On Metaphor, Contain-hers, Marion Woodman + a Nietzsche quote that I’m both fond of, and slightly put off by…

My MA Thesis began with needing to answer the question:  Why make art?  To which now, I have an answer that works for me. 

My partner-in-conversation crime has been asking questions about images -- where do they come from, how do they get here, and what are they for?

He’s a studier of philosophy, which makes his answers, and the places that he goes looking for these things very different than mine. 

He offered a Nietzsche quote the other day: 

"You creators, you higher men! Whoever has to give
birth is sick; but whoever has given birth is unclean.
Ask women: one does not give birth because it is
fun. Pain makes hens and poets cackle.
You creators, there is much that is unclean in you
That is because you had to be mothers.
A new child: oh, how much new filth has also come
into the world! Go aside! And whoever has given birth
should wash his soul clean."

And then this one:

"An image costs as much labor to humanity as a new characteristic to a plant." 

 Jacques Bousquet

We were talking about the idea of image, and form as well.  Which for me, has to do with this marriage of soul and spirit -- of creativity needing a form, a container, a body in order to come into existence. 

The container. 

Or as I recently spelled it, the contain-her.  But not in an oppressive, restrictive way.  In a safe – “hey, I’ve got you,” kind of a way.

A place for the inspiration to go. 

A body that it passes through. 

Which, I suppose, is inherently messy.  The “unclean” thing in the Nietzsche quote is a bit too loaded a word for my taste, but if I consider it in terms of blood and bodily effluvia I can get with it… 

Things emerging…

I’ve been adjusting my relationship to my practice lately.  Being fiercer about my boundaries, clearer about my schedule, more explicitly nurturing of the creative process itself. 

Because it’s about boundaries, and a body that can support what wants to come through. 

It’s about having a strong enough container so that the images can emerge. 

Conscious Femininity

Woodman gets into this in such beautiful ways in her book Conscious Femininity:

”…she also has to be very strong as a container—the feminine principle is the container and that’s true in a man as well as a woman.  Think of a poet like John Donne, for example.  He says, “Nor ever chaste except You ravish me,” speaking to God, speaking of himself as a poet or an artist.  An artist has to be ravished by the archetypal unconscious or there is no art.” 

Woah.  I repeat, in the name of Marion Woodman:  An artist has to be ravished by the archetypal unconscious or there is no art. 

--Pausing to digest that one—

Puts a serious spin on the inner critic and all the internal noise that is so often a part of making images. 

She goes on:  “It’s his femininity that is ravished by archetypal energy.  So the container has to be strong and at the same time very flexible.” 

And then she goes on to talk about how once that is over, we have to be able to return to our everyday self and step out of the archetype. 

And scrub the toilet…

Reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s brilliant Ted talk about the artist as a vessel and not the one who’s entirely responsible for what comes through.  

We show up.  We set up the banks of our river.  We labor.  And new life comes through. 

Then we go home and wash the dishes and scrub the toilet…

I love the profoundness, the sacred and profane combo of it all. 

These moments of rapture, the exquisite joy of the process, the labor pains and then re-membering that we have to then return to our “selves. “

Watching with curiosity at what has just emerged… 

And the mess, the bloody mess that precedes it, without which, life couldn’t continue… 

More on the container here:  Some Structure and So Much to Digest

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