About a year ago, the world of literature lost a great one, Adrienne Rich. This year, I marked the 30th year in my career as a teacher. These things are bound together by the fact that over time I have begun many of my classes with a reading from Rich’s “Claiming an Education”—the text of her convocation speech at Douglass College in 1977. Her comments specifically engage the concerns of young women entering higher education in a different era, but I have long extrapolated their relevance to all human beings seeking greater knowledge of the world and themselves. And I’ve connected it to the creative life, too.
I’ve come to interpret Rich’s comments through the lens of a clear, potent message at its core, one that has guided me as a teacher, a writer, and a lifelong learner: the only education worth having is one you actively seize. Cape tuum educationis.
Take this seizing further still. Yet another great mind of that era—Joseph Campbell—has influenced the latter half of my teaching and writing life, and specifically, his concept of the bliss station, a personal “sacred place” designed specifically and robustly for “creative incubation.” This sounds lovely and fuzzy until you realize that our contemporary lives and the world around us tend to meet such efforts with conditions that range from numbing to hostile.
Campbell states, “As you get older, the claims of the environment upon you are so great that you hardly know where . . . you are. What is it that you intended? You’re always doing something that is required of you this minute, that minute, another minute. Where is your bliss station?”
Join these concepts of Rich and Campbell (I hear each of them shrieking in their graves) and the creative person gets a deceptively simple, direct, and practical purpose. Seize your bliss station.
Campbell goes further on this point.
“You must have a room or a certain hour a day or so where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning. You don’t know who your friends are. You don’t know what you owe to anybody or what anybody owes to you. But a place where you can simply experience what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. First you may find that nothing is happening there. But if you have a sacred place and use it and take advantage of it, something will happen.”
I happened on this quote about five years ago when I was preparing a course on mythology and had an epiphany. Of course! Campbell was talking about a challenge in which I was already deeply enmeshed: locating within oneself a certain condition of the mind and then building an environment where unfettered imagination meets action. There and only there can creativity flourish and the artist become truly productive. Like many writers who struggle to cultivate creative energy, I have strived all my adult life to be productive. Readers of this blog—I trust you know what I mean when I say this effort is day to day, from one word on the page to the next and the next. This is fundamentally the same for all who live a writing life, and it is never, never easy.
Campbell was talking about what I was living, and as I drew back from his text in those very first moments, I recognized that I had from childhood been fierce about claiming a working, productive bliss station. For creatives, this work is continual—like any structure, it must be imagined, built, and rebuilt as conditions change, as the self changes. I carve it out of my life of responsibilities as a husband, father, teacher, and friend—and the metaphor of carving is entirely apt, as this seizing of space/time, so necessary to the writing life, comes at a cost, sometimes high. I sacrifice for it, trade for it, steal it when necessary, and accept the impact of it upon everything from my financial situation to my social life. I keep carving, and each cut leaves a raw edge.
So here it is. I’m within it now as I write to you. I own it and hold the only key. I lock the gate when I enter and I lock it when I leave. Here, I imagine books and then I make them real. I read what I want to, think what I need to, write what I mean to. I forget what I should, and also what I should not, but that is the deal I make until my imagination and hands grow still—and only then do I step out and deal with the consequences of my sequestration, whatever they are. But I always re-enter that fray with new pages in my hands.
My life isn’t yours, and yours isn’t mine. Building a bliss station is different for each writer. That said, we can identify common patterns, borrow methods, mark dangers, and learn from triumphs and failures. Like carpenters who are also friends, we can share tools and knowledge.
I’d like to help you build a bliss station, or if you already have one, to do a bit of repair work on the gate. Join me at the Lighthouse Lit Fest ’13 for a craft seminar where we explore ways and means. Quiet the noise, seize the space, and let the world be damned.
Building a Bliss Station
June 10, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
