Witness to the fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction

Ch. 1: The Hostage

Perhaps the journey of the creative person and the addict were similar. Perhaps both the addict and the creator were drawn into the dark regions of the soul. (3)

Thus, inherent in the meaning of addiction is the sense of dedication or bearing witness to creative energies. (4)

The addict is held hostage through denial. (5)

Addiction, when confronted, brings a person face-to-face with his or her own dark side–the capacity for the horrible and destructive. (6)

The daimon is an inner force, a spirit within that energizes us and calls upon us to be and become creatively. (8)

Many creative artists see this struggle–the call to live in the tension between good and evil and to bear witness to the good–as the challenge of human existence, and the meaning art bears is to reveal this universal struggle. (9)

The daimon brings us the unusual intensity of creative fire. But it can also destroy us. (9)

But the same energy that serves addiction can be transformed into creative fire. (10)

If we look within the psyche, we find two archetypal figures corresponding to addiction and creativity–the Demon Lover and the Creative Daimon. (10)

The addict tries to escape the tension of existence. The creative person honors the tension by living in it and creating out of it. (11)

Creativity requires living in the tension of the opposites (11)

Creative transformation is guided by the wholeness of the psyche and centers the individual, leading to a new relationship with the self, the thou, and the cosmos. This is what happens in the recovering process of the addict. (11)

Out of the wounds of addiction, consciously and courageously faced, can come creativity and healing. This is the call that challenges the recovering addict–the call to creativity. It is a call that requires courage–transforming one’s addictive afflictions to creativity. (12)

Addiction is linear, a progressive, degenerative disease. But creativity is regenerative and cyclical, a process of death and rebirth. Even though its energy may first be experienced as a kind of possession, ultimately, if integrated, the Creative Daimon brings new being. The creative person gives regenerative energy to the world, for his own transformation moves toward wholeness. A miracle happens in creativity–receiving becomes giving and giving becomes receiving. This is the key to the creative process. (12)

Ch. 2: The Moneylender 

Looking back he could see that as the addiction progressed, he had stopped feeling the music he had inside him. With all his energy directed toward getting the drugs, he had none left for either love or creativity. (29)

Every decision and every act limits the way in which the potential of our being can be actualized at any given moment. This debt is the paradoxical guilt that must be accepted as part of the human condition. (35)

In addiction we avoid facing the nothingness–the open place that is also the dark face of wholeness. Conscience calls us to this open space, where we face death. Only in this space can we choose to live authentically as the paradoxical creative beings that we are. (36)

Ch. 3: The Gambler

“The dark has lost its seductive power.” 47

Ch. 4: The Romantic

Bound by a longing that is insatiable and ultimately does not satisfy, the Romantic is behind all addiction. But behind the restless longing of the Romantic is the soul’s thirst for the divine fire of creativity. Therein lies the possibility for transformation. (48)

In love with the night, the Romantic can still have the “dream,” if not the embodied reality. (49)

For the lovers the practical world of the day is filled with deceit, false value, superficiality, and transitoriness, while the night-world holds the mystical, eternal truth of oneness. (61)

Thus ultimately, the longing for merger becomes the longing to forget, which is typical for the addict. (66)

We live in denial of the paradox of being human, not even acknowledging our pain. It takes a crisis to break through the denial and bring this to consciousness. (67)

Ch. 5: The Underground Man

Nietzsche saw resentment to be the antithesis of creativity. (70)

The Underground Man is a dreamer-romantic gone cynic. (75)

Ch. 6: The Outlaw

Sometimes it seems that to be a creative person it is imperative to be a rebel or misfit or outsider. (84)

The resentful person wants to be other than he is. (92)

Ch. 7: The Trickster

The Trickster is the highly seductive energy at play in the beginning of addiction. (95)

It is a mistake to reduce the life and work of the creative person to his disease. But it is also a mistake to ignore a disease such as addiction and romanticize its relation to creativity. (111)

PART II: THE FALL

Ch. 8: The Madwoman

Because we refuse to accept the energy of The Madwoman, we are unable to see the creative wisdom inherent in her madness. (117)

Many creative artists are called to express their own personal suffering before their peers are aware of the same suffering in themselves. (136)

The discriminating awareness of judgment, wedded to the dark chaotic visions of the Madwoman, is required for creative expression. (139)

Ch. 9: The Judge

The Judge refuses to let us face our own humanity, and hence our creativity. (141)

Thus, the individual must be responsible for his or her choices and actions, and this requires a clear, serene interior space, which addictive life destroys. (163)

The vision of what we can create is always far greater than what can be expressed concretely in any given work of art or in any life. (163)

Ch. 10: The Killer

All addicts have to learn to honor and nurture their true self–not the identity of ego desires but the process of inner growth. (173)

According to Kierkegaard it takes humility to take a leap of faith, for the leap is beyond rational control. (185)

The Killer is the inner character who gives up the struggle of life. (196)

Ch. 11: The World’s Night

The denial experienced by the individual addict is a microcosm of the denial experienced by our addictive age. (199)

PART III: THE CREATION

Ch. 12: The Abyss

The pivotal point in transforming an addiction is letting go–surrender. (213)

The creative process is chaotic. There is in it an unfathomable void. (214)

As his recovery grew, so did the honesty of his work. (216)

Drawn to the creative powers of the underworld, he becomes a hostage to them. (219)

And all the time he worked at the craft of writing, growing more capable in expressing what might come forth. (220)

To be lost in the chaos throws us into a fertile disorder. It is there that the creative can break through and put everything into a new perspective. (220)

In the end the addict succumbs to the temptation to escape the tension of multiplicities by reducing himself to monomaniacal possession by the one thing to which he is addicted, losing all creative openness and withdrawing from life. (221)

In such a process the poet is a vessel through which the inspiration is formed. (222)

And, as is the paradoxical nature of humankind, the way down is at the same time the way up. (223) #drdog

Only if we confront the chaotic irrational powers at the very depths of our being will we be able to transform them into something meaningful. And, perhaps more important, only then will we be able to face them in another person. (225)

Both creativity and recovery require sacrifice and surrender. They require a readiness to die for the birth of the new creative being–whether it is an artwork or the new person one can be. (226)

Ch. 13: The Dark Night of the Soul

The growth process requires a period of chaos that intervenes between the old state breaking down and the formation of the new state of being. We see such a state dramatically manifested in adolescence, the transition between childhood and adult life. For the great mystics, such periods of chaos and misery often lasted months or even years before the new and higher state of spirituality is reached; often the dark side is experienced before the possibility of the new is apprehended. (229)

Yet this very period of blackness is precisely that which contributes to the re-creation of character. This great period of negation in The Abyss is “the sorting-house of the spiritual life,” just as it is the agonizing effort for the artist who gropes in the dark before the creative outburst. (230) #brighteyes-messenger bird

Feelings of impotence and aridity, torments of temptation by old demonically possessed states, deception of both self and others, bitter-ness, anger, even hatred and denial of the Divinity, madness, and the propensity toward self-destruction-all can be experiences of the mystic and the creative person in this darkness. (230)

The purpose of all this is that the soul may be humbled so that it may afterward be greatly exalted. (231)

This process happens in stages; there are periods of relief in which one can find respite and see the work that has been done. But the fire of love attacks again; the soul is increasingly refined. Burning, blackening, the soul is assailed by bitterness at the evil it sees in itself. But as purification progresses, joy increases as well. Finally, moving toward union in the divine fire, the soul consents and sings its passion for God, the ecstatic song of the divine wedding. (232)

But the failures resulting from addiction, if acknowledged and accepted, can be the fertile ground for growth. The fall can be an awakening for the addict, just as it is for the mystic. (236)

Awakening to the call of something higher in us requires that we look at ourselves and recognize the unlived lives we have led when we have lived in denial and were unable to hear the call of the creative. In The.: Abyss, the addict must face the pain of knowing that his life blood was sucked away by the vampirism of his addiction. This requires the purgative way of intense introspection. (236)

In order to purify himself, the mystic consciously chooses this path. This requires facing one’s painful and humiliating cravings (237)

His ability to give up his flight and identification with the bird and affirm the crawling creatures of the dark ground shows a humility requisite for the purification of the self and for its creative transformation. (237) #caterpillars

We must be able to wait. From the fire of the abominable comes the sunlit silence. From the misery of addiction comes serenity. (238)

This divine wedding is also the gift the addict receives if he sees his addiction as the dark part of an individuation journey toward wholeness. If accepted and transformed, the addict is purged of neurotic guilt and the humiliation of failure and opened to the grace of the transcendent power that was always within. (240)

Ch. 14: The Battleground

The artist is a gentle warrior who must stand between these opposing elements to allow · and tiring forth the new. What is true of the artist struggling to create a painting or a poem is true of the addict struggling to create a new being. (243)

In order to create a new being, recovering addicts must review their entire lives and repair their relation to the Eros (loving energy) that was damaged through their addictive behavior. This means confronting all the dark feelings of pain that were repressed through their addictions and allowing them to resurface. Then one must sort out the painful experiences and assess one’s own part and assume responsibility for it. In the twelve-step program, the work of digging down into oneself, looking at one’s shadow, taking responsibility for one’s own feelings, and making amends for addictive behavior are encompassed in steps four through ten.2 These steps can be done only after the first three steps, which accept the descent into the dark abyss, acknowledge the fall to the bottom through addiction, and surrender to the greater powers that · be. In these steps, the addict admits to powerlessness, recognizes a power higher than the ego, and surrenders in faith by turning the will over to that higher power. (243)

Every creative person must be heroic. (246)

In any addiction it is essential to make this amend so that one can love and forgive oneself for the suffering one has inflicted on oneself through addiction. (249)

One must struggle in a committed way with what is trying to be born. (251)

Ch. 15: The Soul on Fire

All creation is a risk! (277)

Ch. 16: The Work of the Heart

Ch. 17: The Healing Fields

To make an amend one must wait patiently for the right time. (324)

Ch. 18: The Dwelling

But when we are devoted to what we are doing, we experience time quite differently. (341)