Today's Daily Dharma from Tricycle:
Great Art and Great Dharma
The artist's dilemma and the meditator's are, in a deep sense, equivalent. Both are repeatedly willing to confront an unknown and to risk a response that they cannot predict or control. Both are disciplined in skills that allow them to remain focused on their task and to express their response in a way that will illuminate the dilemma they share with others.
And both are liable to similar outcomes. The artist's work is prone to be derivative, a variation on the style of a great master or established school. The meditator's response might tend to be dogmatic, a variation on the words of a hallowed tradition or revered teacher. There is nothing wrong with such responses. But we recognize their secondary nature, their failure to reach the peaks of primary imaginative creation. Great Art and Great Dharma both give rise to something that has never quite been imagined before. Artist and meditator alike ultimately aspire to an original act.
~ Stephen Batchelor, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. IV, #2; from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith.
I like this way of looking at art, even though that isn't the point Batchelor is making. In my experience, and I may not be like other poets in this regard, the creative act is beyond my control in some ways. When I begin a piece, even if I know vaguely what I want to say, I am often surprised by what comes out.
Creativity, in this sense, is very similar to meditation. But in creativity, the artist must try to channel the energy a bit more than we might while meditating.
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