Emotion and the Ocean

I was noodling around in a bookstore today, and came across a book I had read a review of some time ago, “Trip to Echo Spring”, which deals with the intersection of creativity and alcoholism.  It is likely a book I should read, since alcohol has played an important role in my life for some time.  I can’t say I have wrestled with alcohol: on the contrary, it has unquestionably been a net boon to me.  All the same, why I drink is to me a very interesting question.

This book seemingly has the metaphor of water throughout it–she visits the sites where several writers, like Virginian Woolf, drowned themselves, and she deals with a story “The Swimmer”–and I would submit that this metaphor has occurred in my own dreams.  I was once told more or less explicitly to stop drinking and start swimming.  I took this literally, and bought myself a suit and some goggles, but I don’t like swimming.  It’s funny, but it’s true.  I likely will take it up before long, but I am for now dealing at its root with my own unfreedom, exploring it, understanding it, massaging it, to use the Kum Nye metaphor.

And I see now that the image is metaphorical.

Let us let water represent emotion, and the ocean deep, uncontrolled emotion, and the swimmer someone reconciling himself to emotion.

Can we not posit that many reject, in what we might term Ordinary State of Consciousness (OCS), the possibility of the ocean?  When I say emotion, I mean all emotions, good and bad: joy, love, hate, sadness, anger, attachment, obsession, sex, sex, sex, power, powerlessness, belonging, rejection.  Emotions have all the shades and varieties of clouds.  None are the same, even if we speak of types out of the necessities imposed by language.

And can we not posit that many writers, in unleashing their creative potential, always unleash at the same time unprocessed demons–which I have recently begun to believe are those cages we have internalized that seek to limit us?  Can we not say, perhaps, that they are driven to create by what they fear, and simultaneously liberated and enslaved by entering through intoxicants Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

Can we not see the ocean as potential, and grant the possibility of rejecting this potential in ordinary waking states?  Can we not say that people with serious, deep emotional issues are afflicted by dryness without alcohol, and an admixture of terror and joy which get expressed through creative synthesis when high in some form or other?

As I said a few posts ago, Charles Bukowski’s tombstone apparently reads “Don’t Try”.  Can we not add: “Let it”, where it is a spontaneous flow which emerges when allowed? He was an alcoholic from an early age (13, if memory serves).  He apparently tried early on, and failed.  Alcohol let him move without trying.  That is why he consumed so much of it.

It not the task then, liberating creative energy without lust, without fear, without panic, without compulsion?  Has not most of the creative energy of the last century within our dominant cultural sphere been traumatic and unhelpful, because mixed of both toxic and life-bearing elements?

I am thinking out loud here, but I think there are some thoughts here worth considering deeply.