James Cowan's Lecture on Creativity and Spirituality

James Cowan's Lecture on Creativity and Spirituality

On Entering a Virtual Monastery
Towards a definition of imaginative space

From time to time I suspect that all of us here tonight cast a critical eye over our society, asking ourselves why we seem to be so hell-bent on self-destruction. Further, the public debate seems to be of such a low order that we begin to ask ourselves whether there is anyone out there capable of articulating our deepest concerns. We know our politicians are unable to do so; the philosophers for some reason refuse to take a public stand anymore; thus we are left with a plethora of pop psychologists and TV personalities who like to simplify – no, to emotionalise the issues. As well, we are inundated with certitudes derived from the rapid march of scientific inquiry, which seemingly is determined to ‘improve our lives’ through its advances.

Yet secretly we feel ill-at-ease with what we see and hear. I know I do. I suspect that I am being hoodwinked by people bent upon organizing my life around agendas that have little to do with what I consider to be a genuinely qualitative life. For that is precisely what I am looking for, both as a person and as a writer.

For the past three years I have been living in Italy researching the life of St Francis of Assisi. I don’t know why I was drawn to him, or why I felt that I should write yet another book on this the most well known of saints. The image we all of have of the man suggests someone in league with birds and animals, and of someone who had received the stigmata of Jesus Christ a few years prior to his death. I had probably thought these attributes as being rather less than remarkable, except as confirmation of his sanctity.

But as I entered his period, and travelled through the country that had made him, I began to encounter a man who had suffered, doubted, and at times found himself in a state of despair. In other words, he was no different to any of us. He was simply a man who had found himself surrounded by a deep sense of spiritual malaise, and living in a society verging upon the dysfunctional. What he had tried to deal with is what we today are trying to understand about our own society – that it is somehow devoid of any substantive meaning other than as a tax revenue base for the state, or as addendum to the machinations of Wall Street.

At the age of 24 or so, Francis realized that he could no longer live the way he had, that he must do something for himself in order to realize his own humanity more fully. Out of sheer frustration he took upon himself the task of regenerating the psychological sphere of his time. This was no easy exercise. He knew, as we all know, how difficult it is to take on the entrenched attitudes – and in our case the huge economic forces that govern our lives – and somehow overturn them.

But in a period of little more than eighteen years he managed to do so. He managed to re-invigorate a church all but gone at the knees, a church in the hands of class interests, in order to found a new order that made poverty into an ideal, and to instil into his followers a totally new concept of freedom. This freedom was the freedom to embody what Goethe later referred to when he said: ‘A man is he who has no care for himself.’ The idea of a supreme carelessness became the hallmark of Francis’s life. He wanted to show to himself that he was able to live a certain kind of life, a life governed by spiritual values rather than those espoused by the marketplace.

What he set out to do, then, I think is as equally important in our own time. The quickening of the human spirit that Francis sought to invoke in the 12th century must be re-enacted today. He of course resorted to extreme behaviour. Not only did he remove his clothes in a public place in order to demonstrate to his father, and to his fellow Assisians, that he was through with a life of possession and acquisition, but he also adopted the life of a wandering ascetic to emphasise the values he held to be important. Francis literarily stripped himself bare of everything that he felt tied him to his old life – the life of a wealthy merchant’s son who enjoyed merely playing at life.

The ancient Greeks called this animating spirit aeolus, after the god of the wind. The wind – or breath - instils in us the spirit of life, which enables us to become inspired. My work with Francis taught me that it is possible to become inspired in whatever one does, be it writing, working in corporate finance or on a farm, or teaching at a school or university. To be in-spired is to draw in the spirit of aeolus, distil it into thought, which in turn precipitates activity, so that a meaningful act may be realized.

This is what Francis achieved in his short lifetime. He took what was a fairly ordinary life, his own, and translated it into an extraordinary one. He did this by subjecting himself to a painful and often lonely regime of social ostracism, hunger, and insecurity. He broke with the old feudal structures of Italy, distanced himself from the theological obsessions of his contemporaries, and founded, initially, a society of one. He was its sole member! I like that: I like the idea of a man founding his own society in order to conform to the values established therein.

In my novel A Troubadour’s Testament I explored this idea in southwest France, where my narrator meets a man who confesses to being a member of a singular society. The man confesses that only himself and his thoughts were members. In other words, we embody a society that has the power to influence change in the way we live.

This is what Francis did. He set up himself as a society of one – which, of course, inevitably drew its adherents. He criss-crossed Umbria and Tuscany inspiring others. He did this not in the name of corporate success, or as a social dissident, or as a religious nutter, but as a man deeply committed to renovating the spiritual life of his time. I found this to be extremely exciting. Furthermore, I no longer saw Francis as a historical figure, but as a man in league with my own time. For me, he had become a revolutionary that I needed to listen to.

Feudal Europe was fraught with unresolved tensions, both psychological and social. No longer could these be resolved through the medium of the old gods or the burdensome theology of the medieval church. Men were yearning to be free of their own self-imposed constraints. They wanted to break out of the sclerotic structures that imprisoned them in a thoughtless round of activities designed to prop up outmoded political and spiritual systems. Men genuinely wanted – to repeat Nietzsche’s phrase – ‘to overcome themselves.’

Here I was, then, plunging into an adventure of my own that somehow echoed another man’s nearly nine hundred years before me. As I travelled around central Italy in Francis’s footsteps, I began to understand more fully the true nature of his endeavour. Francis, I realized, had chosen to step from summit to summit, and not only travel the path of words. He carried with him in the folds of his robe a heartfelt aspiration to be substantially more than the person he thought he was.

Firstly, I discovered how unsure Francis was of his vocation. He tried being a man about town, a leader of the revels in Assisi. He tried to become a knight and journey to the Holy Land to fight the infidels. He attempted to live a life of absolute poverty that precluded knowing where he might sleep next, and what he might have to eat. In a strange sort of way Francis chose to live a life that called into question every value that men possessed.

It seems to me that what he wanted to recreate was a new sense of interior solitude. Francis wanted to find out what it might be like to live outside the framework of rules and regulations, the prejudices and attitudes that governed small town life. He set out to imagine a new kind of life, and to put it into practice.

How did he do it? This was what I set out to discover. It was not so easy a task. Between having to deal with the hordes of tourists in Assisi trying to catch a glimpse of their hero, and climbing lonely mountains to sit in some out-of-the-way cave where Francis had once lived, I found myself having to deal with my own sense of the banality of modern life as measured against his relentless pursuit of something entirely different. As the French poet Edmond |Jabes remarked, ‘To imagine means to create more. Yet this more cannot be specified.’ I suspect that Francis didn’t know what this ‘more’ was either. All he knew was that he must somehow revoke all his preconceptions of life lived in the pursuit of gain.

I soon began to realize that Francis was no ordinary fellow. He had set out to release a tied-up energy in order to possess another kind of energy capable of helping him to understand his true relationship to things. His genius, if you like, was to recognize that he had entered a strange house of the spirit, whose floor was a chessboard on which he played an unknown and unavoidable game against a changing and sometimes frightening opponent.

It is this game that we all play, in one-way or another. Speaking personally as a writer, I see my task as being not altogether dissimilar to that of Francis. I look for caves in the mountain of our time in the hope of finding some kind of inner quiet. I travel to the very edge of the world in the hope of finding someone who has the answer to the question that I have asked myself ever since I commenced writing – a question that Luis Borges paraphrased brilliantly when he said: ‘whether I have no kingdom or my kingdom is limitless; whether my whole body doesn’t belong to me or the whole earth belongs to me.’

This is the great metaphysical adventure – to know whether it is possible to transcend the limitations of body or place, and allow our minds to become a kind of theatre. For it has been said, I think by Hume, that we ‘are only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them.’ Was this what Francis was attempting to do: to realize the heady pleasure of knowing that he was only a system of floating ideas, that he had broken free of the contagion of certitude that afflicted his contemporaries? I like to think so.

Recently I came across an image in an ancient Buddhist text that reflects this admirably. The Viss-udd-him-agga or ‘Path to Purity’ says: ‘The life of a being lasts as long as an idea. Just as a rolling carriage wheel touches earth at only one point, so life lasts as long as a single idea.’ Here we are, then, in the midst of something that precludes our immersion in things. You and I – every one of us – lives and breathes and dreams in the preserve of an idea.

What does this mean: to live within the preserve of an idea? It is a challenging question that goes to the very heart of why we do what we do. If we but admit it to ourselves, for most of our lives we live outside the preserve of an idea. Rather, we inhabit conventions. We owe our allegiance to the premise that security is acquired after much hard work. We build careers, we have families, and we possess property. This is the ‘idea’ that sits well within our contemporary existence. As we all know, modern Western society is based upon this construct.

Yet I have met men who have removed themselves from this idea. Indeed I have been extremely fortunate to encounter adventurers of the spirit who have chosen to experiment with a new idea of living. For them, the universe had no other essence than to be obedient to the voice of their innermost self. They put themselves at the mercy of circumstance and the guiding hand of fate.

One of these men was a gentleman that I met in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. I had gone there last year to visit a cave where the first anchorite had once lived in the fourth century. I hired a taxi in Port Suez for a couple of days, and drove down the Red Sea coast, and then turned inland towards the Nile. Some twenty miles along the road, we turned off again and made our way to a remote monastery, a Coptic monastery names after St Antony of the desert.

The monastery was set at the foot of a high ridge known as Mt Colzim. All about us the desert impinged, a gold expanse of sand, stones, and that pure aridity that one associates with the prospect of solitude. Deserts are extreme places. They are confronting. They make us want to cling to ourselves, and yet at the same time fling ourselves into its abysm of starkness.

I walked through the main gate of the monastery. High walls enclosed a silent community of monks living the life of their founder – a life of prayer and asceticism. At once I felt that I had entered a strange, almost alien space, until I realized that I had entered the preserve of an idea. This was the idea of renunciation, an idea that I had rarely, if ever encountered before. I had momentarily stepped out of my own idea of existence into that of another – one that was, to quote Edmond Jabes again: ‘a sacralized inner silence heavy with all silences.’ Wonderful. I felt exhilarated. I had stepped outside myself.

The Guest Master met me as I proceeded along a sandy avenue. He asked me why had come so far into the desert. I told him I had come in the hope of meeting a genuine anchorite, someone who had walked off into the desert to dig his own cave. The Guest Master informed me that there was only one man living such a life on the mountain. And, of course, yes, I was welcome to climb a rough mountain track to his hermitage, if that was what I wanted, provided I was prepared to carry a sack of bread to give to the hermit.

I set out on my hike up Mt Colzim, up the mountain that had spawned the idea of the monastic life in Europe. Indeed this was the place where one man set to work to create a new idea of living. Antony was this man. A Copt by birth, he had walked off into the desert in the mid-third century because he had grown disillusioned with the Roman idea of existence. He had grown tired of living within the preserve of an idea that espoused a meaningless existence.

Half way up the mountain I stopped to catch my breath. When I looked out over the broad valley, I was amazed by what I saw. The sand reached westward towards the Nile. Not a tree or suggestion of life were visible. I felt like I was standing on the edge of the world, a tiny pinprick of a being clinging to a rock face. Even the monastery below was obscured by a hill, so that I could have been the only person left alive on earth.

Finally I recognized a rough stone compound on a ledge above me. Peering over the edge was a man wearing a black habit and an equally black bonnet. He waved to me to come up, so I climbed the final stretch of track knowing that at least I was not going to be asked to turn back. When I stood on the tiny terrace outside the anchorite’s cave, I knew that I had entered an entirely new mental habitation. For this was the home of someone who had chosen to strip himself of everything that might hinder his quest to enter into the idea of spiritual and psychological expansion. In a sense, I had entered one man’s dream of creating an invisible monastery.

Surprisingly, the monk greeted me in English. When I asked him where he came from, he informed me that he was from Australia, my homeland! You can imagine how I felt. Here I was on one of the most sacred mountains in the world, a place that had revolutionized the idea of European spirituality right up until the days of Francis, talking to a man who hailed from a country wedded to values that were the opposite of those held by Antony and his friends. It all seemed too crazy to be true!

We sat down together on a stone seat and discussed the world. We spoke of home, which he knew little about, and of the life he was leading up on Mt Colzim. I soon realized that I was talking to a man who had discovered a certain kind of freedom that I believed was impossible to find. He had set out to poetise his future. He wanted to carry himself forward into a new set of ideas that might relieve him of the burden of being valueless.

This was the key to his life. Lazarus – that was his name because, as he told me, he’d risen from the dead of his old life, was – is I should say… not satisfied living within the preserve of an exhausted idea. He had so ordered his life that he might suffer less and meditate more. I suspected at once that this was the ‘more’ that Jabes had intimated as being unspecified. The ‘more’of meditation.

I am reminded here of a remark made by the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset when he said that ‘Progress is an elastic prison which stretches on without ever setting us free.’ Clearly, in Lazarus’ case, he had rejected ‘progress’ and so set himself free from his elastic prison. He had journeyed to the end of the world to find a cave in which he could live out his idea of a much larger imaginative space.

It is this imaginative space that I want to explore with you this evening. For it is this space that Francis inhabited, so too did Antony, so also does anyone committed to creating for himself or herself a genuine style of life that it intimates.

What exactly is an imaginative space, you may ask? It is something I have grappled with for a long time, trying to come up with a valid answer. Do I mean a thought process that enables me to quit the world of real objects, the land of calculative process, the terrain of technology? Or do I mean some interior level of existence that enables me to partake of realities that are entirely insubstantial? Whichever way I look at it, I think I am trying to indicate that imaginative space is a deeply primordial experience of the suprasensory, the world of archetypes, indeed of Plato’s very Ideas.

Metaphorically Rome represents the empire of the real, the domain of calculative process. Conversely, Antony’s desert is the place we all need to retreat to if we are ever going to enter imaginative space. And what we have to do is what Francis did in the square of Assisi – that is, to strip ourselves bare of all that we value in the realm of the real. Success, wealth, and wilful domination of the environment – these are the sorts of things that make up this realm. They represent an old idea, an outmoded idea of securing life through a calculated response to the physical world.

How do we attain to such a condition? Firstly, I must recognize that wealth springs from immobility, and what I desire most of all is movement. In the words of Paul Valery, what I need to do is ‘acquire the power of lightness which is proper to the bee, for this is the sovereign excellence of a dancer.’ Entering a genuine imaginative space implies a desire to want to break with gravity, with the immobility of place and circumstance, in order to embrace a vision that rises above material images and likenesses.

To do this, however, requires some revolutionary act on our part. It’s all very well for Francis to remove his clothes in public, or Antony to head off into the desert, or my friend Lazarus to climb Mt Colzim and dig out his cave – but how can we quit our present lives as family members, professors, business executives, students and the like? By implication, would not this bring down the whole superstructure of modern life?

I’m not sure whether it would. This is an argument offered by the status quo to preserve its position. It was probably the argument that Emperor Dioclitian invoked in the third century to justify his attack on those early Christians, men such as Antony himself. These people were disrupting the state. They weren’t paying taxes either, since they’d all escaped into the desert! We’d better haul them back into line so that the state may be maintained.

This is one scenario for opting for the status quo. It preserves things as they are. It’s no matter that systems don’t seem to work anymore, or that more and more of us find what is on offer as a viable life to be verging upon the infantile. It’s better to have these than embark upon a wholesale cleansing of society’s ills by way of some monumental act of social engineering. No one wants this, as I guess no one in down-town Rome wanted to see life change too much either.

Nonetheless I think that entering the imaginative sphere, which is another form of resistance, is a more subtle expression of disavowal. One doesn’t have to wear sackcloth and ashes in order to register one’s disapproval at the way the world is presented to us. Imaginative space is a condition of thought which enables us to discern the difference between the world of appearances and the primordial realm of ideas. It is the world that Meister Eckhart believed contained ‘great essence,’ without which whatever a man did or performed in his life, nothing would ever come of it.

So we can now say that imaginative space contains something that we liken to ‘great essence.’ In other words, we can say that primordial values determine how imaginative space is nourished. I’d like to think that such values permeate and nourish existence in the same way that air nourishes the earth. Abdisho Hazzaya, a seventh century ascetic from the region we now know as Iraq, tried to explain what constituted this ‘great essence.’ He said, and I quote, ‘that it was higher than all likenesses, images and representations of our creation, because its nature is so much finer than fire, light, or air.’ Unquote.

Clearly we are drawing a little closer to understanding the content of imaginative space. Firstly, it possesses ‘great essence’ – that it is made up of a substratum of primordial values. Secondly, it is devoid of representation. Thirdly, it manifests a nature that is finer than fire, light, or air. If this is so, then we have gained some insight into the qualities required of us to enter our own imaginative space. We need to do what Eckhart advises us to do – enter our own inner ground. For here, he says, everything we do will partake of life.

Edmond Jabes reminds us that every age has its voyage. If we might classify our most recent voyage, then we would have to say that it has been dominated by the promise of a technological Shangrila made perfect by the stability that democracy is supposed to bring. In America, you have been immersed in this idea more completely, and for far longer, than any other peoples on earth. And yet deep in your hearts you know that this idea is already beginning to fray. The scientific and technological revolution has become a pandora’s box, unleashing a whole host of degraded images that you are ill able to cope with. Cities in decline, a landscape ravaged by chemicals, and increasing economic gridlock that threatens to envelop everyone in its tentacles – these are but a few effects of the utopia we have imposed upon ourselves. And the government that you acquire is largely the projection of powerful economic interests whose sole interest is in keeping everyone in a state of consumer serfdom.

All of which begs the question: what is the idea that we wish to inhabit in this our present age and the age to come? I think for the first time we can safely say that we want to live inside a new idea that gives greater credence to imaginative history, the history of ideas, to the rich chronology of imaginative experience. You and I want to range back and forth across the whole of earth’s experience – no, the universe’s. We don’t want to serve any longer under the tyranny of the real.

Of course, many of us look to what we now call virtual reality to salve our wounds. The idea that we can escape the confrontational nature of our age by escaping into the internet holds great appeal. But isn’t this exactly what Antony attempted to do way back in the third century – escape the real? His ‘virtual reality,’ just as it was for Francis and my friend Lazarus, was – is – to embark upon a new kind of voyage…not into the future as our pop sages would advise… but into a deeply primordial present that is governed by something we associate with the luminosity of our own being encountering the luminosity of nature itself. This, surely is the highest pleasure, since it is based upon the complete and harmonious adaptation of mind and world to one another.

We have not yet embarked upon such a voyage. We are still firmly attached to the wharf. The old cargo of economical and technological wellbeing lies stowed in our holds, already in a state of decay. Few of us are yet willing to heave this cargo overboard and set ourselves adrift on the ocean of imaginative experience. Because this means firstly making a voyage into ourselves. We are, as Seneca remarked, perfectly content to live a wretched life of refusing to transcend our own humanity.

I would like to think, however, that this situation is not irrevocable. It seems to me that the challenge that faces us all is to restore the imaginative domain to its rightful place at the center of all human activity. This mean that every one of us should enter his own virtual monastery and learn there the value of stillness. The Greeks call such stillness apathea, which means cultivating a state of calm that makes one immune from the storms and stresses of life. The word still has relevance.

So if I might leave you with these few thoughts. They come from long years of wandering in out-of-the-way places, talking with men and women who have retired to their virtual monasteries. Such people, as I have already noted, belong to a Society of One; but there are many of these scattered throughout the world. I guess I’m calling on everyone here tonight to form his or her own Society of One, and so join this rich imaginative network of people dedicated to cultivating the imaginative sphere once more.

If Antony, Francis, and Lazarus could do it, then I’m sure we’re up to the task.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

This lecture was delivered at Michigan State University in autumn, 2000.