The creative power of emptiness

Cane embracing a sense of emptiness help us heal today's broken world?

Dear Readers,

Since the start of this year, I have been thinking about the qualities of emptiness and its relation to creativity. Or rather, more than I have been actively filling my mind with thoughts, I have been noticing the varying forms of creative emptiness as they present themselves to me. Let me start by sharing a few seemingly unconnected moments from my life. Maybe you will find the same connections I did or maybe you will find your own. Or maybe you will find an emptiness in the place where you wanted understanding. That as you will see is just fine too.

1. Scotland

I spent the first weeks of this year in a spacious holiday let in the Borders. One wall of both the lounge and bedroom was glass. I spent days resting, devoid of most of my possessions, unburdened by obligations, gazing out over the valley. Over the fields dusted with remaining snow, down in the valley, the River Tweed swelled with melting ice. Beyond that lay a sleepy town, and beyond that the two breast shaped hummocks of the Eildon hills. A small plateau separated the mounds – a cleavage if you will – and my eyes were repeatedly drawn to that gap, that flat pause between the geological pushing and shifting, accumulation and retention that built the hills.

Image c/o Holiday Cottages Melrose

2. The Girl with the Louding Mouth by Abi Daré

Home from Scotland, I took a train to London. In the station was a charity bookstall and I picked up a pristine copy of Abi’s first novel. It tells the tale of a fourteen year old Nigerian girl with a passion for education who is sold into marriage. It is superb. The moment I finished it I checked and saw that not only did the author have a second novel, it was a sequel. If I ordered it there and then from my hotel bed it would be at home when I returned the next day. I hovered over the BUY NOW button, but then realised; I did want to know what happened next. I did want to be inspired by the skill of the author. More, however, I wanted a time to let the first book settle. It was so memorable, so instructive to craft, so revealing about the world, that I wanted to let it sit uncrowded in my mind a while before taking on the next segment of the tale. I didn't want to fill the emptiness that came after the last page too soon.

3. Robert Louis Stevenson

I also recently read an essay written in 1888 by Robert Louis Stevenson in a book called The Writer’s Reader. He had been asked for advice by a young would-be writer whose father had ‘fiercely’ discouraged his ambition. Stevenson told him that whether his father was giving good advice or not depended on the type of vocation he had.

First there was the kind of artistic vocation that was less about creativity and more about ‘an impatience against all other trades’, a shying from all ‘cut-and-dry professions’. That kind of vocation was in fact a temptation that would ‘pass gently away in the course of years’. It was probably that kind of experience the young man’s father was thinking of.

Then there was the vocation Stevenson described as ‘imperfect’. Here people have

‘Minds bound up, not so much in any art as in the general ARS ARTIUM and common base of all creative work, who will now dip into a painting and now study counterpoint and anon will be indicting a sonnet : all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge.’

Stevenson declared that ‘of this temper when it stands alone, I find it difficult to speak’ but saw it as a useful way to learn many tools.

Lastly, he came to,

‘those vocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting or the sea or horses or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any trade apart from any question of success or fate, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may have a taste for all the arts and I think he often has, but the mark of his calling is the laborious particularity for one, this indistinguishable zest in its technical successes and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire and to this the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry.”

Of this last vocation Stevenson advised: “if you recognise in yourself such decisive taste, there is no room for hesitation: follow your bent.”

You may be scratching your head and wondering where is the emptiness in this quote but to me it allowed a clearing out of a room inside me, a curation of all other arts but writing into one play room and the creation of an empty room dedicated to the one art that truly called me and has all my life. It gave me permission to clear out and focus.

4. Mosab Abu Toha

Mosab is a Palestinian poet, author of Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear and his new book Forest of Noise. He is now safe with his immediate family in Syracuse but according to an interview in Poets and Writers Magazine lost thirty-one members of his family in one single airstrike. Much of his poetry relates to what he has lost ( or I should say, what has been taken from him), whether that is writing about his own childhood playground to which he will never be able to take his own three children or to the death of loved ones. He says of his new collection,

“There’s the poem titled “the Moon” about the girl who was killed in the street with her father while trying to run away from the bombardment there and also the girl who was buried under the rubble of her house [ in “Right of Left”] we were [only] able to retrieve her body after [several] months and we only found her arm.”

So often we see images of Gaza now and say in horror, ‘There is nothing left’. But that emptiness is in fact filled with memories, with remnants and in Mosab’s view, duty:

“Whatever strikes me as a poet or a human being, I document because it’s my duty as a poet to document everything that I see.”

Emptiness as enhanced presence

Really, there is no such thing as emptiness. Every physical space is filled, if only with air, with memories, with resonance. The plateau between the Eldonian hills had grass and trees, the cottage had furniture, the gap between novels had plenty of others words from multiple sources. What we mean when we speak of such kinds of emptiness is that there is a noticeable absence of something else. Whether it’s a lack of city noise that made the Scottish valley feel empty despite all the cars, houses and business whose lights twinkled below me, or the constant bombardment of bombs and sniper fire that emphasises the loss of quiet moments talking to grandparents under the mulberry trees outside of Raffah, or the lack of children’s laughter in a Southern kibbutz, emptiness is not absence, it is enhanced presence.

I am writing this on Holocaust Memorial Day when any of us who have been to Auschwitz will recall the very present sense of absence of the thousands of political prisoners, Soviet POWs, Sinta, homosexuals, Jehovahs witnesses, Roma and Jews who were murdered or suffered there. The emptiness throws a searchlight on to our consciences and requires us to ask not whether the exact suffering is happening again but whether any egregious suffering in general is being repeated and if so what are we going to say about it?

Creative emptiness

As creators in our every day life, however, emptiness more often shows up as ‘creative blocks’. When we complain of being blocked we often mean the absence of what we are used to – that abundant choice of activity and inspiration Stevenson identified as a love of the whole ARS ARTIUM - the ‘art of arts’. We despair that we do not have the next thing and the next thing and the next thing coming to us in an easy flow. We fall prey to the assumption that what matters is the ‘piled up humps’ – the productivity, the attention bringing achievements, the accumulation of skills. We grieve and miss the loss of our faculties, the ease we are used to. It starts to go to our core identity: who am I if I cannot create?

What if we saw those moments of creative dryness, the moments when it feels that everything we knew of our creative life - or just of our life in general - had fallen away or been cruelly destroyed by life circumstances, as honing moments. Times that bring clarity and point to the trueness of what we need to do at base level? What if we reframed lack of inspiration as the world’s way of giving us time to practice experience what life shattering emptiness feels like? Would it give us the empathy to see the whole world in a different way? Would it enable us to create something about the emptiness we feel, despite the emptiness we feel, because of the emptiness we feel? Would we start to speak up about the bigger emptinesses of other people?

Creativity takes practice. From the day we first hold a pencil as a baby learning to control our grip, fathoming out the particular marks that convey language in our culture, we practise. No novelist writes without having learned to form words. No embroiderer works without having practiced threading a fine needle. We also need to practice the noticing, the feeling, the understanding which we put into what we create.

The regular creative blocks we regularly experience are not world shattering events. They are, we might say, first world problems, when we sit blank-minded unable to paint in our warm bricks-still standing-studios. Or when we have the money to gaze at hills from rented holiday homes and feel we have zero ideas for the next Substack. But creating in the middle of and making work about these petty blocks is practice. We hone our muscles to then respond when we see loss and devastation that seems insurmountable. We build up strength to use our voice in times when wildfires and war come and the loss seems overwhelming.

Mosab in his interview said that one definition of poetry is being able to express how he and others feel and expressing what other people are trying to say.

In my view one might equally say that is a definition of fiction or art or dance. That we are expressing what others are struggling to articulate. Or expressing what others can articulate but are shy about putting into the world. Mosab continues:

“During the hard times a poet should use the best of his words, put them in the best order he can, and then share his words immediately, this is nothing that can’t wait because it’s about people’s lives. I cannot wait until this conflict ends to tell people how I felt or what they should do. When I write a poem and other people relate to it and they read it to other people who are struggling to understand what is going on, then that poem is working because it’s delivering a message that something is going on and that people need to act…..The only joy I find is when I can write about something indescribable. I find joy when I finish because I’m doing something not for myself but for other people. And hope? Hope is a noun and the verb form is to act.”

What if…?

We are living in a time when so many of us feel an emptiness where the compassion and wisdom of leaders used to be. A loss where justice and fairness used to sit. A void where decency and truth belonged. A gap between our understanding of how decent people should behave and how the world actually is. In the light of such important problems we may feel lost in our creativity, blocked by thoughts of its unimportance. Or lost for the words and images that can possibly make a difference. We are too small, empty of power.

What if we reframed that feeling of emptiness and made it a spotlight shining on the values that do matter to us? The one thing that we are called to do and do best? If we followed that bent without hesitation?

What if we held ourselves deliberately in an empty space of uncomfortable anticipation and contemplation?

What if we simply recorded the emptiness we feel and offered it to others as a witness to encourage them to also to create and speak and to hope and act?

What if we used that emptiness to spotlight the voices of those who need to be heard most at this time?

What if the emptiness we fear is actually the space where hope and action live?

Shalom,

Helen

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PS

If you want to practice taking some action from a feeling of emptiness you can join in Mosab’s project in association with Poets and Writers to write the world’s longest poem, by contributing two lines you need to create a free account, but its free to take part, can be done anonymously, and is not just for people who consider themselves Proper Poets!

Or, in the light of recent events in the USA and Latin America you may like to consider this sound art piece from Finland : 'Like A Prayer': A Sound Art Piece Makes Us Hear How Deportations Sound Like ( the sound file is in the first hyperlink in the blog post) then create your own art piece in your own media.