Status Updates From Witness to the Fire: Creati...

Dostoevsky: “Without suffering, happiness cannot be understood. The ideal passes through suffering like gold through fire. The heavenly kingdom is attained through effort.”

Mechtild of Magdeburg: “From suffering I’ve learned this: That whoever is sore wounded by love will never he made whole unless she embrace the very same love which wounded her.”

Rilke: “Who talks of victory; to endure is all.”

‘The creative work always falls short of the vision, the immensity of which it never can fully express. Then, too, there is the paradox of faith and doubt in every creative process. To create one must hold one’s faith that one can create, that one will be spoken to and receive the inspiration. Yet, one must live with the doubt that one might be wrong, which counters inflation, grandiosity and fanaticism.’

‘The act of creation is a paradox. To create one must have the courage to stand in the tension of the opposites. To create one must be alone and set aside a sacred time and space to listen to the deeper Self; one must have a certain distance to have perspective. But one must also be involved with others.’

‘We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are ours; has it abysses, those belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.’ — Rilke

‘I feel like a small battlefield, in which the problems of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accomodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.’

- Etty Hillesum

‘… The heavenly powers
Cannot do all things. It is the mortals
Who reach sooner into the abyss. So the turn is
With these. Long is
The time, but the true comes into
Its own.’
- Hölderin

Heidegger: ‘What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank, down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the onset destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could possible arise.”

‘We often dismiss the disclosure of meaning as revealed in art as “mere play”—something to entertain us—rather than that which essentialy confronts us with the meaning of life and death. Instead of honoring the sacred silence revealed in the poetic image, we prefer rational concepts. We want easy answers and solutions rather than insights that leave us with a new reverence for the questions of life.’

‘We try to control love and human relationship through noisy small talk and gossip, which escalates through alcohol, rather than opening up ourselves to the surprise of genuine conversation, when we listen with awe to each other and to the silence of creation.’

‘Just as an individual can be hostage in the abyss of addiction, so can an entire epoch or culture. Western civilization is experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul due to our self-asserting will to control, epitomized by the technology that we expect to provide us with a secure, happy and comfortable life.’

‘The patriarchal Judge emphasizes comparing and competing, as well as results (fame and fortune) rather than process. This impedes creativity. All of these proclamations from The Judge, who wants to be “highest”, are toxic to the creative process. In contrast, creativity requires judgements that have unconditional respect for the unique voice and style of each person and that celebrate the creative process.’

You must be able to stand in the tension between potentiality of the vision and the finite limits of the embodiment, just as a genuine work of art always contains creative tension and offers it to the recipient. This conflict—essential to the creative proces—keeps many people from daring to create or to risk putting their creation out into the world. The same issue arises in the recreating of one’s life.’

A work, wether of one’s life or one’s art, can’t be perfect. The vision of what we can create is always far greater than what can be expressed concretely in any given work of art or in any life. Thus there is a “guilt” inherent in the process of creation, for the creator always knows that he has been unable to give complete and perfect expression to his vision.’

‘I, like many others, was susceptible to “bad faith” by wanting to be “above” it all. The fatal flaw of The Judge is wanting to be above the disease of addiction, and at the deepest level, above the finite human condition, to want to be so special that one does not deserve the “unjust” treatment of having a disease.’

‘When you’re playing, you are being your soul over and over. Playing music is the soul’s struggle to be in the fullest way, to keep learning new things and to have that show in the musical expression. When you play you have to face yourself over and over again in your limitations. You’re on the line from minute to minute.’

‘Perhaps our addictions are similar to Rilke’s dragons which can turn into princesses: if we turn and face them, there lies the surprise of the divine.’

‘It is a mistake to reduce the life and work or the creative person to his disease. But it is also a mistake to ignore a disease such as addiction and romanticize its relation to creativity.’

‘Intenseness and duration are as ancient enemies as fire and water. They are mutually destructive. They cannot co-exist.’