a thirteenth reflection... 'creative balance'

Being creative, or attempting to be, is a wonderful thing - for the most part.  It is a great way of finding out who you are, and for generating alternative perspectives on life; it can be very nourishing for the soul.  And yet, because of the introverted nature of aspects of the creative process one must exercise a little caution, and be prepared for one’s artistic vision not to become fully realised.

In 1980, Joy Division (gleefully named after German concentration camp prostitutes) recorded their second LP, Closer.  It is a brilliant record, but also a very macabre one.  And between recording and release, song-writer Ian Curtis took his own life.  Listening to Closer in the aftermath of Curtis’s death, it is hard not to see the collection of songs as a series of oblique, sometimes overt suicide notes.  Curtis perhaps took his art and the creative process that lead to the creation of his songs too seriously; he came to inhabit the space in which songs about loss, wretchedness and death came into being and seemed all too real, all too much.

While Curtis’s songs certainly had integrity, something which artists continually strive for, as well as, as far as is possible, originality and free expression, the price creatives like Curtis have paid for integrity in their art remains over the odds.  Art is a representation of a particular philosophy, or indeed emotion, and however integral said piece of art may seem, there are always other ways of representation, just as there are other ways of being.  The trick for a creative is not to confuse or conflate the two.

Being creative is a pro-active activity, it entails a search for meaning in physical and non-physical worlds, therefore it requires energy and application, it can be exhausting, even frustrating.  This is especially so when one doesn’t realise the particular philosophy or emotion one is trying to give form and expression to.  The superbly named Mairi Hedderwick, author of the Katie Morag adventures, has spoken before of how she finds the creative process frequently depressing for this reason.  It must be remembered that to understand something doesn’t necessarily i) require pro-activity, rather the Zen art of being still and knowing, ii) the creative process isn’t always the only solution to philosophical or emotional expression, it remains after all a version of the internal monologue, which in itself can be a limited discourse.

Indeed to become exclusively absorbed in creative exploration and expression, whether it be in writing, composing, painting etcetera is to perhaps climb too far inside oneself, and in doing so run the risk of a self-indulgent failure, or worse.  Film Director David Lynch suggests creatives always need to have their antenna skywards to tune into the frequency of ideas that flows in and from the world outside and around us, but also that his years of practising Transcendental Meditation (TM) has given him ‘effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within’.  There is seemingly a balance here worth heeding when pursuing a creative existence. Or, as fictional science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout (Kurt Vonnegut) opined for artistic types life can seem ‘no way to treat an animal’.