Creativity in the EDAP
Adrienne (host), Janet, Patrick, Hermione, Lorraine, Kevin
Vision is a creative process. We need artists, poets, actors, musicians, writers, dancers to help us.
We need writers to write stories about their progress in changing – novel or narrative. Stories are important.
Drama/street drama.
What we are facing is a mythic journey. Enactment of the journey/ pilgrimage/ aboriginal songlines. Stations of the cross, souls and soles, sacred walks tracking the energy, tuning in to the earth. (At this point the creative seam started to get deep and rich!)
Look for the myth – creation myth, destruction myth, transition myth.
Rosalind Bruyer, hopi prophesy, oral tradition. Transition is a time of enlightenment.
Mayan prophesy for 2012, end of the calendar.
We need to reconnect with the old visions, get in touch with our own creative process and get beyond our perceptions.
Dig out stories: Joseph Campbell, There is my People Sleeping, David and Goliath, Lord of the Ring. (In Jan? Let’s put on a storytelling evening.)
Can we attune with/reconnect with the myth? Is there a mythic story that describes our time and inspires us?
There are no new stories, but the stories are new to us.
This is an archetypal situation. All old civilisations have peaked and declined/disappeared, eg the Romans.
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann
What is the metaphor that climate change and peak oil are reflecting to us? What language creates the link in the chain? We need language to communicate a difficult message, but with hope.
Maybe we need a series of metaphors: for business the metaphor language is about saving money. For children the metaphor language is fairy tales.
What is the response of our heart? To be effective we have to have an open heart.
Words like ‘impossible’ create a closed heart – it’s a hard place to start from.
Let’s enlarge the context, use hope, enthusiasm and involvement.
We need to facilitate an expansion in people’s awareness, change will be gradual; what people feel and hear will make them respond.
Artists often come to creativity through intense personal conflict/pain.
SLOW LIFE – need time to be creative, to reflect, away from the adrenaline-, agenda-fuelled life.
Visioning, imaging, visualisation, these are all tools that need facilitators.
It’s about initiation. Our culture is devoid of those rituals and myths. Transition is an initiatory process. We have to move to another level of awareness or become extinct.
Let’s create initiation opportunities, eg woodcraft folk, guides, badge scheme, tertiary college.
TTL needs to model energy efficiency in all processes – and reconnect with nature.
Empowerment: we are each responsible to communicate this. Let’s look at personal transitioning processes: eg 10 steps for making a personal transition – eg bicycles, lightbulbs, bags, make a pledge or vow!
FOotnote thanks to Patrick ref the discussion about avant garde.
Artist means people of imagination - artists, poets, musicians ...
Avant-garde
Originally a French term, meaning in English, vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest). Applied to art, means that which is in the forefront, is innovatory, which introduces and explores new forms and in some cases new subject matter. In this sense the term first appeared in France in the first half of the nineteenth century and is usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism. He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society. In 1825 he wrote: 'We artists will serve you as an avant-garde… the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas… What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function and of marching in the van [ie vanguard] of all the intellectual faculties!'
And another quote Irmeli Hautamaki (This is his introduction of his book the Origin of Avant-garde, Modern Aesthetics from Baudelaire to Warhol )2003).
Henri de Saint-Simon was the famous figure who suggested that, in order to transform modern industrialized society, it would be only necessary to gather together a group of leading intellectuals, scientists and artists, and join then with industrials; this leader group would then make the future ideal state a reality. Saint-Simon valued artists very highly because, as “men of imagination,” they were capable not of only foreseeing the future but also of showing others what the future ideal state would be like.
Get involved: contact hello [at] TransitionTownLewes.org.uk
