Dr. Kim Hermanson

Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs

Imaginal

Having a conversation with the Gods

I started a new class at the Sophia Center yesterday. I always emphasize that it’s about creative process, rather than creative product. We can all live in a rich, creative process, and in fact, in my not-so-humble opinion, living in a way where we’re deeply connected to our creative process is the only way to live a full life.

For whatever reason, the quilts from Gee’s Bend keep coming to mind, urging me to write about them. (Maybe because I forgot to mention them in both my pre-class presentation to the students and in yesterday’s class.) So here’s the story if you don’t know it already: Gee’s Bend is a very poor, isolated African-American community (surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River.) The residents’ ancestors were slaves on the cotton plantations, and subsequent generations stayed on the land as tenant farmers. Because of the river (there was no ferry service) and the poverty, this community was isolated from everyday American culture and in fact, has been called by historians “another civilzation.” The people in this community were too poor to purchase quilts and blankets, so the women stitched together quilts from scraps of worn-out clothing and old feed sacks. By now, the quilts of Gee’s Bend have been on display in every major museum, nationally and internationally. Many experts have hailed them as the “most important modern art in our century.”

Seeing them on exhibit, I was overwhelmed by the pure, pulsing Spirit that seems to emanate from the quilts, to say nothing of their extraordinary beauty.

Patty Ann Williams, 1955
Quinnie Pettway, 1975
Annie May Young, 1970
Mary Bennett, 1965

If these quilts don’t clearly show that you don’t need years of prestigious art training in Paris to make exceptional art, I don’t know what does. The Gee’s Bend quilts speak for themselves, or should I say, “glow for themselves.”

In Native American and Aboriginal cultures, making art was all about having a conversation with the Gods. There was no thought given to whether an art object met an external criteria of “beautiful.” The crudest art was often the most profound, and the simplest artworks were the most accomplished.

Creating space for Spirit to speak

I’ve always been interested in the idea of creating space. For years I had a note attached to my computer that read, “Create Space for Spirit to Speak.” If we don’t have the space for it, we can’t do anything new or creative because our life is already filled up. A simple example is writing–one has to create space (physical, mental, emotional) in order to write something new. In graduate school I was fascinated by a book titled Free Spaces: The Source of Democratic Change in America. In their book, authors Sara Evans and Harry Boyte talk about how political movements are formed by having “free spaces” (voluntary associations from churches to social clubs to civic groups) where people can congregate, connect and talk with one another.

And while I’d been interested in how the creative process happens in everyday life for a long time, the research for a metaphor course I taught last spring opened up a whole new world for me around the subject of aesthetic space in everyday life. Aesthetic Space is a parallel world of deep beauty that is already there, but except for rare moments of heightened clarity, we don’t normally tap into it. The research for this course gave me both a language and a way of thinking about what I am now calling aesthetic space. (Aesthetic space somehow seems more appropriate right now than the term creative space. I have also sometimes used the term third space, which came to me by way of Charles Johnston in his book Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenge of a New Cultural Maturity.)

From this research and an intense dream I had following the completion of the course (see below), I came to the realized that aesthetic space does not involve geography or linear time. Aesthetic space is another world that exists parallel to everyday life. To experience this world, we simply need to shift our focus. And I believe this is our future as humans–beauty is what we are evolving into. Social change isn’t going to happen by way of our intellects, trying to figure out a better solution for global warming and other vexing issues. (It was Einstein who said that our problems would not be solved with the level of thinking at which they were created. Carl Jung said something similar.) Beauty brings us into the heart, which has a deeper wisdom and knowing. I believe that beauty is our way toward a higher evolution.

There may be many reasons why a course on the “psychology of metaphor” opened up this new world for me. A metaphor links two unlike things together in a way where we are able to get a new perspective or understanding about the matter. When we are in aesthetic space, we naturally see those deeper connections and relationships between diverse things. And the mystery is–this aesthetic space where rich metaphors and connections live, is always available to us. From my perspective, it’s another world we just need to tap into.

A couple of months after the Metaphor class ended, I had a powerful dream. I was in the basement of the house I grew up in, I stepped out of the basement door into our backyard, and at that moment the dream was no longer ordinary. Magnificent, pulsing, glorious energy was vibrating in everything around me–the trees, plants, animals, but also the clothesline and houses. Every single thing was alive with beautiful dancing energy. I became lucid in the dream at that moment.

After a few moments of gazing in wonder at this sight, my body was pulled forcefully away toward distant forests and mountains. As my body got closer to the forest, I saw that the forest was actually a huge piece of cardboard (like a billboard). There was nothing BUT cardboard–I could see that the forest was actually a photograph on cardboard, but there was no end to it. I freaked out, because my body was being pulled at a tremendous speed and I was heading straight toward the cardboard–I was going to crash into it. And just at the last minute before I crashed, my body was zipped into a train tunnel that was going through the cardboard forest. After recovering from my near miss, I looked out the train window–the train was traveling through a tunnel, but there were some windows in the tunnel, and out the windows I could see the beautiful dancing energy again. The beautiful, vibrating life energy was still there–BEHIND the cardboard. The profound lesson of the dream was obvious to me–it was showing me that what we humans (like me) see when we look at anything is only the photograph on the cardboard. We don’t see the pulsing beauty that lies BEHIND the tree, or the house, or the grass, or the person. Our ordinary, everyday world is like living in a world of cardboard photographs. But there IS something more to see. We just need to wake up a little more to see it.

If you’re interested in exploring aesthetic space in more depth, check out my Creative Space and Metaphor class at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Saturday December 13th, from 10 am to 4 pm. Call Book Passage to sign up.
 
 

Dear Rumi

I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.



— Rumi

The aesthetic is what holds the world together

In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards brilliantly shows us the importance of background or negative space when we draw a contour of any object or person. By noticing the negative space and drawing the edge that defines that negative space, we shift into right-brain mode and can much more accurately draw the image. (I never thought I could draw until I read her book and did the exercises. Truly amazing.)

The late cultural icon Marshall McLuhan also wrote about the importance of the background (he just called it “ground.”) His point was that there is much we don’t see because we only notice the central figure or object of a situation, but not the context or space around this object. And in a different field, the British scientist Gregory Bateson also wrote about ground. In his book Mind and Nature, Bateson discusses the wider knowing which he described as “the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human communities.” His point was that we humans notice the starfishes, but we don’t notice the glue that holds the starfishes and the rest of the world together.

So why does it matter whether we’re aware of this background context that creates the space for the starfishes, streams and forests? Because the background is what makes them possible. Think about an empty container–it’s the space within the container that makes it useful. We love our houses, but it’s the space within the house that makes it a house. The Tao Teh Ching says, “While the tangible has advantages, it is the intangibles that makes it useful.”

According to Bateson and many other writers, thinkers, and scholars, this background or wider knowing is aesthetic. Back in the early 1800s, the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also claimed that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic. We live in the midst of a large aesthetic space, and we don’t typically notice it (much less honor it for its wisdom.)

Bateson describes a time when he was teaching a class of “young beatniks” at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Bateson showed them a starfish and asked them, “How are you related to this creature? What pattern connects you to it?” Bateson tells us that this was an aesthetic question that he posed to the students.

Bateson later writes, “Is this what Plotinus meant by an ‘invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things?'” The ultimate unity, Bateson argues, is aesthetic.

Getting Messy

One of my favorite art quotes is from Herbert Marcuse, a hard-to-read but brilliant philosopher. In The Aesthetic Dimension he writes, “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the established reality principle…The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.” Wow. Love that quote. (And I sound so impressive when I repeat it to someone.)

Art opens up another world—a world that I want to live in. And it’s not about the finished product necessarily. I don’t spend a lot of time looking for creative inspiration in museums (although there are definitely noteworthy examples to the contrary.) But in general, the art in museums doesn’t feel accessible to me, perhaps because it’s packaged up behind neat, tidy, bullet-proof plexi-glass cases. My experience in museums is often “dry” (intellectual), rather than “juicy” (sensory or emotional).

In his book, No More Secondhand Art, the artist Peter London describes walking through an art museum as a graduate student. The art exhibit included the works of some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, yet he left the exhibit feeling drained. “We…came away quiet and joyless, as if life had been somehow drained from us. Why?…There was no vitality here, no direct engagement with life, with its mind- and soul-slamming mysteries…It was secondhand art. We left the gallery stunned and saddened, disoriented. How could the best and the brightest be so tedious, so empty, so dead?” He writes, “What ingredient is missing whose presence would make the work throb with vitality and invite us to live more fully–or at least to see more fully–as a consequence?…we seem to have lost contact with the earlier, more profound functions of art, which have always had to do with personal and collective empowerment, personal growth, communion with this world, and the search for what lies beneath and beyond this world.”

I teach many creative process classes, and I always have a student or two who want to see my “art.” Maybe someday I’ll have something to offer them, but for now, I’m fascinated by the PROCESS. The process is what inspires me. It’s aesthetic and beautiful precisely because it’s NOT behind a plastic case. When we’re in the process, we get messy. We get to immerse ourselves in that big, immense dark space of the unknown.