On camels, creativity and coping with life.

How silliness shows us how to face serious loss.

In six days’ time, the sandy soil at the foot of the Aravalli hills in Rajasthan will be whipped up into low scudding clouds of dust. Hooves of prancing stallions and lumbering dromedaries, delicate feet of turbaned acrobats and dancers in embroidered robes, the pneumatic tyres of coaches bearing tourists; all these and more will churn and disturb the land. The Pushkar Camel Fair is coming to town.

Alongside the neon lights of a modern funfair, livestock will be bought and sold. Hairy Sikhs will compete for the longest moustache competition or race their animals around in circles. Tent cities will spring up. Sadhu’s will perform rituals. Near tables stocked with handicrafts, folk dancers will spin while over in the lake, devotees of Lord Brama will dip in the hope of having sins forgiven. The mela will be a riot of movement, colour and clashing sounds. And camels playing musical chairs.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Let me say that again.

Camels playing musical chairs.

I know that in my Festivals series so far, I have focused each month on a deeply meaningful cultural festival, aiming to draw a thoughtful statement on our own creative lives from ancient teachings. And I promise you I will take you to something serious and useful about creativity in just a moment. However, we are simply going to have to go via camels and musical chairs because here in the UK it’s November, it’s dark and dingy almost all day, and we all need some amusement to brighten us up.

I can find a video of what is best described as camel dressage (think camels with pink garters standing on a trampoline, rearing and can-can dancing or parading around a compound, their necks curled into S shapes, snooty noses aloft). I can’t, however, find a visual of the camels playing musical chairs.

What I did find was a wonderful story of Financial Times Analyst Katie Martin who, bored in her job, started to draw funny pictures around stock-market charts. When she started tweeting them, out some people took it seriously and started reporting that, the gold market was in danger - about to hit the splat zone - as the market was moving in a ‘vomiting camel pattern’. I kid you not  – she owns up in this video.

But back to the camels and the musical chairs.  There are questions to be asked about this. How big a seat does a camel bottom need? Are the camels as competitive as some of the kids at my childhood birthday parties were? Do they too nudge fellow camels off the remaining chairs, all sliding buttocks and sharp elbows? Do they participate with glee? Or are they as unenthusiastic as I was as a seven-year-old? (It didn’t take much to work out that the removed chairs don’t vanish, they are placed elsewhere in the room and if you make zero effort to plonk your backside on a seat remaining in the circle, you can leave the idiotic game and go and sit in a removed chair with a book).

I might be anthropomorphising these beasts too much, but I do wonder:  if they do take this game seriously, do they feel a huge sense of loss when the bangla music ceases and they find themselves standing alone, knobbly-kneed and exposingly tall in the centre of a circle of smug dromedaries braying with victory? Do they stand, there bobbing their necks and searching around in surprise for the seat they thought would support them? Do they have to slink away shamed and bereft, having lost their position in a social circle? Worse, does their failure to kick and shove their way to a chair reduce their worth in the livestock market?

This is probably because, in the context of creativity in the second half of life, I have been thinking about loss and removal a fair bit recently. It’s impossible to get to 54 and not have loss around you. Car keys, collagen, parents-in-law, jobs, car keys (again), confidence, patience, other people’s names, purpose in life, the spare car keys you were using because you never did find the original car keys. Then there are the huge losses of other people which, if we have even a shred of empathy, we feel small parts of. The sense of joy at the thought of music festivals. Neighbours. Apartment blocks blown to smithereens, with favourite clothes, journals and family photographs still in them. Legs. Children. Homelands. Historical losses have tentatively been finding my way into my work recently as I burn paper and think about lost libraries and Nazi bonfires.

No wonder I am eagerly embracing the riotous comedy of camel games because an easy approach to loss is to ban it from our creativity. To paint over it with daring crimsons and the determined cheeriness of sunflower yellow, to fight to be the one who doesn’t lose at all, who retains to the end what we think holds us up.

Yet in reality, whilst serious individual losses can temporarily floor us with their devastation, loss as a composite experience can be creatively liberating. Understanding that can sustain us in the devastating moments – and the anticipatory fear of them - because in that understanding there is the hope of not just recovery but of creating something new, fresh and promising.

The serendipity latent within creativity is inextricably linked with loss. Losing an art kit on a vacation train brings sadness and the opportunity to hunt down new supply shops or to make a body of work with the cheap pen and telephone notepad from the hotel or the soil from the ground rubbed into grocery bags.  Losing an expected exhibition opportunity or a competition can lead to more meaningful ways to show your work. Losing the whole thread of your creative life can cause you to detour, explore new forms, meet new people, read new books or hear new podcasts.  

Loss in the creative process can clear us out for new things and as ever, the arts function as a learning ground for life. They teach us that holding on, and investing worth only in what we can retain, can be stifling and limiting. Clinging to what we view as vital can lead to great disappointment and faux security.

So it is in life. The winner in musical chairs is ultimately left alone holding a cheap lollipop as a prize whilst the losers have long wandered off to make fun elsewhere. The mogul who, being smarter than the rest, constantly sells and reinvests his shares in safe holdings before the fictious camel vomits, ends up rich and alone in a rocket somewhere approaching outer space whilst those left behind group together to revile him on his own platform. The leaders who refuse to let go of avaricious, racist, revengeful violence find themselves weakened, destroyed or isolated in pariah states, isolated on the wrong side of history.

Storytelling is a classic creative way to help humans experience loss in a positive, safe and vicarious way. Fictional tales often model for us the possibilities in re-creation after loss.

I recently stumbled on the 2014 Robert Di Niro film The Intern. Di Niro plays a 70 year old who has lost his wife. He is bored with retirement. He has lost all sense of purpose. He worked all his career for a firm printing phone books so even the point of his whole life’s work seems to have been lost with the invention of websites. He applies for a job as a ’senior intern’ at an online startup fashion firm run by a young mother.

The writers avoided the clichés of a May-to-September romance or the trope of the man coming in to save the company from the clutches of the young and incompetent female. Instead, we see Ben, hanging out in the very same building where he used to print his phone books, offering his wisdom and friendship and making a difference in people’s lives. In so doing he gains a deep sense of purpose and belonging. His loss enables an unexpected gain not in monetary terms but in human wealth. The gain does not cancel out the losses he has experienced but rather it is founded upon them. The dip in the floor created by the weight of the printing machines remains but is now covered by the desks of a successful firm.

Practising the small losses creatively teaches us that there is a principle at play here that runs through the world. As we age, we lose our sense of inviolability. We have lived long enough to see repeating patterns, to worry about the resurgence of fascism and the loss of women’s rights. We start to focus not on the loss of balls over fences and best friends at school but on the feared loss of material security, loved ones and our health. There is the danger that we could get bogged down in the uncreative belief that the world is a place of unredeemable ever encroaching loss.

And yet, silly articles about camels playing musical chairs can remind us that when all seems lost and bare, there is a re-creative process that repeats both at the micro-level of our small personal creative tasks and also at the macro level of politics and human survival. Each year the barren Indian landscape in Pushkar collapses into the sad husk of a place that forms when a fair moves on leaving only tent peg holes and camel droppings. Also, once a year that desolate place transforms with joy again as stalls are re-built and flags raised.

You may have noticed I have been quiet on Substack recently. I was feeling the tail end effect of some losses. I felt that I no longer had anything to say, that my ability to write newsletters worth reading had left me. A very wise and wonderful friend told me that I was wrong, that I had the ability to ‘write about the phone book and the stock market and bring it together into something meaningful’.

I have tried to take that sense of loss, to take the seemingly insignificant thing that was left – the mere passing suggestion of a phone book and a stock market - and re-make it into just such an article. I aimed to prove to myself at a tiny macro level that whilst loss as an individual moment in time might never be undoable, loss as an emotional experience is not antithetical to finding a new way forward. I wanted to channel the silliness of a camel fair and make myself smile. I hoped by showing the result publicly you might also get some benefit.

I will let you decide if I achieved my goal.

Shalom,

Helen.

PS. Don’t blame my friend for the camels. That was all me.