This is a continuation from the last article: When the Work Makes Itself
How to Disappear Without Becoming Lost
There is, however, another side to this move from rational intelligence to intuitive intelligence and that is to return back to rational intelligence.
I have spent countless hours in this state of creative absorption. Sometimes an entire day can disappear. Sometimes several days seem to collapse into one continuous period of working, sleeping, waking and returning to the work. I have missed appointments. I have forgotten what day it was. I have become so completely unaware of the clock that I once forgot to pick up my children from school. Ok, more than once.
At some point, what sounds like a wonderful description of artistic flow becomes a practical problem.
My son Zach has the same capacity for deep creative immersion. He sometimes calls it a “condition,” almost as if it were a psychological disorder. There is humor in the word, but also genuine apprehension. He knows how completely he can disappear into something he is making, and he recognizes the danger that accompanies it: while the creative life is flourishing, the rest of life can begin falling apart.
The bills still arrive. People are waiting. Appointments have been made. The body needs food and sleep. Someone has to remember what day it is.
Perhaps the artist therefore needs to develop two complementary abilities: the ability to disappear into the creative wilderness and the ability to return from it.
We talk a great deal about the first. We cultivate concentration. We seek solitude. We arrange studios. We silence phones. We meditate. We develop rituals for beginning. We try to quiet the internal critic so that we can enter that place where self-consciousness diminishes and the work seems to make itself.
We speak much less about how to come back from that state.
Yet reentry may be an equally important artistic discipline.
If I know that my internal sense of time becomes unreliable when I am deeply immersed, then I cannot reasonably depend upon that internal sense of time to bring me back. The boundary has to exist somewhere outside the deep intuitive state itself.
The clock must be outside the dream.
That might mean an alarm, a calendar notification, a written stopping time, another person expecting a call, or some other external interruption that cannot easily be absorbed into the creative process. These things may appear to be intrusions upon artistic freedom, but perhaps they are better understood as the structure that makes such freedom sustainable. Freedom requires discipline.
The deeper the freedom inside the container, the stronger the container needs to be.
We accept this principle everywhere else in art. A canvas has edges. A poem has a final line. A piece of music begins and ends. Even improvisation occurs within some kind of structure. Boundaries do not necessarily diminish freedom. Very often they make freedom possible by allowing us to work unfettered and unworried within that space.
Creative time needs boundaries as well.
I can disappear into the studio from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon. Within those hours I can stop watching the clock altogether. I can forget myself. I can follow the work wherever it wants to go. But at two o’clock an alarm sounds from another world.
It says: Come back.
And perhaps returning requires its own little ritual.
Save the document. Photograph the painting. Put down the brush. Write a sentence to your future self: This is where I stopped. This is what I was about to do next.
That last gesture may be particularly important. Sometimes we resist stopping because we are afraid of losing the thread of inspiration we are following. We have finally arrived somewhere, and we don’t know whether the door will still be open when we return. Leaving ourselves a marker is a way of tying a rope around the tree before descending back into everyday life.
Then we can leave.
We wash our hands. We look at the calendar. We remember the hour. We remember the day. We remember the people who inhabit our lives.
The ordinary rational self returns. And the ordinary self has important work to do. It remembers appointments. It buys groceries. It answers messages. It pays bills. It notices that someone else has needs we must attend to. It takes care of the body through which all of this creativity is happening. It remembers that there is a world beyond the studio.
This is why the disappearance of the self should never become the disappearance of responsibility.
There is nothing particularly enlightened about forgetting that someone is waiting for or depending on you.
The selflessness of creative immersion is valuable precisely because it is temporary. We enter it and emerge from it. We surrender ourselves to the work and then reclaim ourselves for the rest of life.
Over a lifetime of making things, one begins to recognize this rhythm.
Disappear into the creative wilderness.
Return.
Disappear again.
Return again.
The mature artist may therefore be neither the person who maintains perfect control nor the person who abandons themselves entirely to inspiration. The mature artist becomes a traveler between these conditions.
You learn where the entrance is. You learn how far you can wander. And eventually you learn to leave markers along the way.
Because the artist must learn how to disappear without becoming lost.
Head in the clouds, then feet on the ground.
Creative freedom is a discipline.
