THE  ARTISTIC  CREATION AS GIFT

Dr. Lou Montgomery

“Not I, but a fine wind that blows through me”
          - D.H. Lawrence

“Becoming fruitful as a result of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift…Announce the word, pronounce it, and give birth to it…Every creature is doing its best to express God.”
          – Meister Eckhart

    As a theatrical artist I see my craft as a gift to the world.  The artist/therapist  is the person who has drawn inspiration from the realm of psyche and brought that forward into life experience. She moves freely between inner and outer realms.  Ira Progoff writes,

” the creative person is one who is able to draw upon the images within himself and then to embody them in outer works, moving inward again and again for the inspiration of new source material, and outward again and again to learn from his artwork what it wants to become while he is working on it.”  Suzi Gablik in the book The Reenchantment of Art, challenges the art world to let go of its modernist ideas of “value-free aesthetics” and “art for art’s sake” and instead embrace a new paradigm of interdependence instead of solitary creation. This would mean bringing the feminine back into art. She is calling for “cultural healers” who are focused on relationships rather than objects, so that, in the language of Native Americans, “ the people [ all creation] might live.”

     Art is intrinsically tied to social justice; its redemption takes place in our bodies and is thus a bodying forth.  If art is true it will develop our moral capacity because is enables us to picture and identify with the suffering of others. As children we have the capacity to imagine which develops as adults into our capacity for compassion; thus clear perception in and of itself grants us moral insight.  Biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes that memory and knowledge exist in energetic morphic fields shared between humans and other creatures. Artists create fields around them. Thus they have a special responsibility to continually create new images or be a “ Distant Early Warning system of the collective thinking of a society.”

     Matthew Fox espouses that art without spirituality is ego centered, pessimistic, tired, materialistic, exclusive, elitist, anthropocentric, and narcissistic. Art effused with spirituality, he feels, is inclusive, open, celebratory, courageous, energizing, compassionate, fresh, youthful, and innocent. I would simply call it Eros.  It promotes what psychodramatist Milton Hawkins calls the “jublilation.”  Fox equates the differences in art to Aquinas’s two kinds of waters—the stagnant and the living.

     As an artist with a sense of vocation I remember that Meister Eckhart promises us that our work becomes enchanted when we return to our origins. Otto Rank said that creative work was the desire “to leave behind a gift.” Our artistic work is intended to be a blessing, a grace, a source of delight for others. Like the earth itself, as artist we bestow; it is an ordering principle of the universe. St. Paul said the only real sin in life was to refuse our vocation, our calling, which is itself a sacrament between the artist and the universal life force.  Within the artist’s soul swims the need to gift. African spiritual teacher Onye Onyemacchi says, “Praise takes all of you. Give it all away. Hold nothing back.”  Rilke, who said we can build temples, “extravagances of the heart,” tells us what we must attend to:

     A book I found to be a wonderfully persuasive argument for the artist embodying the role of gift-giver to the world is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.  “ An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his daemon….The celebrity trades on his gifts, he does not sacrifice to them. And without their sacrifice, without the return gift, the spirit cannot be set free.”  A gift’s spirit is kept alive by its constant donation. It needs to constantly move, be consumed, used up, and perish.  In opposition to a market exchange value, the gift that is freely exchanged moves in a circular fashion throughout one’s community to the world at large and has momentum and fertility.  It cannot be manipulated but rather circles into mystery, lightening as it moves. As the gift is given away, it feeds us again and again. As Eros, erotic exchange, its libido increases with giving. The gift moves from plenty to emptiness, nourishing the poor, the barren, the stuck, and the arid. It moistens and quickens.

     I am remembering during a time when I felt that my artistry was not getting the public exposure that it warranted and that my professional portfolio and acumen was seemingly too scant, I consulted a wonderful friend and poet who is a gifted Tarot reader.  She wisely advised me to release all ambition and simply let my work be like a Tibetan Buddhist sand painting—to have no attachment whatsoever.  Later I saw a documentary film about the Kalachakra Initiation, a week long ceremony officiated by the Dalia Lama, wherein Tibetan monks labor meticulously around the clock for days in the creation of the most stunning and intricate sand painting mandala, which embodies a universal prayer for the benefit of all sentient beings. At the ceremony’s conclusion this artistic masterpiece is swept up and offered to the elements. Its instantaneous destruction is as sacred an act as its tedious, time-consuming, and devoted creation.  I have taken the metaphor to heart and envision at the end of each performance the energy being scattered to the winds, walking off the stage with only a homeopathic trace.

         Like Dionysus, the gift’s zoe runs through all of life and endures.  As wine freely pours itself out, the gift only becomes a rarer and finer vintage as it passes along.  Meister Eckhart again says, “ Man ought to be flowing out into whatever can receive him.”  The more the gift is used up, the more it is worth. It binds many souls and gathers generosity, always tending toward community.  The gift does not earn profit, yet it increases.  In traditional tribal communities, Hyde explains, where gift exchange once flourished, there was always the faith that the gift would flow back, just like blood flows back to the heart.  One’s artistic gift, if turned inward and unshared, becomes heavy and toxic.  Rather than have the artistic gift implode into itself or exist as commodity, it is an honor to be Muses to be self-sqandering and self-forgetful, what Jack Keroauc called being “ a crazy dumbsaint of the mind.”  Sometimes the creative gift that is embodied creates the same gifted state in the receiving audience.  When we are in the gifted state we are in an erotic state, what Walt Whitman knew to be a carnal commerce, a kind of lung, inhaling and exhaling the world as he gave himself away. “Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and the index.”

     We are in the time now where the spiritual paradigm of humans being the “lords over creation” viewing creation from above, must give way to a paradigm in which we understand through our bodies that we are inextricably bound together with other bodies. The web of life connects in ever-widening concentric rings with the whole diverse rich planet. ( I heard a radio program recently that discussed a huge split occurring within the Christian fundamentalist movement—whether Christians have been ordained by God to be dominators or mindful earth stewards. The argument basically boiled down to whether Jesus, upon his Return. would either approve of every natural resource being consumed already, since it was allegedly put here for our exploitation, or be righteously pissed because His bounteous earthly bequest had been trashed and squandered by His custodial ingrates!  The argument also turns around whether nature is seen to be spirit or God infused, i.e. all sentient life regarded as sacred, or whether seeing nature as spirit filled is pure heathen animism and thus to be reviled.  Naturally, each side had copious scripture citations to beef up its position. )

     As one organic, infinitely diverse phenomenon, it seems to me that soul tending means literally tending the body of God as it manifests in all life forms. As a performing artist I feel I am not creating aesthetic abstractions but rather a hands on tending of heart, body, and soul.  At the end of one of my pieces, I sing and chant about animal spirit allies, saving habitations, and living for the future generations. I say we must get way down, get real,  get it together, get wet and muddy, connect to the web of all  creation, whether it wears fur, feathers, skin, scales, or soil, and let that web pull and stretch us. Let our hearts break. Let ourselves crack open. The opening is the gift—the giveaway.

     Several years ago, when I was in the throes of menopausal depression, lacking energy, vision, any sense of belonging to anyone, I felt imploded and worthless. My gifts were unused and were shriveling up. As May Sarton wrote in Journal of a Soiltude, “ There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most.”  Luckily, by the grace of the Muses, I had the occasion to be invited to facilitate psychodrama in Eastern Europe. None of the people I worked with could pay anything close to a usual workshop fee, so I just began gifting the work. I since made five trips to Poland. The gifting has spread to Israel and South Africa.

     In the process, my zoe  has returned, my creativity has mushroomed, and Eros is loosed within and without.  One of my plays was first performed as a gift in South Africa. It then traveled to Russia to be presented at an international conference on conflict resolution. Not every performance can be a financial giveaway, of course, but I have learned the great secret of the soul giveaway. One of my mentors, the immeasurably talented psychodramatist Dorothy Satten would often say that her desire was to end her life having been fully “used up.”  I too am learning how to tend soul through the erotic commerce of the gift. As long as I have the means to travel and to mount the stage, I will give my all without reservation, without question.  Having spent a sojourn in the underworld where my gifts seemed to languish, a terrible hell indeed, it my great joy to expend myself copiously and excessively. I close this section with words from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, a true gift to the poetic soul of the world: “ If you become ailment and the wet, they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches, and trees…[ as the artist] spreads out [her] dishes, [she] offers the sweet firm-fibered meat that grows men and women.” It is my desire to gift my works to the world  precisely in the measure with which they have been wrought—in love.