Nothingness and Creation
“People who don’t create from scratch, critics or journalists who interpret others’ work for example, in my experience, find it difficult to understand that most creators do not create from a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but they create from a place of nothingness where things spontaneously arise. That is the place of the unknowable and in our lives it is very difficult to live with what is not known (yet), even though “I don’t know” is essential to true change and new growth. Instead we’re taught to find the answers to everything, and we have to quantify everything we have to have the cash flow chart for the next five years.”
Sheila Chandra from the liner of ABoneCroneDrone.
I read this as I was putting this CD on the computer to listen to it. It struck me as so true for my creative process. I don’t take this and that and shove it together, because when I do my art doesn’t turn out. I get a piece that I feel sucks. The concept for me is not a mix and match kind of deal.
It is one that comes out of the unknown as Sheila states in her liner notes. This unknowing state can last for months, sometimes years. You can feel it bubbling up below the surface but you can’t see it yet. There is no feel for it, just something almost ready to be known, almost ready to be seen and created. Procrastination is not always a bad thing, sometimes I feel like we lack a word for the process of letting ideas gestate. The cultural urge is to go forward to create with all out beings, to make it happen.
What would happen if we took that word away, took procrastination right out of the vocabulary and replaced it. Made room for the unknown to bubble up in us and have time to form into what we need it to be. How would that change life to not fall back on the the known of doing and let the unknowable create and blossom inside of us. To understand that even once we know that the unknowable can move in and change that knowing back into the unknown.
My Rune tile is a piece that I had a vision that spontaneousness of the unknown becoming known. The idea welled up and I created it and was very happy but yet not happy with it. It felt that there was some other component that needed to be there, but I had nothing, no idea what that component was. So I sat with not knowing and nothingness, for about a year and half, maybe two years. Time sequences are not my strong suit. One day there it was, it came to me, and it was there. I knew what I wanted to do with the Rune tile piece and all there is now is for me to act, when it is time to create the new part of that piece.
Just because you know it now does not mean that the time for action has come, it can still gestate until you are ready to know it and move back into nothingness.
