Getting Around Creative Obstacles

You’re writing, composing or painting — doing any work that employs your creative intelligence — and you run into a wall. You can’t see how to proceed. What to do?

“When I hit a wall, I usually stop and do something else,” noted the singer-songwriter Carole King. “This effectively turns the problem over to my subconscious mind, which keeps working on it under the radar. When I return to the task, my subconscious has often solved the problem before my ego has time to assert control.”

King is describing a technique I‘ve used successfully throughout my writing career, and so did my friend and mentor Elleston Trevor, the British novelist who wrote “The Quiller Memorandum” and “The Flight of the Phoenix.”

Elleston advised that you forget about the project entirely and let your already-programmed unconscious mind work on the problem without flogging it.

To that end, he recommended any semi-automatic activity that would keep you busy without absorbing your attention — driving, shaving, mowing the lawn, that kind of thing. The old saying about “sleeping on the problem” taps into the same wisdom.

And then, sooner than you’d think, without conscious effort, the detour around to your creative roadblock simply appears before you.

She Had an Invisible Friend

Carole King

Hypnagogic Active Imagination, a technique developed by the psychologist Carl Jung, makes use of the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, between the realms of the conscious and unconscious minds, as a means of tapping the wisdom of the integrated self.

The singer-songwriter Carole King apparently had a spontaneous experience of something like that at a moment of crisis in her relationship with her abusive husband Rick.

Isolated and indecisive, her interest in music diminished, fearful of physical and emotional attack, she needed help. And that night in a rainy LA during the recording of her Welcome Home album, some mysterious other part of herself provided it.

“At 2:02 a.m., I awoke and saw Rick sleeping next to me,” she recalled. “I turned my head and registered the time on the clock. Then I turned my face up toward the ceiling and lay on my back, motionless. I knew who Rick was, but I couldn’t remember who I was. At that moment, if someone had asked me my name, I would have drawn a blank. Suddenly I heard someone ask a question. It might have been I, but I hadn’t spoken. It was as if I were outside myself hearing the question asked in my own mind.

“’Who am I?’

“I sat up slowly, attentively, the way people do at night when they think they’ve just heard something but aren’t sure… I stepped quietly down from the bed, and started to go … where? Where was I going? I couldn’t remember why I had gotten up.

“Suddenly my perception shifted and I was regarding myself as if through someone else’s eyes. I watched myself walk over to the window and look out. Then I saw myself turn from the window and, with a movement like that of a silk scarf slipping off a mannequin, the woman I was watching slipped down and collapsed on the rug at the foot of the bed. At that moment, she — I — curled into a fetal position and disappeared. I had no thoughts. I had nothing, and I was no one.

“Then I heard another question in my mind as clearly as if I had spoken it aloud.

“’Where’s me?’

“An answer grew out of the nothingness and shaped itself around the person I was experiencing as not-me. It wasn’t sudden, like a thunderbolt. It was an unguent, a healing sense of possibility that slowly permeated my consciousness, a balm that soothed my soul, reanimated my body, and infused my mind with a renewed sense of identity and purpose.”

She recalled her success as a songwriter, her joy as a mother and the financial independence she had won for herself. She determined, if not to leave Rick, then to seek professional help to improve their unhealthy relationship.

“With clarity and resolve, I stood up, walked to the bed, climbed in, and immediately fell asleep,” she wrote.

And that was the beginning of the end of Carole King’s abuse.

Source: “A Natural Woman” by Carole King

On the Path with Blackwood

The itinerant early 20^th century British author Algernon Blackwood became famous for writing short stories about the supernatural, but his primary interest was in finding a way for humanity to reunite with nature despite the ravages of the industrial age.

His thoughts led him to certain conclusions that are familiar to me — that the path to a more complete human being may be found in the alignment of our conscious and unconscious minds.

‘I think, honestly, the deepest interest in my life is to find any knowledge, in book or practice, that may widen the field of consciousness and waken powers which, I feel convinced, lie dormant in our greater self — the subconscious so-called,” Blackwood wrote. “I still believe we have latent powers which could bring us nearer, if only a little nearer, to Reality. This is the insatiable quest in my blood and compared with it other things, money least of all, do not count.”

“I have long since reached a stage where I feel that there can be little progress until the subconscious powers become developed and accessible,” Blackwood wrote on another occasion. “Without these we can become better, but not greater.”

Drawn to Georgei Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s ideas about ways to “bring a scientific rationale to mysticism,” Blackwood remarked, “The preliminary training in yoga convinced me that it was genuine and helpful for any serious student. The methods of changing one’s type of consciousness, rather than merely extending what was already possesses, seemed to me true and practical.”

One effective method I’ve found for doing this is Jungian Active Imagination, which I also call Hypnagogic Active Imagination — a means discovered by the psychologist Carl Jung for developing direct communication between the unconscious and conscious aspects of the human mind.

Source: “Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life” by Mike Ashley

As the Crow Flies

Guest Essay by Lysa Fisk

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Against the grain of a bright summer sky, the crow flies. It calls to others, and they call

back, using a sublime language consisting of a single sound uttered with an infinite number of patterns and inflections. From our ground level vantage point in the woods where we hike two- legged and upright among the four-leggeds and slitherers, my brother calls back to the crow. He throws back his head; the muscles of his neck tighten and flex as he opens his mouth and fires the sound at the black bird’s big sky: “CAW!” he answers as he hikes.

Last summer, we could only imagine what lay hidden in the heart of these woods: these fields of grass and wild flowers, this grove of weeping willows and cottonwoods, these inter- dunal ponds algae skinned and teeming with dragonflies, salamanders, snapping turtles, and water moccasins, these pussy willows and cat-tails, these paths snaking through wetland wilderness and tracing stream beds that flood with spring showers and dry in the summer sun, for we’d only witnessed this place from the car windows of our mother’s Ford Granada as we sped past on the newly opened interstate that now connected us to the great new Kmart occupying an enormous concrete parking lot, a brick and mortar scarecrow rising in that vast cornfield south of our new subdivision, or from that safe distance within which we played: where mommy could see and hear us.

We hike single file along the narrow trail into that great beyond, he in the lead. He wears a white tshirt, cut off school pants, and canvas sneakers. His figure contrasts with the infinite varieties of green we wade through. Our mother had told me, “Make sure you keep an eye on your brother,” before she had let us loose in the woods. He is younger than I, so I lead him by allowing him to walk in front of me where I can watch him. We are learning our way around these woods for the first time and being very careful not to get lost. Ahead of me, my brother hesitates and waits bravely at the mouth of a well-traveled trail on the edge of that danger zone: a thicket of elephant grass far from our mother. This summer, the elephant grass dwarfs us.

I come to a stop beside him. He looks at me and grins nervously. He’s missing a front tooth.

“Well?” I ask, “Who wants to go first?”

He turns to look at that intimidating sea of elephant grass threatening to swallow us then turns back to face me. “You,” he answers positively.

I cannot see into this great field of the unknown, beyond our mother’s reach and gaze, but I take a deep breath and move ahead of my brother. I do not show my fear, though I feel certain he senses it as much as I sense, mingled with his own fear, his willingness to follow me, our mutual desire for danger and adventure. I hear the giant blades of grass whisper like sandpaper smoothing a rough wooden surface. As we cut through, the sharp blades leave tiny cuts on our exposed legs and arms. The crow my brother had cried out to continues its flight in a northeastern direction, circles, returns, is joined by others, their coordinated movements punctuated by conversation: “CAW! CAW!” We watch them even as we watch each other. I say to my brother, “I wonder what they’re talking about?”

To me he says, “I don’t know.” To them, he cries, “CAW! CAW!” His inflection has risen in pitch; his volume has expanded in enthusiasm. I draw a deep breath, throw back my head and “CAW!” The crows seem to understand us for their flight tracks our progress through the elephant grass and deeper into a muddy forest of trees.

Our confidence grows each time we explore the woods. We learn the layouts of the trails and how to find our favorite places. We often become separated. We never get lost because we can always CAW! When I am alone in the woods, and I know my brother is out there somewhere looking for me, I perfectly imitate the crows’ CAW! and watch for one to fly overhead and CAW! in response. The crow seems to hear my CAW! which he answers as he flies in the direction of my brother. The answer could either be my brother or a crow bringing my brother’s coordinates. When my brother needs to find me, he sends the same message to me via the flight of the crow. Once perfected, we demonstrate our crude homing system to our skeptical best friend. All three of us always return home together from our adventures, and our mothers never suspect how many times we lose and find each other in the woods.

My brother and I are grown now and have long gone our separate ways. He remains near our parents and eventually buys a home, marries, and has children. He walks a predictable path in life while I wander rugged trails through a wilderness newly opened to women of my generation. I could never have said my brother and I had a final fight that divided us so much as we lost sight of each other through thousands of tiny disagreements. Many times since the days of our childhood adventures I have lost my way in time and space and found myself beyond where even our mother’s love could reach me.

Thus, the paths I wander in life eventually lead me to a place that branches off into Indian country, where a political stand-off between the elected tribal council and the council appointed

by the hereditary chief has forced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to close their casino. The appointed council occupies the Tribal Center, the seat of their government. The elected council remains in exile. Brother fights brother; honor struggles against corruption. There are good guys; there are bad guys. Through the years, I have forgotten many things like how my brother and I used crow language to track each other through the woods. In my own time and in my own language, I hear the stranger who has crossed my path tell me, “I will plant you in Mother Earth.” I am as lost as he is when we find each other. Bravely, he leads me, a White girl, up the hill where he smudges me off and sweats me.

Early in the morning after one such night in the lodge, I wake up from a sound sleep on a Sealy Posturepedic® mattress in his house in the woods, the purifying smoke of sage and sweet grass still in my eyes, the voice of prayers spoken reverently in a dying language still in my ears, the steam and dust from the rocks caught in my teeth, and just a bit lost in last night’s trance. I have never felt so relaxed and peaceful.

In my mind’s eye, I notice a figure on the hill, on the edge of the trees behind the lodge, its back to me. I do not question if this is merely imagination, a dream, or fantasy. I simply watch. The scene is more vivid than a reality of this hill that exists beyond the back windows of the house. Curious, I study this mysterious figure.

He has both human and birdlike characteristics. He has a human face with an avian slope to his shaggy head. He stands upright, his arms resting at his sides. His arms have black feathers like wings and end in fingers like feathers. Is this a man wearing a bird costume? From this distance, I cannot say for sure. In my mind’s eye, I place my right foot on the narrow path to the lodge. As I take that first step to approach him, I sense a sudden SWOOSH as I join him on the hill, and he joins me at the foot of the hill. In this instant he materializes before me and reveals himself to be half man, half crow. His eyes meet my eyes as his thoughts soar through my mind. He perches on my shoulder and takes me under his wing.

We are in two places, all places, at once. As broken as I am, I am whole. Telepathically, this creature must have heard me ask, “Who are you?” for in this moment I am inhabited by a CAW!

I watch the ground become a blur below as we fly over the Nation. The treetops remind me of a well-tended lawn in the suburbs. Their branches and trunks root into the sky. The Iowa River snakes below us, and the wind carries the musical tones of its watery movement past our ears; a sound like coarse blades of elephant grass whispering as they scrape against each other. The swollen river feeds the land and creates a booming economy: a richly varied ecosystem. We set our course by the river’s winding shape slicing through the leafy treetops. However, as the crow flies, we seem to have no real direction.

In fact, the movement may not even be ours. Perhaps it is the earth that moves below us as, anchored in the sky, we watch it shift? With this thought, I feel my mind clear the way the sky clears after a summer shower. As my eyes follow the shifting scenery, the water rushing through the main artery of the river and feeding its capillaries suddenly dries up leaving behind a colorless, cracked valley. The leaves on the trees whither and die. The barren branches bleach to a zombie gray. Nothing moves.

As I continue to watch, it seems as if a floodgate opens and the tracks of the rivers and streams gush thick with blood. The blood rushes in from thousands of tiny cuts, wounds opened in battle, beating hearts torn out by the hands of a shaman and offered to the gods who created us of corn and water. Upstream, a heart of stone, non-moving, absorbs the rushing tides of flowing blood, softens just enough for the pressure of the blood to start it beating once more. It pumps the blood, and the death force in that blood flow powers this dark heart. All that I survey turns a rusty red. A shadow moves over the land.

I see my brother’s head, bowed in a field of elephant grass, listening for the CAW! and searching for the trail that will lead him back to me. Across the field, where she cannot see him but can see me, I see a frightened little girl who has lost her brother. She throws her head back and cries, “CAW!” And the crow carries her message and cries out to her brother, “CAW!” He raises his head, and I hear him, “CAW!” Before they find their way back to each other to make it home before the coming storm, blood consumes them. They step into a pool that swallows them like quicksand. The more violently they fight, the faster it sucks them in until they drown.

And in less than an instant, I am sitting in the lodge, facing Crow. To any outsider who dares to listen, the conversation might sound like a series of CAW!s, one indistinguishable from the others.

He tells me:

“Fear is the external power that dark heart needs to keep beating. It requires bloodshed as it drains Humanity of power. Love is the heart’s own self sustaining Source of energy that guides Humanity from a loftier perspective, and turns the evil heart to stone. Ask that the love in our hearts guide us.”

With this, he vanishes.

I open my eyes. I stare at the lines the morning sun coming through the blinds makes on the ceiling. No matter how lost in the wilderness I ever become, I can always count on the crow to bring me a message from my brother. But it is up to me to heed it.

I get out of bed to call my brother for the first time in years. I catch him at home. He answers, “Hello?”

The Vapor Sword

Last night, I dreamed I was being handed what I can only describe as a vapor sword, something largely invisible in the shape of a Roman short sword that was sketchily outlined in broken wisps of cloud stuff. I take it as a message from my unconscious that the weapon on which I can rely is not physical, but intellectual, if not spiritual.

Fantômas: An Insolent and Surrealistic Source of the Superhero

Book cover painting by Mikael Eriksson

By Dan Hagen

If you’re tracking the origin of the American superhero genre, you’ll find one path winds inevitably back to Paris.

Much of American popular culture seems to have been anticipated in France decades before, and that includes the costumed supermen who engage in titanic struggles of good versus evil and always narrowly escape the endless fiendish traps that are set for them.

The superhero emerged in the U.S. in the 1930s’ pulp magazines and comic books, a fantasy antidote to the powerlessness and despair experienced by millions during the Great Depression.

But such characters had already captivated the attention of the French public at the turn of the century, although they were often presented not as heroes but as ruthless criminals. The assumption seemed to be that a person who had abilities far above those of the common herd of humanity would use those abilities to exploit that herd. Probably a safe assumption, at that.

It’s useful to remember how very weird the end of the 19^th century must have seemed to the people who experienced it, the press of technological change on society even exceeding what we undergo at the beginning of the 21^st century.

The most famous image of Fantomas

Look at Paris in La Belle Époque, particularly from the 1890s on — the newly electrified City of Lights a beacon to the world; the new telephone breaking the old rules of time and space as effectively as telepathy; a new subway system and the new automobiles permitting fluid movement, shifting identities and new opportunities for criminality. Even flying machines were visible on the horizon.

This juxtaposition of the commonplace and the seemingly fantastic would inform the 1920s artistic movement known as surrealism, the aim of which was to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” And it’s in that hypnagogic space where we will find the secret lair of the superhero.

“At the founding of their movement, the surrealists drew inspiration from currents of psychological anxiety and social rebellion that ran through certain expressions of mass culture, such as fantastic popular fiction and sensationalist journalism,” wrote Robin Walz in “Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth Century Paris.”

Before World War I, a ruthless, faceless superman called Fantômas schemed, feinted and glided through adventures in 32 serialized novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain and in five Gaumont silent films by the brilliant director Louis Feuillade.

Fantômas particularly caught the fancy of the surrealists, cutting-edge artists like Belgian painter Rene Magritte who created a 1943 homage called “The Backfire” or “Le Retour de Flamme.”

This translates as “The Flame Returns,” essayist David Kalat noted. “Some destructive, primal force has returned. It threatens our end.”

“The picture depicts a masked villain bestride a helpless city: a rather on-the-nose metaphor for the dark times of the day, and the globe-spanning influence of supercriminals like Adolph Hitler.” Magritte knew his fascism-besieged audience would instantly recognize the reference to Fantômas.

Fantômas had predecessors, notably Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail’s 19^th century criminal adventurer-turned-hero Rocambole, who appeared in novels from 1857 to 1869. Another inspiration was Léon Sazie’s Zigomar, a murderous master criminal who bowed Dec. 7, 1909, in a feuilleton or serial in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin. His symbol of a flaming red “Z” may have inspired Johnston McCulley’s Zorro a decade later.

Fantômas also had arguably even weirder contemporaries like the Nyctalope, a superhero with an artificial heart who could see in the dark. He appeared in novels by Jean de La Hire published between 1911 and 1944 (meaning that the Nyctalope holds the dubious distinction of being the only superhero to finish up collaborating with the Nazis in occupied France).

But it was Fantômas who captured the attention of the public and the avant garde, a shadowy figure who somehow anticipated the sinister, exciting zeitgeist of the new century.

“The narrative trappings of Fantômas were arcane, melodramatic, Belle Epoque schlock — the ‘family circle’ of principal players, the Manichean opposition of good versus evil, the sublimity of overstated rhetoric and the spectator’s total pleasure in riding along for the performance,” Walz wrote.

The pleasures of the novels were not literary. Like the science fiction novels of A.E. Van Vogt and the Arabian Nights tales, the books offered hypnagogic escapism, a sense of wandering through the infra-logical, identity-fluid, symbolic demimonde that we touch between wakefulness and sleep.

Fantômas was a figure set against, not a literary landscape, but a literary dreamscape, or perhaps nightmarescape. He left an enemy suspended in giant bells, raining blood and gems. He killed another by having her long hair caught in that fiendish new contraption, a washing machine. He left the fingerprints of others by using gloves of human skin. He secreted razor blades inside the shoes for sale in a department store, and replaced the bottles of perfume with bottles of acid. He destroyed everyone on board an ocean liner by releasing plague-infested rats onto the ship. He placed enemies face up on a guillotine, so they could see what was coming.

And yet the dreams and nightmares were somehow those of an era, an age.

“Fantômas exceeded the boundaries of its melodramatic trappings,” Walz said. “Moral restitution was fundamentally denied through the motif of the escape of Fantômas at the end of each episode. All the reader was left with was an endless, yet predictable string of murders, thefts, disguises, pursuits, traps, confrontations, arrests and escape — and not a bit of it plausible.”

My favorite example of that comes from the first of the groundbreaking Fantômas films, in which the supercriminal escapes by leaving his captors holding not the bag but his arms, which turn out to be fake and detachable. Boy, that’s planning ahead.

Yet as laughable as the adventures are at times, they are almost equally unsettling because of the casual way they are peppered with vicious mass murders.

“While the classic British whodunit affirms rational order through the intervention of saintly detectives like Inspector French and Miss Marple, Fantômas tends to undermine any notion of stability or ultimate purpose,” observed Geoffrey O'Brien in the Village Voice. “To sustain the series' open-ended structure, crime must always triumph, and Fantômas is no Robin Hood.

Ernest Moerman's 1937 "Monsieur Fantomas," an homage to the 1913 serial

“With his blend of technical elegance and cruelty … he infects a whole ocean liner with plague — he foreshadows a peculiarly modern type of gratuitous killer. The novels that chart his mythos are themselves amoral: there is no pretense of edification, but rather a frankly perverse fascination with terror and death-dealing. Any possible ethical concerns are further distorted by ambiguity. Both Fantômas and his nemesis, Inspector Juve, spend most of their time in disguise, so that it’s hard to tell who anyone is. The only certainty is that fairly soon another body will fall.”

Walz wrote, “As the series continues, Fantômas’s number of aliases diminishes and increasingly he assumes his role en cagoule, in black tights, cape and cowl.” An evil Batman, in other words.

“Think Batman, and then think what would happen if Batman had no Bruce Wayne,” Kalat wrote. “Fantômas is a fictional identity, a mask, a brand name for crime. But Allain and Souvestre never allow Fantômas to remove that mask, to reveal the man beneath. We get snippets of his back story: we meet his lover, his daughter and his son, we visit his hometown, and we even learn his real name, but none of these fragments adds up to anything substantial.”

All this anticipates the American super hero sagas of much later in the 20^th century — the breathless melodrama, the astounding abilities, the never-ending seesawing battle of criminal and crimefighter, the elaborate death traps, the bizarre gadgets and, especially, the fluidity of the secret identity.

I’ve explored this particular curious convention before, in the essay “The Mystery of the Menacing Mirror Men” and in “The Secret Identity of Don Draper.” I don’t fully know what it means. It’s as mysterious as Fantômas himself. I just know that it means something, it’s uncannily dreamlike and it’s unmistakably there.

Both Fantômas and his archenemy easily assume the identities of others, while the secret of Fantômas’ own “real” identity, if any, is never pierced.

“The characters in Fantômas are not merely ‘disguised’ as someone else,” Walz observed. “For the practical purposes of the novel, they actually have to be someone else.”

Right and wrong, good and evil, order and chaos, forever changing position in an endless, dizzying waltz. Underlining the symbolism, Fantômas and Juve also disguise themselves flawlessly as each other.

That has to raise a psychological and aesthetic question — are we really dealing with two people in opposition here, or with the opposing elements within one person?

“In Jungian psychology, the shadow or ‘shadow aspect’ may refer to (1) the entirety of the unconscious, i.e., everything of which a person is not fully conscious, or (2) an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not recognize in itself,” Wikipedia notes. “Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one’s personality, the shadow is largely negative. There are, however, positive aspects which may also remain hidden in one’s shadow (especially in people with low self-esteem).

“Contrary to a Freudian conceptualization of shadow, therefore, the Jungian shadow often refers to all that lies outside the light of consciousness, and may be positive or negative. ‘Everyone carries a shadow,’ Jung wrote, ‘and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.’ It may be (in part) one's link to more primitive animal instincts, which are superseded during early childhood by the conscious mind.’”

This Shadow archetype, Jung thought, is the source of the mechanism of psychological projection — of seeing one’s own unperceived faults in others as a way of escaping full realization of them and confrontation with them.

“These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world,” Wikipedia said.  “Jung also believed that ‘in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness — or perhaps because of this — the shadow is the seat of creativity’ so that for some, it may be, ‘the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow ... represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar.’”

Are these mirroring masks the popular culture shadow of Jung’s Shadow, lengthening itself across cultures, nations and centuries — evidence, therefore, that within human nature of all of us, of each us, lurk secret identities, doubles, dark and light?

I don’t know. But I do know this, that the creators of the contemporary iterations of superheroes, in a quest to make the material seemingly more “adult,” increasingly give up the concept of the “secret identity,” and do so at their peril. They may be cutting off one of the deepest wellsprings of dreamlike psychological power that is available to them.

Superheroes, after all, do not derive their vast power from the real, but from the surreal.

Sources: "Crime After Crime", by Geoffrey O'Brien. From the Village Voice, August 18, 1986: review of Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, New York: William Morrow, 1986

“Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early 20^th Century Paris” by Robin Walz

“Shadowmen: Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction” by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier

“The Long Arm of Fantômas” by David Kalat, an essay in “Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives”

"Fantomas" became a comic-strip serialized the weekly Gavroche during World War II

Whether super hero or a super criminal, it's important that you know how to make a properly bombastic entrance