Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
Poison in the River
There are many myths about the pollution of and the sealing
off
of the creative and the wild, whether they be about the contamination of purity as personified by the noxious fog that once spread over the island
Leda,
where the skeins of life with which the Fates wove were stored,
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or tales about evildoers stopping up village wells, thereby causing suffering and death. Two of the most profound stories are the latter-day “Jean de Florctte” and
“Manon
of the Spring."
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In those tales, two men, hoping to deprive a poor hunchbacked man, his wife, and little daughter of the land they are attempting to bring to life with flowers and trees, seal off the spring that feeds that land, causing the destruction of the soulful and hardworking family.
The most common effect of pollution in women's creative life is loss of vitality. This disables a woman’s ability to create or act “out there” in the world. Though there are times in a woman’s cycles of healthy creative life when the river of creativity disappears underground for a time, something is being developed all the same. We are incubating then. It is a very different sensation than that of spiritual crisis.
In a natural cycle, there is restlessness and impatience, perhaps, but there is never a sense the wild soul is dying. We can tell the difference by assessing our anticipation: even when our creative energy is involved in a long incubation, we still look forward to the outcome, we feel the pops and surges of that new life turning and humming within us. We do not feel desperate. There is no lunging and grasping.
But when the creative life dies because we are not tending to the health of the river, that is another matter entirely. Then, we feel exactly like the dying river, we feel loss of energy, we feel tired; there is nothing creeping, roiling, lifting leaves, cooling off, warming up. We become thick, slow in a negative way, poisoned by pollution, or by a backup and stagnation of all our riches. Everything feels tainted, unclear, and toxic.
How might a woman’s creative life become polluted? This sludging of creative life invades all five phases of creation: inspiration, concentration, organization, implementation, and sustenance. Women who have lost one or more of these report that they “can’t think” of anything new, useful, or empathic for themselves. They are easily “distracted” by love affairs, too much work, too much play, by tiredness, or by fear of failure.
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Sometimes they cannot coalesce the mechanics of organization, and their project lays scattered about in a hundred places and pieces. Sometimes the problems issue from a woman’s
naíveté
about her own extroversion: She thinks that by making a few motions in the outer world, she has really done something. This is like making the arms but not the legs or the head of a thing and calling it done. She feels necessarily incomplete.
Sometimes a woman trips over her own introversion and wants to simply wish things into being; she may think that just thinking the idea is good enough, and there need be no outer manifestation. Except she feels bereft and unfinished anyway. These are all manifestations of pollution in the river. What is being manufactured is not life but something that inhibits life.
Other times she is under attack by those around her, or by the voices yammering in her head: “Your work is not right enough, not good enough, not this enough, not that enough. It is too grandiose, too infinitesimal, too insignificant, takes too long, is too easy, too hard.” This is pouring cadmium into the river.
There is another story that describes the same process, but uses different symbolism. In Greek mythos there is an episode wherein the Gods decree that a group of birds called the Harpies
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shall punish a soul named Phineus. Each time Phineus’s food is magically laid out, the flock flies in, steals some of the food, scatters some, and defecates on the rest, leaving the poor man ravenously hungry.
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This literal pollution can also be understood figuratively as a string of complexes within the psyche whose sole raison
d’étre
is to foul things up. This tale is most definitely
a
temblón
, shiver story; it makes us shiver in recognition, for we have all experienced this. The “Harpy Syndrome” destroys via denigration of one’s talents and efforts, and through a most disparaging internal dialogue. A woman brings up an idea and the Harpy shits upon it. The woman says, “Well, I thought I would do this and this.” The Harpy says, “That’s a stupid idea, no one cares about that, it’s ridiculously simplistic. Well, mark my words, your ideas are all dumb, people will laugh, you really have nothing to say.” This is Harpy-talk.
Excuses are another form of pollution. From women writers,
painters, dancers, and other artists, I have heard every excuse concocted since the earth cooled. “Oh, I’ll get around to it one of these days/' In the meantime, she has the grinning depression. “I keep busy,
yes
I squeeze in my writing here and there, why I wrote two poems last year, yes, and finished one painting and part of another over the last eighteen months, yes, the house, the kids, the husband, the boyfriend, the cat, the toddler, need my consummate attention. I am going to get around to it, I don’t have the money, I don’t have the time, I can’t find the time, I can’t make the time, I can’t start until I have the finest most expensive instruments or experiences, I just don’t feel like it right now, the mood is not right yet. I just need at least a day’s worth of time to get it done, I just need to have a few days’ time to get it done. I just need to have a few weeks of time to myself to get it done, I just, just, just...”
Fire on the River
Back in the 1970s the Cuyahoga River at Cleveland became so polluted it began to bum. Polluted creative flow can suddenly erupt in a toxic fire that bums not only on the fuel of garbage in the river but incinerates all the life forms as well. Too many psychic complexes all working at the
same
time can cause immense damage to the river. Negative psychological complexes rear up and question your worth, your intention, your sincerity, and your talent. They also send exhortations that assert unequivocally that you must labor to “earn a living” doing things that exhaust you, leave you no time to create, destroying your will to imagine.
Some of the malevolent complexes’ favorite thieveries and punishments of women’s creativity revolve around promising the soul-self “time to create” somewhere off in the foggy future. Or promising that when one has several days in a row free, then the rumpus will begin at last. It’s hogwash. The complex has no such intention. It is another way of suffocating the creative impulse.
Alternatively the voices may whisper, “Only if you have a doctorate degree will your work be decent, only if you are lauded by the Queen, only if you receive such and such award, only if you are published in such and such magazine, only if, if, if.”
This
only-iffing
is like stuffing the soul with junk food. It is one
thing to be fed with any old thing; it is quite another to be truly nourished. Most often the logic of the complex is extremely faulty, even though it will try to convince you otherwise.
One of the greatest problems of the creative complex is the accusation that whatever you're doing won't work because you're not thinking logically, you’re not being logical, what you have done so far isn’t logical and is therefore doomed to failure. First of all, the primary stages of creating are not logical—nor should they be. If the complex succeeds in stopping you with this, it has you. Tell it to sit down and be quiet or go away till you're done. Remember, if logic were all there really was to the world, then surely all men would ride sidesaddle.
I've seen women work long, long hours at jobs they despise in order to buy very expensive items for their houses, mates, or children. They put their considerable talents on the back burner. I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to
write...
and you know it's a funny thing about house cleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman.
A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.
The scattering of plans and projects, as if by a wind, occurs when a woman attempts to organize a creative idea and it just somehow keeps being blown away, becoming more and mote confused and disordered. She is not tracking it in any concrete way because, again, she doesn’t have time to write it all down and organize it, or she is called by so many other things, that she loses her place and cannot pick it up again.
It may also be that a woman's creative process is misunderstood or disrespected by those around her. It is up to her to inform them that when she has “that look” in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled. It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and a little spit, and if she can just get it all to the table without it falling down
or flying apart, she can bring an image from the unseen world into being. To speak to her in that moment is to create a Harpy wind that blows the entire structure to tatters. To speak to her in that moment is to break her heart.
And yet, a woman may do this to herself by talking away her ideas until all the arousal is gone from them, or by not putting her foot down about people creeping off with her creative tools and materials, or by the simple oversight of not buying the right equipment to execute the creative work properly, or by stopping and starting so many times, by allowing everyone and their cat to interrupt her at will, that the project falls into a shambles.
If the culture in which a woman lives attacks the creative function of its members, if it splits or shatters any archetype or perverts its design or meaning, these will be incorporated in their broken state into the psyches of its members in the same way; as a broken-winged force rather than a hale one filled with vitality and possibility.
When these injured elements about how to allow the creative life and how to nourish it are activated within a woman’s psyche, it is hard to have a dit of insight into what is wrong. Being in a complex is like being inside a black bag. It is dark, you cannot see what has hold of you, you only know you’re captured by a something. Then we are temporarily unable to organize our thoughts or priorities, and like bagged creatures, we begin to act without contemplation. Although acting without contemplation can be very useful at times, such as in the premise of “first thought, right thought,” in this instance it is not so.
During a poisoned or stalled creation, a woman gives the beautiful soul-self “pretend eating.” She tries to disregard the condition of the animus. So she throws a little workshop to it here and drops a little reading time for it there. But in the end, this has no substance. The woman is kidding no one but herself.
So when this river dies, it is without its flow, without its life force. The Hindus say that without Shakti, the personified feminine life force, Shiva, who encompasses the ability to act, becomes a corpse. She is the life energy that animates the male principle, and the male principle in turn animates action in the world.
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So we see that the river must be reasonably balanced between its pollutions and its cleansings, or else all comes to nothing. But in order to cany on in this manner, the immediate environ must be nutritive and accessible. In matters of survival it is an incontrovertible fact that the less available the essentials—food and water, safety and shelter—the fewer the options. And the fewer the options, the less creative life, for creativity thrives on the many, on the endless combinations of all things.
The destructive
hidalgo
in the tale is a deep but immediately recognizable part of a wounded woman. He is her animus, who causes her to struggle, not with creating—often she cannot even get to that point—but rather with her gaining a clear permission, a solid inner support system to create at will. A healthy animus is meant to involve himself with the work of the river, and this is as it should be. Well integrated, he is the helper, watching to see if anything need be done. But in the
La Uorona
story, the animus is one-sided; he takes over, prevents vital new life, and insists on dominating the life of the psyche. When a malignant animus gains such power, a woman may denigrate her own work, or else, at the other extreme, attempt to fake real work. When any of these take place, a woman has fewer and fewer creative options. The animus gains power to push the woman around, denigrates her work, thereby inauthenticating it in one way or another. He does this by ruining the river.
Let us look first at the parameters of the animus in general, then we can proceed to understanding how a woman’s creative life deteriorates when there is negative animus influence, and what she can and must do about it. Creativity is meant to be an act of clear consciousness. Its actions reflect the clarity of the river. The animus, that which funds outer action, is the man on the river. He is the steward. He is caregiver and protector of the water.