Aesthetic Space

Navigating the Unknown - Examiner.com article

David Lynch, the legendary director of many noteworthy films including Elephant Man and Eraserhead, was once asked by Terry Gross on Fresh Air what he does when he makes a movie. After a long pause he replied, “You know, when I’m making a movie, I don’t know what I’m doing.” Of course there is something that is guiding his actions, but whatever it is, isn’t something that he can verbalize. When Lynch is immersed in his creative process, he has a way of knowing that doesn’t involve words.

Even if we are not professional artists, every time we enter a situation not knowing how it's going to turn out, we are engaged in the creative process. How do we navigate this unknown territory? ...To read the rest of the article, go to the Examiner: http://www.examiner.com/arts-education-in-san-francisco/navigating-the-unknown

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The source of the imagination (what makes us uniquely human) is an unconscious metaphoric process

...and another reason to attend my upcoming workshop on metaphor at Book Passage.

http://bookpassage.com/event/class-kim-hermanson-metaphor-everyday-life

Images have a very quiet voice

Lucy Mooney 1935

For a long time, the various parts of me have felt separate: I'm both an academic and a creative. I am passionate about teaching and learning, as well as creativity and the arts. As I've journeyed on my path, I've realized that it's my mission to bridge the academic and creative. Since images lie at the heart of the creative process, images also lie at the heart of learning.

I believe that my academic courses provide a strong foundation for the "legitimacy" of the arts--offering substantial evidence of their centrality in learning and cultural change. Some of these courses include Psychology of Metaphor, Psychology of Creativity, Psychology of Transformative Learning, The Purpose and Power of Image and Imaginal Ways of Knowing. (For course descriptions, go to Events & Classes page.)

I often think of image and imagination as the "language of the heart," and this language needs our support. While images are at the center of any kind of creative transformation, they have a very quiet voice. Images need to be welcomed and given space, else they will not be heard.

We're at our most creative when we actively engage with images

Florine Smith quilt 1975
Creative individuals mentally play with images all the time, no matter what field they work in. But research shows that all of us are embedded in the world of mental imagery all the time... and our cognitive systems are based in metaphor. Even individuals who define themselves as "less creative" are at their most creative when they actively engage with images.

Third Space

When I was two years old, I was sitting on a carriage swing with my older sister. She sat on one side while I sat on the other side facing her. The neighborhood kids were pushing us too hard and I wanted them to stop, so I put my foot down and my leg snapped. It split in two above the ankle. I had just learned to walk, so after my tiny leg was encased in a plaster cast, it was back to crawling for me.

When I was twenty-six, I again lost my ability to walk when the car I was traveling in was struck head-on by an oncoming car. It was a high-speed impact on the highway and fortunately I was wearing a seat belt. Unfortunately, my spinal chord was displaced by 40 degrees, I broke T-12, my body was paralyzed from the waist down, and the doctors at the Mayo Clinic (where I was flown by air ambulance) gave me less than 5 percent chance of walking again. It was a slow, painstaking process of re-learning and rehabilitation.

Not surprisingly, these two events gave me an attendant fear of “stepping out.” There is no part of me that is interested in getting injured again, having spent too much of my life encased in body casts and wheelchairs. But I have always been a risk-taker, with a yearning to see and do new things. Perhaps that is why the exploration of my own creative process has always been most important to me. I needed another “world” I could explore that would not bring bodily harm. The world that I found was a place that the ancient Sufis called the “imaginal world.” I like to call it third space.

What is an Image

I'm really lovin' Lynda Barry's book What It Is.

"When I was little... I would hold myself as still as I could and make my eyes like a toy's eyes that don't movce and I would wait. I would wait for the other things in the room to forget about me and begin to move...I knew I had to be patient and wait for a very long time...I believed there was another world that would show itself to me in the smallest ways. The gray kitten in the picture by my bed would accidentally blink his eyes. The girl in the picture would breathe....Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real. But what caused the disillusionment?...What is an Image? At the center of everything we call 'the arts' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive."

The Dimension of Not-Knowing

I'm teaching the first session of my "Psychology of Transformative Learning" course for graduate students at Meridian tomorrow. So in honor of that, thought I'd provide a quote from Derrida. Enjoy.

Language is an intrinsically unreliable structure for communication. Real meaning exists in a dimension that transcends reason and language. It is a ‘dimension of not-knowing’ and this domain of not-knowing is the appropriate domain for true education. Creativity and transformation require entering that dimension – going beyond language and reason and finding the common ground between all living things from which real creativity and profound transformation emerge.

--Jacques Derrida

That's where I like to play.

Living on the Shooting Line

[The artist's] antennae pick up messages before anybody else, so he is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present. There are very many reasons why most people prefer to live in the age just behind them. It’s safer. To live right on the shooting line, right on the frontier of change, is terrifying. – Marshall McLuhan

Sigmund Freud once said that for every new idea he ever had, a poet had already been there ahead of him. There’s something about how artists look at life and contribute back to life that has always enthralled me. Marshall McLuhan said that artists are “on the frontier of change.” We continually look to art and artists for new ideas, energy and inspiration. Artists work with third space in the imaginal realm, befriending the images that show up for them. Image is the language of the imaginal realm.

For more immersion in the world of the image, I hope you'll sign up for my workshop “The Transformative Power of Image” at Book Passage in Corte Madera, April 16 from 10 am to 4 pm. Here's the link: http://www.bookpassage.com/event/kim-hermanson-transformative-power-image

Do You Have a Key Image? Is it Real?

I had a disagreement with an old friend recently about whether the images and metaphors that show up in our subconscious are "real." I believe, just like with dreams, that when images and metaphors show up in our lives, they have something to teach us and I don’t think my friend would argue with that. His concern seems to be with something that I call a “key image.” I've been intrigued by poets and artists who have talked about having a key image that they keep "working" in their writings and art (or more accurately, an image that keeps “working them”). Stanley Kunitz and the Irish poet John O'Donohue are two who have written of this phenomena. In his book Beauty, O’Donohue wrote, “In the end, every artist is haunted by a few central themes. Again and again, they return to the disturbance and endeavor to excavate something new.” These key images typically come from childhood. For example, as a child E.B. White was fascinated by spider webs; he went on to author the bestselling children’s book Charlotte’s Web.

A few archetypal psychologists have looked at key images from a psychological perspective, namely James Hillman (who refers to key images as "acorns") and Bill Plotkin, who calls them “personal soul articulations.” He writes in Nature and the Human Soul that each person’s soul articulation “employs a metaphor from nature to point to an ineffable mystery—the unique way in which each person belongs to the wild world.” And finally, the philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin, an expert on Sufi philosophy, wrote that the Sufis believe that each human has his or her own distinct "image of God." In other words, [God] “can no longer be imposed by a collective faith, for it is the vision that corresponds to his fundamental and innermost being.” (I love that line. If only we could remember it, our religious wars and conflicts would surely go away.) In Native American cultures, visions are given prominence in one's life when young people go on vision quests to uncover them.

From these writings we can infer that perhaps each of us has an inner vision, image, or metaphor and this image may be the key to both our learning and development in life, as well as in a broader way, to social change on the planet. For me, the notion of a key image is more than an intellectual musing, because I’ve been aware for most of my adult life of a key image that lies in my heart. It has to do with growing something in nurturing soil. I have worked with metaphor and imagery for twenty-five years, both professionally and personally, and the image of planting and caring for whatever wants to grow in rich, fertile soil is an image that won’t let me go. And I wouldn’t want it to. It not only feels like part of me, I’m sure that it’s the best part of me.

My friend wrote in an email: "I have a deep-seated objection to the perspective of Jung, Hillman and others like them. It is based on my conviction that they distance and separate us from a part of our own, unique process. Metaphors and myths are and are not nouns. They can be studied as nouns (e.g. Greek vs. Celtic myths), but if we approach them in a more personal way…in terms of how we express ourselves and how that type of expression emerges from and impacts us and others... then we see that they are part of the river of being. As such, they co-mingle with the continuing flow of process…ever-changing as a result of context. On a personal level, they are empty shells until we put them on and give them life—and every time we put one on, even if it is the same metaphor, it looks and feels different. "River of being" and "empty shell" are two images that I have used before but never in this context, and they feel different, fresh, and new as a result.”

Research over the past forty years has shown that our thinking stems from our imagination and imaginal process (see George Lakoff’s work in particular). We're only conscious of five to ten percent of what goes on in our minds; most of our thought process is unconscious. So if we’re not conscious of most of the activity that goes on in our minds, key images may be very difficult to prove. Perhaps the best way is to ask you about your own direct experience. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Do you have a key image? Do you have something that won’t let you go?

Making Friends with Your Imagination

Imagination is indirect, nonlinear, and fuzzy. It’s more about taking you to a “new place” and providing a fresh perspective than providing a numerically clear solution or quick fix. Further, when we open up our imaginations, we challenge traditional norms. Our creative process comes up with ideas that are often at odds with standard procedures. It’s scary to open up to these foreign, quirky voices; it’s much easier to cover up and ignore them. Creativity is definitely messy.

But how many of us spend our days trying to find solutions to complex problems? Try as we may, new insights and fresh ideas are not going to come with reason or mental will power. Whether it be finding economical ways to market a workshop or developing a sustainable school system or managing our personal relationships in a way that brings satisfaction and happiness, we need to become friendly with our imaginations. Both Albert Einstein and Carl Jung said in different ways that no fundamental problem can ever be solved at the level at which it was created. To come up with enlightened solutions, we need a larger context, a larger set of possibilities, and expanded ways of think­ing. We need access to something that’s bigger than us and bigger than our current state of knowledge. We need the imagination.

Don’t you find that to be true? When you find yourself stuck on some problem or issue, taking a trip or simply immersing in a new environment often brings up synchronistic solutions. The trouble is, we can’t mentally “will” ourselves to go to this new place. Our minds know how to analyze, compartmentalize and dissect; they know how to churn things around in circles. They do not know how to enter the imaginal.

That said, here are some ideas to help you become more friendly with the imaginal realm:

1) Remember your dreams, but don’t analyze them. Turning the images in your dreams into an “interpretation” takes the life out of the them, or as the psychologist James Hillman would say, “it leaves the soul unanimated.” When you analyze your dreams, you put them into a box where they can’t breathe. Instead, think of your dream images as “friends” that have shown up to keep you company. Let your dreams images accompany you during the day, working their magic on you.

2) Write a fairy tale. Allow yourself to be five years old and bring in dragons, castles, kings, princesses, or any other fairy tale character that seems appropriate. Start by writing the sentence, “Once upon a time, long, long ago in a land far away….” When you allow yourself to move beyond the “adult behavior” box, surprising insights arise. There’s a wisdom that lies beyond your trained mind. Give yourself the space to discover it.

3) Find your key image. The late poet Stanley Kunitz said that poets have one or two favorite images that captivated them as children that they keep working over and over again in their writing. For example, as a child E.B. White was fascinated by spider webs. He later went on to author the bestselling children’s book, Charlotte’s Web. I believe we all have such key images, and even if we’re not poets, our images keep “working us” over the course of our life. Some of my students’ key images have been fertile soil, ocean waves, and street festivals. Just muse for a moment—is there an image, or cluster of images, from childhood that is always close to your heart? We ultimately become the images we hold—-the images that have chosen us.

4) Play with visual imagery. Find a funky magazine (or other printed material like catalogues or old picture books) and scan through for whatever images appeal, provoke, or disturb you. Cut them out. Don’t try to make sense of what you’re doing, just continue ripping until you feel finished. One important route to the imaginal is through play and ripping pictures from magazines is “grown up” enough to give us room to do that. After you’re done, randomly pick up a couple of your images and see what connections can be made between them. See if you can combine the disparate elements into a new pattern or come up with a wild hypothesis (the wilder the better).

5) Notice the presence of metaphor. We normally think of metaphor as purely a linguistic device, but in truth, metaphor is the lens through which we see the world around us. A range of scholars, from Marshall McLuhan to the linguist George Lakoff to the German philosopher Martin Foss, have all argued that we live within an unconscious metaphoric process. Notice the metaphors that you use to describe the situations and people in your life, and notice when new metaphors show up. New metaphors provide fresh ways of looking.

Every perception that we have of the world around us is colored by the images through which we perceive. In daily life we are all poets and artists, and consciously or unconsciously, we are all working with the images we hold. As Rollo May once said, “…imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the foundation of human experience.” It’s time to make friends with the imaginal.

** The image at the top of this post is a quilt by Annie Mae Young, 1970.

Non-Literal Ways of Knowing

Picasso:
Every one wants to understand art. Why not try to understand one song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand? But in case of a painting, people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works because he must, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of others things in the world which please us, though we can't explain them.

Picasso's insight is my segueway to say that I'm teaching a class on image at Pacifica Graduate Institute next year. Images lose their power when we try to explain them. Instead, we can "befriend" them, noticing their presence and the effect they seem to want to have on our life and the lives of those around us. When Pacifica sent me the title, "The Purpose and Power of Image" and the course description, I knew this class was mine. Here's the description:

Depth psychology has always maintained a close relationship with image—-the literal images which visit in our sleep, the fantasy images we flirt with while awake, the autonomous images that appear “out of nowhere,” the metaphorical images we have of ourselves and others—the psyche is always creating images. In turn, those images give shape to our psyche, an idea which archetypal psychologist James Hillman explores in his work. Hillman proposes that “at the soul’s core we are images,” and that life can be defined as “the actualization over time” of the images in our hearts and souls. Hillman goes even further by suggesting that our unique images are the essence of our life, and “calls [us] to a destiny.” Students will study the writings of James Hillman and others on the purpose and power of image in psychological and creative life and meditate upon the core images meaningful to their lives and work.

This is an academic course for "creatives" in their new Engaged Humanities program. The course will incorporate "non-literal," as well as literal, ways of knowing. Call Pacifica for more info!

Five Disconcerting Qualities of Creativity

Newsweek magazine just came out with a cover article on creativity. Apparently, a poll of 1500 CEOs said that creativity was the most important skill of the future. Authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write, “The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed.” The article goes on to lament that creativity scores are declining and we don't teach creativity in school. So I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about the somewhat problematic relationship between creativity and modern organizational life.

(1) Creativity is about expansiveness, unlimited possibilities, and being comfortable with the unknown. The way educational and business leaders typically define creativity is that it’s something that produces a given end. Both schools and businesses want results and something that can be measured. Hence, what is defined as creativity is more similar to “problem solving,” than something that is unknown, expansive, and necessarily bigger than us. When we limit our agenda to producing something that is measurable in this way, we create a “box” and of course, then we are limited to thinking “within the box.” A couple months ago, I got into a conversation with a high-level scientist from Amsterdam about creativity, business, and science. He gave me the question of exploring “Why is the sky blue?” as an example of creativity in science. I in turn asked him, “Why does the sky have to be blue?” Believing that the sky is blue is what limits our creative options and possibilities. Think of Monet’s impressionist paintings. Monet allowed his creative process to travel outside of the box—snow wasn’t necessarily white and the sky did not have to be blue. When we travel outside the lines, we find creativity.

(2) Creativity is challenging and confronting. When people are truly being their authentic selves, they challenge people. They’re not following the traditional path. They’re following their own path, which is most likely going against the norm. Society hails creativity as some idealized thing, but yet doesn’t favor or support people who are challenging traditional norms. Real pioneers shock people. (Think of the Beatles.) It is possible that the true creatives are the ones who are getting booted out of the organizations who purport to be in favor of creativity…

(3) Creativity is confusing.The film director David Lynch was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR. She asked some question about making films and he replied, “You know Terry, when I’m making a movie, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

(4) Creativity is not something outside of ourselves that we need to try “gain.” Rather, creativity is the central, underlying process of human life and living. It’s who we are as humans. In my PhD research, I studied how adults learn in everyday life. Learning is a creative process. Every day, we are constantly receiving information, input, and perceptions. We refine and brew over these perceptions, distilling them down until we’ve come up with our own unique “take” on the matter. This is not always a conscious process. Our minds and psyches just naturally want to “work” on trying to understand this world around us. Further, as humans, we have both the ability and desire to express ourselves—whether that be through a traditional creative activity like cooking or writing, or by managing people, engaging in relationships and conversations, digging a ditch, designing a transit system, or whatever. We’re each a unique being engaged in a constant, ongoing process of creativity (expressing ourselves) all the time. Life is a creative process.

(5) High creativity is associated with immersing ourselves in the imaginal. In the last few years, my work has focused on the “imaginal world” and “third space.” I believe that true creativity comes when we enter into an expansive place that I often refer to as the imaginal. As mentioned in the Newsweek article, a research study at the University of Michigan was conducted on people who have received MacArthur genius awards. Apparently, MacArthur recipients are highly likely to have spent time in their middle childhoods creating “paracosms”—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. The kids visited the paracosms repeatedly, and often created languages to be spoken there. Somehow as adults, we shift out of this type of play, calling it “make-believe.” But perhaps it is true, as the ancient Sufi’s believed, that the imaginal world is a real world. What then?

Both Carl Jung and Albert Einstein said in different ways that problems can't be solved at their own level. What we need to do is move to a different place inside of ourselves in order to come up with truly innovative solutions. Moving into that new, unknown, different, imaginal place is where the creative possibilities lie. The problem is, since it’s unknown, it’s scary.

It's also difficult to measure.

What is Aesthetic Space…. (and Why on Earth is it Important)?

Philosophers throughout history have asserted that “the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic” (Alfred North Whitehead, Gregory Bateson, James Hillman, Martin Foss, Donald Winnicott to name a few.) The word aesthetics comes from the Greek word “aisthenesthai” which is the ability to perceive. James Hillman writes, “Aesthetics in this primordial sense involves sensing the things of the world in their particularity and being affected by the many ways things present themselves.” Hillman often quotes an ancient philosopher named Marsilio Ficino who said that the world is an animal (meaning the world is alive and speaking to us.) The world shows itself to us as a living being; each thing has a face and calls for our attention. Our response to this call is aesthetics. Hence the word “aesthetic space,” because it’s only when we make space for beauty, that beauty presents itself to us. We pause, take a moment to notice and appreciate the particulars of some thing, and enter aesthetic space.

I recently published Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination. Much of the impulse for the book stemmed from my sorrow and despair at spending so many years in dry, joyless educational settings and a strong desire to reframe the experience of teaching and learning. Teaching and learning are beautiful, life-giving, creative processes. To teach, or to learn, requires courage, an open heart, and the willingness to be vulnerable. But instead of noticing, appreciating and honoring this inherent beauty and vulnerability, our focus is on achieving goals, setting our attention on some abstract thing in the future; something that is outside of the beauty of the present moment. The book is a call for “aesthetic space” in teaching, training, coaching and mentoring relationships.

The notion of aesthetics is closely linked to beauty, with beauty being defined not as “refinement” or “polish,” but rather, feeling the depth of something. Another way to think of beauty is feeling with our hearts. Elaine Scarry, professor at Harvard, wrote in her book On Beauty and Being Just:

* beauty attends with it a sense of abundance
* beauty makes possible a moment of largess or generosity
* beauty can usher in forgiveness
* in the presence of beauty, we have an opportunity to heal

In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce wrote that beauty is “the communication of the hidden power behind the world, shining through some physical form.”

When we teach, train, coach, and mentor, we’re serving something beyond ourselves. If we’re aware, we can recognize beauty shining through the physical form of our clients, students, or group. Ideally, we can make space for that beauty. Paradoxically, making space for beauty greatly facilitates learning, because it fuels inspiration and passion--the desire to learn.

The writer Iris Murdoch said that beauty is anything that aligns us with unselfishness. Or to say it another way, beauty is the “process of un-selfing.” At our best, as teachers, trainers, coaches and mentors, we are serving something greater than ourselves. This is aesthetic space.