In her sublime A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland describes an inner dilemma that she experienced during her experiments with silence and solitude. It’s a dilemma that has become highly personal for me as well:
Then I noticed something shocking. I had come to Weardale for four conscious reasons: to study and think about silence, to find out if it was delightful for me, to deepen my prayer life and to write better. I was indeed doing and enjoying all the first three, but I was not, in fact, writing. Or, to be more precise, I was not writing any fiction and certainly not of the kind I wanted to write. . . . The desire to write, to tell stories that pull my thoughts and emotions together, has been something that I have lived with and found integral to my sense of well-being, even of identity, for as long as I can remember. Now quite simply stories did not spring to mind; my imagination did not take a narrative form. I had in a peculiarly literal way “lost the plot.” I found this disturbing. . . .
It was commonplace, almost a cliché, that silence and solitude are good for the creative artist and particularly for writers: “the world is too much with us,” we need privacy and peace, and a minimum of interruption because “solitude is the school for genius” . . . .
So it had seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could go and lurk up on a high moor, put in the disciplined practice of contemplation and meditation, and thus become both a better, more prolific imaginative writer and more safely and intensely engaged in the life of prayer.
To put it at its simplest, I was now being proved wrong. . . .
So a new and, I have to say, painful question developed for me, coiled within the pleasure and excitement of my growing silent life. Is it possible to have both—to be the person who prays, who seeks union with the divine and to be the person who writes, and in particular writes prose narratives? I was very much aware that I have always believed that silence, and particularly silence in “nature,” was supposed to stimulate both artistic creativity and religious spirituality. That was not what I was experiencing. . . .
I was learning, with different degrees of acceptance, frustration, willingness, and resistance, that I could not be silent and at the same time be creating new words and new worlds. Silence has no narrative. Silence intensifies sensation, but blurs the sense of time.
I began to feel that this means, or might mean, that I had to make radical choices about who I chose to be. Could I be happy to give up writing? Could I be contented with a more active and businesslike kind of religious practice? The answer to both questions, most of the time, was “no.”
I had a problem.
Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 189, 190, 192, 193.
This links up directly with a passage from an essay by Walker Percy that burned itself into my consciousness permanently when I first read it circa 1995 or 1996:
While no serious novelist knows for sure where his writing comes from, I have the strongest feeling that, whatever else the benefits of the Catholic faith, it is of a particularly felicitous use to the novelist. Indeed, if one had to design a religion for novelists, I can think of no better. What distinguishes Judeo-Christianity in general from other world religions is its emphasis on the value of the individual person, its view of man as a creature in trouble, seeking to get out of it, and accordingly on the move. Add to this anthropology the special marks of the Catholic Church: the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which, whatever else they do, come for the highest significance upon the ordinary things of this world, read, wind, water, touch, breath, words, talking, listening–and what do you have? You have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a searching and a finding.
Such a view of man as wayfarer is, I submit, nothing else than a recipe for the best novel-writing from Dante to Dostoevsky. Even an excellent atheist novelist like Sartre borrows from this traditional anthropology for the upside-down pilgrimage of his characters into absurdity.
It is no accident, I think, that the great religions of the East, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, with their devaluation of the individual and of reality itself, are not notable for the novels of their devotees. . . .
Show me a young California novelist raised in Taoism who spends his life meditating on the Way and I’ll show you a bad novelist.
Show me a lapsed Catholic who writes a good novel about being a young Communist at Columbia and I’ll show you a novelist who owes more to Sister Gertrude at Sacred Heart in Brooklyn, who slapped him clean out of his seat for disrespect to the Eucharist, than he owes to all of Marxist dialectic.
In the end, ten boring Hail Marys are worth more to the novelist than ten hours of Joseph Campbell on TV.
Walker Percy, “The Holiness of the Ordinary,” in Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: The Noonday Press, 1992), 369-370.
The difference between Percy and Maitland, of course, is that Maitland is not talking about the respective benefits or detriments to literary creativity that attach to one or the other of the two generally recognized global hemispheric religious traditions. Instead, she’s talking about a possible conflict between creativity and the deepening of spirituality through silence in general, including within the Western traditions.
Quentin S. Crisp also offered a personal take on the potential conflict between the “Eastern” traditions and literary creativity in his Teeming Brain interview:
Last year I went on a meditation retreat. In 10 or so days, I spent about a hundred hours meditating, observing “noble silence” the whole time, and so on. This was an interesting experience, which has had some beneficial effects for me. One result of this retreat was that, shortly after I came back from it, I began researching and writing what I intended as a book-length essay entitled Fascination and Liberation, exploring the question of whether there is a conflict between creativity and the Eastern form of enlightenment. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish that essay, because I had an experience, after I’d written two or three chapters, in which it seemed to me that my psychic antibodies decisively rejected Buddhism. Interestingly, the rejection felt as if it happened in Zen terms. I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, “My Zen cuts down mountains.” My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.
Now I feel a little as if the Buddhism is creeping back, but I mention all this simply in order to illustrate that there is, in my life, a fundamental sense of conflict between something that I am calling “Buddhism” and my creative impulse. People may wish to say that the thing that is in conflict with my creativity is not Buddhism—that’s fine. I understand that words can mean different things to different people, and, further, that people can have different relationships with complex abstract entities such as Buddhism. To me, anyway, the entity in my life that conflicts with my creativity is Buddhism.
Interview with Quentin S. Crisp: “I Have a Buddhist Voice in My Head”