My son is currently reading Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World series for his homeschool studies. Intrigued to learn more about Wise Bauer, I found her website and subsequently her blog, where I read a post that made me want to go “fishing” again...for my imagination! Says Wise Bauer In search of great golden phrases,
"[Dorothy Sayers] writes of a passage from the mystery novel Gaudy Night in which she says,"
in the silence, something comes “back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days. The singing voice, stifled long ago by the presence of the struggle for existence…began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, like the great carp from the depths of the pool, swam up out of her dreaming mind.”
Says Bauer,
The singing voice, like a great golden fish: it darts away if you try to grasp it. You have to lure it in, waiting for it to flick into view and hover there....My daily routine has made it increasingly difficult to lure the singing voice; so much of what I do–not necessarily the writing itself, but all of the work that surrounds it–seems to act like a little boy’s boots [referring to her sons’ actions when she took them fishing], driving the barely-seen imagination back into hiding.
I almost cried, to see someone else articulate this same thing I’ve experienced, this thing that comes to me now and then in a great searching wistfulness (sehnsucht)...
For me, it’s not just daily routine but also straightening out my life that has sent the fish away. The past several years have witnessed eradication of those awful internal wrenchings that would propel me recklessly toward destructive thought and behavior, mostly self-destructive. But in some ways, they and other “wrenchings” drove some of the best creativity I’ve ever produced. I knew that, were I to become more “normal,” more “ordinary” – the way I thought I wanted and needed to be – a part of me might die forever.
Well, that dying process has been going on gradually for the past fifteen years or so. Compounded by the fact that, nearly twelve years ago, I gave birth to my first child. Since then, the daily tasks of motherhood and wifehood and other duties have been so consuming that whatever creativity I have left comes in glimpses, mostly spontaneous and unthinking. Rarely have I opportunity to get into that zone where “great golden phrases” or their equivalent visions might float to the surface, releasing my mind to dream....
Not that I don’t dream, or play music professionally on occasion, and practice my instrument, and dabble in photography, and attend various artistic events. I just don’t seem to “have it” anymore. Or rarely. And when the glimpses do come, I know they will be short-lived; they will disappear like the macaroni and cheese on my kids’ plates. The clock will pull right up to the next item in my life’s schedule and burst my reverie like a soap bubble. Solitude, real solitude – that land where soap bubbles proliferate – is just not to be found or visited in this life I live, save for that which I must reserve physically to keep my sanity.
But honestly, I’m not sure if I really want to find that land, or dwell there, or make those “glimpses” last, because, frankly, they’re rather frightening. They’re not “safe”...I don’t trust myself when I’m too creative. I fear my head will go floating off with the bubbles.
(You may be thinking, but, Bonnie, you blog. Well, yes, and it certainly is a creative outlet. I won’t deny that. But it, like the rest of my life, is so practially-oriented – a craft more than an art, really.)
The following are "imagination lures" Wise Bauer lists:
Reading (almost anything)
Music (particularly classical, folk, sometimes soundtracks)
Drinking tea (I adore coffee, but it oils the gears of the money-making machine; it doesn’t do much for my imagination)
Complete quiet and solitude
Coffeeshops where I don’t know anyone
A restaurant meal alone
Walking or running by myself
These things do it for me too, although not to the depth that they used to. (Though they provide food for blog-thought!) What really seems to work is having a long period of solitude, or being transported to a different experience -- taken out of myself, if you will, with a camera in front of my eye, or a great book, or a great movie, or travel, or a great conversation with someone.
Tell me...how do you find your golden phrases? Your visions?
