Turning Up the Volume on Beauty
The great Irish poet John O’Donohue said, “Beauty is not just niceness and appearance, it’s healing…even in conditions of control and order, you can be swept off your feet in the presence of beauty… We feel most alive in the presence of beauty. It returns us to our highest self.”
And yet, sometimes beauty can be elusive. It can be hard to find. It can be quiet. Every moment is a hive of neurons, waves, perceptions tied to past histories, systemic realities, and actions built off the back of these perceptions. Beauty can get lost in that mix.
But, on instinct, our curious creative mind hunts for beauty, the quiet hero.
In flow, artists are drawn to write or paint toward it.
Painters tease it out through micro-choices they make in colour, a movement of their hand. And we’re all lucky when they take us there.
Writers, in working under the constraints of language, find beauty when writing toward “the rapids” as George Saunders says. It’s something that emerges in every paradox and uneasy relationship shaping the stories and characters we render that haunt and drive us to our mad, obsessive craft.
Poet Jane Hirshfield said it well when she declared story as “a basic human path toward the discovery and ordering of meaning and beauty.”
Even when there’s darkness, painter Louise Fletcher “always aims for beauty.”
Award-winning writer Deepa Rajagopalan and I found this to be true when our writing practice evolved. Our creative voice wanted to work through areas of disorder and confusion. Organically, the craft of writing directed us into new spaces inevitably “aiming toward beauty.” Which might be why, once you begin saying yes to your creative intelligence, you keep saying yes.
Here’s my conversation with the very talented Deepa Rajagopalan…
Deepa, firstly, congratulations on your recent awards. You won the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices prize, the Malahat Review Open Seasons Fiction award, and, among many other accolades, you’ve been running an online reading series which has supported the work of many writers.
We met just before the pandemic, having both been invited to a great writer’s home with a group of other talented folks to workshop our stories. I wish I could include a photograph of that writer’s home because it was everything I wanted it to be: cavernous; high above the colourful world of Spadina Avenue; there was a bunk bed made into a pirate ship, a collection of chairs from different eras, and burgundy-painted walls everywhere. It was the best.
In that period, I remember your creative voice querying the energy of dislocation and familial relationships. Like me, you seemed to be using language to gain a sense of how it moved through you.
Our creative intelligence helps us, doesn’t it, get close to understanding who we are.
I did enroll in my first writing course when I felt something was missing in my life. Work was fine but I felt incomplete.
I’m from India but had grown up mostly in Saudi, and I went on to live in the United States and Canada in later years. I studied engineering and have worked in Tech for a long time. But growing up, I was a reader and I loved writing. I always thought that the greatest thing you could do was create something that someone else could engage with, and make them feel less alone.
I strongly believe that, as human beings, we are multifaceted. I feel we can be many things, and pursue our many curiosities deeply, intentionally. This has led me to take my writing, and my creative voice more seriously. At this point, I primarily write fiction but I pursue truth-telling. And the way I understand truth is through a language that is more nuanced.
What a great point. Good writing and good art does supply ourselves and the world with nuance. It’s a more holistic knowing, which is probably the thing that could save us all in the end :).
My own creative work helps me include everything, and by this I mean, when I’m in the zone, nothing is a “problem,” everything has meaning.
But by all means, my motivation to write is always to sound smart, something I need on a primal level. But when my ego starts getting supplanted by my creative voice, which only happens when I do MANY things to get me there, most of which are uncomfortable at first, I can begin to get into a more expansive voice that can calmly say, in Tara Brach’s words, “this too belongs.” But it takes work.
Yes, creativity should be defined by its expansiveness.
It’s normal to begin creative work with constraints. When we move freely within those constraints we’re engaged in something more novel and interesting. We always end up with something different than what we started with.
There’s a degree of detachment that has to happen. It’s very natural for me to be an observer. Having lived in so many different places, I like to look at a situation from the outside. And it definitely helps me in my creative work.
I’ve just admitted that it takes a lot of work for me to get to a place of expansiveness. What do you do to get there?
Cheryl Strayed has a great line. She says: “Put yourself in the way of beauty.”
I do this by being in nature, listening to music, reading a good book, learning something new. It shifts something in me. Meditation is also grounding. It has become something I can turn to no matter what I’m going through.
It’s not easy to make space for this. I work full-time and I have a child. There is plenty of non-creative time occupying my life. You have to make time for it. And when I do, it will always give me a sense of connectedness with the rest of the world and the human experience… and a sense of calm. When I don’t prioritize it, I get cranky.
I safeguard it in a very intentional way.
Thank you Deepa. You’ve helped me to think more about how beauty drives and nourishes my work, my relationships, my life. I’m grateful you took the time to speak with me.
Also, I must leave you all with a song!
For me, this one (below) seems to get closest to that feeling of expansiveness Deepa talked about. Leave your recommendations for expansive music in the comments!
Other posts in the series: