by Dawn Garisch
Wholeness as a mass-marketed idea increases the pressure on us to reach an unattainable perfection. It provides a lever for businesses to get us to hand over money to acquire the latest machine, tonic or pill in the uncritical quest for health. Alternatively, we might live a wholeness that implies integrity, encompassing all that it is to be human, including the mess and discomfort of death and illness.
What a dilemma. Here I am, a medical doctor, recommending illness and death as indispensable. I have a strong urge to look over my shoulder. Could such a blasphemy get me struck off the roll?
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Buddhists encourage cognizance of our mortality, with the saying: Death sits on your shoulder. A surprising number of people consider that talking or thinking about death is a morbid preoccupation. Being aware that we will die might well fuel anxiety, or else it can alert us that our time here is precious.
If we were able to banish death and its servants, disease and accident, what would the world look like? Without death, there would be no disintegration towards compost, and the cycle of life would shut down. We would wander the earth like Midas, our clever fingers turning everything into beautiful, durable, indigestible gold.
If we were able to control what happens, the unforeseeable would disappear. We would live within the constraints of our limited view of how things should be. We would never be able to surprise ourselves, or be surprised by information we need in order to review our lives. In doing away with the unpredictability of pain and suffering, we would also destroy what Hyde calls the happiness of happenstance.87
A patient who worked long hours and flew regularly around the world in an important academic job, was diagnosed recently with cancer. After surgery she went for a session of Reiki. The practitioner asked her, ‘Now your body has arrested you, how do you see your new self? ’
She got it. Her body had sent out a distress signal, and she took it seriously. She decided to take the rest of the year off and get more exercise, eat better and spend time doing more relaxing things. She now restricts her work to being the person who develops ideas in her field, and delegates the actual work, meetings and teaching commitments to others.
Her life has improved and her body feels better than it has for a long time.
Grateful. Serene.
A patient, who had a mastectomy for breast cancer, told me that contracting this intimate, life-threatening illness has had unexpected consequences. She has discovered strengths in herself that she has never acknowledged. It has also given the suffering she has experienced her whole life due to family circumstances a concrete and validating form. For the first time she feels that her suffering is visible to others, and has come to realise that people care about her and are there for her. Her illness has helped her allow herself to be vulnerable and to accept support and love from friends and colleagues.
As a consequence, she has become more visible. She no longer unconsciously chooses a background and peripheral position in gatherings, but has the confidence to participate more.
It could have gone the other way. Such a misfortune might have caused her to collapse in on herself and to become unhappier and more reclusive. It appears that we cannot predict how things are going to turn out, nor affix a single meaning or outcome to a single event.
During my midlife crisis, I was so out of my mind with stress that my eyesight began deteriorating. I knew that for over two years I had tried everything in my ability to solve my marital problems. It came to me, coldly and clearly, that I had reached the point where I had to choose between my eyesight and my marriage. My illness helped me take one of the hardest steps in my life. My eyes cleared, and they have not troubled me again since.
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21. Truth and the Artist
The prayer of five stones – Kabul, Gaza, New York City, Somalia, Jerusalem. There Is a prayer that changes the world. I can't remember It. The sound of water is what I think.
Christina M. Coates88
We feel recognition, animation and new alignment when we stand in front of a painting or sculpture that moves us, read a poem or hear music that resonates, or watch an extraordinary dance or theatre performance. What aspects of the truth do artists capture and distil and how do they do this?
Art operates through presenting a juxtaposition of ideas, words or images in a way that stimulates and affects our emotion and intellect. It has the potential to convey a complex of truths in layered ways. When performance artist Marina Abramović stood passively in a gallery as a work of art entitled Rhythm 0, 1974, she was testing and subverting the relationship between performer and audience. On a table nearby were 72 objects that the audience were informed they could use in any way that they chose. Some objects could give pleasure, while others could inflict pain, or even harm. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. Initially people reacted with caution and consideration, but as time passed people began to be more aggressive, taking off her clothes and even cutting her lightly and pressing the gun against her head.
In this piece, Abramović evoked disquieting and contradictory responses: vulnerability, abuse of women, women as victims, shame, violence, provocation, guilt, protection, fear, shock and fury. She held a mirror up to our denial, co-dependency and sado-masochism.
Through its use of image, art can also connect us to the symbolic layer of life. It returns us to our poetic base – to the roots of existence when humans had not yet become alienated from the rest of life on earth. Art can thereby heal the splits between mind and body, ego and psyche, subject and object, humans and nature, sacred and profane. It can restore mystery and awe.
Or not. Art may function by stressing us through widening the fissures and forcing our gaze into the void.
Either way, we are affected, woken up, realigned. We come away changed, with a new appreciation of something that can only be translated into words with difficulty.
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Lyn Cowan89 argues that the relationship between the ego and the unconscious is akin to Alice encountering Wonderland. In Wonderland, or in the unconscious, the rules of analytical, deductive and empirical logic do not apply, yet Wonderland is coherent if accepted on its own terms. When the White Queen announces ‘The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today’, the logician in us objects, but the inner poet understands implicitly.
When an artist embarks on a project, it can feel something like Alice entering Wonderland. A disturbance arrives in my body pressurising me to put pen to paper in an attempt to translate the feeling into words. The discomfort is not altogether unpleasant, but it is a heightened state, or agitation. It contains the element of conflict and conflict is unsettling. By its nature conflict either goes round in circles, or it spirals in towards some kind of resolution.
This tension is usually accompanied by an image. When I start tracking this image, I don't know where the project is going, other than that it probably relates to certain universal concerns that have distilled themselves into my life and into my writing. I suspect that most artists are busy gnawing away at the same bone most of their lives from different perspectives, getting closer and closer to the marrow. Solving the problem of the novel makes me examine closely what is true in myself and, by extrapolation, in humanity.
At the very least a creative act can be a helpful container. It can give form and shape to a vague sense of distress. A difficult emotion can be transferred from the creator to the artwork. Anthony Storr, psychoanalyst and writer, proposes that anything which lessens distress in the midst of chaos, or which increases our sense of control and mastery, gives pleasure.90
The artwork revealing itself through your body is a result of an exquisitely terrifying subliminal conversation between the known and the unknown. Aaron Copland, musician and composer, says that he creates in order to know himself, and as each new work is only a part-answer to the question ‘Who am I? ’, it stimulates him to pursue other and different part-answers.91
I have boxes of scraps and journals, and computer files full of all kinds of writing. Looking back on what I was thinking and feeling ten or twenty years ago is a gift to myself. It allows for a more nuanced reflection, and perhaps a more compassionate understanding of who I am, what I have been through and where I am up to. Writing has set me on a journey towards, instead of away from, myself.
The making of art can act as witness. One of the most valuable aspects of a long-term relationship, like a marriage or a best friendship, is that another person bears witness to your life, as you do to theirs. The most important long-term relationship we have is with ourselves, and art is a way of bearing witness to the truth of our own lives – documenting the complexity and patterns of this undertaking to live well.
Making art for oneself is one thing; publishing, exhibiting, and producing your work for the public is another. Even showing a friend or posting something on the Internet is a kind of publishing. Art displayed in public can also be a form of witnessing – of our time and its beauty, difficulties and challenges.
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Children are born curious, and begin their lives exploring, pulling things apart and trying to put them together again. They draw, act, dance and sing. They try things out, for that is how they learn how things work and what they can rely on. They begin life without the fear of making mistakes. We think to ourselves: how cute, and laugh at the errors of children, for most of us have long since lost that unselfconscious capacity.
Art reconnects us with this spirit of curiosity and discovery, and at the same time it forges new connections in the brain. It assists us in overcoming fear of our potential and fear of error when we discover that our ‘mistakes’ sometimes allow our best work in.
Losing our curiosity and creativity early on in life disables us. It is like losing a sensory organ. We stumble around, half-blind, partially deaf. When we reclaim that which was meant to be ours, we can live more expansively, and be more fully and truly who we are.
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The muse is an old religious idea: that the goddess of creativity has come to inhabit and assist you. It contains the notion that human beings and the gods need each other. A person needs inspiration from the gods, and the gods need a human being to execute the task and commit the project to paper, instrument, canvas or the dance floor.
It is possible that our brains trick us by constructing the sensation of the muse. Yet this possibility does not adequately explain some of the things that have happened to me that are tantamount to guidance.
When I started writing Trespass, I knew it had to be situated post-World War II for reasons of the plot, so I randomly decided that the events of the novel would take place from early 1955 to late 1956.
Twenty pages into the book, I checked what was going on in South Africa at that time so as to better situate the novel. I discovered that the only two all-women's political movements in the history of South Africa arose during the time span of the novel. The Black Sash started their campaign in 1955. Their initial cause was to protest against the Nationalist government's strategy to load the senate and thereby push through a law to take the vote away from coloured men. The following year, the African National Congress Women's League marched on the Union Buildings, protesting the new pass laws for black women. Both these extraordinary events epitomised how oppressed women might stand against abuse – feeding directly into the concerns of the novel.
A scientist might argue that I had once known and then forgotten these dates, and that, at the beginning of the project, I had chosen them unconsciously. It is possible, but I did not take history at high school, and my recall of dates is appalling.
If the muse exists, then I believe it is essential to be available to her spirit and intention. In author Barbara Kingsolver's words we need to be ready to catch the apple when it falls.92 Without our conscious assistance, to continue her metaphor, the muse's gifts just roll away unnoticed to rot.
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There are stories in any family or culture that are true, but that may not be told. Despite this, there are those who are prepared to tell them. Leslie Marmon Silko, in her novel Ceremony, and Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior, broke family and cultural secrets by putting them into print. They were lauded by some and criticised by others for doing so. Thando Mgqolozana's novel A Man Who Is Not A Man breaks with Xhosa tradition which stipulates that those who have been initiated into manhood may not speak to women nor to those who have not been initiated about what they have been through. Lewis Hyde, in Trickster Makes This World, comments that social anthropologists who studied cultures from a distance often misinterpreted what they saw, as many cultures guarded themselves around strangers, not allowing them into their story.
Which stories cannot be told? Who owns a story anyway; who is its guardian? Is breaking with tradition or breaking taboos good and helpful? When is it not?
The writers who have spoken to my core are those who have revealed something about life or themselves which concerns the truth of imagination or experience, however beautiful or difficult. Many of these writers have addressed topics that have crossed private or cultural boundaries, and provided glimpses into intimate lives. These shared experiences have encouraged me, and shown me a way through in my life and in my writing. But I understand the concern about the danger of exposing what is private or sacred. Revelation carries the risk of misinterpretation, loss of identity, betrayal and shame.
A poet, preparing to interview me about the novel Trespass, emailed me the following: ‘Reading Phyllis's thoughts is cathartic and frightening at the same time, because, although she blurs the line between madness and reality, she also speaks the truth. And thinks out loud what many of us dare not say. Is truth-telling important to you as a writer? ’
My response: ‘Well, there are things one can only admit to oneself, then there are things one is prepared to write down in a journal, knowing that there is a possibility it might fall into someone else's hands, and there are things one can say out loud to others. These are all different selves, with censors posted in the gateways. And of course there are the aspects of self that everyone but you can see. I am interested in working with all these truths, how they can even contradict each other. ’
There are those truths that I could write, but decide not to. Not now. The ego can encourage one to make decisions that could have unfortunate consequences.
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There is a paradox in claiming that a novel or art work can reveal the truth. After all, these are fictions. A story is fabricated, although it might be based on a true event, or cobbled together out of real incidents and actual characters. Artists borrow endlessly from life.
A work of fiction is true if it is well told, delves unflinchingly into the heart of the human condition, and then comes up with a resolution that does not cheat life, nor the reader, but wakes us up to ourselves. It is true as in ‘it rings true’ as is said of bells that have been cast without flaw, and sound with great beauty. It is a lovely paradox that through the manipulation of a text and thereby the reader, a truth can be revealed.
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22. Truth-finding Tools of the Artist
If you are too sentimental or conventional for your crystals ever to be knocked out of place the poems you prefer will be sentimental and conventional probably In tight little rooms (room = stanza, In Italian, no doubt someone will explain) with a witty bit left hanging which could be anyone's do not disturb sign (you never know what's going on In there)
Joan Metelerkamp93
In a collection of her published interviews,94 Doris Lessing said that a novel is a problem to be solved. Something must be worked out, or worked through. This puzzle starts at the writer's desk, and if the issues in the book are resolved satisfactorily for the author, even if there are no happy endings, the reader will usually feel satisfied as well.
The difficulty for the author does not only lie in the narrative, or storyline. It is embedded in all the layers of creating the piece. There are the quest
ions of voice, language and style, of form and content. Problems of character and dialogue, of pacing and the shape of scenes, of beginnings and middles and endings. Tensions between the personal and the political, background and foreground, tragedy and comedy.
At the heart of a novel will be a concern that is not random. The writer is embroiled in the subject matter precisely because it originally resides in her own heart. The novel is a vehicle for the author to probe and explore this terrain, not as propaganda, but as an open-ended question. In writing that ventures below the surface, as in living deeply, there are no easy answers. Engaging with the unresolved questions posed by the novel requires the novelist to engage with undecided or disturbed parts of herself. E.L. Doctorow claimed that writers hazard themselves, as every time they compose a book the composition of themselves is at stake.95
Working on a story inevitably brings me face to face with problems to do with the process of writing in addition to the content – my impatience and my ‘drivenness’, my self-doubt and my over-confidence, my fear of exposing myself and the imperative to push boundaries. How will I know whether I am stumbling down a dead-end in the story, or whether my mounting anxiety is instead about entering a dark alley to find the elusive ingredient necessary to help resolution?
My script editor for the edutainment series Soul City taught me that when you write a script, the first two minutes of screen time must contain a ‘hook’ – some moment that grabs a viewer's attention. Movies are either made for TV, or they end up there, where viewers can switch channels if they are not rapidly engaged.