What Grief Does to Creativity

The few times I have experienced creative blocks, particularly with writing, have been during periods following the death of a loved one. When Frankie Smith died, a dear friend who introduced herself to me at a non-violence training as a "Catholic witch," I couldn't write a poem for several months. This spring and summer have brought me several deaths, and most recently the passing on of my 87-year old mother, who died last Saturday at 3:30 a.m.

Mom left me with her last words. When she stirred as I held her on the hospital bed, I asked, "Mom, what do you need?" She came out of her morphine haze briefly to say: "I need . . . belly laughs." For someone with a failed heart, failing kidneys, years of painful arthritis, and a variety of other ailments, she could have used a few more belly laughs, for sure.

I am told by professionals that I am doing about as good as any one could in a time of loss. In truth, I am functioning well, even by my own lights, if "functioning well" means keeping on, keeping on. Since last Friday, the day before she died, I have not sobbed or shed many tears, nor have I belly-laughed, but I've tended to the practical things.

Where does our creativity come from? Wallace Stevens, in his "Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," claimed "God and imagination are one." In times when we are aware of the decay of life, even though the process can be awe-inspiring, it is hard for me to experience God. God is most present for me in beauty, nature, love, and yes, creative imagination. Right now, I just feel the absence of someone I love and my own heart feels flat and grey. Thus, the creativity is stunted and on hold.

I have faith that this will change; experience has shown that it does. For now, I live in the shadow where it is difficult to see God and the imagination, and where belly laughs wait still further back in the wings stifling themselves until they are once again permitted on the stage of daily life.

Relativity

Learning to work with more than one dimension is interesting as I explore color and relationship with shapes and words. This series was for an Oriental Swap and the field was wide open. I decided to use packaging from dry-good products and instead of cutting off lids and working around edges, I'd cut out cards (2.5 x 3.5) incorporating folds and edges.

Because I'm a relative newcomer to artist trading cards and creating visual art, I feel very free to play and make mistakes. My cards aren't professional in any sense of the word, and it is a forgiving world, that of being an amateur.

I'm aware more and more of the dualities our culture poses, pitting success against failure, right against left, cat lovers against dog lovers, meat-eaters against vegetarians. There is an old saying that nature abhors straight lines; well, I think most of us fall in between the false extremes too often posed or given to us as choices. I don't have to pick one and forsake other interests, deny myself the pleasures of witnessing childhood because I don't have children, or hold a solid certainty about any particular issue.

Keats talked about negative capability as essential for a poet. To be able to hold within the mind two opposing thoughts and not become immobilized. More on this another time, but it is a statement that has guided me.