by Eric Maisel
LESSON 31
Existential space is shifting space. Make appropriate meaning today; tomorrow make the meaning appropriate for tomorrow.
To Do
1. Have a rousing debate with yourself about whether meaning ought to stay put or whether it is appropriate for it to (uncomfortably and even unaccountably) shift. Describe a time when meaning shifted in your life. What caused the shift? How did it feel to have it shift? What were the consequences of that meaning sea change?
2. Look into the future. Can you see an important meaning that is likely to shift one day—maybe your work identity when you retire or your conception of yourself as a daily nurturer when your children leave the nest? How might you prepare yourself for such meaning shifts? Can they be prepared for beforehand?
3. Shift a meaning. See how sickening that feels. Then recover quickly.
4. Explain to yourself why you’d choose to live in a place where earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards, or tornadoes are guaranteed.
CHAPTER 32
Using Your Existential Intelligence
For the past hundred years, since the advent of intelligence tests and intelligence testing, people were thought of—and thought of themselves—as falling somewhere along a continuum of intelligence that ran from incredibly high to above-average to average to below-average. It was never very clear “how much” intelligence any of these stops along the continuum represented, so it was impossible to say whether a person of average intelligence, for instance, had “enough” intelligence for a particular task, whether that task was learning theoretical physics or voting in an election. It was simply taken for granted that average intelligence—the intelligence manifested by most people—was “good enough” to handle the ordinary tasks of living.
It was presumed that ordinary intelligence was “intelligence enough” to work in the world, abide by society’s laws, and be able to understand everything from contracts to the math lessons encountered in school. Certainly it was easy enough to believe that a person who needed five tries at the bar exam was not quite as sharp as a person who aced it on the first try and that a great checkers player was not quite the intellectual equal of a chess grandmaster. But distinctions of this sort remained entirely impressionistic, arbitrary, and whimsical. Little was known or could be said about intelligence because the concept was murky at best.
Since “intelligence” remained so murky a concept, the integrity, utility, and meaningfulness of intelligence tests were easy to dispute, as was the idea of “unitary intelligence.” Naturally enough, the idea of “multiple intelligences” arose. From this new point of view, people were no longer smart or not smart but rather smart or not smart in particular ways, a genius here and an idiot there, competent with respect to this and incompetent with respect to that.
Howard Gardner, the leading proponent of multiple intelligence theory, named first seven intelligences and then an eighth intelligence: linguistic intelligence (“word smart, as in a poet” logical-mathematical intelligence (“number/reasoning smart, as in a scientist”); spatial intelligence (“picture smart, as in a sculptor or airplane pilot”); bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (“body smart, as in an athlete or dancer”); musical intelligence (“music smart, as in a composer”); interpersonal intelligence (“people smart, as in a salesman or teacher”); intrapersonal intelligence (“self smart, exhibited by individuals with accurate views of themselves”); and, later, naturalist intelligence (“nature smart, as in a naturalist”).
At the end of the day, and even after the introduction of additional intelligences like Daniel Goleman’s “emotional intelligence,” we were still left with a large hole in the middle of the intelligence debate. First, none of these constructs got at our felt sense of what it meant to say that someone was or wasn’t smart. Second, after a moment’s thought you began to realize how many disparate ideas were being squashed together into one construct: natural differences, cultural differences, experiential differences, attitudinal differences, motivational differences, and so on. Third, and most important, the theory failed to address the following vital question: which intelligence or aspect of intelligence allowed you to comprehend what anything meant?
It turned out that the intelligence pundits had failed, until Gardner’s recent introduction of a ninth intelligence, to describe or even consider our most important intelligence: our existential intelligence. Existential intelligence is the part of our nature that steps back, slips on a wide-angle lens, and appraises in the realm of meaning. It is our most important intelligence because it allows us to know what to do with the other intelligences. We may have a great gift for visual representation; but it is our existential intelligence that allows us to know whether painting is the way we should spend our life. We may be capable in any number of ways, but we are just a bundle of capabilities until we apply our existential intelligence. Existential intelligence is the intelligence, the coordinating intelligence, the intelligence that all the other intelligences serve.
In order to provide ourselves with intelligent answers to questions such as whether it is more meaningful to write this novel, set in a desolate future, or that novel, set in a hopeful present, we are obliged to turn to our existential intelligence. We can’t answer such questions through the application of science, even if we are an Einstein; nor with music, even if we are a Beethoven; nor with words, even if we are a Shakespeare. We can only answer them through the application of existential intelligence: by applying our gift for meaning comprehension and meaning management.
Existential intelligence is the capacity for conceptualizing large questions about human existence, about the meaning of life, why we are born, why we die, what consciousness is, and how we got here. It is all that but it is much more. It is the intelligence we use to appraise the meaning of our life minute by minute. It is only existential intelligence that permits us to think through whether or not we should fight in a war or protest that war, renew our efforts to live or take our life, embrace our culture or rebel against it, manifest our compassion or manifest our rage. Anything that we intend to do thoughtfully requires the application of our existential intelligence.
This is the intelligence that concerns you, as a writer, the most. It guides your writing themes, your writing choices, and your writing relationships. It helps you understand why you are bothering to write, why you are spending years on a recalcitrant book, why you are revising eight times when you would rather go fishing. The other intelligences are all well and good; your existential intelligence is key.
LESSON 32
Existential space is the space you inhabit when you want to consciously make decisions in the realm of meaning. You go there to shine the light of your existential intelligence on questions such as “What should I write?” and “How should I live?” Go there!
To Do
1. Test your existential intelligence by posing it a question such as “Which of these two potential projects is the more meaningful one?” See how it responds. Give it a letter grade and if it gets a poor grade, ask it to do better.
2. Test your friends by asking them questions in the realm of meaning, such as “What should a person do when a meaning crisis strikes?” or “How do you plug up a meaning leak when you feel the meaning draining out of your current writing project?” Rank-order your friends according to their answers. Then visit with the highest ranked among them for some meaningful conversations.
3. Raise your existential intelligence by making it feel welcome.
4. Raise it even further by using it.
Part IX
Epilogue
Creative Space: A Writing Fable
CHAPTER 33
Phoebe Chooses
When thirteen-year-old Phoebe got home from school she found herself wondering whether she should write a short story or perhaps begin a novel. A story had the virtue of being short, pithy, and perhaps doable before dinner (which today was tuna fish sandwiches and potato salad, the kind of dinner you could be late for s
hould your story take all afternoon to write). A novel, which would take months to write and could not possibly be finished before dinner, had the virtue of allowing your characters to have the kinds of adventures that could only be found in, well, novels. This matter was taxing Phoebe and she sat by the window in her room thinking and thinking.
Harold Spider crawled by along the window ledge.
“Harold,” Phoebe said. “I was wondering. I am in a writing mood and I thought I might write a story about laundry drying out-of-doors on a clothesline stretched between two trees. It would be a very atmospheric story full of starch smells and the inner lives of shirts and jeans. But I was also thinking that I might work on my novel set in the South Seas, having to do with an all-girl band stranded on a remote and scary island. The girls all have to play acoustic guitar, as there is no electricity! Isn’t that clever? What do you think?”
“About?” Harold replied.
“Harold!” Phoebe scolded. “I just told you. Should I write the story or begin my novel?”
Harold scratched his head with several different legs. “I confess I am in a confused state of mind today. Why couldn’t you do both? Or am I missing something important?”
Phoebe thought for a moment. Finally she nodded. “I suppose that’s a reasonable question. On the face of it there’s no reason not to do both. Yet there feels like there must be a reason. Wouldn’t a muse know?”
Harold scratched his head again. “It’s amazing how much we muses forget! Just last week someone I was visiting complained of exactly this problem—though that was about writing two songs, but it’s the same thing really—and I know we arrived at the reason why she had to choose one or the other. But I can’t remember what we concluded. She was twenty-three, by the way.”
“How is that relevant?” Phoebe wondered skeptically.
“Well, I suppose I meant to imply that people of all ages find this to be a problem.”
“Not just little girls like me?” Phoebe complained, trying to sound insulted. But actually she was pleased that her problem was a real, grown-up problem.
“I only meant—”
“Oh, pish-tosh!” Phoebe exclaimed. “Not to worry! But isn’t this interesting and perplexing? I could write the short story today and then start the novel tomorrow. Why not? But I’m CONVINCED that I must choose one or the other and put the other one away, say in my little trunk over there, and if I don’t I won’t be able to get my whole head around either the laundry or the all-girl band.”
“Maybe—”
“Wait! I’m thinking.” She put her elbows on the sill and got into her very best thinking position, with her eyes shut.
Harold crawled away, to stretch his legs but also because it was a muse rule to let thinkers think.
“It could be the following,” Phoebe said, opening her eyes. But Harold was gone. She looked this way and that and finally found him crawling up the side of her jewelry box.
“Are you off?” she said.
“No, no! Just doing my walking meditation. Shall I return to the sill?”
“Please! Otherwise I have to scrunch down. I don’t think well scrunched!”
They resumed their original positions, though this took Phoebe one second and Harold a full minute.
“Here’s what I think,” Phoebe began. “I have one brain with a lot of brain cells. Agreed?”
“Agreed!” Harold agreed enthusiastically.
“Now, what is a brain like? Probably you will say a computer, because everybody does.”
“I have never likened the brain to a computer—”
“Never mind. Grown ups always do. But I think the brain is like a jungle full of animals. Now, when they are all going about their own business, many things happen. We have thoughts about warm buns for breakfast, maybe we have a worry about the paper we have to write about the barge canals of England, maybe we think about that new CD we so desperately want. In short, we have a common mind full of common thoughts. Are you following?”
“Yes! I know that mind.”
“Exactly. Now, in order for the brain to write, all the animals must come together and form a community. The lions and dolphins must get on the same page.”
“Dolphins?”
“A little literary license, please! But if the lemurs and skinks—”
“Skinks?”
“An interesting animal I saw on our summer vacation in Hawaii.”
“All right.”
“If the lemurs and skinks are muttering about the all-girl band novel, even though they are far in the back of the circle and hardly audible at all, they will be causing a kind of—” Phoebe paused, searching for the right word.
“Upsetness?” Harold offered.
“Pandemonium! A little pandemonium. Which prevents the group from concentrating on the laundry story, even though the majority of the animals have agreed on the story.”
“With the skinks carrying on so.”
“And the lemurs! So that is my analogy. One has to really choose what one is writing, because if one says, ‘I can write both,’ that’s somehow like letting skinks and lemurs loose, which produces upsetness and pandemonium.”
Harold clapped. “I believe I can visualize that perfectly. The fire around which the animals gather, the exotic birds—”
“All right, Harold. I’m done with my analogy. Now—I must choose!”
Phoebe squizzled up her face something awful. It was a dramatic gesture considerably for Harold’s benefit, and in fact after about three seconds she could feel a headache coming on.
“That won’t do!” she exclaimed. “Choosing isn’t like wrestling, after all!”
They were silent for a while as Phoebe tried to determine what choosing WAS like. Harold cleared his throat.
“Yes?” Phoebe grumped.
“You may take this to be a bit rude—”
“Well, then don’t say it! For I imagine that you know perfectly well that what you are about to say WILL be rude, so why say it?”
“Yes, yes, I admit that. But muses do have certain duties after all, and one is to point out this and that. I am pointing out the following: that in the time it is taking you to choose, you could have your laundry on the line already.”
“Well!” Phoebe huffed. She had the urge to roll up the magazine beside her and give Harold one great thwump. “That was not just rude, that was idiotic! That’s like saying—” Here she paused and thought hard, because only the right analogy would sting Harold sufficiently. “That’s like saying you could already be on the moon, if you didn’t waste so much time building your rocket! I mean, choosing is a PROCESS, and processes take time!”
“Of course, of course,” Harold agreed. “But it isn’t quite so much like building a rocket. I mean, laundry or island. Not to be small-minded about it, my dear, but it’s JUST a choice, not literal interstellar engineering.”
Phoebe’s feelings were bitterly hurt. “Well,” she said, a tear or two angling to venture forth from her tear ducts. “So you think I’m just a slacker. A slouch. A sloth. That I am just AVOIDING writing. That I am just talking the talk and not walking the walk. Well. I am quite sure that you are a very bad muse bearing very bad news and I wish you would crawl away and evaporate.”
“Now, now—”
“Go away, you mean little spider!”
Harold waited for Phoebe to recover but she looked greener and purpler by the second, so finally he trotted off. Phoebe threw herself on her bed, which wasn’t so much of a throw that she was likely to injure herself, and snuffled for fifteen minutes. Then she sat straight up.
“Well. There’s something to what that spider said!” she said to Lexington, the closest cat. “But he was also wrong. Right and wrong both, I say! Choosing IS a process. But perhaps I lingered and dawdled a bit too long. Maybe I WAS delaying, not really wanting to start anything. Plus, I’m not sure the laundry story was really my cup of tea. I think I liked the SMELL of it more than the story. Because I could smell that fr
esh laundry, which was really very delicious. So I suppose that I wanted to write the novel all along. But maybe I was secretly saying to myself, ‘What thirteen-year-old girl writes a novel?’ I fear that I WAS saying such a thing, so familiar does that question sound! Well! Who knew? I had NO IDEA I was doubting myself!”
This realization was really breathtaking and Phoebe had to catch her breath. She never consciously thought that there was anything she couldn’t do. To learn that she had some doubts about her ability to write a novel staggered her.
“Well, I’ll be the skink’s pajamas!” she exclaimed. “On to the novel immediately! I will eat late! I will write and write! Where are my pen and pad!”
She was indeed talking in exclamation points, which made Harold smile. On the ceiling, quite visible if you were looking that way, Harold waited another few seconds to see if Phoebe would open her pad. When she did, he trundled off, stopping only to nibble a red ant appetizer.
LESSON 33
If you won’t choose, you can’t create.
CHAPTER 34
Phoebe’s Novel Gets Under Way
The following Saturday morning the forces of nature, her genetic makeup, the hidden influences of muses, and whatever else was stewing in the pot of her personal creativity caused Phoebe to really start her novel.
She felt suffused with a new feeling. Previously she had liked the general idea of writing a novel and the specific idea of her all-girl band story. She relished the idea of being an author, of seeing her book in shops, of catching a glimpse of her likeness on the back cover. She also quite enjoyed the actual writing, though not when it wasn’t going well—which, it turned out, was disappointingly often. All in all, she would have said that she had been working on her novel for some weeks and had made a “fair start.” This Saturday morning she knew better. That had all been preamble.