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Harmonious Chaos
Owen Brierley
Harmonious Chaos.
When we think of creativity or rather the results of creative effort, we see Truth, Beauty... some kind of manifestation of a perfect idea that the artist wishes to convey. The artist seeks that perfection. Even if that perfection is messy, it is, at the hands of an artist, perfectly messy. This perfection is a result of a very messy, agonizing, and intense effort on the part of the artist. I had an acting teacher once tell me that if I wasn't working so hard that I was sweating on stage during a show, I wasn't working hard enough. My goal was to finish a play physically, emotionally and sometimes spiritually drained. That was my gift as an artist. The audience deserved nothing less.
Let's think on this idea of Harmonious Chaos a bit. The idea of harmony includes concepts like balance, precision, congruity with another entity. (two notes resonating in harmony). The idea of chaos includes concepts like randomness, unpredictability, "too many notes..." Often we seek to create harmony in the world by removing or editing out the chaos. We place harmony and chaos on opposite ends of a continuum and swing between them. Often people will associate positive or negative emotions with either of these. Some folks find harmony incredibly stifling and dull, while chaos is lush and rich and inviting. Others view this in exactly the opposite way. It is the chaos that is dark, murky, scary... and harmony that is tranquil, peaceful, and centering.
Just for fun, let's mix it up a little. Let's take the phrase Harmonious Chaos and reverse it.
Chaotic Harmony.
There is a physical activity that typifies comfort zones that I sometimes share with my design students to help them understand their own tendencies in order to play against their nature as they try to delve into new thinking and discover new creativity. Hold your hands up and do this. Feels comfortable? Now open your hands and move one finger over to reverse the grip and then close them. How does that feel? It feels weird doesn't it. Maybe some of you find it comfortable either way. The point being illustrated here is that we gravitate to what is comfortable for us. We aren't even aware of it as a choice.
So now, consider your comfort with these two phrases. Harmonious Chaos? Chaotic Harmony? As you ponder these, you realize they are quite different and quite the same. For me, Harmonious Chaos is looking at a river from a birds eye view. The river's apparent completely chaotic path of twists and turns and unpredictable eddies and flows, is the epitome of chaos in action. In contrast Would anyone ever argue that the river's flow was anything but harmonious? For me, this river is one of many examples of Harmonious Chaos.
Chaotic Harmony. For me, this is the "hand-made" contrasted with the "machine-made." The artist who works to achieve perfection in their work approaches perfection, but there are many subtle flaws that somehow make it authentic and more real. Prized guitars are cherished for the little bits of scratches and dents they receive and the evaluators on the Antiques Roadshow advise never to clean, or repair any of these telltale bits of chaos. Lastly, music played by a real person will always sound more real than when it is played by a machine. A machine will play the notes in the exact order and rhythm it is told to, humans will always be slightly ahead or behind the rhythm. The confluence of these imperfection give rise to the chaos necessary to make the harmony sound natural.
A Greek philosopher (Aristotle, I think but I have to check) once spoke about how we can hold the image of a perfect chair in our minds, and each and every manifestation of a chair in the real world is a cousin to that perfect chair, but the master carpenter can never truly achieve that crystal clear perfection of the mind.
James Gleick, in his book "Chaos; the birth of a new science," talks about the challenges that mathematicians had with chaotic equations. Early math thinkers ruled these equations out as nonsensical and a waste of time, as they lacked the elegance and harmony of other math patterns that could be more easily formed in the mind. It wasn't until computers provided a means to map out this nonsense and incredibly complex, but very organic patterns emerged what would eventually become known as fractals. Mandelbrot, Julia, and others paved the way for these strange and wonderfully harmonious visualizations of chaos. Anyone who has seen a fractal mapped out will recognize trees, ferns, clouds, coastlines, mountains, and other shapes that while they are harmonious in there own way are truly chaotic in other ways.
So here we have Harmonious Chaos, and Chaotic Harmony. Different in some ways, similar in some ways. What does this have to do with creativity? For me, creativity is all about blending chaos and harmony. Someone here, I think it was Christine Watts, who once said she had been struggling to find here creative core. Her exploration took her through many instruments and none of them ever connected. She was competent and was able to play these various items with skills and precision, but none of them found their way, for her, to becoming "music." Then one day she found her instrument that allowed her to also find her "music." I like to think that she discovered that Harmonious Chaos that gave her the freedom of expression within the realm of harmony.
Joseph Campbell tells a story in his book, "Myths to Live By" of attending a Japanese Tea Ceremony. If any of you know of these ceremonies, you know that they are incredibly exacting performances for the Tea Master. What amazed Campbell was that while the performance, to his innocent eyes, was an exercise in precision, many of the other attendees remarked with wonder at the Tea Masters level of spontaneity and "play." This spontaneity is the chaos that intervenes in the planned and organized harmony. This master, was able to harness both in order to create an experience for the audience that was unique and memorable.
So here we are, we have connected Harmony to Chaos, brought in some thinking about how creativity plays with this connection and now we are left with one final realm of thinking that connects to these three ideas. Spirituality.
For me, creativity is necessarily spiritual. Whether one chooses to acknowledge it or not, creativity comes from somewhere and often the individual expressing that creativity will report things like "losing themselves," "my muse was operating through me," or "the idea just popped into my head." Add to this sense of "lost self," Jung's idea of the "collective unconscious." This is most evident in the numerous examples scientists coming to similar conclusions around the same time. Bill Bryson is his book "A Brief History of Nearly Everything" seems to have a repeated theme that compares the scientist whose papers and research made them famous to their colleagues who had completed similar work, come to similar conclusions and was not published.
In acting class, there were two significant events that connected my creative life to my spiritual life. First, was very early on, one of my acting teachers insisted that we, the students, park our ego at the door. This was a key to unlocking inspiration. I had to learn how to lose myself. I needed to tap into that collective unconscious. Losing your ego, or at least leaving it stored somewhere while you do some growing work, isn't easy. Working in a group and acknowledging that the ideas may come from someone else is challenging, especially in our culture. We are raised to compete, to 'put up your hand' if you want the teachers attention and receive the positive reinforcement. We are encouraged to find ways to stand out. Parking my ego at the door flew in the face of all that. Yet, when I could, and when everyone else did too. Something magical happened. Suddenly, the ideas and creativity flowed and we aren't talking no trickle, this was a fire hose. We discovered that letting go actually invited more, so much more, we had trouble keeping up.
The second event, was an exercise in improvisation. My acting teacher at the time referred to it as "embracing the void." The exercise required that we perform some simple improvisational act with no time to prepare. Bam you are on. The immediacy was necessary to achieve that break from our clever brains that immediately kick into problem solving mode and try to seek out a clever solution from a set of potential solutions. The improv exercise was designed to strip away that moment of thought, of self-awareness, and induce an immediate action. No thinking, no organizing, no planning, no predicting. Just go. The "void" is the complete and total absence of ideas that you have and own. The void required the stuff to come from somewhere else. It was this exercise that taught me how to embrace the "space between two thoughts."
For me, the spirituality of creativity is a confluence of chaos, harmony, self and non-self. It is about trust. Trust that what gets expressed through you is exactly what is needed. If we can truly allow ourselves to play in the realm of the ego-at-the-door we may discover things that we never thought possible. While what we have to offer now may not make sense in the immediate picture, it does make sense in the whole picture. We just need the opportunity to embrace the chaos, discover the harmony, recognize the creativity, and celebrate the spirituality.
Go now in peace.
Owen Brierley
2006
We believe that everyone has the right to seek truth and meaning for themselves. The fundamental tools for doing this are your own life experience, your reflection upon it, your intuitive understanding and the promptings of your own conscience.