The Lyf So
Short, the Craft So Longe to Lerne...
"The lyf so short, the
craft so longe to lerne, Th'assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge, The
dredful joye..." -- Geoffrey Chaucer, 1382, "The Parliament of
Fowls"
As a creative writer, I owe
a huge debt to the irrational. That spontaneously fanciful part of our human
reality has gone by many names: the unconscious, Muse, duende, Dionysian
mysteries, mundus imaginalis, the bardo, al mithal. Let me now add yinsanity.
You know what I mean. To do
anything creatively, there’s got to be a lot of yin: yinteriority:
receptivity to the inner darkness from which issue all the images that give
imagination its name. What amazes me is that within us a dream force organizes
these images into narratives. Every night when we dream - and in all our
daydreams - this dream force is busy telling stories!
The irrational storyteller
inside us is our yinsanity. By relating to this darkness that glimmers with
secret fire, we answer a central question for readers, “Where do writers
get their ideas?”
The source of our yinsanity
is the mystery that is reality. Thanks in large part to three Teutonic wizards
- Kurt Gödel, Werner Heisenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - we are among
the first generations to know that reality is unknowable.
That’s the imploding
reply to the explosive question, “Why write creatively?”
To possess oneself.
Our lives are narratives. In
the past, people could sincerely believe their narratives corresponded to
reality - to God or science. Three Teutonic wizards punctured that illusion
forever. Truth for 21st century minds is unavailable. All we have is imagination.
Our brains trick us. The reality
we see around us doesn’t exist. Though our nervous systems are made
of the same material we find in our environment, we feel separate. We cherish
a distinct sense of past and a canny awareness of future. Yet, for over
a century now, Einstein’s relativity theories have demonstrated (time
and again!) that time is an illusion.
Brain chemistry has evolved
to optimize opportunities for reproduction, and it seems our world - our
ordinary, rational reality - is an elaborate and sexy fiction, exquisitely
useful for survival but not at all representative of what really is.
Perhaps our yinsanity offers
a more realistic perspective than reason. Perhaps creative writing is a
way of sharing yinsanity and its deeper dimension of reality: our mindful
confrontation with Mystery.
Writing began as an alphanumeric
magical code. Spelling creates spells in the earliest writing. We still
use it to spellbind destiny by fixing our narratives on the page. Even a
shopping list is a contract with destiny. How much more so our dreams with
their own secret narrator? Or our stories dreamsprung from the unconscious
and manipulated into art?
Thousands of generations of
human dreaming - and just a few with the opportunity to write down these
most intimate stories of our yinsanity and share them with complete strangers,
even with the unborn.
Damaged like flowers for the
gods, we are strewn across time, that hard illusion, and trampled. Our written
stories remain. The Muse and Chaucer’s pilgrims are real - because
they don’t exist.
What a spooky power! But (as
master spellbinder Chaucer points out) writing is not easy. Evolution didn’t
adapt our brains to read and write. Creative writing, our dreadful joy,
is a new way of human being - an invented way - of entering together into
the dreaming, into the ongoing narrative of our creaturely psyche - our
yinsanity. |