The call of the wild...or shall I stay indoors?

I went for a run yesterday. Running can be quite meditative. It shakes my mind and my body and draws up any lethargy that's been collecting. It leaks out in my sweat and I feel like I'm running away from my own laziness. Or running to combat my laziness. I also get restless. So running is a great antidote to restless jigging and building frustration.

I'm in the south of Finland on holiday. I kept to the road on my run, but there were tall silver birch and pine trees either side of me, where the forest stretches out.

As I ran, I stole glances into the trees. I always associate the forest with peace and stillness. But as I peered into it, a deep sort of anxiety started to well up. The forest here was wild, unkempt, close to people, but not looked after by them. I could spy rotting, fallen trees and thick darkness. Masses of moss and tangled branches. There was something chaotic and futile about it.

 

I am the first to romanticise nature and idealise notions of 'returning to the wilderness' but I started to realise just how divorced I really am from the wild. I am a smart-phone wielding, distracted, safety-groping modern person with little knowledge of nature beyond the greenness we cultivate in our back gardens. I am a massive, laughable hypocrite. I love the ideal postcard picture of a forest, not the real thing.

As I ran and looked into the forest, I thought about creativity, artists and anyone who dares to travel to the edges and beyond what men and women have already cultivated. I thought about madness. Henri Matisse famously said 'creativity takes courage.' Looking into the dark forested chaos from the paved road I started to feel like I understood what he meant.

The act of creativity involves submitting to chaos. It means going beyond the social constructs of all the labels and boxes we have created to order things and put ourselves in a position of mastery. To create something new, one first has to screw up and destroy all sense-making maps and step off the trodden path. Creativity is walking into the wild and trying to keep your wits about you, letting yourself be an instrument, absorbing what you see, using your eyes as if for the first time, and then hopefully coming back with new forms of meaning. Prolific American artist Georgia O'Keefe's words in a 1923 letter to Sherwood Anderson ring out; 'whether you succeed or not is irrelevant - there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you.'

We worry about creating meaning as a species. Don't all our forms of progress come from creativity? Daring to imagine something new? Realising there are endless ways of making sense of chaos. Submitting to nothing, and coming back with something.

In 'The Courage to Create', American existential psychologist Rollo May distinguishes creativity as the product of a raw, undefended encounter between self and world. Courage is needed to withstand the intense anxiety provoked by a natural world with no meaning ascribed to it. When one puts aside empirical fact, order, the history of everything we 'know' and meets the world just as it is,

'Our sense of identity is threatened; the world is not as we experienced it before, and since self and world are always correlated, we no longer are what we were before[...] The anxiety we feel is temporary rootlessness, disorientation; it is the anxiety of nothingness.'

May goes on to define artists as those who 'do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.'

I wrote the below after my run and wanted to share it here. There's a sense  of futility to it, but I'm not going to apologise for that. Futility is uncomfortable, but it exists. Artists probably know it well. It's a scribbled homage to all the artists out there, sacrificing themselves as instruments, travelling beyond their edges, and bringing back visceral meaning for all of us.

What if we veer off course?
End up lost, among the fallen trees, compounded by moss,
Confused by thick, impenetrable bracken.
Weighed down by the damp, with just an echo for company,
An echo that fritters away, gets swallowed by the deepest forest,
And disappears.
Into nothing.

What if we submit to the chaos and it devours us?
Turning to see the path we marked on the way here, to keep us safe,
We are shocked to find that it's gone.
Was it ever there, we start to wonder...
Did order exist at all,
Or did we dream it up to put ourselves at ease?

What now?
We summoned the courage to create,
And we teeter on the edge, grabbing at the hand of destruction,
Desperate for company when we find ourselves alone.
Futility creeps in on us with the beetles.
Is this the only way back to ourselves?

What if we lose the web of language that keeps us rooted,
If we see new forms we cannot live without.
How do we express them?
How do we share them?
Will people call us crazy?
Will we be crazy?

Trapped in limbo with the longing call of the wild,
With messages for men and women who no longer possess ears to hear.
Will you take us back, when we have been away so long?
Or maybe we've walked too far,
Stepped over the edge.
We're knee-deep in chaos and there's nothing left.

Either way, wouldn't you rather say you took the risk?