Divergent approaches to the creative process

Divergent approaches to the creative process
Arundhati Subramaniam

Euripides, the great Greek playwright, used to retire to a cave, we are told, to write his plays for the annual theatre competitions in the 5th century BC Athens. Film-maker and writer Woody Allen, on the other hand, says he virtually breaks out in hives, and finds himself in a state of acute creative paralysis when he leaves New York for more pastoral surroundings.

Two vastly divergent approaches to the creative process. In the first, art arises out of solitude, reflection, detachment. In the other, it arises out of active engagement with the hurly-burly, the frenetic pace of daily life. (I’ve often wondered what Euripides would have done had he been a turn-of-the-century Mumbai theatrewallah. He’d have probably fled to a bungalow in Alibaug, or just opted out entirely).

Personally, I’m inclined to be sympathetic to the reclusive Euripidean temperament. Eight consecutive weeks in Mumbai, and I’m frayed at the edges, my nerves taut as sitar strings, my mood decidedly tetchy, my conversations laced with a certain cosmic melancholy. I thirst with genuine anguish for freedom from the metropolitan life-sentence from the geographical (and psychological) linearity of the city. From its dense swarms of humanity. From its fascist insistence that we live on its unyielding terms. From its transformation of its inhabitants into mean-spirited, territorial beings, locked into tawdry tenements of personal identity.

And so I dream, like most of my friends do (we’re a motley crew, perennially on the verge of leaving the city). I dream of that wonderful house on the palm-fringed Goan coastline, where poems get written with an effortless fluidity, reminiscent of the rippling waters of the River Mandovi. I dream of sipping cappuccino in a sundappled Venetian trattoria, scribbling verse desultorily, while gazing at the fairytale shimmer of the Canal Grande. I dream of the panoramic mountainside of Shimla, where the shrunken mind regains its former expansiveness, and where I can become an adventurous explorer of inner spaces rather than a mere sentry of my embattled outer frontiers.

Occasionally, those of us who keep threatening to quit the city actually get a chance to escape for spells of time. And yes, of course, it’s marvellous. And no, we often don’t get much creative work done, and even that doesn’t matter much anymore. But then a fortnight elapses, then a month, and the old anxiety returns. Not withdrawal symptoms exactly, but the gnawing question: how long can we stay away? How long can we resist the insidious world of hyper-maya? The neon lights of ‘samsara’? How long will the city let us off the hook? How long before we are claimed again?

And so eventually, we return all of us who dare to dream of inhabiting alternate worlds. Sheepish, muttering under our breaths, threatening that one day we’ll actually ‘do it’, but aware that our karmas are still linked umbilically with this place.

And yet, oddly enough, many of us find that the most creative phase in our lives is actually the return journey. It is somewhere in that transitional bardo state between the dreamworld and the smoggy destination frequently, in fact, in the aircraft that breakthroughs happen. It is here that new ideas are born, that new directions emerge, that the faith to follow one’s star is restored.

Then comes that glorious first week back home when we can actually become tourists in this city all over again gifted with the possibility of looking at ourselves and the world anew. And suddenly we begin to discover once more the magic and romance of this much-mythologised grimy sea-port of western India. The honeymoon starts afresh. Even if we’re aware all along that it seldom lasts more than a week.

And perhaps that’s the way it’s always been. Perhaps Euripides, like the rest of us lesser mortals, secretly pined for the creative flurry of Athenian life during his self-imposed exile in the cave. And perhaps he perversely yearned for solitude when he was back amid the bustle of civic life. And perhaps it was somewhere in the interstices of those two worlds that his great masterpieces were born. ‘Medea’. ‘Hecuba’. And ‘The Trojan Women’.

And perhaps Woody Allen, hammering away at his PC in some plush Manhattan apartment never longing to be any place else is the most blessed of us all?

Arundhati Subramaniam is a poet