Are you doing enough nothing?

Why blank space is vital to creativity

The quieter you become, the more you can hear” - Rumi

At the top of my garden a young man stands on a ladder. His phone sits on the dustsheets at his feet and he is making some flat toned yelping sounds that I assume is not pain but his attempts to sing along to Beyonce. The irony is that he is painting a pergola which will form an open entrance hall to the summer house I have dedicated to creative peace and quiet. Already inside it is a calming grey, its exterior a deep blue with cool marble trim. It has a small desk made from a chunk of solid oak, a cabinet with open shelves for baskets and cubbies for neatly rolled throws, mediation cushions and yoga props. A teal sofa is about to arrive and then it will be complete. The full-length windows look out onto cherry and magnolia trees and pots bursting with petunias.

I wait for the decorator to depart, finally taking his unwanted noise with him and then I let myself in. Instinctively I take a deep breath and let it all flow out through my mouth. Ahhhhh. I sit on the cushion, close my eyes and almost immediately the next-door neighbour walks to the opposite side of the garden fence, with his young daughter and begins a loud phone conversation interspersed with making the baby squeal.  I practice mindful compassion and eventually he goes and I can bathe in silence. Three seconds later a fat pigeon lands on the roof, starts stomping to and fro over the felt and insistently coo, coo, coo-ing.

John Cage, the composer of the piece 4’33”in which orchestras play not a single note, explored his need for creative silence by spending time in an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, said to be the quietest place on earth. Even in there he heard sounds. He tells the story that an engineer told him the high-pitched sound he heard was his nervous system, the low his circulatory system. Others have cast doubt on this and suggest he was hearing tinnitus and breathing but there is no doubt he was right when he said, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. `There is always something to see, something to hear, in fact try as we may to make a silence we cannot.’

What we can create however is space for quiet and stillness. Room to pause, to let the the sediment in our lives settle to the bottom leaving clarity at the top. We can choose not to engage, to embrace solitude and to simply be.

This I know and this I do not easily do.

I am still too often in the world that Nina Power described where she wrote,“[you] are at all times supposed to be a kind of walking CV… that neatly summarises where you’ve been and how you made profitable use of your time… there is nothing subjective, nothing left hidden behind the appearance… you simply are commensurate with your comportment in the world.”

The creative world is no exception with its demand for regular social media posting and websites with lengthy exhibition resumes and artists bios.  I see articles in the self-publishing world explaining how to write a book every month or two,  about the necessity of fast pace writing for success.

The work of sustainable and deep creativity, requires a space to think, to reflect and allow the mind to wander and the soul to rest. Creativity requires room for mental and emotional expansion, a capacity to store within us piles of ‘failures’ and aimless meanderings as well as the execution of exhibitable works.

            As Lesley Saunders writes in the London Review of Education,  “Creativity is not always visible measurable, exploitative…on the contrary, creativity is often unbiddable, unconforming and quintessentially idiosyncratic – and as any artist knows there are extended periods of waiting and hoping when you cannot command inspiration.”

Or, as Margaret Atwood more simply phrased it, “A poet is someone who sits looking out of the window when other people think she should be cutting the grass.”

     This raises two big questions for me: First, how do I learn to live with the slowness and quiet the creator in me craves, when I must do so in a world that demands proof of daily achievement? (Because it is not so simple as to say: don’t worry what anyone thinks. My former work life has imprinted the overvaluing of activity deep within my own thoughts and beliefs. What is now required is not only a willingness to be different to the mainstream but also a significant deprogramming.) The second question is, how can I incorporate space and rest visually in my work so as to offer it as an experience to my viewers? As you will see from the art piece below, it is not exactly present at the moment. No surprise there given how our art so clearly reflects our inner states.

I don’t think I knew how fundamental these questions were to my current stage of development as an artist until I overheard a Rabbi friend mention that a five-day residential mindfulness retreat was being held just an hour away from my home and I recognised that my soul and body considered that idea pure bliss and nourishment. I signed up at once. By the time you get the next newsletter I will be able to report back on the experience. I anticipate joys, challenges and surprises. We shall see. 

It is run by a Jewish organisation and so when I had the initial call with the retreat organiser the word kavannnah was mentioned – the setting of intentions. Mine is to explore in particular  - there and in later days - how space, quiet and mindfulness interacts with creativity.

I have mentioned before that I find exploring the unfamiliarity of Hebrew a useful way to get out of my usual thought patterns and into a different mindset. In textual analysis of ancient texts, the methodology assumes that there is significance to all small details. Nothing is present or absent without reason. (Of course ,this does not mean that we have to believe the text in a fundamental way unless we choose to, simply that we can use this approach as a tool and see if we can use its quirks to find some way of looking at the world that helps us in our daily life.)

Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a consonant, but it is a silent sound, often described as the sound you make just before you speak, that intake of breath. Yet, the creation myth in the Bible starts with the word bet, the second letter of the alphabet, a ‘b’ sound. If it is right that creation starts with quiet intake, why not start the story about creation with the first letter, the one that is representative of pre-action? Why does the word bereshit which means ‘in the beginning’, not start at the beginning?!

One possible answer is reflected in the fact that the books of Talmud (ancient Jewish legal teachings) are divided into daf or two sided pages, daf aleph and daf bet. Page (a) and page (b). Each book of Talmud however starts with daf bet. Why? Why waste paper and leave a page blank? Why start with the second letter? One answer I read recently is because if we believe we know the beginning ,we believe we know the end. Leaving space acknowledges that we understand there is a beginning beyond what we know and which precedes us. It also impliedly makes room for an ending we cannot see.

This makes sense to me in terms of creativity. It is not a religious idea so much as a metaphor for a truth about how making things works. Ideas come formed at times and we have no understanding of where they were made. We are born with personality traits and likes and dislikes all of which feed into our art and whose origins we never really understand. We continue of millennia of human creativity much of which is lost to us. Our art works turn into creations we never could have imagined when we began work. They go out into the world and viewers interact with them finding meaning the artist, writer or composer never contemplated.

And so,  I shall be going to retreat and going into the studio in coming days looking at space, dealing with its discomforts and its joys and seeing what might happen in the future I do not know.  Perhaps then, I should now start that practice by shutting up and leaving some  space in which you might contemplate the ideas in this post and their possible relevance to your own practice!

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For your contemplation:

• Where do you want more space or quiet in your practice?

• What do you tend to fill space with and why?

• If I invite you to contemplate reducing your pace of production what positive and negative emotions arise for you?

• Underneath those conflicting and noisy reactions what can you sense your need is right now?

• Will you gift yourself what you need?

  Feel free to share your answers with me and others by leaving a comment. It can be a powerful thing to hear your own experiences reflected by those of others.

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From the studio:

Ma Tovu. Acrylic and oil pastel. Sold

I was invited to produce a piece to grace the cover of the brochure commemorating the 60^th anniversary of Menorah Synagogue in Manchester.  This piece is the result. The flames are the letter samech which is also the symbol for the number sixty. The Hebrew text is a prayer said to welcome people into community at the start of a morning service. The original was auctioned at the celebration lunch and I’m glad to say raised more money than I would have priced it at!  A similar piece in a different colourway is available via my online gallery (at my pricing!)

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And finally, a blessing:

May you find the quiet today to hear your own wisdom. May you find the space to stretch to your full potential free from the constraints of societal expectations. May you live with peace as your companion and guide.

Shalom,

Helen