A few weeks ago I found myself musing about Terrence Malick’s films. My guess about why they came up is that it was a result of holding tension, psychological tension. For quite some time I had been feeling blocked in my creativity. I was still recovering from a concussion and neck injuries from a bike accident. I experienced pain whenever I attempted to write, do photography or paint. So I stopped. Working in my Pilates studio and doing jobs around the house were more than enough to exhaust my limited energy and left me with constant headaches and body pain. I couldn’t force myself into something that I sensed might make me unable to work or maintain the house. Yet my soul wanted something else and this created the tension I mention above.
Out of holding this tension and through the pain I began to have dreams that were different than ones in the past. Perhaps I was ready to receive them. I’m not sure. These new dreams did make me curious. What might be stirring internally that I needed to allow out? I decided to try writing a poem not based on a dream I had had, but on what might arise in a new way if I let go of creating meaning from that dream. Before going to sleep one night I lay down on my bed pen and notebook in hand and waited for something new to arise. In the past I wrote from making things up from inside my head. I call this egoic writing. It never felt satisfying at a soul level. It mostly felt willful, like I was imposing myself on the creative process. So I stopped writing. Laying in bed I said okay Mike write whatever comes up no matter how stupid your inner critic says it is. Yes my inner critic, which I’ll write about in another blog.
I told the inner critic to take a night off and waited. In the past I could lay still for hours and absolutely nothing would come. Just a grey soundless void. Not this time. I pictured the images from the dream I had. Nothing. A few minutes later, wait what was that. A voice- words. My analytical mind, inner critic generated, cut in. Who is that? That’s not real. It’s just your mind playing tricks on you. GIVE UP!! I settled that down by saying screw the analysis and wrote the few words that I had heard. Gradually a poem formed. Something new.
Russell Lockhart has written that dreams are about the future. This isn’t about making your dreams come true or finding the egoic meaning of dreams. It’s about negative capability in relation to the dream one has had. Being able to lay doubts, analysis, understanding, knowledge gathering aside and wait for an inner voice to speak. This voice, which our logic and reason saturated civilization says doesn’t exist or is the voice of madness, is coming from somewhere else. A place one can’t prove to others. If one has experienced it then you will know the truth of it.
I spent a number of nights like this. A few poems took shape. Not Robert Frost poetry by any means. I realized that this wasn’t the point. I expanded my sources. Instead of dreams I would wait for internal images or voices to arise spontaneously and then write poetry from there. I learned a different way of handling my creativity and my pain.
Back to Terrence Mallick. Laying in bed one night I was working on a poem about storms, climate change and human storming. Suddenly images from some of Mallikc’s movies came up for me. The inner critic cut in. Pah, older white man, movies based on men, white men, heterosexual relationships. Oops stop I said to myself. That’s actually not what Terrence Mallick is doing with his films.
I explored his work a bit. I came across a site called Stories of Old on You Tube where the creator talked about his view of Mallicks work. I was particularly struck by his comments on the film A Hidden Life. I had been attracted to this film for quite a while particularly with the rise of fascism worldwide. Although it is about an older white man being victimized, which is our default mode of being in the West these days, he chose his path out his own peaceful integrity not out of being a passive victim or violently reacting to being victimized. The Stories of Old narrator said what Mallick was going for was the state of Being-Open to the Other-even to Nazis. This struck a deep chord in me. I mulled this over through the day. I lay down that night and brought this aspect up again, the resonance of it. This is the poem that wrote itself. It doesn’t have a title.
Being-Open
What if I become the dog in my dream?
What if I become the otherness?
The Other
Open-Being
This has led to many new possibilities.
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