“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”
DAVID HARE
A WOMAN THRUST AN envelope in my hand after a recent lecture, and when I opened it on the plane, I discovered an essay called “Finally First at Forty-One” by Christine Bergman.
“One day,” she wrote, “a small voice inside just said no more … The End, Finale, Terminus, Kaput, FINIS!” To the amazement of her colleagues, and with only a part-time designing job as an excuse, Christine quit her very responsible position as a unit secretary at a major hospital. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, only what she didn’t want to do: go on meeting other people’s expectations as a “Scullery Maid (Cinderella) to Doctors, Nurses, Patients, Visitors … helping them all get ready for the Ball.”
“After much writing, exploring, researching and reading (and napping with the cat when I could think no more),” she wrote, her “true voice” began to come clear on paper.
She wrote first about the beliefs she had absorbed in school: “That everyone was expected to be alike, follow the rules, that there would be no allowances or nurturing for the creative nature. …” Then she wrote about the beliefs that had been fostered in her family. As the daughter of an alcoholic father, she had been made into the “black sheep” for attempting to “turn on the lights in a family of denial.” As a result, her mother took her to a child psychiatrist who was very judgmental, and Christine learned “just how important it was to look good, and fit in, especially when you are the small one. Otherwise, you might end up in a really crazy place.”
Once she had understood this creation of a false self, fairy tale-like myths began to rise from the back of her mind. They revealed a child within who felt “seven again. Very small and fragile, and afraid”; an inner critic who called her “stupid” and said she couldn’t learn anything; and the woman she had become, who knew the only escape from this negativism was to “let the truth out and shatter my silence”—but who was also afraid. The more she wrote, the more she understood her bond with a philosophically inclined father, who, like her, had loved words, but who anesthetized his fear of failure with alcohol. Seeing the world from “similar places of woundedness” had been their connection, but her father had never been able to face and thereby heal his past—which she was doing by writing.
Gradually, her fairy tales began to collect themselves into a kind of mythological autobiography. “I come upon a symbol or word in my outer world which connects directly with an inner issue,” she explained, “and in a daze I sit in front of the typewriter and the story types me.”
At the end of the essay she had given me, she described the days of writing she supports with a variety of jobs as a writer, storyteller, and leader of writing workshops:
Now, I’m a woman who gets up every morning, usually pretty early, and walks myself to the kitchen, where I go to work at my desk. There I meet with my self, as the authority, to sniff out the day. I whirl through my projects, each flowing one to the next, with a sense of spirit, of adventure, of sleuthing. … From the inner world of richness and vast treasures come these ancient and sacred fairy tale–like truths. “What I write,” she concluded, “is exactly that which I need to know.”
Experiences like Christine’s are not uncommon. Writers from Thomas Mann to Virginia Woolf, Joyce Cary to Maxine Hong Kingston, have described being “visited” by their characters, and “making up” things that turn out to be true. Ancient and modern mystics have often described “automatic writing”: words that come from a place so deep that they feel another person is writing “through” them. Many psychologists have recognized the “writing cure” as well as the “talking cure,” and many professional writers would agree with Tennessee Williams that they write to stay sane. “We do not write in order to be understood,” as C. Day Lewis put it; “we write in order to understand.”
Though we know about the few who publish their results, we rarely hear about the many who do not—and they may be even more likely to be writing from the soul without censoring themselves. Forgetting about shortcomings of skill or grammar and writing entirely for oneself can transform the often difficult task of putting words together into a way of tapping the unconscious. Many methods have been devised to trick a critical mind into relaxing enough to let this inner voice emerge:
Each of these methods provides a unique kind of access. Writing with the nondominant hand so often invokes the inner child that some people refer to it as the “honest” hand. For instance: Try using your nondominant hand when answering the question about your childhood at the end of chapter 2. Or conduct an internal child/adult dialogue by writing a question with one hand, its answer with the other—and then reversing the procedure. Jotting down thoughts on first awakening can capture the webs of consciousness through which you have just risen. Battered women, prisoners, and other people deprived of self-expression—often for so long that they believe there is no self worthy of expressing—have found that keeping any journal, perhaps sharing it with others in a similar situation, is the first step to believing their own voices. Writing in great quantity is a technique recommended by many teachers of creative writing. Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior and China Men, tells her students that this quantity-writing reveals a voice both unique to each person and expressive of one of the universal biological rhythms that are, Kingston believes, the source of classic literary forms. Each sonnet is a writer’s unique message, but its rhythmic structure, Kingston says, is the pulsating of the human heart.
Perhaps the oldest of these methods of tapping the unconscious is dream recollection. Australian aborigines use “dreaming” (tjukurpa) to refer to the wisdom of the timeless past, including still-followed migratory paths once made by totemic beings—events thought to be alive and still affecting the present. (“Those who lose dreaming,” says an Aboriginal proverb, “are lost.”) On this continent, many Native American cultures make “dream-catchers,” small circles of twigs or metal with cobweblike strands of leather stretched across them, and place them at bedside as a reminder. Modern therapists suggest a dream journal as a way of capturing important images and emotions. From Rabindranath Tagore in India to Truman Capote in the United States, writers have learned that taking notes on their dreams keeps them in touch with their creative core and exercises their powers of description at the same time.
Whatever the purpose or tradition, there is one thing diverse cultures agree upon: the more you cultivate the habit of dream-memory, the stronger it becomes—and the greater your access to the true self. When we write down our dreams or any unconscious wisdom, perhaps we literally write our souls out—putting them down on paper where our minds can see them.
“We talk too much; we should talk less and draw more.”
GOETHE
About a decade ago, Judy Collins told me she had taken watercolors with her on vacation. I accepted this as news from a different species. In addition to singing, playing the piano and guitar, composing many of her own songs and lyrics, and touring the world as a modern troubadour, she had now become An Artist. No matter how she tried to explain that this was simply a way of expressing herself—that she couldn’t draw, that she just spread big sheets of paper on the floor and filled them with whatever shapes and colors she felt attracted to—I assumed that this occupation took her beyond me.
It was only years later while reading Alice Miller’s description of painting as the path to reexperiencing and healing her own over-controlled, spirit-breaking childhood (see chapter z) that I began to understand what Judy had been trying to tell me. After all, Miller was not An Artist, but she had used the process of creating visual images to make a breakthrough that had evaded every intellectual attempt at retrieval. It was only the free, tactile act of painting that finally broke through a protective shield of denial.
When I talked to Judy about my belated understanding of the universal need to create images, she said that she, too, had waited a long time before trying it. Not only did she have a mystique about painting, but her own talented and self-sufficient father had been blind—and so making visual imagery had seemed a betrayal of him. It was no accident that her first attempt to make anything but music had been the tactile art of pottery. Only years after she had become a successful musician and composer—and had written poetry, kept a dream notebook, and tried other paths to the self—did she take up watercolors.
“I finally realized that it isn’t just dilettantism,” she explained. “Visual images are part of our genetic heritage. In other cultures, we would have been decorating our houses and our bodies, making pots because we needed them, singing songs to pass the time, weaving fabric for our clothes; everything. We have five senses because we’re supposed to use them. I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world—and if we don’t express it, we lose faith in ourselves.”9
Since that conversation, I’ve noticed that most art in the world does not have a capital “A,” but is a way of turning everyday objects into personal expressions. With no thought of critics or museums, it is perhaps the truest art: Bedouin weavings and American quilts are abstract paintings, simple Amish furniture and native American pottery are beautiful sculptures, Hopi sand paintings and Palestinian embroidery often invoke healing, the painted symbolism of Mithila women in India and bushpeople in Africa speak for the same collective unconscious, and abstract paintings redone casually and routinely by West African women on their mud-walled houses after each monsoon could put many of the canvases in modern museums to shame.10
Art can be such a vital part of daily life that the Kung bushmen of Africa carry their painting tools in their belts, to have them always at the ready, and young women of Turkey and Afghanistan weave their hopes into the traditional kilims that will hang in their doors and cover their floors after they are married. Even in the United States, artists from frontier and Native American cultures, the ethnic traditions of Mexico and South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, are beginning to take art out of museums and into personal and community life. As Lucy Lippard explains and illustrates in Mixed Blessings: New Art in Multicultural America, this is an art about naming experience, representing the self, storytelling, and dreams.11 It is about art that has burst out of museums and entered real life.
As it turned out, Judy’s experience was personal—but it was also universal. Once I stopped thinking of image-making as a rarefied pursuit, I began to notice it everywhere. Within a few months, these examples had crossed my path:
• A Chicana teenager in East Los Angeles whose self-esteem was so low that she rarely made any definite statement—until a barrio program encouraged her to “paint what you see when you close your eyes.” She produced paintings of such sliding, eliding, colorful beauty that even she began to believe there was a worthwhile world within herself.
• A young friend in New York, an anorexic former dancer who gained weight and health during six months of flinging paint on big canvases, then troweling it into the shapes of larger-than-life women’s bodies. Having created females who had breasts and hips and were still strong, beautiful, and safe, she stopped starving herself out of being a woman.
• An Iowa farmer who painted huge, colorful, imaginary birds on the side of his barn. He told me that this “crazy period” had been brought on by his wife’s rebellion and departure over his distance and coldness; a crisis that made him realize he had become like his own cold and distant father (who had forced him, among other cruelties, to kill his pet birds). His wife never came back, but this man became closer to his own sons; now, they paint the barn with new bird-spirits every spring.
• An account of Winston Churchill’s long years of disgrace and exile from political power, a period in which he wrote memoirs and did paintings of the English countryside. He emerged from this inward journeying with a new strength and maturity that helped to sustain England when he became its leader in wartime.
• A book published by psychotherapist Peg Elliott Mayo after the suicides of her husband and son. In it, she used her own experience of grief to create rituals and images that others could use to unearth their feelings about death.12
• A teenage boy I met in a folk art gallery in St. Paul, Minnesota, who had been thrown out of his farming family’s house because he had been honest about his gayness. After months of living in the street, he had begun to draw with colored chalk on sidewalks to the delight of passersby, and only then did he stop his plans for suicide.
• Art historian Robert Farris Thompson’s remarkable book, Flash of the Spirit, in which he connects African and Afro-American art, philosophy, and music. It is, as one reviewer said, “art history to dance by.”13
If everybody from Winston Churchill to an Iowa farmer has discovered the importance of image-making, why do I and so many others grow up believing that painting is a never-never land from which non-Artists are forever barred? Perhaps it has come with the long separation of art from daily life, and the denigration of useful art as “crafts,” or perhaps it’s the encouragement to desire the mass-produced. For whatever reasons, using paint, crayons, and clay has become something many of us do before we’re old enough to read and write—and then abandon. Only indigenous cultures, futurists, and a few pioneer educators seem convinced that we need to use all of our senses if we are to value all of ourselves.
So give yourself an opportunity to discover your own imagery. Walk through an art store and see what attracts you: using a sketchbook and soft pencils, getting your hands in wet clay, smelling oil paints on real canvas, sloshing brushes over watercolors, feeling finger paints, or scrawling with big crayons. The images you create can bypass the intellect and go straight to emotion, and so can the tactile feel of the medium you make them in.
Whatever you end up creating will be as universal as a human hand and as unique as your fingerprint. The more regularly you create, the more you will notice an image often repeated in varying ways. That is your true self made visible.
“When we see how funny we are, we see how dear we are.”
ANNE WILSON SCHAEF
THINK OF THE FEELING of laughter—helpless laughter. It starts in the mind, spreads irresistibly to the body, and involves the whole self. It drives out other thoughts as surely as an orgasm, more surely than sleep—and can be as restorative as either.
Laughter has many poor relations: smiles that ingratiate or deceive; giggling at our own embarrassment or at someone else’s expense; grinning with victory or defiance; chuckling with appreciation; smirking with prurience; simpering with need for approval—and many more. But only laughter is something you “burst into” with complete spontaneity. Sleep can be induced, even an orgasm can be faked—but not a good laugh. False laughter just isn’t convincing. It can’t be planned or even predicted, coerced or compelled. It just is: a flash of recognition; a moment of perfect balance between inner and outer worlds; a fast dip into the unconscious that the whole self revels in. In many cultures, laughter means health, balance, self-acceptance, even a flash of cosmic joy.
Often, the absence of laughter and humor is a sign of mental and emotional illness. Those who are stuck in the inner world may become severely depressed and a danger to themselves, while those who live only in the outer world may be psychopaths and a danger to others, but neither can let inner and outer worlds meet and produce the contradictions that create laughter.
Students of physical illness have learned that laughter can be literally health-giving. Even limited experiments in which one group of patients watched a laughter-inspiring film and another group did not have shown that the immune systems of the first group became measurably stronger for a period of hours afterward. Laughing also calls up endorphins, the body’s natural shields against pain, with none of the side effects that artificial painkillers bring with them (for instance, suppression of protective cells that impede the growth of tumors). Norman Cousins, who was a modern-day prophet of laughter, discovered its beneficial effects during a long and life-threatening illness. A few minutes of laughter gave him a few hours of pain-free sleep without medications and strengthened his body’s ability to fight beyond medical predictions. He lived fifteen years after that illness: more than long enough to write about his experience, persuade many hospitals to include humor, films, and literal “living rooms” in their medical programs, and to see his controversial theories confirmed. In 1989, the staid Journal of the American Medical Association published this conclusion from a Swedish study: “A humor therapy program can improve the quality of life for patients. … Laughter has an immediate symptom-relieving effect.”14
Like any expression of the true self, laughter is radical and revolutionary, and it upsets conformity. As Robin Morgan explained in The Demon Lover:
When you try to stifle laughter, it just gets worse. It gurgles and bubbles and rises until you’re ready to explode with it—like in church or in a judge’s chambers or in a business meeting. … You can gulp back tears if necessary. You can certainly swallow words you know will get you into trouble if you speak them. You can grind your teeth and not cry out in pain. But there’s no way to swallow laughter, real laughter.
I say all this to convince you that there is such a thing as a path of laughter. As far as we know, it is unique to human beings—a flash of consciousness, a clue to who we are.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
WALT WHITMAN
EACH OF US WITH hearing and vocal cords can sing, yet many of us have been embarrassed out of this primordial pleasure by self-consciousness and shame at the sounds we make. Our critical, conscious self literally stifles our voice. And, as with any other human capacity, the less we use it, the less we believe it to be worth using.
An inability to sing even for oneself has become so common that there are now classes, camps, and retreats to help people make, hear, and appreciate the sounds of their own voices. Paul Winter, a gifted musician and composer, often holds summer singing camps for adults. Though he travels and performs internationally to bring musical traditions of different cultures together, and has pioneered the use of natural sounds in his compositions, he finds that getting the silent to sing is as gratifying as anything else in music. With the simple act of doing this intimate thing they were convinced they could not do, people’s lives change.15
Perhaps this need to use all our senses explains why a decrease in such school “extras” as music, art, dance, and gym often seems to parallel the loss of student self-esteem described in chapter 3. And as adults, we tend to narrow our forms of self-expression even more.
Any one of our human capacities, if unused out of fear or shame, leaves a small hole in the fabric of our self-esteem. Think of the times you have said: “I can’t write,” “I can’t paint,” “I can’t run,” “I can’t shout,” “I can’t dance,” “I can’t sing.” Since this was not literally true, you were really saying: “I can’t meet some outside standard. I’m not acceptable as I am.”