Closeness for Creativity’s Sake
This one has been brewing a long while: Part ode to those who taught me creative communication, part vision of reciprocity with Creation, part writing to remember the importance of keeping conversation creative.
When I think of creative conversations, I remember moments with strangers and long-term friends alike where it appears every thread I’ve gathered recently is woven into present perfectly. It’s integration of all I’ve been noticing. Like all the nuggets the universe has dropped before my feet have led me to here, right now, to speak to youabout this. There’s something inside you I need to hear, and there’s something in me, too, for you.
One conversation like this that’s coming to mind is my day with Tyler, a stranger sitting next to me on the Amtrak. That happened to be a long one - we were crossing the continent. But a creative conversation could be even 5 min. Just this morning, I needed to hear someone at the grocery store talk about their friend.
It’s almost two years since this train convo. I accepted Tyler’s challenge. At first it made me really cringe. But now, I love to meet my own gaze and really witness my love.
Conversation is art because art is the precious moment where the inside and outside world meet. It requires mutual aliveness, presence, and reciprocity.
I especially need this reminder right now; in the midst of so much macro beyond our control shit, it’s helpful to remember that how much space I give my conversations to bear fruit is transformative.
It’s no secret there are bad ideas (see Israel and Cybertrucks). It’s no secret we are not meant for everyone and vice versa (see your Facebook friends). So when a perfect idea emerges like a baby through two people’s serendipitous togetherness — how the hell did I ever find you? — it’s like a double miracle. Definitely not a coincidence.
We come here with work to do and people to do it with!
Last month, I stumbled onto the book Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity, and it was the perfect answer to my questions on how to honor and sustain creative intimacy. It focused on several iconic partnerships like Lennon-McCartney and Marina and Ulay. I want to go one step further than intimacy driving creativity and argue that the point of closeness is to create. Why are we drawn to who we’re drawn to? And what do we do with this magnetism? What is our responsibility to it? I am most interested in the things that cannot be imagined and built alone.
Yet we live in a moment where most people’s time and energy is exploited to build the ideas of a very select few. It’s tragic!! Imagine all the perfect things that haven’t been made because there hasn’t been space to imagine or resources to build them.
Creativity is not reserved for a select few, but the myth of genius serves capitalism’s preference for ideas that keep a few rich and the rest of us starved (emotionally, spiritually, materially). When we experience Creation as a source outside us that anyone can tap into and collaborate with, it becomes obvious the ways in which capitalism closes our channels through consumption, severing our relationship to the divine.
Part of reclaiming our labor and therefore creativity is reclaiming the abundant potential of our closest relationships. It is from within the tenderness of these relationships we will remake the world.
A Building Kind of Love
Starting in late elementary school, I was lucky to go to the same summer art camp five years in a row. It was at Columbia College in Chicago, where my grandpa took film classes but never graduated. For six weeks, a group of 20 or so kids would diligently collaborate on a film and play. I remember a few of them: Golden Dentures of America, The Cat Therapist, some spin off of Candyland and Scooby Doo.
Looking back, I recognize the rarity of this experience. This wasn’t an assigned group project with a predetermined outcome; our education system is extremely individualistic and competitive. We aren’t taught true collaboration because it is transformative. Because it necessitates uncertainty and risk.
so 2012 lol
I never understood the return to school in August. I thought camp was heaven. We led ourselves. We were children entering the void together and coming out the other side. It was magic. Something materialized from nothing!
What if this happened? And then this happened!!
I can still feel the bubbles of our unadulterated enthusiasm. I can hear our frustrated tones as we learned how to listen and have grace with each others’ ideas, feelings, and preferences. Of course, there were tears as we navigated conflict and recognized the necessity of compromise. Ultimately, we each had to surrender our idea of perfection and realize the value in something we could never have imagined alone, the value of each person’s unique contributions.
Here, I met Legacy. You know Legacy - even if you haven’t actually met - if you know me. Our friendship was the first I recognized myself in.
John O’Donohue talks about the anam cara, or soul friend:
“With the anam cara you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging.
You are understood as you are without mask or pretension. Where you are understood, you are at home. The heart learns a new art of feeling. It altered the meaning of identity and perception.”
Legacy taught me what closeness is. Our togetherness rearranged my insides. We created a world, a language built of our shared questions. We had what felt like infinite attention and curiosity for each other, which we fervently wielded to understand and poke at the world around us.
bell hooks writes about listening as a creative act necessary to experiencing belonging and fullness:
“We seldom think of conversation as commitment. But it is. I find that expressing what I really feel and telling another person what is actually important to me at the moment is difficult. It requires a commitment on my part to do so, and I sense that this is true for most of us. It is equally difficult to listen. We are usually so full of our own thoughts and responses that we seldom really listen close enough to one another to grasp the real flavor of what the other person is attempting to convey. Creative communication in depth is what allows us to experience a sense of belonging to others. It is the force that limits the destructive potential in our lives and what promotes the growth aspects. Life is a struggle. Coping with a lifetime of change is a struggle, but through a lifetime of change we will experience ourselves as full persons only to the degree that we allow ourselves that commitment to others which keeps us in creative dialogue.”
I attempted to capture this feeling of creative communication in my animation thesis, Walking Nights, about the friendship ritual between Ivy, Legacy, and I. On the edge of adulthood, we grieved the loss of creating for the sake of creating. We grieved our aimless conversations.
There’s a moment in the film where Ivy says, “I didn’t know where to put myself.”
Later, Legacy says, “it didn’t have to be this big thing like you create things to be productive - how can you commodify your ideas? - your ideas were just there to be fun.”
Creating together, we found ourselves whole. And we gave ourselves wholly.
I’m forever grateful I had a childhood that gave me faith in the power of creative collaboration and conversation; it’s the feeling that guides me to spaces of communal play and restores me to continue imagining.
Closeness ≠ Connectedness
I want to differentiate between closeness and connectedness because these days - in an attention scarce world - it can be especially easy to confuse the two. Our digitally caged intimacy robs us of really knowing either truly, but both are obviously necessary in different ways. And one is only possible with the other.
Relearning to cry with strangers is really what allowed my body to begin to differentiate the two. In one of my mental health liberation classes, my teacher gave me permission to rest. She said the class would protect me and keep me safe if I wanted to take a nap. I cried just at the thought of letting go of my performance of awake and productive. She was giving me permission to be tired and showing me that even in my tired state I was valued. I’m sure, like you, I’ve struggled to trust people will be there for me if I have ‘nothing’ to contribute.
I grew up in a home that couldn’t handle sorrow or anger - really the authentic expression of any emotion was feared - yikes! So, being around adults in a space where my tears were as welcomed as my laughter was radical. It taught me that connectedness is honesty. It’s getting to experience your emotions openly. It’s trust and safety. It’s awareness of your own truth moment by moment melding with attention on your surrounding environment; movement between the two is easy because you’re allowed to show up as you are. It’s being instead of thinking about how to be. It’s a mind working with - not against - the body. It’s a system in unity.
In his comic book Unflattening, Nick Sousanis explains the difference between the right and left brain and the necessity of merging different kinds of awareness and perception.
It’s in the space between wide and narrow awareness that we find connection and belonging. It’s the balance between being and doing.
Connectedness proceeds closeness. You must be in your body - you must be here - to make the choice to move closer. From here, you can discern whose vision aligns with yours, who reciprocates what you want to build and how you want to play.
It’s life altering to be authentic and feel connected to people who you are not close with - who you do not need to be close with. We shouldn’t have to be close to be ourselves. We waste so much precious energy performing. Feeling connected to strangers retrains the capitalistic, dissociated mindset until slowly you internalize: I do not have to be close with you to be protected, valued by you —> Wow! There are so many people to trust. —> WOW! People are so good!
When we are connected through a spectrum of types of relationships - when we are part of a web - closeness doesn’t have to be hoarded like some scarce medicine to mend our wounds. Closeness is really about the limitation of time and therefore depth. There will be so many people you connect with. So many people you are excited to see. So many people you genuinely enjoy being around. So many people who reciprocate your presence. So many people you don’t like but still love. But there’s only so many you can collaborate with. Only so many you can show up with over and over again, day after day.
So what are we making? / The Offering of Us
I’ve noticed that all my generative closenesses have blindsided me, occurring simultaneously, sparking completely outside my control. Neither person is pursuing.
Pursuing is necessarily a game of fantasy or projection. Instead of moving with forceful speed towards each other, bound to collide violently, we trust who we need to meet will arrive, almost fall out of the sky, when we ferociously direct our life force towards our soul’s purpose.
We’re moving balls of energy, so maybe it’s a matter of surrendering to our gravitational pull and seeing who we bump into. Then, we find the perfect distance apart; we see who sticks around or who was a comet passing through.
These are the people you’re inexplicably magnetized to. For some unknowable reason, your idiosyncrasies have patience for each other. Your obsessions are shared and expanded. You’re guided by similar questions. You attend to complimentary details. You happen to be walking the same way. Your purposes clearer in parallel.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote,
“love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
Poet Donald Hall, reflected on his relationship with his wife after she passed and how their gaze met in the same place:
“We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one.”
What could only be found or channeled or found through our closeness, through such multiplied attention? How are we remade by the third things we create together?
If you haven’t already seen Fire of Love, a documentary about lovers and volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, I absolutely recommend it for this reason. Also The Taste of Things.
But the list of closenesses for creativity’s sake could go on and on… The Beatles, the discovery of DNA
Misusing Each Other’s Attention
If the opposite of connection is disconnection, what is the opposite of closeness? Farness? How far is far? What makes closeness sterile and uninspired?
Adulthood has been awkwardly making mistakes, hurting myself and others — learning what closeness isn’t.
Closeness isn’t merging. Closeness isn’t telling you everything. Closeness isn’t certainty. Closeness isn’t meeting every need. Closeness isn’t you making me happy. Closeness isn’t you making me feel anything. Closeness isn’t unchanging. Or consistent comfort. Closeness isn’t the lack of hurting. Closeness isn't talking every day. Closeness isn’t always remembering or connecting. Closeness isn’t always even understanding.
It’s probably one of the riskiest things we could do — be close to someone — it’s absolutely horrific.
The largest lesson of my adult closenesses has been around misusing the close one’s attention. When we slip into taking closeness for granted or mistake it for comfort, it veers towards the opposite of generative: corrosive… the ego seeking to constantly validate its own existence through the close one’s convenient attention.
*cue me compulsively expressing some re-branded, recycled insecurity for the thousandth time to someone who has waaaaaaaaaay too much patience for me, wasting both of our time, instead of………....changing*
At my least conscious, I’ve treated my closenesses as receptacles to hold my fear and negativity, and I’ve justified it with some subconscious thought like, “we’re close, so this person can handle the worst of me.” That’s what closeness is for, right?
*bell hooks cackling from the grave* LOVE IS CONDITIONAL!
Of course, part of closeness is shining a shared light on the shadows of ourselves and our loved ones sometimes seeing our fears more clearly than us, but if the close one becomes your attitudinal salve and convenient comfort, conversation is bound to become draining and boring - your precious energy wildly misdirected, your togetherness preventing you from finding transformation within.
My misuse of closeness has shown me how much effort and mindfulness it takes to keep closeness fresh and fruitful. Of course, it comes back to relationship with self: how to alchemize fear within and discern what thoughts and feelings need collective attention. I have to keep surprising myself to be able to notice and appreciate changes in others.
Animating the Distance Between Us / Trusting Disconnect / Keeping Closeness Generative
I say building a world - not just building a home - because world’s are what we deserve. We will not live on their terms. And they cannot take worlds away from us.
Living with Maya has given my creative voice roots. But making a home together has often felt at odds with building a world. The unending practical logistics of the mundane (keeping the house clean, taking the car to the mechanic for the 300th time, going grocery shopping, etc.) can take away from the effortlessness of play and creativity.
We’ve gone through so many different eras living together. We’ve disappointed each other. Surprised each other. Misused each other’s attention. Misunderstood each other. Avoided ourselves through each other. But at home, there’s no where to hide. We have to trust the times of disconnect, and those moments of disconnect make it clear:
We must be individually committed to changing; solitude is key to changing together. An eco-system of closenesses are key to staying close.
In the name of creative commitment, over the summer we had a little ceremony with Victor as witness. We took the moment to pause and ask ‘what is our togetherness serving beyond ourselves? What is our closeness creating?’
The answers to these questions will be unfolding, of course. But we took photos and shared vows to mark devotion to these questions as paths we’re intentionally walking.
Some of our vows:
i vow to love others deeply, to give generously
i vow to nourish the parts of me that are you, and to cherish all that is your own
i vow to flow with the rhythms of my solitude and remember my edges, so i can give myself entirely to here, to heaven
i vow to reflect back to you your gifts, your convictions, and the necessity of your aliveness
from here, home with you, i love everyone! and so to you, i return, with everyone and everything i love!
i promise to spread the peace loving you has helped me know!
what more is there to say?
Vero
