Surrender to Stillness: What if You Just Stopped?

Untimely reflections on writing, silence, and the call to abandon everything

Dear Living Dark reader,

Here is Chapter Nine of Writing at the Wellspring. It deals with a state of mind and soul that comes to us all from time to time in our writing lives, and maybe even our wider lives as a whole. Or at least it has come to me repeatedly in my own creative journey.

I’m talking about the state where you just want to stop, where you feel a deep urge to drop everything, give up all effort, and rest in total silence. Is this an unhealthy state? Would your creative work wither if you gave in? Would your life implode? Or does this seemingly sinister call really represent a gift, a spontaneously given opportunity to discover something deeper about yourself and the world?

You can find the previous chapters of Writing at the Wellspring, plus the book’s introduction and conclusion, in the Living Dark web archive through a simple search for the title. For now, maybe you will see something of yourself reflected below in what I’m tempted to call—borrowing some language from Nietzsche—a chapter of untimely meditations or thoughts out of season. In our present age of wall-to-wall productivity advice and universal emphasis on getting things done, there is little place in the mainstream culture of writing and creativity for speculating, as I do near the end of this piece, that “maybe we are all writing . . . in search of the flashpoint of stillness, when we will realize that we don’t have to do it anymore, and that we don’t even want to do it anymore, because we have finally waked up from the dream and found the thing-in-itself.” But maybe, as with so many things, mainstream rejection doesn’t automatically mean something is false. Especially if it finds an echo in your own soul.

Warm regards,

Embrace the Unknown

Chapter Nine of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity as Refuge and Revelation in an Age of Upheaval

The Whisper of Inertia

Are you ever tempted to abandon all your creative projects? Let them collapse? Maybe even let your whole outer life crumble as you sit there silently and watch it all burn down? Is there ever an inner spiritual call to do this? If so, is it valid? Should we assent to it? Or is this desire instead your enemy: the energy of self-defeat, the siren song of your lower self, a function of negative self-image and defective mental/emotional programming? Could it even be the voice of some evil demon that we ought to recognize and resist, a spirit of destruction working to overturn and undermine us?

The call to sink into inertia and give everything up is a question and a temptation that has suggested itself to me many times over the course of my life. The peculiar nature of my mental-emotional makeup apparently renders me highly susceptible to such thinking. I have repeatedly experienced moments when it becomes apparent that what I am seeking through my creative efforts and actions is in fact a sense of final fulfillment in which I will not feel the need to do such things anymore, but will instead feel free simply to exist, to be, to sit in silence.

Being reasonably well read in the literature on creativity, I am self-aware enough to ask at such moments: Is this simply a manifestation of Resistance (a term and concept that we will examine in detail in Part Three)? Or is there something valid about that inner murmur that urges me to let go, sink down, and give blissful assent to the dream of entire rest?

Several times over the years, at moments when a sense of mutual resonance with a fellow writer or creator has led me to feel comfortable enough to share what can feel like my shameful secret, I have described this experience in words. And these moments of self-disclosure have pointed up an interesting fact: I’m not the only one. My sense of isolation in this experience is actually a function or manifestation of the writer’s paradox that I mentioned in Chapter Six, the ironic revelation that what we think is most private and peculiar about us is actually the most universal. Other people, other writers, have encountered this same inner sea change. They grok it with gusto, including not only the sudden—or sometimes lasting—desire to drop everything and go silent, but the same sense of combined dread and relief that accompanies it. Maybe you are one of them.

“Is there ever a real call just to cease all action and let structures crumble, as overt ‘failure’ blooms all around?”

Naturally, a recurrent feeling this powerful and long-lived in my experience has made itself known in my journals. For thirty years I kept a private journal that served as one of the central external repositories of my inner life. It was there that I learned the sound of my own voice, the nature of my fascinations, and the style and mode of writing that was natural to my self-expression in words. I brought this centered knowledge of myself to my public writing as well. And then, unexpectedly, my private writings became grouped with my public ones when much of my journal was published in two volumes.

There are many entries in its pages dealing with this long-running, ever-returning, always attractive and seductive and convincing call to quit everything and retreat into a cocoon of blessed, blissful silence and stasis. The following example is a case in point that shows me grappling with the pull toward absolute inertia. Maybe you will find that something in it resonates with your own experience. Note that when the entry mentions “the mummy book,” this refers to Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture, which I edited for an academic publisher, and which ended up being published in 2014. When I wrote this journal entry, I was deep into the process of that book. And when the entry mentions “the paranormal encyclopedia” this refers to Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies, which I edited for the same publisher, and which was eventually published in 2015.