Aesthetic Space

Not Knowing Lies at the Core of Creativity

photo by Mariusz Kubik

From Wislawa Szymborska's Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture, December 7, 1996:

I value that little phrase "I don't know" highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

I hope you've said "I don't know" at least once today.

Beauty is Life. If It Seems to be Dead, It's not Beauty.

"Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us joy and afterwards a peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one’s sense of being alive...Beauty is the mystery which enchants us. Like all higher experiences of being human, beauty is dynamic; its sense of repose, paradoxically, is never dead, and it it seems to be dead, it is no longer beauty." (excerpted from My Quest for Beauty by Rollo May)

I have the sense that beauty is the direction of "True North." In other words, whatever it is that our culture is searching for in this time of chaos and change, the place we need to be looking, is toward beauty. It's easy to feel this when you spend time in nature--the cares of the world dissolve and peace settles over us. But beauty can be found in other arenas as well, such as meaningful connections with people and the arts. In my view, Beauty is the direction of True North.

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.

The Purpose and Power of Image Course Syllabus

Hi folks. Update: This is a course I recently taught for Pacifica Graduate Institute. If you are interested in the content of this course, please let me know! You can send me an email by clicking "Receive Event Announcements" on the left side of this page. I'd be glad to share my sources. Thanks for your interest!

Psychology of Metaphor Course Syllabus

I'm in the midst of fine-tuning this course for itunes. If you're interested in the content of the Psychology of Metaphor course, please send me an email by clicking the Receive Event Announcements" link on the left side of this page. Thanks!

The Enchanted Loom

I feel moved to post this email from an amazing woman who heard me on the radio last fall. Her metaphoric images are full of spirited life, and I love her image of the culture being in the "neti-neti" stage of childbirth: "We are 'not here nor there' but somewhere in-between. Neti-neti is a time when the mother must relinquish her own boundaries and lose herself, becoming a semi-permeable membrane that will allow the spirit of the child to emerge."

I also love her notion that the human collective imagination is pregnant with "as yet unarticulated" new metaphors. It speaks to the workshop I'll be doing at Esalen next March on creative process and social change, which feels "pregnant" as well!

..

hi kim,

i don't usually post comments on blogs ...
but i couldn't resist responding to your work.

i hope that teachers continue to lean toward the sort of enlivening inspiration and support you offer::
i spent much of my parenting energy ensuring that my children received creative educations and now their adult work reflects that beautifully::

but i wanted to let you know how delighted i was to encounter a kindred spirit when i heard your interview on the radio::

as you described your creative "languaging" of the concept of "aesthetic space" i was reminded of a workshop i took back in 1986 with Hugh Redmond at the ATP Conference, a workshop in teaching Transpersonal Psychology::

he suggested that one should not be averse to allowing silences in the classroom:: and suggested that rather than lecturing or attempting to "fill in" all the space available:: (the fifty minute hour?):: that instead we allow for the "place of 'I DON"T KNOW' " in order for something new to possibly emerge:: also reminds me of the Jungian notion that when the tension of the opposites is held, the previously unimagined third can emerge::

SO, happy to hear that you are bringing this work into the mainstream of readers as well as teachers, and beyond the academic world of psychology

to use a metaphor, this cultural time reminds me of the "transition" stage experienced during child birth ::
the stage that is "neti-neti", not here, not there ::
when the mother must relinguish her own boundaries, lose herself, become a semi-permeable membrane to allow the spirit of the child to emerge :: trusting that she will reassemble after the birthing process (although that may take 18 years or so ) ::

so, it seems that now especially the human collective imagination is pregnant with "as yet un-articulated" metaphors that resonate with what we are already experiencing ::
again, I'm not involved in the world anymore, I'm "doing a Sister Wendy" in terms of living a necessarily quiet solitary life but I will share with you my "KEY" Symbols ::

always numinous and luminous dream themes ::
Weaving Looms and Harps ::
in some dreams they are conflated :: a loom that sings or a warehouse full of looms that weave by day but are transformed into harps for playing music every evening :: beautiful creative images that always fill my heart with gratitude :: in response to these images, i "literalized" them for a time, learning to weave and play a Celtic Lap Harp :: both my loom and harp were handmade of cherry wood (a completely serendipitous similarity) ::

i have passed on the artifacts but the images stay with me ::

last night I began reading Diane Ackerman's book, An Alchemy of Mind and was delighted to see her chapter titled, "The Enchanted Loom" :: that phrase resonated with the "tone" I receive from my Imaginal Loom/Harps and so I decided to respond to your blog query today but in an email, not a post ::

merely to "resonate" with you ...
Ackerman begins the chapter with this quote from Sir Charles Sherrington's - Man on His Nature ::

"... an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns."

Blessings on your Work/Weaving,
May your shuttles keep flashing !

..

Isn't that a cool letter? Here is the link for my workshop at Esalen on creative process and social change: http://webapp.esalen.org/workshops/9329

Happy Weaving!

Best, Kim

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.

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.

Love is Destructive

It has been said that love does not want to destroy, but to preserve. Quietistic love has been praised, [yet]...mere passivity is surely no true love. The process of love is a creative drive, a force which, in spite of its tranquility of the present, lives a life of active realization.

I've often told the story of how I came to teach my Psychology of Metaphor class. I was speaking to the president of a small university, he asked me what class I wanted to teach, and the word "metaphor" popped out of my mouth. Since I didn’t know anything about metaphor (except as a literary device) I was a bit taken aback. He said, "Great! We'll call it the Psychology of Metaphor" and I walked out of the room wondering what I'd just gotten myself into. I was set to teach the course in three months to 20 Ph.D. students in Psychology.

The part of the story that I haven’t shared is just as amazing. I would go to my favorite table at the San Francisco Theological Union library and odd books would just sort of happen to be sitting there, having been somehow missed by the librarian who was responsible for re-shelving them. One of these odd books was Martin Foss’s Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience. Published in 1949, this book had been out of print for decades. I’d never heard of it. I did an internet search and learned that Martin Foss is considered by many to be a greater philosopher than Martin Heidegger and that Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience has been called one of the most important, yet forgotten, books of the 20th century. (Although they both share the same first name, Martin Foss has no Wikipedia entry...)

The opening quote is from Symbol and Metaphor. Here is another:

Love sees in failure the ground for its necessary work. Therefore it is distracted neither by painful nor by joyful expressions. Disappointments do not reach into the depth of love—on the contrary, they stimulate love to stronger efforts…The eyes of love are not fixed on the moment, not on the social position, not on the habitual character, not on the narrow status of profession, not on the achievement and success which are important for those only who are indifferent to higher values. Love sees the future which it anticipates, and in the scope of this, its wider vision, failure and success look very much alike.

You might wonder what love has to do with metaphor. I’ll let you read the book to find out.

Foss, Martin (1949). Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Mary Lee Bendolf, 1998

Thinking with the heart

From Evolution's End by Joseph Chilton Pearce:

Saints and sages have always claimed that the true seat of the mind is in the heart. In 1932 an American Indian medicine man told Carl Jung that white men, with their wrinkled faces and constant anger, were insane and killed so wantonly because they thought in their heads. Whole people, he explained, think in their hearts.

It's not true that our left brains are "smarter." The mind likes to look for complexity, which is why it perpetuates so much stress. Heart intelligence looks for simplicity and ease.

On the Need for Beauty...

Where beauty is perceived an integration of self takes place.

Arleen Hynes

Valuing the Unseen

Here's part of a recent conference proposal that is all about valuing inner vision. I hope it inspires you to value your unspoken, unarticulated knowings today...I believe they're more important than what we can actually "see" in the physical world.

The ancient Sufis believed there are three worlds: the world of the senses, the world of the intellect, and something they called the “imaginal world.” The imaginal world is a real world; it’s not make-believe. But our Western culture is generally dismissive of things that we cannot see or measure. When we look at a tree, for example, we see the branches, trunk, leaves, fruit. Although we know the roots exist, our focus is on the “product”—the tree that we can literally see. When we look at a field that’s empty of crop, we call it “fallow.” The empty field is less interesting than the field that’s full of plants; the empty field is dismissed as unimportant.

It’s not easy to be visionary in today’s world. When individuals have inner visions, they enter a process that requires them to value something that is not tangible; something that they can only vaguely feel or sense. If it’s a revolutionary idea, it’s even more difficult to value it, going against the grain of what’s considered “normal.” And what makes this process yet more arduous, is that the imaginal world of unseen possibility and potential does not articulate its messages in clear words. Until we name it, until we give it a voice, it is voiceless. It is easy to reject what we cannot articulate. Our job as visionaries is to value this unseen world and create a space to protect it, giving it room to grow.

For those of us who care deeply about the health of our planet, presuming that we already “know what to do” or we just need to “figure it out” is a lie. Accepting that we don’t know what to do and allowing ourselves to nurture and protect the unseen is what we are being called to do now. The guidance that we need is in the imaginal realm of vision and insight; it is in the roots that lie below the surface of everyday life.