CREATIVITY AND ITS SHADOW

(Part 2)

By Robert A. Johnson
Our culture is slow to accept the fact that every human experience is
based on pairs of opposites. It is strange that a fact so obvious should
be largely ignored, but that ignorance constitutes one of the worst forms
of suffering that moderns face.

Every creative act carries a saurian tail, a shadow of its opposite.
Day exists only by virtue of night; warm by its constant companion, cold;
feminine by masculine - on and on, encompassing every human experience.
Eric Neuman startled me into a finer differentiation of this subject
by saying that something is masculine only in the presence of something
more feminine than itself; exactly the same thing is feminine when it is in
the presence of something more masculine than itself. The implications of
this ran like a shock wave through my whole philosophy for many a month.
We speak of the Unity of God and the Oneness of Enlightenment; but these
are rare experiences for a human and are purchased by moving out of the
time-space duality which is our human definition.

Enough has been said about Creativity, too much to my mind. I wince
when I hear of creative writing, creative suffering, creative exercise,
etc. etc. My own shadow bellows from its rude cave, "Fine! But where is
the destructive writing, destructive suffering, destructive exercise?";
nothing exists in our human dimension without its opposite close by.
I designed and built a clavichord D'Amour many years ago. None have
survived from the l7th and l8 centuries when it held a high place in the
musical world; only one paragraph in an obscure treatise on instrument
building describes its physical structure but long paragraphs of the
fineness of its tone and the observation that it is the ideal instrument to
accompany voice, violin, etc. did survive.

If I was to hear this fine voice, I would have to build an instrument
from the meager description of the one remaining short paragraph.
I spent two winters of spare time in the designing and building; a
fine instrument resulted. I was so pleased with it that I spent nearly as
much time on decorative inlay of the case as the structure itself. When I
was studying with Toni Sussman in London I grew weary of so much interior
work. To balance this I found an old harpsichord builder and apprenticed
myself to him to learn his art. He proved to be a poor builder but a
master at the nearly lost art of inlay. So my clavichord D'Amour is my one
foray into both instrument design and the art of inlay.

The point of all this is that I was daily reminded of the polarity of
all experience; I was shuffling around in piles of wood shavings,
companioned by glue pots and a general mess of cast off wood and metal as I
fashioned this delicate instrument. The glue was the old horse-hide
concoction, perfect for inlay work. Horse hide glue?: skin an old horse,
boil its hide for a week, skim the fat off, boil it down to the proper
consistency, etc. etc.

Mess: that is the lesson I learned exactly parallel to finding the
dulcet tones of the clavichord D'Amour - probably the most delicate and
refined sound of any man- made instrument.

The accompanying mess affected me deeply.

So; what about the mess that man makes with any activity he engages?
What about the poor horse? That is our subject to examine now.
I evade the subject and sense the collective reluctance to look
squarely at it. Mess! How can I cope with this concept when I was born
and bred into the worship of the good the beautiful and the true?
There is no way around it but to plunge into this collectively
proscribed subject. At risk of rudeness, I have to say that Shadow and Shit
have remarkable parallels. There is one notable difference - to be noted
later on - but the parallels are nearly exact.

To create or choose the good is to extract what we value from the vast
array of stuff that greets us from all sides; the alchemists called this
stuff the Prima Materia, the material from which all creation springs. We
eat natural food, extract from it what is useful to us - and excrete the
rest.

Mankind seems to be the single - or at least the principle - carrier
of the search for the good. The rest of creation seems content to take
what is, or at least to follow its instinctive patterns of the right way to
do things. Man, on the contrary, is not easily content and wants to
improve everything he touches. There I was, improving the state of wood
and glue and metal and varnish - to make something better of it. I like
what came of the work, but I am in severe danger if I lose track of the
mess I made in the process.

 
So: what about the mess?

Christian man drifted off into a trick so cheap that it is
unbelievable; he sold himself the idea that there is no mess or at least
that it was polite to hide it and even play as if it did not exist. So
much of our persona world consists of playing as if we don't have
perspiration or dandruff or smell like a billy goat, or make frequent
calls to the bathroom. Carried to its extreme, we can not even stand
direct names for the toilet we use daily. An article some time ago pointed
out that in the Anglo Saxon world a new synonym has to be found for our
toilet as soon as the recent name becomes clear in its meaning. Toilet
turned into lavatory which turned into bathroom which turned into rest room
which turned into wash room which turned into WC which turned into ----.
Our reluctance to face our shadow is very strong.

Our reluctance to give dignity to our sexual nature is far worse than
our unease in the lavatory department. Christianity departed from its most
basic tenant - that Christ (the prototype of man) is equal parts Man and
God, equal parts of Earth and Heaven. Much of basic theology concerns
itself with this fact and the word HERESY originally meant to be off
balance - to overrate one side or the other of this basic equilibrium. To
degrade the human, earthy side of man is to break the central teaching of
Christianity. Yet, the attitude of most Christians is that the body is to
be denied, mortified, given the smallest possible place in human
functioning. It is pure heresy to hold the opinion that mortification of
the body is a virtue in the eyes of God. Our sexual nature bears the
heaviest exclusion in this heresy.

This needs some examination: Ancient man - and continuing on to
medieval man - was so immersed in the physical world that he desperately
needed to be moved from this one-sided position to the desired paradox of
man-god, earth-heaven which is the deepest teaching of Christianity. A
great structure of ceremonies and disciplines was built up around medieval
man to draw him away from his heretical position of too much earth and not
enough spirit. This served him well and spoke directly to his needs. But
modern man has overshot the process and has relegated earth, body, sex,
femininity to an inferior position. We are in need of balancing as badly
as medieval man was, but our need is quite the opposite.
Most of our religious disciplines - both West and East - are designed
for an imbalance quite the opposite of our present needs. In fact, it is
quite impossible to say what each man needs now in any collective sense;
one man may still need to be drawn out of medieval clumsiness while
another may need to have his earthy sense rescued from the over rational,
theoretical mentality which threatens to tear him completely out of his
human rootedness. Never was the old proverb, "One mans poison is another
mans meat." more applicable. If someone is drowning, don't try to
resuscitate him by throwing a pail of water in his face; or another man may
be dying for lack of the same water and does not need more discipline and
abstractions but a dousing of water. . .

What to do? Obviously the first need is to be aware of one's
'heresy'. Is one's life too flooded or too dry? Is one refined to the
point of enervation and in need of some of the shadow material he threw
away as useless? Or is his earthy connection so strong as to exclude the
heavenly visionary nature? Just this insight is half way to the
restoration of wholeness (holiness).

Most likely anyone reading this paper will be on the too refined side
of perfection ( the middle point) and must set up some exercises to regain
his balance.

Ceremony and symbol are the greatest help at this point. No one would
agree to throw away some of the abstract theoretical power which he has
gained at such cost. And, thank God, it is not necessary to do so.
Ceremony is the royal way to add what one needs to his character without
having to descend into barbarism to accomplish it. Traditional religions
are rich in old customs and ceremonies to meet anything that might befall a
man. If only we could recall these ancient wisdoms since they are already
there, tried and true. But a strange law has risen up in modern man; he
can not take anything now by authority and must design afresh the exact
ceremony that will heal the imbalance he suffers.

To devise the medicine (ceremony) that is exact for your ailment is the highest
form of creativity.


Unfortunately, most people have a huge resistance to devising
such a ceremony, for, by definition, it must contain exactly what he has
refined out of his nature by a lifetime of discipline. A teacher is of
great help, though no teacher can tell you what to do. He/she can only
encourage you and lend some energy while you find the specific medicine you
need.

Ceremony is all but unknown to modern rational man. After great
labor, I have devised a definition of this royal function: Ceremony
consists of doing something (probably some forbidden act), but not doing
it. That is accomplished by enacting some play or symbolic act that
carries the energy of the frightening event, but not doing it in any
literal way that would endanger oneself or anyone near you.
As St Augustine said, "To act is to sin." A modern addition would be
that it is a high sin to ignore the shadow side of whatever he has done. *

I promised a notable exception to the parallel of Shadow and Shit
which brings a bright note to this discussion. Much of what we discard,
psychologically speaking, is excluded because it is too GOOD to bear.
When I first heard this teaching from Dr. Jung I did not think it could be
possible. But it is true: much of what we evade in our own personalities
is the pure gold which we can not find the courage to bear. One can draw
the skeletons out of the closet fairly easily in a person of integrity;
but he will likely fight to the end of his neurotic strength to hide the
divinity of his own being. It is a bright note to learn that work on one's
shadow is not unrelieved darkness, but also brings the highest value.
Dr. Jung went on to teach that our excluded shadow sides form our
neurotic symptoms - those powerful attempts of our psyche to regain a
homeostatic balance in our personalities. Thus it follows that the only
possible cure for a neurotic symptom is to find an honored place in our
personalities where it can contribute to the wholeness ( holiness) of our
being.

I end with a medieval Catholic quote which touches me deeply:

"Don't forget; God chose to incarnate midway between the feces and the urine."

We can find our own midpoint between the many pairs of opposites that
besiege us daily and find that whole (holy) experience we hunger for. A
number of words in our language derive from the root WHOLE: holy, health,
hello, hale, hearty.

It is, indeed, a holy concept.

* See my book OWNING YOUR OWN SHADOW, Harper Collins, San Francisco.

© 2000 Robert A. Johnson

This work is not to be published,  or sold without the Author's written permission.

Our thanks to Robert A. Johnson for sharing this previously unpublished work with us.

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