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Symbols for the Soul: A Mythopoetic Inquiry Into the Craft of Soul-Making

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“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” It is with these words that the Romantic poet John Keats proposed, in a letter to his siblings, a “grander system of salvation” than the Christian religion, “a system of Spirit-creation” through which suffering can be addressed not in the afterlife but instead within the world. Frustrated by the religious rhetoric of his age that cast the world as an inevitable ‘vale of suffering,’ Keats insisted: “call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making,’” in which the experience of pain can be creatively transformed, allowing humans to form a “Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.” By making our soul, we are able to find a greater and more harmonious sense of self in the world.

While ignored in religious discourse, and more evocative than technical in its description, Keats’ concept of soul-making has been taken up in the work of archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Attempting to restore to the discipline of psychology a concept of soul – the original Greek definition of ‘psyche’ – Hillman stressed in The Dream and the Underworld: “I call this work soul-making rather than analysis, psychotherapy, individuation. My emphasis is upon shaping, handling, and doing something with psychic stuff. It is a psychology of craft rather than a psychology of growth.” Writing in Religion & Literature, Walter L. Reed suggested that, like Hillman, Keats may have had a process of artistic craft in mind: “The problem of pain is answered for Keats not by the acquisition of immortality… but by an act of creation or poiesis.” Comparing Keats and Hillman’s views on soul-making to the theories of literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin – in which there is a strong functional homology between an author’s relation to the hero of their aesthetic work and the spirit’s relation to the soul – Reed opens up the possibility that there is more to soul-making than its completion in a creative act. Drawing on Keats, Hillman, and Bakhtin, as well as the mythopoetic work of Carl Jung’s Red Book and a variety of other poetic and spiritual writers, this paper attempts to examine the possibility that, like an aesthetically crafted hero, the soul is itself an artistic product, a creation of the symbolic imagination.

“How then are Souls to be made?” asked Keats. “How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them-so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence… but by the medium of a world like this?” In order to examine the artistic production of the soul, we must first say what such a thing is. Soul is a slippery concept that has been defined in a broad range of often-contradictory ways throughout history. For Keats, there is a distinction between the individual soul and the intelligence or spirit: “There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions-but they are not Souls till they acquire identities.” This layered understanding of the spiritual self, which also informs the writings of Hillman and Bakhtin, extends through Greek philosophy, Christian and Gnostic theologies, medieval alchemists like Jacob Boehme, and metaphysical poets such as William Blake. For these diverse thinkers and artists, the self contains an external, perishable body as well as the spirit – the eternal, essential intelligence or spark of divinity common to all life, which Reed described in the Christian tradition as “an aspect of divine being as well as human existence” – a duality against which stands the soul: “commonly considered the possession of an individual human being, his or her particular vital identity.”

Rather than reaffirm the old and problematic Cartesian dualism separating mind and matter, spirit and body stand in interactive relation to each other through the soul. As the alchemist Boehme stated in his Confessions: “The flesh marks the outward moving… The second moving in man is the astral… The third moving is generated between the astral and the outermost, and is called… the soul.” Blake expressed this more poetically in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” In this conception, soul can be seen as an interface or medium through which the internal spirit relates to the external world. Bakhtin discussed this relation between soul and spirit in aesthetic terms in his essay, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”:

“The soul is an image of the totality of everything that has been actually experienced… the spirit is the totality of everything that has the validity of meaning… The soul experienced from within is spirit, and the spirit is extra-aesthetic… The spirit cannot be the bearer of a plot or storyline, for the spirit is not present.”

Soul then is the aesthetic medium through which experience is transformed into meaning, suffering transformed into bliss, common intelligence transformed into personal identity.

Being a medium, the soul operates through an aesthetic mode common to psychological experience. As Hillman commented upon his use of the term soul-making, “making is a term which reflects what the psyche itself does: it makes image. This image making is the first given of all psychic life.” According to Hillman, one of the Greek words for soul is eidola, meaning image: “we are speaking of images that are at the same time invisible. We are inside the imaginative mind.” Soul, then, works in and is made through the imagination. Jung summed this up when stating, “the wealth of the soul exists in images.” Avoiding the unscientific terminology of soul in his later psychological writings, Jung attempted to examine the imagistic nature of soul in his personal journals, collected in and recently published as The Red Book. Being a mythopoetic (literally, ‘myth-making,’ that is, a literary rather than philosophic-scientific) account of Jung’s own journey to find or make a soul, The Red Book continually and evocatively stresses that the soul is found in images, especially in archetypal symbolism. “Oh [my soul],” Jung declared, “that you must speak through me, that my speech and I are your symbol and expression!”

“Psychic images are not necessarily pictures and may not be like sense images at all,” Hillman clarified about the role of symbols in the imagination, “rather they are images as metaphors.” Symbols are not static, literalized images but are instead perceived as multivalent, dynamic, and autonomous forces working in the human imagination in a manner similar to belief in religious deities. As Jung stated:

“The symbol is the word… that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue… Salvation [of the soul] is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols”

Keats’ “system of salvation” may thus be a system of artistic symbolization, in which, “the human species must have their carved Jupiter… their Christ their Oromanes and their Vishnu.” Keats stressed that such symbols serve a necessary function for soul-making. Hillman likewise spoke of the psyche as having a “natural polytheism,” while Blake wrote: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses… All deities reside in the human breast.”

This relation of gods to the individual psyche helps illuminate the lived experience of symbols in the imagination as autonomous and interpersonal. As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, a key influence on the work of Hillman, said, “classical psychoanalysis has often treated its knowledge of symbols as if symbols were concepts… Such [an interpretive] method… disregards particularly the problem of imagination.” The role that symbols play should instead be viewed in light of the fact that, “the dynamic imagination is a primary reality.” For Bakhtin, the soul is “the properly empirical reality of inner life,” and it thus must be experienced, as in Hillman’s words, “like a mystery… as fully real.” Historian of religion Mircea Eliade often stressed that gods and other symbolic contents of mythology are not experienced as dead, textual concepts but as vitally real: “In such societies [where myth is the foundation of social life and culture] the myth is thought to express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred history.” Symbols, as expressions of the personal psyche, must also maintain this vital quality in order to be creatively effective for soul-making. Upon finding his own soul in The Red Book, Jung is surprised to learn that the soul is “a living and self-existing being… What I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system.”

Jung further spoke of the soul as something larger than and external to the individual psyche, leading to the development of his theory of archetypes: his soul was something that “did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.” Similarly, though “your soul is your own self in the spiritual world… the spiritual world is also an outer world…” in which one is surrounded by “thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you.” A symbol is archetypal in that, though experienced personally, it exists autonomously from the self across individuals and cultures – a figure that “constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed.” Hillman concurred in Re-Visioning Psychology: “Man exists in the midst of psyche; it is not the other way around. Therefore, soul is not confined by man, and there is much of psyche that extends beyond the nature of man.” Though, as E.F. Edinger said in Anatomy of the Psyche, “the individual psyche is and must be a whole world within itself in order to stand over and against the outer world and fulfill its task of being a carrier or consciousness,” that psychic world of the soul also contains us. The symbolic soul is not just our own created identity, but also an entire imaginal reality, co-created by our cultures and by humanity at large.

“Individuation is a world-creating process,” said Ediger. In order to create an imaginal reality, the mythopoetic act of soul-making can be seen as akin to the aesthetic process of narrative ‘world-building.’ The symbols of the psyche can by read in terms of literary elements: characters, locations, and events. These elements are not externally determined but are drawn from the internal or subjective sense of reality. As Bakhtin said, “the principles of giving a form to the soul are the principles of giving a form to inner life from outside.”

As a personal interface between the essential self and the external world, the soul should first and foremost contain a representation of the self as a symbolic object – the ‘hero.’ As Reed explained about this form of representation in Bakhtin’s theory: “The hero exists on a different level of being from the author, but he is nevertheless involved in a dialogic relationship with the creative mind that has produced him,” an opposition that “embodies the opposition of spirit and soul.” Bakhtin stressed the point that “it is only when my life is set forth for another that I myself become its hero.” The soul, and its heroic representation, is other than the spirit or author; soul as an aesthetic object can only be created as a totality of meaning existing beyond the individual self, that is, as its symbol:

“To consolidate aesthetically… a lived experience must be purged of all undissolvable admixtures of meaning… these moments must be rendered immanent to the lived experience, must be gathered into a soul that is in principle finite and definitively completed… only this kind of concentrated soul is capable of becoming an aesthetically valid hero.”

Like the aesthetic hero, the host of archetypal characters found in the soul can be seen as both inherently other than but also reflections of the individual psyche. One of Jung’s major contributions to psychology was the concept of the archetypes: the psyche is expressed in a group of figures – self, shadow, anima, &c., which exist collectively but in personal relationship to each of us. As Jung examined only a few select figures in his scientific work, later psychologists seemed to feel that there are only a limited handful of archetypes, whereas in The Red Book, Jung suggested that the soul contains an infinite number of characters that transform into each other, taking on different roles and relations as needed by the psyche: “Haven’t you noticed that [the soul] has become multiple? …First she divided herself into a serpent and a bird, then into a father and mother, and then into Elijah and Salome.” Hillman reiterated this sense of multiplicity of the archetypes: “The endless variety of figures [in dreams] reflects the endlessness of the soul,” as well as the essential otherness of familiar figures: “The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations (simulacra) of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles.” The self or hero-soul actively engages or interacts with these characters, as Blake poetically demonstrated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when he (the poet’s heroic representation of himself) meets the same Elijah whom Jung converses with in The Red Book and then wrestles with the archetypal figure of an angel. For the poet, these symbolic archetypes are perceived as existentially real.

Just as Jung’s critical work focused on a handful of characters, so to did it underplay the importance of archetypal locations in the psyche: as Jung said, “I have avoided the place of my soul.” And yet, “you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds.” As Hillman pointed out about the symbolism found in dreams, “every dream has its psychical locality, where its images come into being. Images are somewhere.” Bakhtin stressed a similar aesthetic environment for the soul: “In art the object-world in which the hero’s soul lives and moves has the aesthetic validity of a surrounding world or environment of that soul.” In The Red Book, Jung mythopoetically arrived at “the place of the soul and found that this place was a hot desert.” In Jung’s narrative, this desert self can only be transformed into a garden through the cultivation of soul – a potent environmental symbol for the individuation or soul-making process.

The soul has landscapes, literally a ‘psychogeography.’ This is not a new idea, however, but can be seen in various cultures’ myths about the creation of the world from the body of a dead god – or in ancient Taoist alchemical manuscripts, like the Book of the Center, which claim: “The human body is the image of a country,” and, “when Lao Tzu died, his body was transformed into a landscape, the same landscape we find within ourselves.” According to Eliade in his study of the origins of alchemy, “the [Taoist alchemical] quest… was thus bound up with the search for distant mysterious islands where the ‘Immortals’ lived,” lands which are “to be found in the most secret recesses of the brain and belly.” In The Taoist Body, Karl Schipper pointed out that the Taoist alchemist saw the human body through a “symbolic vision… of the inner world”:

“The landscape of the head consists of a high mountain… around a central lake. The lake lies midway between the back of the skull and the point between the eyebrows… In the middle of the lake stands a palatial building… In front of this palace and the lake around it, lies a valley (the nose). The entrance to the valley is guarded by two towers (the ears).”

Like Jung’s journey through the desert landscape of his soul, the Taoist alchemist actively engaged with this internal landscape through meditative and physical practices, interacting with a symbolic environment peopled with mythological characters.

It is important to note that the characters and locations within the symbolic imagination are not passively encountered during the soul-making process – there is an active engagement with symbols through a series of archetypal processes or dramatic events. According to Hillman, “the logos of the soul, psychology, implies the act of traveling the soul’s labyrinth in which we can never go deep enough… It is an operation of penetrating, an insighting into depths that makes soul as it proceeds” Bachelard poetically expresses this process in terms of adventure: “A true poet… wants imagination to be a voyage… The true voyage of the imagination is the voyage to the land, to the very domain of the imaginary.” As Eliade notes, Jung discovered that the steps of this ‘journey of the soul’ map onto the stages of medieval alchemy: “The unconscious undergoes processes which express themselves in alchemical symbolism tending towards psychic results corresponding to the results of hermetic operations.” Or as Edinger explained, “many images from myth, religion, and folklore also gather around these symbolic operations, since they all come from the same source – the archetypal psyche… These central symbols of transformation make up the major content of all culture-products.”

As an artistic endeavor or ‘culture-product,’ soul-making thus follows a series of symbolic operations that can either be expressed alchemically-psychologically (as in individuation) or through the mythopoetic language of travel and adventure. Drawing on the rhetoric of heroism, Joseph Campbell examined various hero and quest mythologies in The Hero With a Thousand Faces in order to construct an overarching narrative structure that artists could also apply to the process of soul-making:

“The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return… A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

For Campbell, the transformation of personal and cultural symbolism is at the heart of the heroic quest: “[The hero] and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolic deficiency.” As the quest of the mythological hero is to restore meaning to the world, so does the psychological growth process of the individual center on the attempt to restore vital symbols to the creative imagination. Soul-making is the journey to discover and transform one’s inner reality.

In order to artistically make a soul, how are we first to recognize those symbols that are most expressive of our own psychic relationship to the world? While archetypal, such symbols are also felt to be intimately personal – individual experience grants certain characters, landscapes, and events more symbolic potency than others, a potency that Jung asserted that we recognize through “a peculiar emotional intensity: it is as though chords in us were struck that had never resounded before.” Though for Jung, “the symbol can neither be thought up nor found: it becomes… through willing attention,” the becoming of symbols must begin somewhere in individual experience. For Bachelard, these archetypal images were found in childhood reverie, which “remains at the center of the human psyche… That is where the childhood being weaves together the real and the imaginary, and lives in the fullness of the imagination.” The fantastic author Bruno Schulz, who drew on the symbolism of his own childhood for material for his fiction, strikingly summed up this relationship between childhood images, the creative imagination, and the artist’s soul:

“In childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes for us… Such images constitute a program, establish our soul’s fixed fund of capital… the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights… These early images mark the boundaries of an artist’s creativity.”

Memory, then, and the remembering of childhood images, is crucial to soul-making. Hillman suggested that the ancient Greek “art of memory” presents a “complex [method] of soul-making.” According to Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, Aristotelian philosophy correlates imagination, memory, and soul: “‘Memory, [Aristotle states in De anima], belongs to the same part of the soul as the imagination, it is a collection of mental pictures from sense impressions.’” The art of memory works by imprinting “on the memory a series of loci or places,” – the memory palace – which are then filled with images that help memory “by arousing emotional affects through… striking and unusual images,” including incidents from childhood. While beyond the direct scope of this paper, one imagines the possibility of reverse-engineering the construction of a memory palace as a technique for recalling the symbols that were pivotal in the formation of the childhood psyche.

Another classic, psychological means of getting at personal symbolism is through the imagery of dreams. As Jung proclaimed in The Red Book, “you [the soul] announced yourself to me in advance in dreams… my dreams, are the speech of my soul.” Unlike the interpretive, critical approach to dreams favored by Freud and even Jung, Hillman insisted that “interpretation arises when we have lost touch with the images” – we must instead enter into the reality of such symbolism the way it is actually experienced in dreams. For Hillman, “dream-work [is] an activity, less of a censor than of a bricoleur… The imagination at night takes events out of life… removing more and more empirical trash of the personal world out of life and into psyche, thus allowing the imagination to shape new symbols through the ‘bricolage’ or recombination of daily impressions. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss explained about the art of bricolage in The Savage Mind: “The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire” – the limited cultural ‘givens’ that are collected and recombined for the purpose of cultural expression. The symbols in dreams can thus be collected into a cohesive soul: as Bakhtin asserted, in order to restore a unitary and meaningful sense of self from experience that “disintegrates into factually existent, senseless fragments of being,” artists must “assemble… the scattered pieces of [their] own givenness,” a givenness that Hillman suggested is realized in the rarified symbolism of dream images.

As the soul can be seen as a symbolic or mythopoetic world, one might also take an anthropological or cartographic approach to dreaming. Bachelard said, “we must take up residence in these dreams again to be convinced they were once ours. Afterward, we turn them into stories, into fables of a former time, adventures of another world.” Artists might thus draw maps of oneiric locations, catalogue the various dream entities found therein, or write stories organizing their symbolic events through the structure of alchemical symbolism or quest narratives. By tracing out the recurrent imagery of dreams, one not only learns which symbols are most potent in the psyche, but allows them to take on a richer, more meaningful imaginative life, the life of the soul.

As in alchemy where, according to Edinger, “the central image… is the idea of the opus… a sacred work,” the art of soul-making ultimately requires the construction of a work, a creative act that places the imagined soul outside of the individual, and thus able to be seen in its completed totality. In discussing the process of ‘active imagination’ in which therapeutic patients give free play to their fantasies, Jung suggested in “The Transcendent Function” that one method for dealing with imaginal psychic content is to transform it into an aesthetic product: “the material [obtained from fantasy] is continually varied and increased until a kind of condensation of motifs into more or less stereotypical symbols takes place. These stimulate the creative fantasy and serve chiefly as aesthetic motifs.” Through this process of shaping or crafting the symbolic content of the psyche, “one goes on dreaming the dream in greater detail in the waking state, and the initially incomprehensible, isolated event is integrated into the sphere of the total personality.”

And yet, as Eliade hinted about the alchemical arts, “‘to make’ something means knowing the magic formula which will allow it to be invented or to ‘make it appear’… the artisan is a connoisseur of secrets, a magician.” While memory, dreams, and active imagination can recall, recombine, and condense the psychic symbolism of archetypal characters, places, and events into aesthetic material for use in the art of soul-making, the methods and mediums through which this inner reality is transformed into a tangible cultural product reside in the abilities and needs of the individual artist. According to Reed, one can learn about the artistic process of soul-making through its display in the creative works of certain artists; Keats, for instance, “offers a symbolic enactment of the process [of soul-making] in his odes,” particularly in poems like “Ode to a Grecian Urn” that were produced by the poet “in the weeks immediately following his letter on soul-making.” This paper has suggested a similar display of the soul-making process in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and in Jung’s The Red Book. Further scholarship might examine the poetic crafting of soul through archetypal symbolism in the angels of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the suffering Duende of Frederico Garcia Lorca’s In Search of Duende, or in the mythological bricolage of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with its soul-seeking conclusion (echoing Bakhtin’s injunction to the artist to assemble the scattered pieces of the self into a soul): “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

As Jung remarked in “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”: “Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices… he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional… into the realm of the ever-enduring… That is the secret of great art, and its effect upon us.” The greatest and most lasting works of art, in which the fragments of culture and individuality have been shored against the ruining effects of suffering and impermanence, are those in which the artist has tapped into the deepest symbols of their psyche and set those images forth for the world to see. “If we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation of our entire civilization,” said Campbell, “we should become indeed the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day.” Great art does not only display the process by which artists create their individual soul, but can also reveal to all who witness it the contents of their own souls, as well as the soul of the world.

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Double Visionary: The Art and Life of the Visionary Artist Alberto J. Almarza

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It was a brutally sunny day in northern New Mexico, and a young Chilean teenager on vacation with his father was staring at a half-buried doorway in the Anasazi ruins when he had a fainting spell. “I became extremely disoriented and felt utterly confused,” he says years later, “and I remember noticing around me these strange beings with strange outfits doing things like talking in a strange language, and then looking around me and getting this deep horror by seeing how desolate everything was. Nothing that I knew was there.” Coming back to himself, the boy realized the beings were only tourists taking pictures. “But the image was so alien to me,” he says.

The boy’s father, a rational but mystically inclined man, helped him to make sense of the experience: perhaps an ancient Anasazi shaman had used the child’s eyes to look into the future – our present – and had seen our world as the strange place it must appear to long distant cultures.

So began a magical dialogue with the universe that has shaped the life and artwork of the visionary artist Alberto J. Almarza. Beyond being a professional artist, an art teacher at the Pittsburgh School for the Creative and Performing Arts, and a father of two children, Almarza is also deeply interested in shamanism and the representation of spiritual realities. With his long dark hair, fox-like features, and intense gaze, Almarza has an air of the supernatural about him that, with the evidence of his artwork, make the experiences like the one he had in New Mexico readily believable.

And yet Almarza has often had to struggle against the disconnect in the contemporary world between everyday and spiritual life – which leads tourists to take pictures of Native American artifacts rather than explore their cultural significance, and gallery owners to reject paintings detailing anything but conventional reality. Despite this, Almarza has managed to find a balance between his professional, personal, and preternatural occupations.

* * *

It is a sunny Saturday morning, and the extended family is over for breakfast. Everyone wants Almarza’s son Javier to sing one of the songs he learned in his class at the Waldorf School. But the hematite-eyed seven-year-old is too busy eating free-range bacon and organic orange juice and showing off his latest Lego creations: a tiny robot, a trophy, and a spaceship. “I love Legos,” he says, “you can make anything you want from them.”

Almarza smiles proudly behind his dark, Chilean eyes. As an artist, Almarza, who is twenty-nine, understands the joy of making anything you want, part of the sense of wonder found by both artists and children. His wife Sarah, a massage therapist and yoga teacher, also understands that both artists and children like to make a mess,

“I thought you were going to clean your studio today,” she says. “Alberto is such a hoarder.”

When they recently moved into their Regent Square home, she asked Almarza to throw out a bowl full of seeds, stones, and feathers collected from the Allegheny Cemetery, but it somehow survived the move. She tells how Almarza’s father refused to ride in their car for fear that the collections of odd objects would fly up and hit him in the face.

For Almarza, though, these objects are not junk but the materials of his craft. Unlike many contemporary artists, Almarza uses a wide range of naturally occurring materials in his art – clay, dirt, salt, plant pigments – either gathered locally or brought back from his native country. His work, similarly, does not fit into any preconceived artistic categories, though one could place it within the broad school of visionary art, practiced by painters such as Alex Grey.

The walls of their house are hung with examples of his work: early paintings that look like ancient maps or organic-technological structures, many of which feature strange blue-and-white-striped creatures, visitors from another world that came to Almarza in his dreams. A more recent series of works are called Pok: clay pots, flutes, and mummies designed to look like buried artifacts which were featured in 2007 in the Mobile Museum project of the local artist, Ally Reeves. On the mantle are small view boxes, each containing a miniature tableau behind a magnifying lens; as well as his latest series of living terrariums, glass globes full of moss and stones that Sarah says are cluttering up the kitchen, one of which is inhabited by three blue-striped tetra fish and a shy eel.

* * *

The storyteller Bruno Schulz once claimed that, for artists, the symbols and themes they explore come to them in childhood and artists then spend the rest of their lives trying to work out what those basic symbols mean. As such, Almarza’s interest in natural materials and their use in art can be traced back to his own childhood.

Raised by his mother in Santiago, Chile, Alamarza’s father – also named Alberto, a flautist at Carnegie Mellon University – left them when Almarza was three years old. “We were pretty poor,” Almarza says, “and I was met with an enormous amount of time when my mom would be busy and I would just have to play… hanging out in the yard with a hose, making mud piles, collecting plants, and making potions.”

Almarza continues to work with the dirt of his childhood, and recently heard a theory that many displaced or immigrant artists are attracted to the use of soil as it reflects their deep desire to be grounded. For Almarza, this lack of grounding indicates a larger cultural issue: “We’re literally separated from the ground by our shoes and by sidewalks, and then we’re buried in sarcophagi and don’t decompose in the earth. My use of natural materials goes back to the fact that I can rely on nature. I know it’s true and I know nature’s ancient.”

Almarza was similarly attracted to art from a young age. One day he went to visit his aunt Loreto, a painter who lived across the street. Loreto showed him a book of the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali – whom Almarza claims is still one of his most important influences, along with other visionary artists like Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, and William Blake.

“She opened it to a random page,” Almarza says, “to this painting of Dali as a little naked boy, maybe five years old, and he’s picking up the surface of the ocean, and underneath is this sleeping dog.” This image – Dali’s 1950 painting, Dali at the Age of Six Lifting the Skin of the Water to Observe a Dog Sleeping in the Shadow of the Sea – made a deep impression on Almarza: “It was the first time I realized it was something that people can do,” he says, “that you can create something that is your own that at the same time resonates with elements of reality that are not necessarily evident in your daily life.”

Javi immediately chimes in that a painting about a naked boy is inappropriate, at which Almarza lets out a hearty laugh.

* * *

Their one-year-old daughter, Naia, is asleep in the front room and Sarah has to get their children ready for the day. After breakfast, Almarza rolls a cigarette on the back porch and points out another of his latest projects, their garden: eight raised beds for growing herbs and vegetables, a fire pit lined with stones, and what he calls his witch’s garden. This contains ginger and lemon balm as well as more esoteric plants like salvia divinorum, and a sacred tree from Bali from which he shoos away a squirrel.

In recent years, Almarza’s interest in natural materials has shifted from inert to living matter; he says he dreams of someday having a full greenhouse. For the time being, Almarza could not be happier: he has a beautiful home, a loving family, a satisfying job, success in his artwork, and a rich spiritual life.

“Chile is a very Catholic country,” Almarza says about his spiritual upbringing, “so the culture, much like here, is very influenced by Christianity.” Though his mother was deeply Catholic and raised Almarza in the church, institutional religion never resonated with him. “I was like, how did you find this out, who told you this? When God came and talked to people, well, how did he do that? Can I talk to God?”

Around Javi’s age, Almarza began to have his own visionary experiences. During an intense illness, Loreto and his mother had a fight. “I remember that night hearing voices… the fever made it like a tormenting sound. Once the fever was gone, I would have random times later when the sound would come back.”

Along with the strange experience of this fever, Almarza began to become interested in dreams, as well as the ghost stories told to him by a nanny. It is possible that his childhood home was haunted. “So there were a lot of vibes,” he says, “a lot of energy all around.”

Almarza’s true introduction to the spiritual world occurred when he was in his early teens and visited the Anasazi ruins with his father. Since then, his shamanic visions haven’t stopped. “Any single time I’ve been to New Mexico,” Almarza says, “I’ve had some kind of powerful experience.”

Almarza doesn’t like to make public statements about the details of his spiritual experiences. “I think a lot of people are not familiar with certain practices or belief systems,” he says, “and they tend to be judgmental about it: oh, that’s just primitive or, oh, that’s just weird, or hippy, or a number of prejudices.” Instead, Almarza lets his shamanism surface in his art.

* * *

Upstairs, Almarza’s studio isn’t nearly as chaotic as Sarah feared; much of the mess is actually projects in process. Shelves bearing clay objects line the walls; drawers contain rocks, dirt, feathers, and bones. The moss bed for an unfinished life-size terrarium sits in the corner opposite a drum kit, and drawing tools and paper litter every surface. This is Almarza’s sanctum, the ritual space where the magic of his art comes alive.

Javi pokes his head in the door to ask if he can borrow some pencils and a straightedge so he can practice his own drawing. Almarza happily complies before breaking open an old journal written in ink made from black tea, in which he has recorded his theory about synchronous dialogues, a spiritual and creative idea drawn from Carl Jung’s essay on synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences.

“You can become aware of these synchronous connections, and if you do they become more reoccurring and you start building this path,” Almarza says. “The synchronous dialogue is, what if I choose to respond to that, what if I choose to act based on those synchronicities, then you establish a dialogue.”

To illustrate what he means, Almarza recalls the squirrel in the garden and then talks about one proposed art project that he called Squirrel Divination – a synchronous chain that he experienced while working on his Miniature Museum of Modern Art installation for the Tom Gallery at the Mattress Factory in 2008.

“I came out from installing it and saw, right on the crack of the sidewalk in the alley way, there was a peanut plant. I was thinking; how did that peanut plant get there? And immediately on a wooden fence across the street this squirrel jumps up and she’s staring right at me.” He had no doubt that the squirrel planted the tree.

Later, a friend happened to show him a National Geographic article on Dogon shamans, who would mark out plots of ground and read their community’s fortunes in the tracks of foxes.

“Sarah and I had been talking about the disconnect in our culture from ancient traditions… that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Almarza says. “We were talking about not having a modern parallel to this wild animal to help us communicate, and I thought of the squirrel as an urban animal that is basically our fox.”

Following this synchronous chain of events, Almarza wanted, like the Dogon shamans, to mark a plot of ground in front of the Mattress Factory and place peanuts in it from the plant he’d found. He hoped that in exchange, squirrels might be encouraged to make meaningful marks in the dirt.

* * *

These kinds of resonant events and inspirations have brought Almarza from his childhood in Santiago to his present life in Pittsburgh. When he was eighteen, Almarza moved to the United States to study art at CCAC, eventually transferring to Carnegie Melon University because his father taught there. He graduated in 2005 with a major in communications design and minors in fine arts and photography. Barely speaking English when he immigrated, Almarza at first suffered culture shock before settling into a typical college partying lifestyle that he’s glad to have gotten out of the way so that he could really focus on his esoteric studies and artwork.

In 2003, his junior year at CMU, Almarza became friends with a fellow student and local visionary artist named James Gyre. “James was also a musician,” Almarza says, “We would get together and jam, and talk about all kinds of ancient traditions and occult knowledge.” To this day they still share artistic and shamanic techniques. That December, James invited him to a winter Solstice party that changed Almarza’s life.

When they got to the party, a blue-eyed, blond-haired girl named Sarah Bauer opened the door. “I saw her for the first time and I was blown away,” Almarza says,” I remember getting this epic feeling of the presence of the goddess in front of me.” As the evening progressed it turned out that the pictures Almarza had drawn in his notebooks over the preceding months all depicted scenes from Sarah’s dreams. Within six months they were married and expecting their first child.

At the party Almarza also met a number of people who are still his closest friends – a spiritual and creative community with whom he has played music, made art, and helped found the Zany Umbrella Circus, a Pittsburgh based circus troupe. “It was a profound life changing experience to finally meet the community of people that I had been looking for, but didn’t necessarily know that they existed,” he says.

* * *

While Almarza describes the majority of his spiritual experiences as “fun and profound and learning,” they have not always been positive.

In the autumn of 2004, when Sarah was pregnant with Javier and he got his first professional job, Almarza had a terrifying vision that he is even less willing to talk about than his other shamanic experiences. He can only describe it as “a near-liminal experience of absolute chaos,” the result of poking in esoteric matters he wasn’t ready for.

“I was living a very intense daily life right at the time my shamanic practice was breaking through into another level,” Almarza says, “And the collision of those two was profoundly intense to the point where I almost didn’t survive it.” He couldn’t play music or create art, almost dropped out of school, and nearly broke up with Sarah. But, as Almarza explains, his most terrifying experiences “have been the important ones, the teaching ones.”

Almarza managed to get out of this dark place through the support of his friends and family, and has since then experienced increasing success in his life and artwork. Beyond gallery showings at The Warhol Museum, The Mendelssohn Gallery, The Mattress Factory, Boxheart, and Moxi Dada, in 2009 Almarza was invited to give a TEDx talk called “Honor Your Inner Oddball” at an innovation conference hosted by Leadership Pittsburgh, Inc – a local version of the international talk series on new ideas in technology, entertainment, and design.

That same year, he also organized the first Pittsburgh Visionary Arts Festival, held on the main lawn of the Schenley Plaza in Oakland and featuring works from local spiritually inclined artists.

* * *

Breaking to smoke another cigarette on the sunlit front porch, Almarza talks more about his personal spiritual beliefs, insisting in his intense and spirited manner that they remain off record. A neighbor strolls by walking a dog, and construction workers yell at each other while restoring a house on the corner. Even the way the light falls on Almarza’s face seems to place him in another world from this casual Saturday morning.

Almarza has often experienced conflict between his spiritual, creative work and his professional, everyday life. When first trying to expose his art to the public, for instance, a gallery owner interested in showing his work visited Almarza but was not pleased with what she saw.

“The more she looked at it, the more she was put off by it,” he says about one series of paintings depicting energy-based, spectral imagery. “She asked me, ‘how many joints did you smoke to paint this one?’” According to Almarza, the gallery owner felt that his style would only appeal to teenagers and crazy people, and that art should reflect this world and the issues of our life and times.

“I was really devastated by her response,” Almarza says, “I was like, well shit, I should reconsider and transform my art into something else.” He decided instead to redefine and simplify the terms in which he presented his work, in order to make it legible to a wider audience. “I have this enormous world in my head and I needed to reconcile it with the outer world.”

The conflict with the gallery owner directly inspired Almarza’s organizing of the Visionary Arts Festival, an event that allowed him to publicly articulate the role of spirituality in art.

“We have purposely neglected one of the essential aspects of art,” he says, “which is the spiritual aspect. And it’s iffy subject matter because everybody defines spirit differently. But to me, however you see it, spirit is how you define truth. To me there was a lot of art out there that was very clearly truthful and yet was disregarded by the art establishment. I realized that there was a gap in the message, and bridging that gap became part of my work.”

* * *

Almarza has also struggled, but learned to bridge the gap between his visions and his home life.

“If you want to go from regular daily life to a synchronous world or magical parallel world, it takes a different state of mind,” he says, “and those two states of mind are not compatible. Going into my shamanic practice… requires some kind of retreat from the difficult tasks of daily life. But I have two kids, there’s always something that I could be doing.”

Sarah is extremely supportive of his art, though, and the two of them have worked out a system where they take turns watching the children and doing chores. This leaves Almarza with three free days each week to solely pursue his craft. Even then, unfinished tasks have a way of impinging upon his studio time.

Finishing breakfast earlier, Sarah tells him not to worry about doing the dishes, which now litter the kitchen counters. Almarza knows that he’ll have to take care of them before letting himself become immersed in his creative process, otherwise he might end up drawing dirty plates rather than sacred geometries.

“If I were to neglect my daily life to pursue my shamanic passions I would find myself really suffering during my journeys,” he says, “because I would feel the neglect of any layer of my life that’s important. If I was a bad dad, that would be the first thing I would be confronted with.”

The daily tasks of parenting are not always a chore, though, and the process of raising two children continually inspires Almarza: “When I’m hanging out with the kids I’m still doing my art and my work,” he says. “We go to the park with the kids and look at nature; we play games and do things that can be connected to my work.”

On one evening walk he said to his son, “Look, the moon is so full,” and Javi answered, “So full of what?” As Almarza explained in his TEDx talk, after paraphrasing the author Proust, who said that the real journey of discovery consists in having new eyes: “But my son would say, oh, is there any other way to see things? Children are the ultimate experts in seeing things fresh; they experience every moment as a new moment.”

The Almarzas have decided to raise Javi and Naia outside of any particular religious tradition, believing that it is more important to nurture children’s fresh minds, innocence, and their desire to question everything. “It is more important to really question all the religions and find your own meaning in them,” Almarza says, recalling the dissatisfaction of his own Catholic upbringing.

“Spirituality is a journey that one has to take.”

* * *

Sarah has returned from taking Javier to his karate lessons, where he recently achieved his purple belt and numerous trophies that he is excited to show off. Naia is in Sarah’s arms, and she’s finally awake. Like her brother, her eyes are a cross between her parents’ black and blue eyes, a rare magnetic color that seems to drink in the sunlight, the artwork, and another squirrel nibbling at the witch’s garden. It is clear that these two children have before them a journey bound to be full of wonder and discovery. And though Javier is currently into Legos and karate, it seems only a matter of time before Almarza takes his family on vacation to New Mexico, and the Anasazi ruins of his own spiritual awakening.

(To see more of Alberto’s works, check out his blog.)

The Perfect Note, the Pivotal Word

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Earlier today I was jamming around on the guitar and managed to get the levels of overdrive and reverb just right so that a long pulled off note created that microtonal beating that can send shivers down the spine. Sonic wave interference seriously must be one of life’s hidden treasures.

Recently when I play I’ve been thinking about how the finesse of one note can create these kind of deep physical and psychological effects. Years ago when I was playing in bands, what was important to me was the song – crafting repeated structures, the tension and resolve of key changes between parts – but after taking a couple years off and returning to the instrument I’ve been approaching music at a more fine grained level, a precision and subtlety of effect – how to vibrato only the third note in a chord, when to pull off at the end of a measure to create an arpeggiated triplet with only one strum, &c.

A lot of why I’m focusing on this kind of technique is that, not being in a band currently, I’m far less concerned with producing finished songs. Interestingly, I’ve also been exploring my creative writing on these finer grained levels. Though I’m still interested in the construction of tension and resolve across a story and the use of volta or turn-of-consciousness in a scene, I’m also working a lot more at the level of language. On the one hand exploring the juxtaposition of different modes of discourse within one text (action, memories, quotes, stories, ideation, &c); but I’m also giving a lot of attention to the pacing of sentences, how to hold off saying the key word so that it falls on the most rhythmically powerful place in the phrase. Or there is the juxtaposition of specific words, and even the shape of words themselves as symbols, the visual and sonic repetitions of specific letters.

Once again, though I am still finishing stories to submit for publication, I suspect this comes from a greater turn in my understanding of myself as an artist: that is, the product is really ceasing to be the important thing for me, and the process, the craft, the precision is becoming pivotal. How do you say the one right word that changes everything? Part of this, at least for the writing, comes from being in school for creative writing, and finding that no one really teaches craft at this level. Both classes and writing manuals focus on plot, dialogue, characters, idea generation, &c. and even though poetry classes can get closer to concerns of word choice and sound, there is still a hesitancy to examine how these fine-grained choices produce certain effects. There is almost a mystique or magic to the way language actually works on us.

Perhaps these kinds of techniques can’t really be taught, perhaps this is where the real art comes in, having to delve so deep into one’s craft that you come out the other side with a mastery of specific moments you wouldn’t even have known existed if you remained a casual creator. Perhaps it is once again about being less concerned for product and end results. Much of the frustration I have with the arts in the contemporary world is they are all about the market – getting an album out or a book published – which only encourages artists to rush, to not apprentice themselves for years and years before thinking they are actually capable of creating something good.

I think of writers like Roberto Bolaño, whose works show a clear mastery because he didn’t even start writing prose he felt was solid enough to publish until he was older than I am now. I think of all the shitty indie rock bands churning out albums each year that get super hyped up, but no one will remember before the end of the decade.

I also think about the fact that playing the one perfect note that can send shivers down your spine is an end in itself, whether or not it’s ever recorded, the small crafted moments that can make you shiver and smile.

The Psychology of Art and Magic

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Another key concern of mine at the Absent Narrative is a relationship between the creative and mystical arts, in particular the way in which writing can act as a form of magic (it’s no coincidence that magic and letters both spell things). I’ve been examining this idea for years, often in relation to Grant Morrison’s concept of the hypersigil, but for the most part it is easy to make these kind of surface comparisons that don’t necessarily further one’s actual practices.

Looking at the issue from the angle of effects, it is clear that both art and magic aim at causing effects in the world. Crowley for instance defined magick precisely as the ability to cause effects in accord with one’s intentions. And while many mystical practices do not aim at (and sometimes forbid) the intention toward external effects, there is certainly the goal of causing effects in one’s internal state. As for writing and the other creative arts, Oscar Wilde once said that good art should be useless, while 20th century literary critics felt examining the effects of creative works to be anathema to true scholarship. In reality however, art does cause people to feel or act differently, an understanding that has led to acts of highly effective creation, whether artistic genius or the mind-control of contemporary advertising/marketing. The only truly successful art in my eyes is art that changes you and your world.

But what of the actual processes that go into either artistic or mystical creation/ performance? How similar are these crafts? I am currently taking a class on psycholinguistics, and for my term paper am researching the psychological processes that go into successful creative narrative prose production, in other words, what our brains do when we invent and tell stories. While that paper will end up a lot more focused on experimental scientific research, the main processes that have come up in my preliminary research bear some strikingly similar features to my recent examinations of mystical practices (whether Daoist or Jungian, &c.), suggesting that psychologically, art and magic may be very interrelated processes in the brain.

The first aspect to consider for acts of creation is why do it. Why write that tweet or novel, why cast that spell or commune with which spirit? Why create at all? Psychologically this question is one of motivation, and more particularly motivation toward conflict resolution. In magical terms this is a question of intent. Artists and magicians – and really most people who are attentive to the complexities of the world around them and their need to address these complexities – are often struck by situations that they do not understand, or that present conflicts and challenges unable to be resolved through external and direct means. Even in wholly internal mystical traditions there is the conflict of not yet being unified with whatever force or intelligence your tradition is aimed at. If this need for resolution is great enough, the creative person will dwell on the problem (often at night, in lieu of sleeping, for hours on end), until they recognize it can be approached through sidereal means: one’s art.

Now that the primary conflict (situation/concern, &c) has been established, how is it resolved? The obvious and eventual answer is through the application of the techniques of one’s craft. There is however a far more important and fascinating psychological stage that occurs prior to (or at least in tandem with) an art’s techné: the conflict is in some way entered into the imagination and there symbolically manipulated as if it were actually occurring. Now the challenge of discussing this process is that the imagination continues to remain a bugaboo to the sciences; it is like a black box or more accurately Schrodinger’s box, in that any logical attempt to access the contents and process of the imagination alters those contents and processes, especially in an experimental setting. However as an artist with a clear grasp of my own imagination it is possible to make some comments about what goes on in there.

According to current theories of psychological narrative production, humans create mental models or schemas to internally resolve conflicts. My recent research into Daoist physiological practices and Jungian psychology turns up a remarkably similar mechanism: the act of visualization or active imagination. Essentially an internal reality is constructed that corresponds with the conflict to be resolved, populated with settings, characters (archetypes/deities), and goal states which are manipulated in order to realistically play out the potential resolutions of the conflict. While this process of imagination can be conscious and direct, much of the work done here may also happen below the level of conscious thought, that is, once the internal reality has been constructed the conflict continues to work itself out there regardless of direct input, as in dreams.

The key thing though, which makes me regard narrative production and mystical-magical acts as highly similar processes, is that this symbolic manipulation is not abstract or conceptual – we do not manipulate the contents of our imaginations like so many chess pieces. Rather we actively participate in our imaginary worlds (even when that participation is subconscious). Theories of narrative production for instance indicate that authors both follow the actions of their main characters as well as become their main characters and perform their actions for them as if they as the characters were really acting in the external world. Mystical traditions suggest something similar, often called a pscyhodrama, and anyone who has done some amount of dreamwork will certainly testify that they are experientially there. To return to science, recent studies are leaning in favor of what is called embodied cognition: on a basic neuro-chemical level, the act of imagining an event triggers the same neural pathways as would be triggered by real sensory experience. One might say then that artists and magicians, through their visualization practices, are in a very real way forming new experiences of the resolution to conflicts without those situations ever “really” occurring (and if anything is truly magical, that is).

Finally once these imaginary resolutions are reached, that experience must be translated back into the external world. This requires the concretization of symbols into specific mediums through the techniques of those mediums. In narrative production, that medium is words; in magic-mysticism the medium can be, well, really anything, from movements, to sigils, to vocalizations, &c. But the important thing is that the specific techniques and media used will correspond in some clear way to the symbolic processes in the imagination. True art is not sloppy or haphazard, but draws a clear line from an external problem through the symbolic underside of the psyche and back out into a concrete form.

Of course, in reality the processes of artistic or magical creation may rarely be this logically ordered. Often the original intention, its imagining, and its technical statement will occur at the same time (as in spontaneous performative acts), or will operate in a spiral back and forth between these psychological processes (especially in larger or longer term works). But at least from my experience I can’t imagine any successful creative or magical work resulting without all three of these processes.

The Oppression of the Senses

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If you ask people how many senses they have they will generally tell you five; sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. It is commonly held that this is a natural and physiological division, but the fact that people also talk about a “sixth sense” suggests that this is far from the case. Certainly there are physical limits to our perception; we cannot perceive the far ranges of our sensory spectrums, the infrared of reptiles, the ultraviolet of bees, the high pitches of dogs and small children, the subsonic vibrations of bats and whales. But then again, there is the case of the blind boy who trained himself to the sense of echolocation, suggesting that our sensory limitations may be more mutable than we typically suspect.

William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, calls for a radicalization of perception. He suggests that, though our senses are the “chief inlets of soul in this age,” that soul, ie: Reality, is greater than the classical five senses can readily perceive. That we claim five senses only, Blake seems to hint and I’ll say outright, is a matter of habit and scientific rationalization. These particular senses are perhaps most empirically measurable, and thus have been historically categorized so that, as children, we are taught we only have these five senses and thus do not learn to develop the multitude of other perceptions available to us. I call this the Oppression of the Senses, which also connotes that in an empirical world, we do not believe in things that we cannot perceive, including our ability to perceive other sensations.

As a child I was diagnosed with what is called a Sensory Integration Dysfunction, what I like to call a dysaesthesia, in which not only are the various senses dis-integrated from each other but become uninterpretable to themselves. For instance, it is sometimes difficult for me to filter out voices through the small channel of the telephone as interpretable amidst the vast amount of other auditory data and white noise with which we are constantly bombarded. One thing that always struck me though about the occupational therapy I had to go through as a child in order to become a functional sensory being, is that the senses to be reintegrated were not just the classical five. They also included motor skills such as balance and movement, but the way these senses interrelated to the aesthetic senses, in short, a total spectrum of being a sensory body in a sensual world. Though people refer to a “sense of balance,” we don’t typically think that this is also a mode of perception. Just try dancing or juggling, or even better watch dancing and juggling while paying attention to what senses you use to perceive such actions, and you may begin to understand that our perceptions of the world are much wider and subtler than we are habituated into.

Conversely there is the condition of synaethesia, the artist’s boon, in which the separate sensory modes trigger each other, perceiving sound as color is a common example. Personally I suspect (though I’m not sure if science chooses to support this) that we are all born a little synaesthetic, and only learn through use and habituation to keep our senses apart, it is perhaps easier to handle the world discretely, the same way we eventually settle through use on left or right handedness. I for instance have noticed for at least a decade that I smell touch, and have also through artistic mediums and active imagination trained myself to other synaesthetic perceptions. To complicate this though, there is recently discovered the condition of time-space synaesthesia, in which time is perceived visually, the year for instance as a ring circling the body. Jokes about Time Lords aside, this begs the question, do humans have a natural sense perception of time? Anyone who’se been stuck in a boring job will tell you, yes, you can almost physically feel time slip by if you pay enough attention to it. But, it seems that through the centuries of reliance on watches and calendars, we may have left undeveloped what may otherwise have a strong sense of time, suggesting that, though technologies extend our senses, they also limit them and their potential evolution.

Beyond these extra motor and temporal senses, we might discuss the perceptions of face recognition, pattern recognition, gesture, emotion, intent, subtle energies, spirits, hunger, significance, really any condition which we can conceive we can potentially train our brains and bodies to perceive, and even appreciate. An expansion of perception might lead to an expansion of aesthetics and the arts. For instance, the classical senses each have an associated artistic mode, hearing – music, touch – textiles, sight – visual arts, taste – cooking, smell… well, perhaps we’ve been wary of creating an olfactory art. But what of dance and acrobatics, which, though perceived visually, do rely on our senses of movement and balance for their performance and interpretation, or writing, particularly the tension of narratives, which relies on our sense of patterns and significance, the perception of what we know we don’t yet know. Or what art comes from the temporal sense? Film still mainly relies on vision, and though both film and music rely on time there is no aesthetic of time perception as might radicalize and stretch the possibilities of the temporal arts.

I’m not here going to get into the deeper issue of our belief only in the perceptible, but there is still a great importance to an opening of the senses themselves. As Blake says, we currently view the world through the narrow chinks of our caverns, more so now than when he wrote, that is, our five senses are not enough to fully experience life. And because we don’t recognize the senses necessary to fully experience life, we can not yet know how to fully appreciate being alive.

Keep the Pen on the Page, and Other Tips for an Effective Creative Practice

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Yesterday I took a break from working on the novel and got into two separate conversations with friends who write, who both said that they’ve been having difficulty with their writing practices of late. Over the past year I’ve managed to hone my own writing practice into a highly effective juggernaut, so it seemed that getting out what’s been working for me could be of benefit or reminder to my fellow writers (and general enough to be applicable to almost any creative art).

1. Focus and peak times of day. I used to be able to write anywhere and any time, but for working on the novel with its particular voice and tone I’ve recently found that I write best if I get into it first thing after breakfast. I have the most sustainable focus then (these days), and make use of it diligently. This of course has required getting the rest of my life scheduled so that I don’t have to be anywhere till the mid-afternoon most days. It helps the focus to not be looking ahead to being somewhere, no time limits to take you out of the moment of creation. It also helps the focus to not have any other pressing intellectual or emotional concerns on your plate; if something else is distracting then take care of it first, even if this means putting down the work for a longer period of time. I find the morning particularly useful for creating as I am still coming out of the more liminal and imaginal mode of dreams, and thus more open to the subconscious’s novel creative movements. I tend to edit in the evenings. It doesn’t really matter when you create though, but you have to set time aside to do so or you won’t. Make creating a priority, a job even, pen it in your daily planner. Of course, if inspiration strikes on the off hours, for art’s sake make use of it.

2. Steady practice and pacing. Write everyday, no matter if you don’t feel like it, unless you really don’t feel like it, in which case the writing won’t be all that good, but keep writing. Regular practice is the only way to become better at any art or sustain a longer work. This is common advice, but more importantly I’ve found it helps to apply the same continuity of practice to the actual pacing of the creative act (as in how fast you write), as the pace is reflected in the tone and style of the piece. Different styles take different paces, but for whatever particular style you intend to create in, stick to its pace, steadily and almost methodically, even if that means giving up wanting the work to be perfect the first time around (because it won’t be, generating material and editing are two different processes and you can edit later). Don’t slow down your pace for fear of writing a bunch of crap, in fact don’t judge the quality of the work at all in the moment of its creation. That you are practiced and paced should allow what needs to be created to create itself. As Borges says, a work is never finished, it can also be changed, even after it is published. So forget quality, and also forget quantity. Don’t speed up or push yourself to get more created than you can sustain the pace of to the amount you’re comfortably practiced. You can always keep working tomorrow, and it’s best to end a session knowing where the work needs to go next and being excited to get there.

3. Stepping back and oblique approaches. Sometimes though you could keep going and suddenly hit a wall, some line you can’t quite figure out how to create correctly. Instead of sitting their banging your head off the problem, just walk away, or do something entirely different. Other artistic mediums are particularly effective at translating or resolving such blockages, perhaps synaesthesically, or through the subterfugal whimsy of the subconscious. Brian Eno would use a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies with various non-linear suggestions for creating outside one’s expected mode (similar to how the Unlimited Story Deck might be used). I prefer long walks, as inspiration often lurks to strike down unfamiliar back alleys. Do the dishes even if it’s meditative, at the very least stand up and stretch. Also try working on a different section of the same piece or just tackle the problem area through inversion, from an entirely contrary tone/style/genre/ etc. from what you first expected. Most creation actually happens when you’re not looking at the page. Which leads to…

4. Forethought and perseverance, planning and lots of patience. Be prepared, says Rilke, to forget all your new ideas, specifically particular lines/phrases that occur when you’re away from the work. Let them come back later, forget them again, remember them, many times, and only then make use of them in your art. Creating takes vast stores of patience, waiting for the inspirations and urges to build up and spark, like an electromagnetic charge or, more literally, like a synapse. Be prepared for long fallow seasons of gathering material, whether through research or lived experience. During these off times keep practicing, journaling or sketching to keep the art flowing. But also scheme. Make plans, diagrams, outlines. Interconnect disparate ideas or realms of interest. Dredge up and catalog your memories and learning. Learn to remember your dreams. Read/view a broad range and large quantities of your chosen art. Examine it all again critically for technique and effect. Establish preferences and parameters as your understanding of your craft deepens, but try everything else out anyway. Pay attention to everything all the time and record the significant details. And with all this weave a world. Once this world, or the work you want to create, is in you, pour it through the established daily practice and stylistic parameters at your peak times of day (occasionally taking breaks), and all the work of creating will already have happened.

5. Inner Necessity. Give all your easy ideas away. If someone else could create it, then let them. Rilke also says (in his Letters to a Young Poet, which is full of advice for creating) that the most effective creations spring from an inner necessity, both in the act and the artist. Create those works that need to be in the world, works of which you see a glaring lack, which seem destined or required to exist, for whatever particular reason you deem them so. Similarly, the work should be necessary to the artist. It is something only you could have created, through your particular experience and vision, but it also is necessary for you to create at that moment in your life, perhaps in resolving personal (and thus collective) psychological or ideological quandaries that must be resolved. The prime factor in establishing an effective creative practice is feeling that you have to do it, by whatever compulsion at whatever cost. Anything less and you may be just as likely to go do something else.