Brain Food #845: You can only create what you are meant to create
Free will and the act of creation
Thoughts of the day
The purpose of writing a memoir, and deciding when it is the right time to write one, are as subjective and personal as the contents of the memoir itself. In some sense, all forms of writing and creating are unavoidably personal. As Nietzsche concluded, “I have gradually come to understand what every great philosophy until now has been: the confession of its author and a kind of involuntary unconscious memoir”. But it is in those personal pieces that we often discover the most universal of truths.
In her meditative memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith (the poet, not the Dame) recounts the end of her marriage and the transition to the next chapter of her life, though such distinctions are often not easily signposted by external events, but by subtle changes in the way one feels.
In a certain vignette, she questions why she chose to write a memoir instead of taking the less painful route of turning it all into fiction, still telling a version of the story while altering some of the facts:
“After I finally read Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, I joked to my agent on the phone, ‘Why didn't I think to do that? Why didn't I think to novelize my life?’ It would've been less vulnerable, less complicated than writing this book.”
But if it is true that the story writes itself, then not just the contents but also the format are not a choice, but an inevitability.
It can be a liberating thought, that one’s creations could not have been anything else.
In a recent post,Suleika Jaouad shared how, when she failed to make one of her paintings look more finessed, her mother simply told her: “It looks like what it is. You should not try to make it look like something else.”
Within the same vignette, Smith acknowledges that the book is her life, and her life is, too, what it is:
“I can't change what happened—it's not a novel, it's my life—but I'm glad at least to be living now, and here, free to make this life my own.”
Like many other thinkers, philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris disputes the existence of free will, but not the importance of our individual acts, themselves the sum of our histories, biologies, and environments:
“And the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they don't matter. If I had not decided to write this book, it wouldn't have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.”
In some way, we are all vessels carrying within us something to share with the world, and that something can only be the unique byproduct of who we are.
According to Novalis, this ‘something’ is the universe itself:
“We dream of traveling through the universe—but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us—the mysterious way leads inwards. (MO 17).”
The lives we make, and the lives that make us, eventually become our output, perhaps an act of searching for answers, but also of trying to capture the one thing we mean to say, the single message we intend to share in our fleeting existence:
“Maybe no poet writes more than one [poem] and it takes a lifetime. He thinks he’s writing different short poems but really they’re all part of the same long one.”
- John Berger, From A to X. (from ars poetica)
As Michelangelo said, David was in the stone, waiting to be found. Sometimes, we should sit in the darkness and see what comes out of it.
The Improvisation paintings by Wassily Kandinsky are described as an "expression of inner processes that occur suddenly, mostly unconsciously. It is the effect of ‘inner nature.’” Despite their apparent randomness, and the fact that they were produced as an act of spontaneity, they would have not existed had Kandinsky not painted them, and had he not been who he was.
Love this! I have been thinking about free will lately and this really resonates with me!