Daylight
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Rhythm. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Now I cry for daylight / Daylight and the sun
—ANOHNI
We tell stories about things that don’t exist yet as if they did, the most famous of these that the sun will rise tomorrow. A premise of this newsletter goes further: Reality is not just a chaos of unfolding happenstance but, at least in some cases, the product of deliberate creative choice. How that choice affects the events of the world is never the dictate only of the one who exercised it; but that person’s doing is a precondition for what follows. Building the creative body—the body that is fully realized, and fully attuned, in its readiness and its imperative to create—is not just a self-oriented exercise, then, but also the opposite, a basis for effective action.
As I sit in the noon light of this year’s gradual wind-down to its shortest day—in my apartment with its southern exposure, the sun of the next few months will burn bright and achingly brief—this fact about creative origins is on my mind. Specifically, how it relates to the confrontation between two illusions, of powerlessness and of control.
In Joshua Tree earlier this month, my college friends and I returned to a theme that has surfaced often in our retreats together: retro-causality. It’s the notion—which I’m going to summarize as best I can, neither physicist nor metaphysician—that because time has no inherent direction it’s not only reasonable but actually kind of a “no duh” to think that events in the present could have causal impact in the past, and not just vice versa. It’s like how I can push a book left across my desk as well as right. This possibility has inspired some tongue-in-cheek magical thinking in our group—there’s Future Us, steering us toward the best cheeses at Pavilions!—and yet I love it because it dials straight into my favorite woo woo (belief, true or not, for which empirical verification is not currently available): the enigmatic relationship of the self to itself over, across, and back across time.
Forgive the solar reverie: Closer to earth, one question might be how one’s intent consults with memory, and vice versa—the way that what we meant to do connects with what we’re doing; the way that what we’re doing connects with what we’ll later be glad we did, or wish we’d done.
In my own life recently, clarity has arrived as a perfect inverse to certainty: By surrendering to a scary set of unknowns, I’ve just begun to discern a picture of the life, the days, that might lie ahead. These conditions could not, in this particular case, coexist: the certainty (of a life known and comparatively secure) and the clarity (of a life creatively chosen).
The relaxing of control, though it feels sometimes like it produces powerlessness, does not. It’s an acknowledgment of a power so rooted, so inevitable, that it can tolerate even grave uncertainty—a power that both is grounded in and transcends the self. I respect the belief, imparted by people wiser than me, that selfhood is an illusion. Yet in a creative context I think we must put up a challenge to this. It comes down to another question: What effect will your or my particular creating have, beyond the horizons of what we currently imagine? Tomorrow’s daylight is a pretty solid bet. The greater imaginative burden of the story falls elsewhere. What world, exactly, will the daylight fall on? We have no control over this. We have a great deal of choice.
Coming Friday: Competition.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.