

While tremendously fun and satisfying, right now I’ve got a very big Homework Assignment for which I need weeks of free, wide-open time/psychic space to complete. So for the time being I’m going to take a rest from my weekly Soul Shelter posts, and stay away from the work computer, blogs, and e-mail as much as possible.

In the interim, Mark will continue his excellent weekly missives, and we have some outstanding guest writers lined up to fill some of my Wednesday midnight post slots. Also, Mark tells me you’ll continue to hear Tim Clark echoes throughout my absence as he periodically delves into the Soul Shelter archives to unearth a few of my early posts.

I hope to return around mid-February of next year. And in the meantime I hope you’ll continue to look to Soul Shelter for the inspirational, fun, and soul-nourishing weekly posts you’ve come to expect from us.

Cheers to all!

Tim

You may also enjoy:

“Beautiful, Soul-Affirming Untruths“

“In Defense of Solitude (Part One)“

“To Recharge, Unplug“

“A Hymn to the Library“

Here in the Pacific Northwest the tree-leaves that haven’t yet fallen are burning bright with reds and yellows. Over the last several weeks twilight has come on noticeably earlier, and with our clocks now turned back an hour, we find ourselves in full tilt toward the year’s shortest days and longest nights.

As deep autumn alters the structure of my weeks ahead, time is much on my mind. So I thought I’d offer a few simple if occasionally offbeat ideas for “stretching” time — not, mind you, in the quantitative sense of maximizing productivity, but in the qualitative sense of remembering and appreciating how rich and deep with life every fleeting hour can be if one seeks one’s fulfillment in each.

1. Log-Off, Disconnect, Unplug

In his book The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts makes an important point about the nature of time:

‘Duration’ is deep time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing. Until quite recently, people on the planet lived mainly in terms of duration time. Time not artificially broken, but shaped around natural rhythmic cycles, time bound to the integrated functioning of the senses, the perceptions. We have destroyed that duration… We have fractured the flow of time…into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price.

Given the way our ultra-connected, online existences splinter time into frantic parcels, one’s first and most reliable method of stretching time these days is to switch off one’s devices in favor of analog reality, to become electronically inaccessible, to deliberately remove oneself from the pixellated up-to-the-minute what’s-new-what’s-now? hubbub, and step back into the true Now of the natural world.

In other words, whenever possible choose solitary introspection over information acquisition, or face-to-face interaction over hyper-connectivity.

And once offline, consider each of the following.

2. Travel, or Just Go Someplace New to You

We’ve all experienced a certain strange sensation while walking up a path and back in a place we’d never been before: Always, on that first outbound walk the path seems much longer than it does on the return.

A similar thing happens, on a larger scale, when one travels — especially when one travels abroad. While plunged amid a different culture, and perhaps surrounded by an alien language, each week can seem a month, each month a year, and each year a lifetime in its own right.

In traveling, or just going someplace new, one puts oneself into the realm of the unexpected, where one’s senses and imagination are stimulated to a degree that simply doesn’t occur in everyday life. This has a profound time-stretching effect. In the thick of business as usual, on the other hand, one’s response to the world is largely habitual, and through the lens of habit time seems only to grow more scarce.

Try it. Go away and think nothing of a homecoming. Go as one likes to go by the sea in the night, farther and farther out under the many silent stars. Try it. –Rainer Maria Rilke

3. Undertake a New Project Whose End Is Nowhere in Sight

Write a novel (no outlines allowed). Research your genealogy. Bond with a child. Volunteer at your community center or library or local tree-planting organization.

This point relates to my previous one, for the activities I just mentioned call for a new, often imaginative disposition. Each is an undertaking bound to break up routines of thought and behavior, and thus to take one out of one’s own customary sense of time.

4. Read Books About Other People’s Lives (Fiction and Non)

A wise and inspiring teacher (who happens to be my wife) puts it this way for her students:

We read to live a thousand lives with the one we’re given.

What could I possibly amend?

5. People-Watch

This is one of my favorite activities. I park myself at a busy spot (in my car or on a bench) and simply observe the various characters strolling or hurrying past, getting coffee, exercising their dogs, chasing after toddlers, waiting for the bus, etc.

The time-stretching benefits of people-watching are much like reading. Again, it’s all about exploring one’s own imaginative capacities.

I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms. I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die. — Hermann Hesse*

6. Meditate

This one’s probably obvious. But many people are unsure about what meditation really is. Think of it, if you like, as sitting and doing nothing — but remember that it’s got to be unadulterated inactivity accompanied by presence of mind, which is a very different state from the vacant passivity arrived at while, say, watching TV. Meditation, as I recommend it, means centering one’s focus upon one’s own pulse and breath, thinking about nothing else in particular. It means removing oneself from all stimuli save the flow of time.

It is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. – Charles Lamb

My previous two suggestions, reading and people-watching, could be understood as more active forms of meditation — but how often these days does one consciously free oneself to do nothing at all, to exist for a while fully separate (and still awake) from all pressing matters and all noise? To do so is to return to a core, and to bask in what Birkerts calls “deep time.”

I suspect that this kind of sitting meditation is today, more than ever, confused with — and avoided as — boredom. But really, boredom, at least as we often mean the term, is the opposite of meditation, for unlike meditation, boredom itself does nothing to renew and enliven the soul’s rich sense of time and time’s elasticity. (This fine article in The Boston Globe, however, makes a good case for reassessing boredom’s benefits).

Here’s a final word for today on the subject of boredom, time, and time-stretching, written some eighty years ago by the great German novelist Thomas Mann:

What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony — uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When every day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. …We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time — and thereby renew our sense of life itself. **

*Hesse translation by James Wright

**Mann translation by John E. Woods

(This is a renascent post from Soul Shelter’s Year-One archives)

You might also enjoy:

“Let Us Begin”

“When Time Stopped”

“The Heroic Journey”

“On Slowness”

“Why ‘Time Management’ is Nonsense”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“The Art of Looking Deeply”

“Time to Give In, Time to Give Up”

“A Hymn to the Library“

Then we boarded, then we were in the air, and I watched as two rows in front of me one of the young girls started braiding her long, flaxen hair.

Somehow the expert weaving mesmerized me, and suddenly time stopped. There was a pleasant buzzing drone, and I felt like animals must feel, just sensing, no thinking, no disembodied “mind” driving the body like a car. Everything seemed one.

I was in the moment, and didn’t have to read, or write, or watch a movie, or do something or be productive or think about tasks ahead or past behind. I was content to watch the girl’s fingers braiding and not anticipate the next moment, which never comes anyway, because this is the moment: Now, the Now that is, the Now that will be, the Now that was. It’s all one Now, and always was, and I knew this again entirely, as I hadn’t for some very long time.

Then the braiding of the flaxen hair was finished, and I started to think about the extraordinary experience of time stopping and scrambled to write this down. But thinking was my mistake; it made the moment disappear. I scribbled down some of the words you see here, then looked back at the braided hair, and tried to recover the feeling, but it was gone, and wouldn’t be willed back.

So I finished the eight-hour flight, with some movies and some reading and some sleeping, but without another Now moment.

And today, some months later, I fondly remember that Now, and how now cannot be willed into Now.

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“Bushido“

“The Heroic Journey”

Last week I presented some ideas concerning restriction as a creative catalyst, and touched upon the writings of John Dewey (1859-1952), one of the finest intellects this country ever produced.

Dewey was the rare sort of soul whose scope of achievement seems wholly the product of genius born into an earlier and more salutary age. He was a preeminent university educator for most of his adult life, a major philosophical influence on American pedagogy, an accomplished psychologist, an authoritative social commentator and Humanist spokesman, and a highly effective political activist. It’s enough to boggle the mind of contemporary admirers.

Somehow, Dewey also managed to compose some of the most adroit and eloquent writing in the “side area” of aesthetics, and it’s here that he had much to say about the paradoxical benefits, in creative terms, of a somewhat blocked creative expression. Last week I wrote:

It’s hard work we do whenever we seek to raise an idea from the dark recesses of germination into the light of day. No matter the freedoms or constraints of our circumstances, such work is always hard—it was never really meant to be easy.

John Dewey would concur. In fact, I was basically paraphrasing the man.

And today I’d like to share some selected excerpts from Dewey’s great work Art As Experience (1934).

Instead of “restriction,” Dewey’s keyword is “resistance.”

“Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—whether through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed.

Dewey refers to biology and the adaptive processes of living creatures in order to argue the usefulness of resistance. It’s a good frame of reference, and gets one thinking positively about resistance as imperative to personal and creative growth and evolution.

However, because I’m excerpting selectively here, I should make clear that Dewey’s analogy is not meant to point out the ruthlessness required for survival of the fittest, nor the merits of Social Darwinism — nothing of the kind. Rather, in truer Dewey manner, the subject here is the mysterious, unexpected ways our creativity is enhanced or reduced in the face of certain inevitable forces (the day job, the dishes, distractions), and thus the ways our ideas succeed or fail to come to full fruition. In the following passages we could substitute “creativity” for “life” and cut to the analogy’s chase.

If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life [creativity] grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives….

If life [creativity] continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life [creativity]. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually takes place. …Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, because of, tension.

Granted, too much resistance can prove harmful, but medium-size tension can be a good thing. If the resistance we face is not completely obstructive, and we’re allowed to make steady, incremental progress toward our creative ideal, we may ultimately find ourselves arrived at what Dewey calls “a more extensive balance … a more significant life.”

Pushing through resistance, our ideas get toned up, driven to evolve into something better, more creative, and more robust, somewhat in the way a body grows immune to disease by low-level exposure. The ideas’ final execution may altogether outshine our original concepts. What’s more, we may find that the whole process of germination, resistance, and achievement has taken us to new personal and creative heights.

Strange as it seems, a creative undertaking — whatever it is, so long as it is serious — will likely profit from influences reasonably adverse to its expression (the day-job, etc.). In fact, Dewey sees resistance, and the surmounting of it by the creative soul, as aspects of a simple natural rhythm — the yin and yang, or perhaps winter and summer, of existence — and indispensable to a fulfilling life experience. Too much won too easily rarely satisfies, as many a morality tale has told us.

The rhythm of loss of integration with environment and recovery of union not only persists in man but becomes conscious with him; its conditions are material out of which he forms purposes. … Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. …

Contrast of lack and fullness, of struggle and achievement, of adjustment after consummated irregularity, form the drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one. The outcome is balance and counterbalance. These are not static nor mechanical. They express power that is intense because measured through overcoming resistance. …

…A world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envisage with pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict. Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is capable of esthetic quality. The live being recurrently loses and re-establishes equilibrium with his surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. …

And yet, of course, having pushed through all obstacles and ushered a creative work into existence, we learn anew that the natural rhythm of germination and resistance must continue. We see that engaging this process (“not shunning moments of resistance and tension”), and growing in our most meaningful work over time, is the stuff of a fulfilling life.

The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew. Any attempt to perpetuate beyond its term the enjoyment attending the time of fulfillment and harmony constitutes withdrawal from the world. Hence it marks the lowering and loss of vitality. But, through the phases of perturbation and conflict, there abides the deep-seated memory of an underlying harmony, the sense of which haunts life like the sense of being founded on a rock. …

And now monsieur Dewey gets downright poetic:

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. …Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates opposition and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation.

There is no art without the composure that corresponds to design and composition in the object. But there is also none without resistance, tension, and excitement; otherwise the calm induced is not one of fulfillment.

Artists and creatives: give thanks for the eloquent insight of John Dewey. Fear not resistance. Harness it if you can. And keep working.

You may also enjoy:

“Roadblocks, Resitrictions, and Other Helpful Things”

“Working Without Working”

“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“Secrets of Creative Longevity”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan”

“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“Are You An Amateur? Why Not?”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

That’s because when the sculpture’s head is fastened on, viewers see before them a contrite, bowing figure of Mao Zedong, seeking the viewer’s forgiveness for atrocities committed against millions during the Cultural Revolution.

Headless, the sculpture remains innocuous and safe from official sanction. Assembled, it breaks the taboo of criticizing China’s leaders.

“We wanted to portray him as a human being, a regular person confessing for the wrongs he’s committed,” said Zhen, quoted in a recent article in the International Herald Tribune.

The Gao Brothers focus on what Oscar Wilde called “the proper aim of art” — “the telling of beautiful, untrue things.”

The Gao’s sculpture is, in short, a beautiful lie. Mao never confessed to wrongdoing, and of course never can. Yet while impossible, such a confession is a beautiful thought.

The IHT article about The Gao Brothers prompted me to consider that most art — fiction, theater, film, paintings, music, dance, sculpture — consists of beautiful, untrue things.

Beautiful, soul-affirming untruths.

You may also enjoy:

“Art Awakens Us: The Diving Bell & the Butterfly“

“My Kid Could Paint That“

“The Beautiful, Untrue Things Entrepreneurs Believe“

“Stacking Stones, Letting Them Fall“

“Restriction breeds invention!”

While fielding audience questions at a public reading a few weeks back, the deeply gifted fiction writer Ethan Canin remarked thusly on the usefulness of limitations—and even roadblocks—for any fiction writer. This, of course, is an idea all creative souls can seize upon.

Canin, author of the now classic 1988 short story collection Emperor of the Air (his auspicious debut at age 28), was talking about restriction in terms both of the nitty-gritty components of a short story and the overall circumstances of a writer’s life.

A teacher at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, Canin said he’s fond of prompting his students to write a short story that will “make the reader cry over a pair of socks”—a supreme example of creative restriction. He’s always surprised and delighted by the results.

Some years ago I read an interview with Canin in which he advocated a regimen likewise dependent upon restriction. He claimed he deliberately restricted himself to one half-hour per day of writing time. (A measly half-hour?!) The amount of productivity generated by so minuscule an allowance, he said, was astonishing.

This calls to mind some comments by another fine contemporary author, Annie Proulx, from a 2003 reading in San Francisco. Proulx restricts herself creatively by deliberately avoiding all regimens. Much like Canin, rather than bemoaning the scarcity of time, she embraces it and lets it augment her energies. But unlike Canin, Proulx works scattershot. She’s done this so long she knows no other way:

I don’t have a regular writing regimen. I write whenever I can get the time—and usually it’s a matter of shoehorning some work in somewhere or it doesn’t happen. I’ll write if I wake up at 2:00 a.m., and I often do. … I’ve never kept a set writing schedule. That sounds really bad to me.

Naturally, Proulx is an extreme example. Not everybody can be so dedicated as to relinquish structure entirely. But she makes a helpful point, underlining the main one here.

As Canin’s notion goes, imposed limitation—in ideas or images, as well as in actual time to create—can galvanize the imagination in ways that, paradoxically, the writer given unlimited creative freedom may seldom experience. (Canin’s own widely read story, “Accountant,” itself revolves around a peculiarly moving pair of socks.)

This notion is not new, of course. The timeworn adage “Resistance sparks the flame” suggests something similar. But such ideas have fallen out of fashion in a present contemporary moment geared toward job obsession, live-work lifestyles, and all-or-nothing dispositions in most endeavors.

The great lot of us, I’ll venture to say, have always got an idea or two simmering on the back burner—but tend to despair of ever realizing them. Our creative sweat and tears, we feel, are sucked dry in making a living. Our time is gobbled up “on the clock” at work. We embody the modern dichotomy of creative energy at odds with practical demands, and we get … well, depressed. Working for the buck, we feel we’ve been coerced into betrayal of our own more creative impulses. Our guilt induces inertia.

But how liberating to think that “distractions,” “creative roadblocks,” and the scarcity of time may prove in many ways beneficial to imaginative production—and not strictly detrimental as many a creative soul tends to believe.

Writing about art back in 1932, the great American thinker John Dewey suggested this very thing. Where Canin’s key term is “restriction,” Dewey prefers “resistance,” but his gist is much the same:

Resistance accumulates energy … The resistance offered to immediate expression of emotion is precisely that which compels it to assume rhythmic form.

In other words, it is resistance to its production that makes good art good. (The rarity of unadulterated inspiration notwithstanding.) Dewey goes on to invoke Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term, “salutary antagonism,” a beautiful term we might usefully substitute for the more negative “creative roadblock.”

And here I’m reminded of a delightful snippet from Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety:

He said he understood that I was into a second novel. How did that go? I told him: Slow and hard. Good, he said. Hard writing makes easy reading.

How inspiring, helpful, and certainly reassuring are these outmoded perspectives for anybody frustrated by an abundance of back burner ideas and lack of front burner “space” to implement them. And I daresay that’s most of us.

It’s hard work we do whenever we seek to raise an idea from the dark recesses of germination into the light of day. No matter the freedoms or constraints of our circumstances, such work is always hard—it was never really meant to be easy.

So maybe our cramped schedules and day-to-day errands are not the enemies to creativity we suppose, but in fact allies in disguise (“salutary antagonisms” perhaps). Maybe our back burner simmers away all the while, reducing the sauce to gourmet richness. The key, of course, is to keep one’s eyes on that pot. Why not spend the little time we’re spared stirring the sauce, rather than stewing in frustration? It just may surprise us what a few turns of the whisk can yield.

In coming weeks, I’ll further explore this subject of Restriction as it pertains to creative life, beginning next week with more John Dewey.

Till then, simmer and stir.

You may also enjoy:

“Working Without Working”

“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“Secrets of Creative Longevity”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan”

“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“Are You An Amateur? Why Not?”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

The scene was the Bend Venture Conference and the focus was verbal pitches (written business plans had already been vetted by the conference organizers). Representatives from a dozen companies mounted the stage in turn to deliver short overviews of their ventures. Eight were in a “Wild Card” competition wherein speakers delivered their pitches within a strictly-enforced two-minute time frame.

Audience members voted to select the Wild Card a winner, so personality, delivery, and presentation order weighed as heavily as venture feasibility and the entrepreneur’s track record. This year’s Wild Card winner was ADASA, a maker of specialized RFID tag encoders for a technology category that has been poised to become the Next Big Thing for ten years running.

Competing for the grand prize of a $120,000 equity investment were four other companies previously reviewed by the conference organizers and selected as outstanding potential vehicle for investment. Each was grilled post-pitch by a panel of five venture capitalists (VCs), who, along with the conference organizers, voted to determine the winner.

Contestants included Moonshadow Mobile (whose founder assured me the previous evening that I had missed the third great technology revolution), Precision Plant Systems, which offers technology tools for crop management, Second Porch, which enables users to rent, trade, or share their second homes, and Site 9, a hosted collaboration tool provider now generating $40,000 in monthly revenue (and which hardly seemed to need funding).

The presentations and feedback sessions were entertaining, especially the good-natured pushback up by the VC judges concerning founder assertions. The scene recalled Oscar Wilde’s characterization of lying as “the telling of beautiful untrue things,” for each entrepreneur’s assumption could only be proven true or false in practice. Therefore contestants could only believe in and vigorously assert their beautiful visions, while the VCs could only assess stated assumptions in light of hard, previous experience with similar ventures. It was disheartening to recognize, for example, that Precision Plant Systems — whose crop management solutions are so economically elegant and socially powerful — faces a stupendously difficult, expensive, manpower-intensive task in selling to cost-sensitive small-scale farmers, who can take years to evaluate purchases affecting their land.

But in the end, Precision Plant Systems took first prize, and that somehow seemed fitting. Returning home, we all felt like winners, hopeful that Precision Plant Systems and its CropIQ system will, indeed, evolve into a beautiful truth.

You may also enjoy:

“The Surprising Truth About Why People Become Entrepreneurs”

“How to Go Solo Without a ‘Big Idea’”

“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas“

“Making Money: The Right and Wrong Questions to Ask”

“How to Create Wealth, How to Keep Wealth”

“ Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory“

“For Entrepreneurs Starting with Nothing, Here’s the Ultimate Strategy”

“Entrepreneurship: Why It’s Not about You“

In my school days I was the painfully reticent kid in the back of the class who paid attention, behaved himself, and made the honor roll every quarter, but would never ever raise his hand or volunteer to speak in front of the other kids. When called upon I would either turn catatonic or talk with a doubt-ridden quiver.

Partly it was natural shyness that paralyzed me. Yet in school theater productions I strutted the stage without fear, happily performing to packed auditoriums. What accounted for my contradictory nature? Simple. While acting in a play, I could rely upon a script. I didn’t have to venture my own thoughts or guesses. Speaking in class, however, I risked saying something silly or giving the wrong answer. In class, I was vulnerable to mistakes — and mistakes are a shameful thing. Or so we’re led to believe.

Ours is a success-or-failure culture. We covet seemingly flawless wins, and avoid at all costs missteps, goofs, or even well-intentioned blunders. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed back in 1841:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.

Success — early, gracefully, and infallibly achieved — is the main idea; God help us if we cannot leap clear over all errors to attain it. We learn these attitudes early: Answer right and go to the front of the class. Ace the test and advance to the top of the grade-sheet. Make no mistakes and excel. But err and you will fail to advance — or fail, period.

Absurd, of course. Human beings cannot learn without making mistakes. We ought to know this, even in youth. The cliché, Nothing ventured nothing gained, dances in our brains from an early age — yes, but being a cliché it fails to penetrate. And so throughout our lives we must teach and re-teach ourselves that mistakes are natural and even useful – not shameful.

Personally, the realities of adulthood re-teach me this lesson often — as does my writing process, which necessitates engaging mistakes and building successes upon them.

In the wonderful book The Conversations, legendary film editor Walter Murch puts it beautifully:

Truly great lessons can be learned from work that fails, but failure is stamped on the product and there’s a tendency to think everything you did was wrong, and you vow not to go there again. You have to resist this impulse, just as you have to resist the syrupy entanglements of success. These are, almost, religious issues. What the world thinks is success, what it rewards, has sometimes very little to do with the essential content of the work and how it relates to the author and his own development.

Like Emerson, Murch speaks here to our success-or-failure culture, but with different nuance. We tend not to credit the value — indeed the necessity — of the mistake, the attempt, the unprofitable or impractical venture, and consequently we often do not understand the real nature of success when we see it.

In his wonderful book Blue Highways William Least-Heat Moon notes:

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.

Thomas Edison faced many a doomed venture, including a scheme to build houses of poured concrete all over America. I recently heard it said, however, that his outlook was always: I never fail, I just find out a thousand ways that something doesn’t work.

My poet Rilke puts it more boldly: “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.”

I can’t help feeling Rilke is right. Meditating upon the subject long enough, I begin to see that worthy mistakes — and not easy successes — are in fact what life is all about. What a freeing thought!

The writer Paul Zweig wrote, “Making our wish, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the wish and its fulfillment.” For today’s post I paraphrase Zweig thusly:

Making our attempt, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the attempt and the attainment.

So throw off timidity, young person at school, and raise your hand! It’s your mistakes that will guide you to the front of the class. Onward through worthy errors. Fail, grow, and keep on venturing.

(This post has re-emerged from Soul Shelter’s year-one archives.)

You might also enjoy:

“Measures of Success”

“How to Achieve Even While Losing”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“An Unforgettable Lesson in What it Means to Be Human”

“Redefining Rejection”

“Why We Should Contradict Ourselves”

“What the Seeker Ultimately Discovers“