musing on
the muse

[number three. 2. 24. 08]

This is the third  issue of musing on the muse, my new monthly newsletter about creativity. If you don't want to receive more musings, click this  unsubscribe link. On the other hand, you can forward this to anyone you think might be interested.
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A Conversation

I met a man named Karl Knobler at the closing party for Dead Mother, the recent TJT production I was in.  He’s a psychologist, about my age, and we immediately began the kind of allusive conversation full of digressions and surprising sudden turns that feels very similar to Jazz. The kind of conversation I take delight in. As we jumped between a few dozen topics, Karl mentioned the idea of “Affective inner self-regulation” if I remember correctly. To explain the concept,  he told me how women, whether they have had children or not, will exhibit dilation of the pupils when hearing a baby cry.  Men’s pupils do not dilate under those circumstances unless they have already become fathers.  Reflecting on this later, I was reminded of some lines from a poem by Rilke: “…that harsh hand / that kneaded him as if to change his shape.” (Robert Bly, Tr.)¹ and thought about the ways we are worked upon by the aggregate of experience, time, the natural world, the stories we live -- in other words, life -- until we become utterly transformed.  When thinking about creativity, I most often imagine people as the creators. But, in this moment, we become the material of some other power’s creativity.

try this:
Do a ten minute timed writing experiment.  Alternate beginning each sentence with “Once I was….” and “Now I am…”  Complete each sentence as you go, writing as quickly as you can, not allowing your hand to ever stop moving on the page until the 10 minutes is up.

Tips

Let go of any need to “make sense.”  When I tried the exercise just now, some of the paired sentences that came up were complete surprises like:

“…Once I was hungry all day / Now I feed wolves… Once I barked in confusion, circling the city / Now I know how to breathe…” ¹

¹ For the rest of the poem by Rilke and my free-write, as well as more thoughts on the first paragraph above, visit my blog

Read:
The Church of 80% Sincerity
by David Roche

This one-of-a-kind creation is a moving, wise, sidesplitting, new memoir by a treasured friend and colleague who is a disarming and generous actor, writer, speaker and activist.  If you've seen David perform his solo piece with the same name as the book, don't expect merely a printed script of the show. The book stands on its own, though it certainly works  as a companion to the theatre piece (which I encourage you to see whenever David shows up in your area.)  I had the great pleasure of directing David in a collaborative theatre piece, Opening to You,  with Traveling Jewish Theatre.  David was born with hemangioma, a facial abnormality. Treatment  with radiation, caused further disfigurement. David has transformed this "hardship" into a lens through which he can see the world in wondrous and hilarious particularity.  As Publisher's Weekly wrote: "He’s used to people staring at him, and he admits he’s been tempted to respond to pestering, obnoxious boys by saying, 'Well, my face is like this because when I was a little boy like you, I touched my wee-wee.' He’s well aware that people find him inspiring, but he doesn’t try to hide his flaws, and that makes him more inspiring.”

The Creative Moment
a workshop with
corey fischer

saturday v march 8 
2pm - 5pm  
western sky studio
2525 8^th  street  berkeley

You’ve learned that you can’t step in
the same river twice.
But even so, putting your feet into the water can become a dry habit sooner or later. What happened to the exhilaration and excitement that carried you so far along your particular Journey?

Maybe you need to [re] discover play. In Sanskrit it’s called lila. And it carries a lot more meaning than the English word: play as creation, as delight in the present moment.

in the three hours we’ll spend together,
we’ll overturn the post-industrial rule that only "professional" artists are entitled to express their creativity. In the safety of each others’ positive witness,
we’ll learn how to make a safe place in which we can play with movement, voice, language, silence, space, shape and imagination.
Through these elements, I’ll introduce you to some ways of touching your own creative energy. You’ll leave with packets of metaphorical seeds to plant in your inner garden.

$50 tuition
($40 before march 5)

mail check to:
corey fischer 
20 sunnyside ave
suite a v mill valley ca v 94941

or, click to pay online (brown paper tickets)

or, for more info, click here