The most common effect of pollution in women’s creative life is loss of vitality. This disables a woman’s ability to create or act “out there” in the world. Though there are times in a woman’s cycles of healthy creative life when the river of creativity disappears underground for a time, something is being developed all the same. We are incubating then. It is a very different sensation than that of spiritual crisis.
In a natural cycle, there is restlessness and impatience, perhaps, but there is never a sense the wild soul is dying. We can tell the difference by assessing our anticipation: even when our creative energy is involved in a long incubation, we still look forward to the outcome, we feel the pops and surges of that new life turning and humming within us. We do not feel desperate. There is no lunging and grasping.
But when the creative life dies because we are not tending to the health of the river, that is another matter entirely. Then, we feel exactly like the dying river; we feel loss of energy, we feel tired; there is nothing creeping, roiling, lifting leaves, cooling off, warming up. We become thick, slow in a negative way, poisoned by pollution, or by a backup and stagnation of all our riches. Everything feels tainted, unclear, and toxic.
How might a woman’s creative life become polluted? This sludging of creative life invades all five phases of creation: inspiration, concentration, organization, implementation, and sustenance. Women who have lost one or more of these report that they “can’t think” of anything new, useful, or empathic for themselves. They are easily “distracted” by love affairs, too much work, too much play, by tiredness, or by fear of failure.
Sometimes they cannot coalesce the mechanics of organization, and their project lays scattered about in a hundred places and pieces. Sometimes the problems issue from a woman’s naïveté about her own extroversion: She thinks that by making a few motions in the outer world, she has really done something. This is like making the arms but not the legs or the head of a thing and calling it done. She feels necessarily incomplete.
Sometimes a woman trips over her own introversion and wants to simply wish things into being; she may think that just thinking the idea is good enough, and there need be no outer manifestation. Except she feels bereft and unfinished anyway. These are all manifestations of pollution in the river. What is being manufactured is not life but something that inhibits life.
Other times she is under attack by those around her, or by the voices yammering in her head: “Your work is not right enough, not good enough, not this enough, not that enough. It is too grandiose, too infinitesimal, too insignificant, takes too long, is too easy, too hard.” This is pouring cadmium into the river.
There is another story that describes the same process, but uses different symbolism. In Greek mythos there is an episode wherein the Gods decree that a group of birds called the Harpies shall punish a soul named Phineus.
Each time Phineus’s food is magically laid out, the flock flies in, steals some of the food, scatters some, and defecates on the rest, leaving the poor man ravenously hungry.
This literal pollution can also be understood figuratively as a string of complexes within the psyche whose sole raison d’être is to foul things up. This tale is most definitely a temblón, shiver story; it makes us shiver in recognition, for we have all experienced this. The “Harpy Syndrome” destroys via denigration of one’s talents and efforts, and through a most disparaging internal dialogue. A woman brings up an idea and the Harpy shits upon it. The woman says, “Well, I thought I would do this and this.” The Harpy says, “That’s a stupid idea, no one cares about that, it’s ridiculously simplistic. Well, mark my words, your ideas are all dumb, people will laugh, you really have nothing to say.” This is Harpy-talk.
Excuses are another form of pollution. From women writers, painters, dancers, and other artists, I have heard every excuse concocted since the earth cooled. “Oh, I’ll get around to it one of these days.” In the meantime, she has the grinning depression. “I keep busy, yes I squeeze in my writing here and there, why I wrote two poems last year, yes, and finished one painting and part of another over the last eighteen months, yes, the house, the kids, the husband, the boyfriend, the cat, the toddler, need my consummate attention. I am going to get around to it, I don’t have the money, I don’t have the time, I can’t find the time, I can’t make the time, I can’t start until I have the finest most expensive instruments or experiences, I just don’t feel like it right now, the mood is not right yet. I just need at least a day’s worth of time to get it done, I just need to have a few days’ time to get it done. I just need to have a few weeks of time to myself to get it done, I just, just, just ...”
...cross -> junction...created by interruptions and weaknesses... different frequencies) Maybe my answer is simple and it just looks difficult right now because I'm lost in a maze of junctions.
