Song of the Act of Creation
This piece was written for the Event In Solidariy with the IIP, an online gathering in support of the International Institute of Psychoanalysis after it had become the victim of an elaborate financial scam. The theme of the event was “The Act of Creation.” You can watch the recording of this unique encounter (featuring psychoanalysts, musicians, dancers, and poets) here.
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The act of creation comes by surprise, never the same way twice. The creator is no wiser than any other about how the creative act will arrive. She is a custodian of a possibility, tending to the conditions in which a creation might occur (if it wants). A lover content to wait indefinitely for what she paradoxically cannot anticipate. That is, to dwell in expectation of the unprecedented, sometimes in agony, sometimes in rapture.
To create is to bring mourning to its fullness by electing to make, to build, in the void. Creation is a radical Yes spoken to the indelible loss which is our birthright, a loss that reproduces itself incessantly in each instance of the act, each event of sublimation, everything love endeavors.
The words, sounds, movements, and colors that issue from the void, burnished and refined by primordial loss, are efflorescences of desire, stars in the night of infinite oblivion. Exploding onto the scene a little late or a little early, dying as they go, always exceeding their idea.
The act of creation may be a form of grace, but not necessarily a graceful one – a sublimation, but not always sublime. Creation is also destruction, making a wreck of what would confine or contain. Setting fire to shibboleths, detonating conceptual prisons, building by dismantling. Creation’s destructiveness arises not from a spirit of violence, nor vengeance, but as a byproduct of unbridled becoming. What flows, overflows.
Though we speak of a creator and his or her creation, it would perhaps be truer to say that one is constituted by what one creates. The creative act is how I create myself. Not once and for all, but in an infinite series of incomplete gestures toward the impossible.
Creation is always movement – a reenchanting of the phenomena we encounter by restoring their essential propensity for dancing. The things in themselves want to move – in fact they never stop but it is we who sometimes become inert. To create is to spin, to whirl in wild counterpoint with the world. Not a bland harmony, not a synchronization, but a generative disjunction, a dissonance of overflow and collision.
The act of creation is assured of failure. It creates not in order to bring processes to closure or completion, but rather to open new pathways, to pose new questions. Failure is the extravagant generosity of creativity, how it creates the conditions for its own genius to be renewed by leaving undone what will prompt the next leap, the next generative failure. This process – one in which arrival is forever suspended – constitutes the creator him or herself as process, as a becoming that overflows being, failing infinitely along the directionless road to inexhaustible mystery.
Creation undoes the strictures of knowledge, freeing us to be struck by the world again in its irreducible strangeness – pierced, shaken. To create is to become intimate with the materials with which I create, to become as one of the materials. To be shaped in the shaping. I surrender myself to a process and open myself to an ecstatic dimension which is never without a sense of danger and vertigo.
Vertiginously the creator hazards to lose her footing in the landscape of the already, plunging headlong into the not yet. Leaning wildly forward, extending through the furrows of tangibility to the elusive, the ineffable, what utterly resists. Giving herself over to the pursuit without even a name to confer upon what she pursues. She works by sensibility and feel. Images, sounds, and words are fashioned by a body moving, a body as process, an aesthetic body that tastes a poem, dances a portrait, nestles itself within a melody.
To create is no longer to wait, but to give form to what would otherwise languish in the liminal. Midwife of possibility, maintaining the dignified posture of timeless anticipation, all her being a readiness, a willingness, a radical hospitality. In the gesture of welcome the act comes to fruition: something of the order of truth is birthed, rupturing the weary clockwork of automaticity, breaking open new horizons of love, of delirious troublemaking, of illuminating folly.
The act is immortal – endlessly renewable but recalcitrant toward linear chronology, emerging from a rhythmic register forever inscrutable. The temporal collision, an incursion of the elsewhere – the elsewhen! – into this simmering expectancy that marks our many moments of laboring, comes upon the creator feverishly, ravishingly. The immortal act reaches its terminus and what is produced is immediately obsolete. The act endures in this elsewhere / elsewhen of the recalcitrant rhythm.
A world of things and discourse, adorned with the artifacts of bygone acts; we move amongst the fruits of past encounters with the irreducible alterity that births singularities. From the vantage point of the act in its heat and its mischief, these artifacts are always to some degree desiccated, decaying. Which is not to impugn them, for the singularities of the act in their deathly form of artifact are often more alive than we seem to be. Even with the passage of centuries some shimmer, some radioactivity remains.
What do these fossils ask of us? To what action of our own do they seduce us? Much more than veneration, these vestigial remains of singularity-events demand our interaction, our playing with them, our participation in their paradigm of becoming toward the impossible. We must descracalize them in order to dance to their inscrutable rhythm at the threshold where the mundane and the elsewhere collide. Intimacy with alterity, flight into oblivion, explosion of unprecedented formal configuration. Sacred desecration, nonsensical sense, splash, spill, shatter, sift, splice, sew, and shatter again, again, again, anew, anew, forever amen.