What I want to be about
Today I’ve taken a step back from my work (fiction writing) to reflect on why I’m doing it. Every so often I need this – a “taking stock” that refocuses my energy and helps me determine whether there’s things I want/need to do differently from week to week to better move toward my goals. I came across another passage in Rollo May’s Courage to Create that has sparked some helpful reflection toward this end. May writes:
“If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols. This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, “unconscious” levels of the culture is destroyed. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world.”
This immediately made me think about all the short stories I’ve been reading. These are art. And the more I reflect on them “long and searchingly,” the more I see in them a reflection of the “spiritual meaning” of our age. As far as I can tell, they portray homelessness in its deepest sense – that lack of rootedness, of place, of purpose, of meaning that has little to do with whether or not you have a permanent address. I leave these stories lonely and cold, wishing for buoys of hope or warmth or relationship, doubting they’re there to be found. I leave feeling like life has little sparkle, and day-to-dayness is a lot of that raw feeling you get when you haven’t slept enough, or you’re about to get sick, or everything you wished life could be just really isn’t happening.
Thinking about these stories this way makes me admire their writers for being such incisive namers, naming our age and the state of so many of our souls. I want to be a namer, too. I want to help raise consciousness about what it is we’re feeling and living through, what we’re hoping for and despairing about.
But in all my “taking stock,” I realize I don’t want to stop there. I want to do more than hold up mirrors. I want to point toward windows, and begin imagining what might be seen through them. I want to stand at the edge of our age, quite personally in touch with the fear and frustration and meaningless that accompany disillusionment and the crumbling of foundations (in science, religion, politics, etc.), and look past that edge to participate in the creation of something more. Something beyond. Something hopeful, even if realistic and not disconnected from despair. May writes, “[The courage to live into the future] will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”
I want to be a namer, yes, but also a creator, courageously creating from the stuff of life that which enlivens, and sustains, and shines light on hopeful paths toward all that makes up “home.”