Love and Creativity

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” 

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Most would agree that true love requires work, a stretching beyond our resources. But is it the end to which all meaningful things are headed? The quote by Rilke suggests so, and I would agree. Unless my work is for the ultimate end of love, there’s no point setting out to labour in the first place. 

There are many different ways to look at love, so I want to outline what I mean by it here. The love that underpins all my work aims to be persevering, self sacrificial, other-centred. It's durable, yet flexible - not stoic, but bendable.

“Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

- Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Janie (via Zora Neale Hurston) teaches me the bendability of love, the fact that it’s malleable in the presence of whoever it seeks to connect with. Love holds in tension an objective and subjective quality to it. On the one hand, it’s as deeply fixed and rooted as a mature oak tree, on the other hand, it’s as tender and perceptibly wholesome as a baby’s yawn. 

This isn’t to say that every time people who engage with my work will feel loved. The feeling is likely to come much more tangentially. For example, I hope that people will feel seen in my work. The ‘eyes’ in eyesandoath refers directly to that. I observe the world around me and peer into my own soul in order to connect with others. My hope is that people listen to my work and ‘yes, that’s my experience of the world too’. This leads to love because it forms connection and combats isolation. The objective necessity of common human experience and the subjective necessity of fleshing out that experience is satisfied. 

The flexible side of love is inherently creative and this is where the magic happens. In order to connect with someone, I reshape myself into their world. Counterintuitively, this requires a subduing of parts of myself which compete with or jar against the uniqueness in others. 

For example in my poem Mother, I speak from the perspective of a middle aged man in a corporate world. Now, I have nothing against middle aged men (I promise! more on what inspired this poem another time…), but we would all agree that a middle aged man working in the corporate world is likely to have aspects to his personality which don’t entirely fit with mine. But in writing Mother, I looked to my own difficult experiences and honoured them through metaphor. At the same time, I subdued aspects of myself in order to connect with someone totally different to me, but who could identify with me in this experience. 

This is an attempt for me to love and connect with others:

“mother is muffled tears behind closed doors over drowned years of suffocating pain, 

mother is perseverance and collapse, 

I, a grown man, run around this world with an umbilical cord tied to her lap, 

chair board meetings with her eyes in the shadows, 

see glints of her wild smile in my daughter’s folly.”

I think this is how empathy functionally works. Real empathy requires putting a pause button on our own demands and preferences in order to step into the world of others, and empathy is a prerequisite for love. 

Four Values and Creativity

This post introduces a miniseries on four values which remain integral to my creative work: love, humility, faith and wisdom.

I will be delving into how each value transforms my practice, but also how they balance each other out to provide a good foundation for others to learn from.

A lot of people talk about how values are your unique flavour to what you’re bringing to the table. But I prefer to think of them as guardrails which help me to stay on track. They provide a focus and an impetus when things are tough and they help problem solving processes. I arrived at these values nearly three years ago during some careers coaching I received and I have returned to them ever since. I don’t take on any projects which don’t have any discernible resemblance of these qualities and they are what I strive for in every working relationship. 

As much as we artists often veer away from clinging to moral absolutes, we’re deeply moral people. Perhaps the word ‘moral’ feels a bit too jarring. We might taper it by saying we have conviction or settle for ‘value-based’. But the truth is no one is out there creating persuasive art simply for arts sake. However subtle or imperceptible, there is always a moral note to be struck. It’s what keeps us going. 

Values are a way to keep us drawing from the deep pure waters of our moral core which lie dormant in our day to day, but flare up when we’re hit with something not right in the world. 

Talking about the arts ecosystem in New York, visual artist Makoto Fujimura puts it like this: 

“It is widely recognized that our culture today is not life giving. There is little room at the margins to make artistic endeavors sustainable. The wider ecosystem of art and culture has been decimated, leaving only homogenous pockets of survivors, those fit enough to survive in a poisoned environment. In culture as in nature, a lack of diversity is a first sign of a distressed ecosystem. 

Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented.”1

Values help us stay hydrated in our sometimes suffocating environments. 

Stay tuned for what’s next: 

• Love

• Humility

• Faith

• Wisdom

1. Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life, (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2017), p. 30.

Ephrem the Syrian’s Poetic Christ

Most people have a version of Christ which makes sense of their world. Whether that comes from a religious belief or not, the historic Christ has many cloaks. I’ve encountered him as a marxist and nationalist, and alchemist. Amongst Christians, he is God. But he also was a man, so how does that all fit? 

If you’re new to my work, you might be surprised to find I’m interested in the relationship between poetry and theology. I find deep imaginative potential in both and have had intellectual curiosities satisfied by both. Ephrem the Syrian has been part of that journey in recent months and I’d love to introduce you to his writing. 

Ephrem the Syrian was a Syriac theologian who lived in fourth century Edessa, modern day Turkey. During his time, many groups were trying to make sense of who Christ was. Was he fully human like us, or was his humanity an illusion? Did Christ have a divided physical and soul nature or was it just one nature? A lot of these debates happened for good reason and answers to them had real implications. However it became tainted for Ephrem when he perceived a certain arrogance. 

Ephrem didn’t shy away from the need to engage in deep theological inquiry (after all, he was himself a theologian), but he saw a problem amongst his peers. What started out as open curiosity, quickly became a mission for managing the mechanics of Christ. What began as genuine inquiry for the benefit of the church, eventually slipped into logical sports for the benefit of the intellectual elite. Ephrem the Syrian valued thorough theological engagement, but cautioned his readers. He saw the need for wisdom in debating with others, whilst remaining humble in quiet contemplation. He puts it like this: 

‘The mouth which wishes to speak about him who is

unspeakable,

Makes him small, for it is insufficient to his greatness.

[...]

Refrain from debating, which cannot comprehend him, and

acquire silence, which befits him.

Enable me, my Lord, to use both of these discerningly:

May I not debate presumptuously; may I not be silent

impudently.

May I learn beneficial speech; may I acquire discerning

silence.’1

Like poetry, the historic Christ is often beyond our understanding. We’re drawn out of ourselves not primarily to make all the cogs fit, but to delight, to feel unsettled, or to worship. Like poetry the historic Christ cannot easily be put together in a neat bundle of comprehension. And whilst thinking deeply about Christ often leads to worship for the Christian, there are ways in which fixating on how Christ’s nature fits together diminishes our awe of him. 

Ephrem the Syrian has taught me the value of thinking deeply, whilst holding open hands for imagination, for delight and reverence.

1. The Fathers of the Church: St. Ephrem the Syrian, trans. by Jeffrey T. Wickes (Missouri: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015), p. 62.