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The Creative Womb

 Things just happen: that’s the sum total of all wisdom.

-Robert Musil, from Young Torles

Robert Musil’s witty epigraph appears just that at first. But after awhile,some deep truth to his maxim begins to dawn on me. How is it that“things just happen”?

As I continue to write poems, the nature of the creative process isslowly being revealed to me. In addition to the literal act of creatingpoems, I am also discovering the creative process as a powerful

analogy to life. For years the creative process was an impenetrablemystery. I was under the illusion that I created, that I was the doer of my artwork. Since my recent experiences, these illusions have all fallenaway, allowing me to see into the true nature of how artistic forms arebrought into existence.

A poem, when it is finished, seems to have a separate and individual“self”. Like any completed work of art the poem is an independententity, or at least has the appearance of one. But in the artist’s mind,before completion, the poem is just the opposite, unformed, aconfusion of images and words, perhaps only a mood or a specific

memory. Then how does a poem actually come into existence as anindividual and independent entity? How does art get created?

More or less every time I sit down to write a poem the creative processis the same. For example, just yesterday I was sitting down to eat in asandwich shop and I saw a tow-truck across the street.

As I’m eating my sandwich I watch what’s happening outside. Thetruck stops under a tree. It’s a mildly chilly afternoon in November. Theleaves have fallen off the trees. An ineffable mood always accompaniessomething that catches my eye about a certain scene.

Later I remember the tow-truck and I begin to write a poem about it. This is the sketch. I feel confident saying that everything, for an artist,must begin as a sketch. The creative process is a process of incubation.After writing the sketch, I leave the poem and come back to it laterthat night or the next day. Now I sit down to write the poem on mycomputer. But this is where the poem actually gets born and begins tolook nothing like what I thought it would.

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As long as I allow for the malleability of the images and the language,the poem is still at this stage in a liquid form. I allow the image of thetow-truck to transform into what it wants to be. I allow the inner poemto unfold and reveal the deeper image. I coax the latent poem into a

visible manifestation that can be understood and appreciated byothers. Soon the poem begins to crystallize itself into a definitelanguage and economy.

 The poem comes into existence as an object foreign to even the artistherself. The artist says to herself, “This is not what I had in mind. Thisis not what I was thinking.”

I do not know my own creation, though my creation knows itself. Thecreation is neither of the artist’s making, nor of her possession. Sheonly intends to create such and such, and as long as her vision is not

imposed, but guided by a power beyond her personal self, an organicwork of art will evolve and eventually manifest.

 The work of art just happens. There is no other explanation.

Artists are not as much creators as they are vessels. The Christianword “kenosis,” or “the assumption of the form of a slave as an emptyshape” is applicable here.[1]

 The empty shape of the artist is also a fertile womb. She soaks up thevisible/invisible world until fecund with experiences, perceptions,

images, language, knowledge, senses, then she gives birth. I do notmean to use the “birth” metaphor lightly here. The birth of the work of art cannot be forced to come out at will. The work of art emerges onlywhen it is ready, when the tension builds up to a precise pitch insidethe artist. Thus the artist is both the fertile womb and the patientmidwife at the same time.

 This organic work is out of her control. The most control an artist hasover her work of art is the conditions of her womb. And even thatcontrol is limited. Some artists fertilize their wombs more so thanothers. Some are very meticulous about what seeds they plant in their

minds and hearts. Some give their wombs the proper nourishment.Others are less discriminating. The progeny of the creative process canbe revealing of the conditions of the womb and the patience of theartist. Nevertheless, the organic work of art always arises out of theconditions of the womb.

I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that the creative process isalso an analogy for life. All forms in reality are like works of art in that

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they get created out of a set of conditions. Every so-called independententity that has the quality of “thingness”, whether that is acharacteristic of a person, a new car, or an idea of the mind, came intoexistence by a set of conditions.

Similarly, these (mostly unknown) conditions give birth to the forms.Nobody created the forms independently, though it may sometimesappear this way. The analogy to the artist’s womb is the womb of reality. In Buddhism, this is called the tathata-garbha (the womb of suchness).

On a more practical level, how can the “womb of reality” metaphor beapplied to life? If the conditions of the womb (whatever that womb maybe) create us and our surrounding world, it then becomes necessary toexamine the seeds that we are continually planting inside and outsideof us. We have control of the work of art to the extent that we have

control over the conditions of our lives.

Know that on the most basic level: things just happen. They are bornout of a cosmic womb. The outcomes of my life are the result of anumber of births (in reality) that have occurred outside of my range of knowing.

Sometimes I ask myself, “How did I end up living here inBloomington?” Of course I can attempt to trace the linear cause andeffect of each event and pretend to be able to be able to delineatereality. But the truth is: things just happen. Everything goes into the

creative womb, and the outcomes of each independent birth, eachindividual manifestation, can be baffling at times.

11/20/2005

[1] Image, Icon, Economy. Marie-Jose Mondazain. Pg.32

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