Choose your delusion

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them…

…throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”

―?Aldous Huxley, Island?

It should be obvious that trying to make something (a novel, a painting or even an ad) in the hope of inspiring a human connection is harder when you're working from a state of burden and isolation. So how did suffering land a starring role in our narrative around creativity - even when the goal is less about soul and more about sales?

The above words from Aldous Huxley found me at a time when life felt impossibly heavy. Covid and the associated Melbourne lockdowns merely papered the walls of a burning room – one my family would thrash about in for no less than 262 days.

I lost almost everything in that fire; much of my business, my marriage, my mind – things our insurance policy sadly didn’t cover. I was wide open to suggestions for surviving this heaviness which, quite frankly, should have had the common decency to just crush me, already.

But there was something about the obvious wisdom of handling everything lightly with just my fingertips, the way my mother taught me to make scone dough. The weight lifted long enough for me to crawl out from underneath it.

I realised I’d been tasked with the ultimate act of creation; rewriting the second half of a story that had once seemed so reassuringly carved in stone. A particularly inopportune time to succumb to writer’s block. And so, I chased this lightness of being and opened myself up to the possibilities of ‘what now?’

Every so often, a not-so-subtle reminder of this quest and its wider application to ‘the making of the things’ raps its knuckles on my door.

Just this week I finally finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic – sage and comforting advice for living a creative life. Amongst the final chapters, she explores the two kinds of energy you can bring to your crafting table: one of childlike curiosity and one of romantic masochism.

Gilbert refers to these energies as the Trickster and the Martyr. The trickster is light, playful, rebellious and constantly shape-shifting. The martyr is dark, austere, unforgiving and rigid.

The martyr, as Gilbert writes, might say something like: “Through my torment, the truth will be revealed.” The trickster retorts, “I didn’t come here to suffer, pal.”

Ultimately, Gilbert challenges us to ‘choose our delusion’. After all, which is more rational: blind faith that inspiration will always be there, begging you to come out and play? Or remaining utterly convinced the Powers That Be have singled you out as specially cursed?

Truth is, we all experience both energies at various times. Bless those trickster days where the work either flows freely, or you just don’t get too worked up if it doesn’t. Others, we find ourselves weighed down by the yoke of the martyr – it’s fine to visit that place once in a while but applying for permanent residency is a questionable life choice.

People do, of course. Largely because we’ve fetishised suffering in connection with creative pursuits.

Truly meaningful work, we believe, grows in a field of anguish and is watered with sacrificial blood. The tortured artist seems modelled after Prometheus; having stolen the fire of inspiration from the gods, they are exiled to a life in chains as their innards are torn from them over and over on a daily basis.

(Enough seductive melodrama to make a SoHo-dwelling, pseudo-bohemian’s mouth water.)

This narrative does all brilliant creators (the likes of Franz Kafka, Beethoven, Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gough and Kurt Cobain) a great disservice. Their work got made in spite of, not because of, their tribulations. Imagine the art we’ve lost due to addiction, mental torture and poverty. These stories should be mourned but never glorified. Certainly not adopted as a pose out of some misguided fear that nothing of value can be born from freedom, joy or even (gasp) financial stability.

This dangerous ‘cursed life of the creator’ BS isn’t confined to the lofty halls of fine art. You’ll find people proudly donning that badge of honour in many creative careers – notably advertising. You hear cult disciples quip that “weekends are for the weak”. Rites of passage include pandering to the egos of sadist bosses whose explosive tantrums are the fire in which all great talent is forged.

(Oh, did you break? That’s a ‘you’ problem.)?

This aspect of agency life needs to take a long hard look at itself and ask “Why?” Is ritual suffering truly the only way to do good work, or is it all a performance? And who do we think is watching? Perhaps all the self-sacrifice makes us feel our work is more important than it really is? What, exactly, is the emergency here?

Which, incidentally, reminds me of my earliest piece of career advice, imparted via the smudged, hot-pink, cigarette-sucking lips of the Avon marketing department’s proofreader.

Having taken to the ladies’ room to sob a little over some mistake or misfire (the details of which I can no longer recall), I returned to my desk where I was given a brusque hug and a philosophy that still serves me to this day:

“Listen, love – we’re just selling lipstick here. No babies died.” (Aldous Huxley in an ill-fitting blue nylon dress.)

This week’s second flashing neon sign reading “lighten the f*ck up” arrived in the form of our current bedtime story, Wind in the Willows.

Reading it as an adult, the metaphor was obvious. The river is life; constant and impartial, creative and destructive. Mole is the martyr – fearful and stuck underground, disconnected and stymied. Rat is the trickster. He plays with the river and in return it nourishes him.

Rat’s greatest pleasure is “messing about in boats” –

'In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not.”

That’s the energy from which to start creating – without expectation.

Expectations are all too often the marble from which grief is sculpted. Things rarely work out the way they’re ‘supposed to’. And our disappointment blinds us to the possibilities of the beautiful mess we’ve made. Aspirations, loosely grasped, are far safer.

Now, before you get your knickers in a twist, shouting that copy isn’t creative writing and someone being paid by the hour can’t lay about gazing skyward and waiting for pictures to emerge from the clouds, let me finish.

Yes, we have a 'somewhere' we must end up. But I firmly believe getting lost in the right direction is the way to begin. When coming up with engaging, distinctive ideas to sell things, sticking to the well-trodden path isn’t a shortcut. It’s a dead end. ?

My best advice is to start lightly and see where the curious wind takes you. When you come back down to earth, you’ll have such stories to tell.

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