Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. by Madeleine L'Engle

Sometimes, we forget.

We wake in the morning and hope to find our way to the desk.  We hope to hear from the manuscript in front of us that we are welcome, that our company is longed for, that the stroke of our hands will be healing and full of discovery.  But maybe the sleep cycle got us, leaving us with dull brain, especially in light of the day before, with it’s logey, unproductive hours.   Coffee doesn’t help, Facebook doesn’t help, the stale air in the house doesn’t help, and the fact that its Saturday doesn’t help.   God’s busy, too busy to bother, and something’s wrong with the browser pages so that you have to choose between waiting and killing them.   Sun’s blazing white beauty on the window sill, and all you really want to do is walk.   The desk sits there, waiting, not giving a damn what you feel, which is pretty much true of most things and people.  So you have you feelings, so what?  Will the work get done?  Will the work be served?  Will words land on the page or not?

I pick up an old copy of Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, that powerful little book by Madeleine L’Engle.   Walking on Water was probably the very first book on the slippery interaction between Christian faith and art I encountered, given to me by a friend I eventually lost due to old-fashioned neglect.   Whenever I pick up the book, I’m reminded of that loss, which means I don’t often pick it up.   But this morning, there it is, and I reach for it, and L’Engle, wonderful writer and human that she was, immediately begins to remind me of what I’m doing.

This questioning of the meaning of being, and dying, and being, is behind the telling of stories around tribal fires and night; behind the drawing of animals on the walls of caves;  the singing of melodies of love in spring, and of the death of green in autumn.  It is part of the deepest longing of the human psyche, a recurrent ache in the hearts of all God’s creatures.

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water.

L’Engle reminds me, at the very top of the book, to listen to the silence.   “When I am constantly running there is no time for being.   When there is no time for being, there is no time for listening.”  She goes on in that first chapter to give focus to that listening.   “If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve.”   She then quotes Jean Rhys.   “All of writing is a huge lake.   There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys.  All that matters is feeding the lake.  I don’t matter.  The lake matters.  You must keep feeding the lake.”

It’s about listening, serving, and giving yourself over to the work.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere.  When the work takes over, then the artist listens.   But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work.  Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer.

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water 

She also says, quite simply, that bad art is bad religion no matter how pious the subject.

Remembering what I’m doing….

It began with politics and a bit of education on the history of art regarding surrealism and dadaism as attempts to forgo making sense in the cultural landscape that was WWI.   The conversation careened around the room with lots of folks willing to pitch in.   Machine noises (refrigeration units?) would kick on occasionally, making hearing difficult, but I supposed we kept trying to hear because we wanted so much to make sense of things.   There was the much-agreed-upon craziness of the right (they’re driving an anti-intellectual mood just now), the ongoing pitch of Eastern mysticism as a means to non-violence (think Ghandi and TM), and the very sane idea that artists should be working in the communities of which they are a part, embedded among the people they serve.    The artist as hero didn’t get much traction, but one articulate painter called into question the whole Modernist notion of the artist as solitary vision meister or revolutionary.  That’s over, he said.   Television is in some sense the Surrealism of today, and the politics we are living in is just “lies, lies, and more lies.”

I didn’t say much, save for a comment at the end about our increasing discomfort with the discovery that our romantic notions of peacefully coexisting “senses” (read “conclusions”) will only go so far.   People really do come to different narrative conclusions–they tell the story differently.   And different readings of reality really do matter when it comes to street-level living.   The narratives of human enterprise, human community, human consumption and production, human sexuality…the stories being told by differing groups can sometimes co-exist peacefully together, and sometimes not, depending on which story we’re talking about, and just where power lies.

Ghandi and Buddha both got nods as having good ideas.   No one spoke of the Christ, and the disdain for what seemed to be the only public face of Jesus in this discussion was evident and strong.

Marty and I left the meeting a bit unsure of what to make of it.  Passionate, intelligent conversation that left me more bewildered than inspired.   Artists are sensitive folks with huge hearts, with radars that instinctively lean in a Jesus-like direction: solidarity with the poor and the less privileged.  I kept thinking of Walter Brueggemann’s idea that the prophet has to make two moves: 1) bring the critical voice to the ruling falseness of the day, and 2) energize the community through a renewed vision of the real.   These artists really want to live as prophets.  But to do that, you have to first make sense of what reality is.

And the basic human problem is this, and we’ve been struggling with it since the beginning:  how do you make sense of what is obviously so much more than we can wrap our heads and hearts around?  We used to struggle with just a few narratives.  Now there are thousands.   “Sense” must be made even though our knowledge and understanding has limits, and eventually we must all turn to faith in something we cannot see.   For that is our design.   And since for so many, God is long dead and gone, where does our design for faith turn?

The leap to faith (even if not in God, but in something else) will always seem to be nonsense to many.

This is not an easy world we live in…

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.  It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.  You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then–and only then–it is handed to you.”  –Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Odd isn’t it, that there is work in receiving grace?  It was Dallas Willard who said that grace is opposed to earning, not effort.  How strange it is that grace and effort are symbiotically linked in a relationship designed to throw the lazy off the track.  Couple the word “grace” with “free” and spend a few hundred years railing against meritorious work and life lived knocking on the Christian door can get pretty out of kilter.   The conundrum of the loving Jesus offering grace set against the Jesus of Revelation 2 and 3 who says unless you turn around and change what you’re doing I’m going to take your lampstand away, spit you out of my mouth, and (perhaps, if you’re Thyatira’s Jezebel), kill your children…well, this is hard stuff.

It seems strange to have to work at receiving a gift.  But there is work to be done in receiving a thing, especially if you think you’re above the gift…or the giver.   Perhaps this is why pride is the worst of sins–it keeps you from receiving the grace being poured out.

Dillard writes about this so eloquently in the fifth chapter of The Writing Life.   She describes that sensation follows the hard work of probing, researching, hunting, structuring, and alligator-wrestling sentences.   When the work actually appears, even as you stand there with sweat dripping off your nose, you know that the arrival of the solution, the form, the final expression of what you had in mind all along has very little, if anything, to do with you.    The chapter, the novel, the play, the poem…they arrive by grace, as you are faithful.

Grace grows crops, but only if we seed, plow, and harvest.

God embeds his ways in ours, inviting us to join in shouldering the world even as He carries the whole thing.

Be faithful, show up, apply muscle, and open your hands and arms as wide as you can.   And grab some friends.  There is way more grace pouring out than we can handle by ourselves.

Grace works…

Jonathan Harris is an artist I just came across last night, but already, there’s something about what he’s up to that appeals to me.   Go to his website to explore.   He begins with a clear statement of vision, and then you go to a page with descriptions of his work.   He is working in the space where humans touch technology, and his basic thought is that somehow, technology isn’t necessarily helping us become more human.  As a believer in technology, Harris is doing some pretty amazing things with the grammar and syntax of what technology can do in story-telling and expression.

The piece I came across last night is called World Building in a Crazy World.   The title appealed to me immediately, because when it comes down to it, that’s what I think we’re here for.   To create and make worlds in light of God’s ongoing making, in an amazing partnership between humanity and divinity.    The first piece of this work is called “Baz” in which Harris recounts two stories about his fourth grade teacher.   The gist of what emerges from these stories is to bring all of yourself to the work everyday, and to stop thinking you have the answers to the big questions, especially if that pride is bleeding into what you’re trying to do as a playwright.

As I read that story, I knew I needed to sit up and pay attention.   Baz had told Harris that he’d wept one day over his realization that his disappointment with the plays he was writing stemmed from his desire to impress his audiences with big answers to big questions.  He decided to own the fact that he didn’t know the big answers, and concentrated on asking the right questions, and inviting the audience into the answering.

I suppose it helped me because all around me I see big questions.  The Civil War (inspiration for current project) is a huge question, and there are times when I get glimpses of answers that I want to tell everyone.  Pride is insidious.

Go read World Building In A Crazy World.  It will take you about 15-20 minutes.   You’ll hear a call to humanize the digital world, a call to make those worlds beautiful, and a few pointers (one I found sort of life-saving) about how to find a place to put your feet down in a world of constant, overwhelming flux.

So my friend wrote a comment on my post entitled “An Artist’s Prayer” that read something like this: “How do you know the difference between artistic desire and artistic torment? It seems one and the same some days.”

Honestly, I’m not sure what she meant in asking the question, but given my mood today, it seemed like a decent place to jump off into some words.

Take off the modifier “artistic” and what you are left with are two states of being…desire and torment.   Indeed, they do seem one and the same many days.   Buddhism holds that desire is one of the chief sources of suffering (or torment, as my friend put it).   The Bible holds that there are two different kinds of desire: evil desires, and by implication, good desires.  (The Apostle James says that we sin when we are tempted by evil desires, and the Psalmist says to take delight in the Lord and he will give us the desires of our hearts.)  So it seems in Judeo-Christian thinking, desire is a given, and the choice is in what to desire.   Lao Tze, according to this website, says, “Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.”    Again, desire seems to be a blinder preventing us from seeing the reality that runs deeper than surfaces.   Hinduism, on the other hand, according to this source, sees the path of desire as a legitimate path to life, and asserts there is nothing to be gained by repressing desires for both pleasure and success.

It seems hardly arguable that while some desires are good and noble, there are desires to avoid, and that the very nature of what is considered “temptation” arises from desire.  On the other hand, even what appear to be “good’ desires can be deceiving, blinding us to deeper and “more excellent” ways.

Just now, the image of an artist sitting quietly before her material comes to me.  The tormented artist seems to be at odds with the material, unable to make it bend to her will.   Imagining “mastery” to mean that she can make the material do her bidding, so that her artistic conception will arise and exhibit itself just as she imagines it, she chafes when the material stays true to its own nature, disregarding the artist’s wish that the material move against its nature in order to fulfill her desire.  Over and over, the artist rains blows on the material, or claws away at it, swearing and cursing, as if to bludgeon her way to beauty.   Tormented, she finally stops in exhaustion, and gives herself to despair over a simple truth she might have easily understood in the beginning.   Mastery will never mean violating the nature of the material at hand, be it clay, words, or human nature.   Mastery will mean humbly learning the properties of the material and working to draw out its best and finest qualities, qualities that existed long before the artist arrived on the scene, qualities that will exist long after the artist is gone.

The hopeful, untormented artist is focused on the dance to which her idea invites the material.   She engages the material, learns of it over long periods of work, settling into the simply rhythms of daily artistic chores; showing up, carving, shaping, setting out rhythms, letting go of mistakes and old ignorance according to what the material is teaching today.   She remembers the sculptor’s remark that he’s simply removing the excess from the forms that are already present in the stone, and she leans toward her material and idea with all her intuitive and sensory understanding, and seeks the patterns suggesting themselves.   To change metaphors, she trusts the winds in her sails, touching the rudder when she must, and allows her desires to rise according to the rhythms, shapes, and sizes of the swells in which she finds herself.    Perhaps the long view was the desire to sail the world, eager for a quality of experience that suggested itself to her as she stood on the shore watching the tides, but now, in the midst of the sea, she will find torment only if she curses the winds and oceans for being what they are, true to their nature.    She will find joy and good work if she stays true to what the nature of the material is revealing to her, even if in the end, the reality of the sea overwhelms her.   Easy enough to say, but in the end, doesn’t the very nature of life overwhelm us all?

Lots of associated images flooding in now, far too many too capture.  But there’s something here of the ease that comes with full commitment, and the faith that the material at hand will dance with you if you pay enough attention, approach it with enough humility, and keep showing up.

There’s also something here of the will of God, it’s arising from the very nature of things, and the possibility that obedience is more elegant dance than spirit breaking subservience.

Charity, thanks for asking the question.

It saved me a little this morning…

If you give a person a drink of water, when they ingest it, there are immediate, real-world results.  If you offer a hungry person bread, when they eat it, their bodies replenish and become better able to negotiate their day’s tasks and responsibilities.  If you offer a coat to someone who is cold, and they take it and put it on, this new protective layer allows a change of body-state that is palpable, beneficial, and easily identified as something that looks like Christian charity.   Each of these acts of kindness address a physical state of being, providing a temporary remedy to a threat.   Food and drink and shelter and clothing are needs everyone acknowledges as being vital to life in no metaphoric sense, but in actuality.

If you offer a person a painting, when they engage it, what happens?  If you offer a person a song, when they hear it, then…what?  If you offer them a play, and they experience it, is there an analogous benefit that would approach the worth of offering them water or food or shelter?

A teaching friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that he thought the days of having to create an apologetic for art-making were over.   Maybe so, but my sense is that we still have many questions to answer about how art-making actually serves.  Ask yourself this question: if the picture of service is that of Jesus getting up from the table, wrapping a towel around his waist, and washing the feet of his disciples, what is the “foot-washing” art accomplishes?

Some answer the question by connecting their art-making with service organizations, donating whatever profits might come from their art to the supported organization.  In this way, it is easy to make the leap from art-making to real-world meaning and worth in that it literally creates energy for feeding the hungry, fighting injustice, supplying clean water, and so on.   But what if your art and its distribution is not related to social justice issues?  What if you’re really just hoping someone will buy a painting to hang on their bathroom wall so that you can afford supplies to create yet another painting?  And one more thing about the painting sold on behalf of the service organization: once the painting is sold and the profit donated to the service organization, is that the end of its purpose?  Or does it still have service to perform?

Others answer the foot-washing question by granting art the power to engender values such as compassion, understanding, generosity…even love.  And while I will grant that art may indeed have the capacity to do all that, it also has the capacity to create hardness of heart, confusion, miserliness…even hate.   So perhaps art’s service depends entirely on the specific work of art as well as the heart of the artist doing the work.

Even so, I wonder how to articulate what art’s service might be, especially if you try to think of it as an appropriate incarnation of Christ washing the disciples feet.

Tomorrow, I’ll come back and give you my take on this, but I’d love to hear how you answer the question.

Art serves by…? 

Dear God,

You make, I make.  You make me to make.  What am I to make today?  What are You making today, and what is the plan for how our making?   In every small corner of every large nation, human beings are setting out to take disparate materials and fashion them into a piece of work that has beauty, meaning, aesthetic unity, and the power to impact and change those who encounter that piece of work. (Though the specifics of the impact and the change hoped for vary wildly.)   Here I sit in my small corner of my large nation, setting out to do the same.

I assume You are intimately aware of the nuance of my thought-life and my feeling-life, of my history and proclivities, of my talents and hang-ups, and You have a perspective on who and what I am that is beyond anything I can grasp.  Yet I am stuck in my perspective; my neural circuitry is what it is, my capacities not unlimited, and it simply isn’t true that I can do anything I set my mind to.   The clock is ticking on this earth-side life of mine, and the sun is hurrying over my head even as I type.  I glance over my art-making, and decisions sit there, staring back at me, demanding (with a certain ferocity) to be made, and made now.  Writing is different than planning to write.   Acting is different that exploring acting.   Dancing is different than vowing to dance.

Lord, I control nothing.   ”The wind blows where it wills…”  My making today will not be enough to combat the enormity of things.   The streams of information, experience, and aspiration that feed a human’s creative work (and by “a human” I mean me) are overwhelming and vast, and to wrestle the elements into a form that contains coherence, beauty, and inspiration may not be as back-breaking as digging in coal mines, but it sure seems that way.   When I ask You to guide me, it seems I am asking You to help me find just what illusions I can live with, because the truth of the human condition seems more than any of us can bear.

And immediately from Your end of the conversation comes a simple, “Stop it.”  By that, I take it you mean the whining.   I can see in Your eyes that decisions must be made, action must be taken, and writing and dancing is to commence now, not later.   The word that seems to be hovering in the air between us is “trust.”    Just trust and move into action, do the work, obey.

It is a given that I will not grasp it all.  You remind me that that is the very nature of the finite.  Maybe I didn’t exactly sign up for it, but it’s the game, and I’ve got no real choice but to play.   So even as I sweat these words out here, I’m telling you again that I am indeed getting on with it, knowing that I’ve asked You a thousand thousand times to guide me already, and I can tell by the look you’re giving me that You agreed (read “promised”)  a long time ago to do just that.   It’s not that You’re tired of this conversation, but I can tell there are some other things You’d sort of like us to discuss.

Like the actual work You’re hoping I get around to.

Today.

Okay, I’m listening.

Oh…You’ll talk to me while I work?

Got it.

What’s that?  Don’t bother with the amen business?   Okay, I’d just as soon keep the conversation open myself.

Hey, sorry about all that over-intellectualizing at the front end of the prayer.  I was just–what?  You’re used to it.  Just how you made me?   Good to know.

Oh, yeah, sorry…the work.

Let me get my notes…

Van Gogh's "Man with Hoe" from the cover of Steven Pressfield's "Do the Work"

What is it about people who speak with “authority” that can be so inspirational?  (Who does that make you think of?)

Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog post about the metaphor of war as it related to prayer. Read it here.  I questioned whether war was the best frame through which to approach life.  I reasoned that if I approached the big relationships in my life as if I was constantly in a battle, the whole thing would be skewed in ways I wouldn’t like.

Enter Steven Pressfield.  A few weeks ago, I read his powerhouse book The War of Art.  (My previous blog posts about it here and here.) As I reported, it knocked me out of my chair, yelling at me to get to work.  Yesterday, my copy of another book of Pressfield’s, the follow-up to The War of Art, showed up on my doorstep.  Do The Work yelled at me again, and once again, I fell asleep with dreams of changing everything dancing in my head.

I keep thinking about that little off-hand prayer I tossed out a couple of months ago as I was standing in Barnes and Noble.  ”Bring me a book.”

Anyway, back to the metaphor of war.  Remembering that I’ve never been crazy about the war metaphor, Pressfield’s assertion that “Resistance” is out to destroy us is compelling.  In Do The Work Pressfield goes so far as to equate “Resistance” with “evil”.   His idea that “Resistance” is “an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential” means that every time an idea for a project appears, if it is a good and noble idea, one that will demand the best of who you are, “Resistance” will answer that call, and seek not only to derail you, but to put you down permanently.   Then these little quotes on pages 59 and 60.

“There is an enemy.  There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us.”  

“It will kill you.  It will kill you like cancer.”  

“It’s aim is not to obstruct or to hamper or to impede. It’s aim is to kill. 

The big a-ha for me, which I think I knew but had not accepted, is this:  the war does not stop.  Ever.   And I turn to Romans 7, and find that Paul agrees.  ”So I find it to be a law (rule of action of my being) that when I want to do what is right and good, evil is ever present with me and I am subject to its ever-present demands.”   (Amplified Bible) This sounds very much like Pressfield’s idea that “Resistance” is elicited by the urge to do any great work.   To vow to “do the work” is to issue a call to arms not just to your own creative energy and spirit, but also to those forces marshalled against you.

Every day?

Every day.

From now on.

No wonder the line that Pressfield cites as the one that defines his life is:

“It is one thing to study war, and another to live the warrior’s life.”

I’m rethinking war as a frame for prayer…

In Christian teaching, the day of Pentecost is the day on which the Holy Spirit of God first took up residence in the hearts of those who follow Jesus Christ.  This same “Spirit of God” is the one who hovered over the surface of the deep when the earth was “null and void”  in the initial creation story, and He (in Christian teaching this Holy Spirit is not referred to as an “it” but with a personal pronoun.  The Holy Spirit is a “person” in the sense of having will, personality, cognizance, rationality, creativity, and those other aspects of life that define “personhood”) is the creative and moral force that generated the life within Jesus, the power through which the Christ lived and worked on the earth.  He is also, according to the Apostle Paul, the agency by which Christ was raised from the dead.

Paul also makes an enormous claim, one that, among Christians, is often cited, then, in practical terms, ignored.  Paul says that with the residence of the Holy Spirit inside those who follow Christ (and it’s a gift, and nothing but) comes the very power of resurrection.

Resurrection alive in the person of the believer.

On the day of Pentecost, those who believed in Christ were waiting, as per his instructions, in Jerusalem, for what Jesus had described to them as “power from on high.”   As they waited together in one place, a “violent rushing wind” came into the space and they received “tongues of fire” and began to proclaim the Christian message of Christ’s love and power in such a way that lots of people thought they were drunk.   But, evidence clearly shows what happened that morning changed the very history of the world.

For just a moment, I want to extend this metaphor to the life and role of artistry and creation in all our lives.   The story of beginning with null and void, then ordering chaos into beauty, traveling on into suffering and loss, finding faith through a death to self, illusion, and falseness, and finally, waiting for and receiving creative energy by which to move dynamically in the world; this is the story of the artist over and over again.   It is the process of creation writ large over the history of humanity.   Life emerging, chaos (or as Pressfield has it in The War of Art, Resistance) pressing in, the artist struggling to push back, praying (sometimes literally, sometimes not) to find a heart guidance to be able to identify the dross and the gold of the work, dying to the false impressions of what we thought was good and beautiful in order to discover true goodness and beauty; and finally holding our spirits in stillness, hoping and praying that whatever it is that humans have always called inspiration will show up and guide.

Ultimately, this artistic process is not for artists only…it is the ongoing way of creation and life as it is actually lived.

The message of my reading and thought-life these days seems all of one piece: the waiting is over.   There is a time to wait, and there is a time to move, to respond to the rushing wind that announces the arrival of the Spirit.   “When will the Spirit arrive?” is a false canard of a question.   Is there ever a day in which the Spirit is not arriving?   Is there ever a day when the hand of God is not willing to pour strength into muscles that are actually in motion?

We go in faith.  We make in faith.  We trust that the Spirit has arrived, is present, is speaking, is leading, and is gracious.   Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within tells me this morning that artistic work must be done “in the middle of everything”, come war, divorce, death, hell, or high water.   Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art tells us we have to make war with Resistance, which is out not just to stop our creative output, but to destroy us.   The book Deep Writing says we have to “hush” the demonic voices inside that tell us we are worthless, shameful, and without any worthy words to say.

What artists can take away from the story of “The Day of Pentecost” is that we are not alone as we climb into our battle chairs to do the work.   The Power to go to the end of the human process has arrived, and in the work (as in life), heaven and earth are colluding to make the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.   Into the world the Spirit of God comes pouring, breathing life into our bodies and spirits as He did in the beginning, and there is work to be done.   There is a language to speak that only He knows, and if the work that is in us is to find incarnation into the world, then mind and muscle and material must come together, and bind themselves together day by day by day.

In gratitude and grace, the waiting over, do your work…

I’m riffing on a chapter in Eric Maisel’s book Coaching the Artist Within, wondering what you think.  I want to invite you to comment upfront on how you generate the energy and capacity to see a work through to its end.  Do not read into this that I’m running out of energy for my current projects.  I’m not.  But I think it’s a critical idea in the ongoing life of the artist.   How to keep going.

Chapter Five of this helpful book is called “Generating Mental Energy.”   Maisel suggests that we associate “high” energy with positive outputs and “low” energy with negative outputs. (For the moment, I’m going to resist pushing back with the obvious notion that to rest is a low energy, positive output activity.)  Overall, I get what he means.  Complaints related to work are full of words like “weary, tired, depressed, out of sorts, down, and sleepy.”  When we feel “good”, we often say we’re “up, energized, excited, enthusiastic, motivated, and focused.”  Maisel likens our mental states to power grids either humming along providing mental electricity as we go about lighting the world or shorting out, leaving lots of homes and projects and relationships pretty much in the dark.   One interesting point he brings up: it takes a tremendous amount of energy to engage in negative patterns of behavior.  Think of the energy it takes to hide addictions, affairs, and embarrassments.  (Oh…you’ve never had to do that…I see.)

One powerful notion: “meaninglessness is an energy drain, while meaningfulness is an energy boost.”

“It takes a real expenditure of valuable mental energy to maintain-halfhearted beliefs, to ignore important truths, to procrastinate, to not pursue your dreams.  Keeping a defensive lid on life is real work and a real energy drain.”

Maisel makes the following suggestions about cultivating the kind of energy you need to do the work.

• Reflect on and write answers for these questions:

1. What generates mental energy?
2. What saps mental energy?
3. What replenishes mental energy?

He then suggests this idea of “mediated mania” that I put in the title of the post, citing the fact that typically, we think of “mania” and “manic” as clinical terms that slide off into craziness.  But that really, when an artist is going at it full bore, with all the energy of obsession and thrill and determination and electricity, it often looks like a kind of mania.   He brings the word “mediated” into play to suggest a manic state that is not out of control, but that is closer to the image of a racehorse with a nimble rider at the helm.    Beethoven is Maisel’s example of this kind of manic life, obsessed with and dedicated to the work.

We should reclaim the word mania and return it where it belongs, to the territory of meaning and the energy that accompanies our meaning-making efforts.

So how do you do it?  How do you keep the mental power grid humming?  How do you throw the breaker back on?  And what’s the culprit in your own work and life that tends to flip the breaker the wrong way?

Flipping the switch even now…