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?