A famous elephant, self-empathy and impactful creativity
How the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi may inspire more deeply personal work.
Welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined me recently. I really appreciate you giving me room in your inbox. This post is the latest in my monthly Festivals series which has a generous and useful (I hope) free element but then some material for subscribers including some coaching type content. The rest of my posts in a month are completely free. I hope you find some benefit here to make your life better.
Hello again!
I took a break in August from writing on Substack to enjoy some time with visiting family from Australia and to enjoy some art events and studio time. I did a great letterpress day with Nick from The Print Project and was delighted to finally buy a vessel from Craig Underhill who was at Potfest in the Park and whose work I have been pinning to Pinterest for years. I have been learning intaglio printing with Sally Hirst, talking to art mentor Susan Stockwell and editor Elizabeth Winder as I start working on my Arts Council Grant year (about which more in a subsequent newsletter) and have been wowed by Geraldine Brook’s novel People of the Book.
Vessel by Craig Underhill: www.craigunderhill.co.uk
I am back just in time to bring you some creativity related thoughts inspired by the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi which falls this year on Friday 6th September. Ganesh, with his broken-tusked elephant head and multiple arms is perhaps the most recognised Hindu Gods. The festival celebrates his birth and lasts for ten days, the end of which involves a ritual immersion of Gansesh statues representing his return to the Himalayas where his ‘parents’ Shiva and Parvati reside. As with almost all festivals there are elements of food and fasting, prayer and decorations. Adherents also spend time meditating on the various aspects of Gansesh.
They have plenty to reflect on as, aside from the symbolism of his form, he has no less than 108 names and a variety of roles including being the patron of the arts, letters and writing and the god of beginnings. What caught my eye though is that he is also called Vighnaraja the god of all hindrances or the god who creates obstacles.
What do artists do all day?
These three roles go well together it seems to me. On YouTube there is a series called What Artists Do All Day in which a range of eminent artists muse on their daily routine and process. I have not seen them all yet but surely one day there will be an honest artist who says,
“I wake up and decide that today I will be an artist. Or a writer. Or some other form of creator. To do that I first form an obstacle in my mind in the sense of a challenge I am interested in overcoming. Something that I don’t know how to do but I suspect I might be able to achieve if I try. Something meaningful to me. Then I simply begin. That is what an artist does. I pick up my pen or my brush and I just start again every single day.
“Then with my implement ready in my hand I create more obstacles in my mind. I build up blocks. They alter from day to day but they may look like fear of success, uncertainty about the market for my work, imposter syndrome or the complete conviction that I must I spend at least two weeks researching the exact pigment of a Brazilian butterfly’s wing before I can even think about this work. Or it could look like a pile of washing that simply must be done right now. Or that good series on Netflix that could conceivably be called research. It is the job of an artist to be imaginative so there is an endless possibility for building these obstacles. Each artist will do it with his or her own voice and I am constantly pushing myself to find my own true obstacle, the one that is my truly authentic way of not being able to create. Something that chimes with my core values and allows me to express myself via a form of negative space - an absence of work, if you like, functioning as an arty-smarty metaphor for the human condition. In a non-performative sense.
“Eventually I will have constructed something that seems worthy of belief. Sometime that comes quickly and means I can knock off at 10 am. Sometimes I have to sit at my desk bleeding before it happens, but discipline is the key. (Unless the need for discipline is your true obstacle in which case I can recommend some great Amazon Prime TV to watch.)
“Once I have a hefty block in place, I feel I have done enough for a morning. That is enough to be able to contribute to the canon in the sense that I can tell other emerging writers and artists with some authority how hard this path is. I like to do that sitting in my garden on social media sipping a glass of absinthe with my poet partner. I spend the afternoon playing with the dog and constructing ornate rituals to enable me to write or paint despite the block. Occasionally I return to my desk or studio in the evening, walking eight and a half times around the house first, wearing the necessary silk smoking jacket and my lucky beanie hat. I breath in the smell of rotting apples (unless it’s a Tuesday in which case it must be the scent of a freshly lit bonfire) and then finally put a few words down or dash off a drawing or two. That’s what I do all day.”
Removing obstacles
Fortunately Ganesh is also the god who removes obstacles. Which led me to think about how he might do that. And more specifically how those of us who do not worship Ganesh might ourselves work to remove the creative blocks and/or the tendency to construct them. Which got me to thinking about the role of empathy in creativity. Empathy being simply the abilty to understand the views and sense the emotions of others.
The truth is I was thinking about empathy already. This weekend six hostages were found shot dead in a tunnel beneath Gaza. I have an extremely loose and vague connection to one of them, Eden Yerusalami, as did many other people I know. There was an immediate outpouring of empathy, for the hostages, for their families, for the soldiers who found them. Even for the people with loose and vague connections to the hostages who were in safe places but struggling with the news and how it made them feel.
What bothered me was that it was also immediately apparent that some of those readily exercising this empathy were utterly unwilling or able to exercise empathy for Gazans whose lives have been equally devastated. There was simply a block that stopped their capacity to direct empathy in that direction. That block also stopped the possibility of any useful discussion between us about creating peace never mind the actual creation of true peace within our own community, let alone in the world at large.
Art, in any form is closely linked to empathy. It is a form of communication that enables and encourages empathy. Stories open up the imagination to new worlds. Visuals bypass ingrained thoughts to allow us to see things differently. The beauty of poetry transports us to a place of pure soul rather than tainted minds. Whether it is the outpouring of heartfelt and eye-opening Palestinian poetry or public art meant to highlight the hostages, art is being used to great effect in the context of the Gazan war to increase empathy.
Often in the second-half-of-life period of creativity which this newsletter focuses on, people do feel this urge to make work that overtly relates to the political or humanitarian. But any art can change the world by impacting one person. It doesn’t need to be political art. A beautiful botanical image can crack open a person’s heart as much as a poem about the suffering in Raffah. A business-related newsletter with just the right Nick Cave quote in can unknowingly energise a weary creator to do her work. ( Thanks
!)What happens though, when we as creators create our own blocks to making art? When we create our own blocks so that we shrink from putting work into the world? When we cease to contribute to the debate about or the actual creation of better world conditions? That’s when the concept of self-empathy comes in, a concept which is different to self-compassion or self-care.