Primal Creativity

Becoming Who You Are

When my daughter’s son was three or four, his brilliant imagination was churning out story like there was no tomorrow. He would furiously drag his crayon across the paper creating shapes unfamiliar to the more developed or more stagnant eye. As soon as the creature was birthed, he named it with a vocabulary as unfamiliar as the image. He would declare, “This a snathglarb,” or something similar, beyond my memory now and assuredly more creative. He was in his primal creative story-telling mode, flexible and willing to be molded by the creature of his making. He was instructing me about the freedom of creating and being created on the fly, giving me a little fuel for the fire of untold and untellable story.

How do we begin to unearth the untellable, let alone commit it to the page? How do we get to the deep and primal root of voice and transform it into something that is more than language? Does it begin with Being, with a willingness to be rather naked in relationship with parts of ourselves that have been hidden from us? Is that part of what we need, that kind of naked honesty face to face with the blank page? Is it from that place that storyteller and story come to life, where a seed of thought can grow inside our imagination? I can’t muscle that kind of life into existence, I can only shape myself around it in a supportive role and try to bring it to maturity.

The thought of a story just out of reach often urges me forward into new frontiers. It’s haunting like the sound of a musical instrument playing bass notes so low that it’s barely noticeable and yet its strength moves you along the musical piece into a place you’ve never been before. You want to nail down what it is that’s moving you, but that part is shrouded.

The kind of story I’m talking about is the kind that when told, remains somewhat untold, like Lewis Caroll’s “Jabberwocky” or Finnegan’s Wakeby James Joyce. Some things are beyond language and yet still must be communicated. This is the crux of the writers quest, so says Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, “The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.”

Our own story, whether written or unwritten is, if we’re being honest, an unfolding mystery, untellable really. John O’Donohue writes in his book Beauty that “Each one of us is in a state of perennial formation…coming to be…in every new emerging moment.” Our capacity to frame life’s events into a narrative is uniquely human and profoundly mysterious, highly resistant to being pinned down. And yet the desire to define who we are through the art of story telling seems almost primal in nature.

In what ways are you becoming who you are?

Writing Prompt Word For the Week: Emerging