On Creating

On Creating

To all my creator friends: musicians, artists, poets, designers, sculptors, dancers, writers, and everyone else in my life whose simple presence brings beauty to my surroundings. And to Alex Grey, for somehow being able to paint the very image that has been inside my head my entire life. Giving me something to look at that reminded me of who I was, and what I was capable of. His art has always looked the same to my eyes, no matter what state of mind I was residing in.

I

Why do you make anything at all, when nobody asked you to?

My answer takes the long way round.

Picture a person who has come into alignment in time: every Jay of their life, every moment they felt something in a meeting and leaned toward or away, all facing one way with the whole they belong to. Are they perfect? Are they different from the person standing right next to them? No. However far down that road I get, I’m still me. I’m still the same person I was forty-two years ago when I entered this world, still the same residual effect of my environment, sitting comfortably between all the mistakes I’ve learned from and all the successes I’ve reached.

One achievement that has narrowly avoided me is a collegiate education. I’m working on that now, late in life, and that’s all right. We don’t get to choose the timing of things, the why or the when or the how; sometimes the most we can do is let them happen, the way the old Vedanta speaks of līlā, creation as a kind of divine play, done for the joy of it.¹ What excites me is studying at Maharishi International University, the school Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded in 1971 around what he called Consciousness-Based education.² It’s an institution built on a wider love of humanity, and on the belief that an education should grow the whole person, résumé and all. That I didn’t spend my time elsewhere feels, in hindsight, like a gift. Beautiful synchronicity.³

And I get to come in on the ground floor of noetic science as a dreamer rather than a scientist: nous, the old Greek word for the knowing that arrives whole, before reason has a chance to assemble it.⁴

II

Meanwhile, what do I do? This. This is what I do: I create.

There exists a reality in which technology has to be restrained by the human mind before any order is restored, and that has been a real hurdle for me. The Greeks kept one word, technē, for both craft and art (the chisel and the statue were the same kind of knowing), and Heidegger warned that modern technology is a way of revealing the world that carries a danger and, folded inside that same danger, a saving power.⁵

For me the saving power is simple: the tool only ever amplifies the hand that holds it. So I treat it as a brush, never a voice. It’s an amazing research tool, and when I’m learning, it explains things to me in ways I’d never considered. Then I write, and it tells me when I’ve gotten something wrong, checks my grammar, and helps me get the work published. Used that way, it’s an incredible thing to have. I can see how it gets misused, too. Once the power of creating is handed over to the tool, the art is no longer a part of the artist. A creation is part of the artist’s soul (a fragment of their character, an explanation of their existence), and some things can’t be imitated. It shows when someone doesn’t care about their work, or how it gets made. What I’m after is the pairing of brush and mind. Zhuangzi tells of a cook whose blade never dulled, because he cut along the grain of the ox; by the end, the hand and the knife were working as one.⁶

The thinker hated the pen, afraid the writer would make him unnecessary. The writer hated the brush for the same reason, and the painter feared the musician. That’s how a lot of people feel right now about artists who use AI. But every artist is the thinker. None of them is the brush.

III

Part of using a brush people aren’t used to is showing them you’re still human underneath it all. In On Forgiving I wrote that I had removed myself from my own equation, that there was no more “I.”⁷ Let me put the I back for a moment, because here the I is the whole point. I can philosophize all day long, and at the end of that day I’m still a husband, still a father, still a family member and a friend. Still human. Whatever the brush happens to be, there is always a person holding it.

And this, for whatever it’s worth, is how I actually talk. Most people don’t listen at this register, so for most of my life I have “dumbed it down,” translated myself into something easier to receive. This is how I actually think, too. And because of how most people are willing to listen, I have spent the better part of my years being quiet. I had plenty to say. The room just wasn’t built for the frequency.

IV

There’s an artist I know who lives and loves to create; her muse is just the way she sees the world, and her brush is a brush. I know poets who have only lately been given permission to sing, because for years no one wanted to listen. They’re a little like Emily Dickinson, who by her own choice kept nearly eighteen hundred poems close, and whom the world mostly did not hear until she was gone.⁸ Plato had a name for what the crowd misreads in people like them: he called the poet’s madness no sickness at all, but a gift of the Muses, a divine manner of seeing.⁹ So when they call you crazy, hear it correctly. That is not crazy. That is being an artist.

And still, I carry my fears. Sometimes I worry this is exactly why I’ll never be a poet, not without years of the practice I never got. Words I’ve read hundreds, even thousands, of times come out of my mouth mispronounced, wrong in the ears of the people around me. A sign that I have more to learn? Of course. If my whole life has been spent inside books, then the work of carrying what’s in them out to other people was never going to live in pen and pad alone. But it also shows me one of the quiet shortcomings of my own mind: I absorb the feeling of a thing, its sentiment, its meaning, without needing to keep the details for long. And because I never gave myself to school until now, no institution ever tested me on any of it. I’ve only ever tested myself, by refusing to stop learning. Does that make me less of an artist? Not for a second. It makes me human. I built these pieces word by word, line by line, then took them apart with a thesaurus and put them back together a dozen times over, and somehow they still land just short of what I’m trying to say.

V

But here is what I’m actually trying to say. The thoughts in our minds did not always have words to hold them. Thousands of years ago, before the vocabulary ever arrived (call it my myth of the beginning), we knew only the one resonating language that ran between us, the world itself as sound: what India’s later traditions of sacred sound came to call Nāda Brahma, the primordial vibration gathered into a single syllable.¹⁰ Then, somewhere, we splintered it. At Babel the one tongue was confounded into many, and we have been translating ourselves ever since.¹¹ Where did we go wrong? If you ask me, I’ll have to check my sources before I answer. It takes a long time, after absorbing it all, to put it back out into the world exactly the way it came in.

And yet the truth underneath all of it is that creativity has always carried the same timeless resonance, no matter the medium, no matter the muse. We make because we were made. Tolkien put it in one line: “we make still by the law in which we’re made”¹² — each of us a small maker in the image of a larger one. The instrument is incidental. The resonance is not.

Nothing made comes from nowhere, either. Whatever gets invented is a binding third, older ideas lashed together until they move as one new thing: a brush is a stick, a tuft of hair, and somebody who wanted a mark to stay. I use the phrase a second way, for the middle term that joins two and lets each go on being itself. It’s the same move both times. What helps enough people gets kept and handed on. What helps no one tends to fall away in time.¹³

Love.

Love of self, love of others, love of life.

Love never fails.¹⁴

The one word that joins all creation in the sky and stays long after the body has gone back to the earth. Dante ended his whole journey on it: the love that moves the sun and the other stars.¹⁵

Long before Dante, Diotima told Socrates that love is the longing to give birth in beauty, in children for some, and for others in poems and laws that outlast the people who made them.¹⁶ I’d add the cathedral, and the song. That is why we create, asked or not. Not to be remembered, but because love insists on taking a form.

The amount I’ve learned in this one lifetime can’t be put into words. So I’m going to spend the rest of it getting my brain onto pages.

The only thing I ask is this: when you read these words, don’t stunt your own growth because the medium doesn’t yet make sense to you. The medium never was the point. Just be. Rest in the bare awareness that comes before the labels arrive, the same stillness I wrote toward in On Seeing.¹⁷

Notes

1. Līlā: in Vedanta, creation understood as divine play, spontaneous and undertaken for its own sake, with nothing it needs to accomplish. The doctrine is first stated in the Brahmasūtra, 2.1.33. Sax, Gods at Play.

2. Maharishi International University was founded in 1971 at the direction of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and began in Goleta and Santa Barbara, California; it moved to Fairfield, Iowa, in 1974, was renamed Maharishi University of Management in 1995, and announced its return to its founding name on December 12, 2019. “Maharishi University of Management Changes Name.” Its curriculum is built around what the founder called Consciousness-Based education.

3. Jung, “Synchronicity.” Jung meant a meaningful coincidence of inner and outer events that no cause connects, and he worked the idea out in dialogue with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The word is used here in its ordinary sense, a fitting arrival, with no claim about an acausal mechanism.

4. Nous is the Greek term for the intuitive intellect that grasps a thing whole, set against discursive reasoning that assembles it in steps. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 6. The modern phrase “noetic sciences,” as in the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded in 1973, borrows the same root for a contested research program; the sentence plays on the Greek word and endorses no field. William James’s “fringe” of consciousness, the dim halo of relations around a clear thought, is a kindred description, offered as resemblance and not as source. James, Principles of Psychology.

5. The Greek technē named craft and art together, as one kind of knowing. Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger gave the lecture in Munich on November 18, 1953 (the Lovitt translation dates it 1955), and published it in 1954. He argues that technology is a mode of revealing; in its final pages the essay turns on Hölderlin’s lines “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also,” and it ends on the piety of questioning.

6. Zhuangzi, Basic Writings, chapter 3, “The Secret of Caring for Life.” Watson spells the cook’s name Ting; Ding is the pinyin. After nineteen years and thousands of oxen, his blade is as good as new, because he follows the natural makeup of the animal.

7. Johnson, On Forgiving: “Now that I more or less consider myself part of the greater person, there’s no more I.” Two sentences later: “So now that I’ve removed myself from my own equation, let’s pull the lens back one more notch.”

8. Dickinson chose not to publish; when Thomas Wentworth Higginson advised her in 1862 to delay, she answered that publishing was foreign to her thought. Fewer than a dozen of her poems appeared in her lifetime, all anonymously. Franklin’s variorum edition counts 1,789. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson.

9. Plato, Phaedrus 244a–245a: among the forms of divine madness (mania) is the poet’s, given by the Muses, a possession that produces what no sane craft can. The crowd’s misreading comes later, at 249c–d, where the many rebuke as out of his mind the man possessed by love of beauty. Plato himself sets this madness apart from the kind produced by human illness (265a).

10. The Vedic and Upaniṣadic roots are the teaching of sacred speech, Śabda-Brahman, and the syllable OM. Nāda-Brahman, sound as Brahman, is the name the later Tantric, yogic, and musicological texts give it, among them the thirteenth-century Saṅgītaratnākara. The popular gloss “the world is sound” is modern. Beck, Sonic Theology.

11. Genesis 11:1–9: humanity shared a single language until, at Babel, it was confounded into many.

12. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia.” The line carries Tolkien’s argument for sub-creation: the maker makes in the manner of the one who made him. The poem was first published complete in the 1988 edition of Tree and Leaf.

13. Johnson, On Joining, draws the binding third out of whole numbers and the physics of confinement, and gives it both senses used here. The term, in either sense, is the author’s.

14. 1 Corinthians 13:8. The King James Version reads “Charity never faileth”; the New International Version, “Love never fails.”

15. Dante, Paradise, canto 33, line 145, the closing verse of the Commedia: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.”

16. Plato, Symposium 206b–212a: Diotima teaches Socrates that erōs is the desire to give birth in beauty, in body or in soul. Her examples of offspring that outlast a maker are the poems of Homer and Hesiod and the laws of Lycurgus and Solon.

17. Johnson, On Seeing, imagines “a human being whose Jays were aligned” (“Picture them all leaning one way”), recalls that most of the prophets “told people to get still, and stay still,” and dreams of “an egoless thought moving through time as a whole.”

Bibliography

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Hackett, 1999.

Beck, Guy L. Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound. University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

Dante Alighieri. Paradise. Translated by Mark Musa. Vol. 3 of The Divine Comedy. Penguin, 1986.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin. 3 vols. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt. Harper & Row, 1977.

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Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Joining. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20711968.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Seeing. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20688697.

Jung, C. G. “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 8. Princeton University Press, 1969.

“Maharishi University of Management Changes Name to Maharishi International University.” Southeast Iowa Union, December 12, 2019. https://www.southeastiowaunion.com/news/maharishi-university-of-management-changes-name-to-maharishi-international-university.

Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.

Plato. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.

Sax, William S., ed. The Gods at Play: Līlā in South Asia. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Mythopoeia.” In Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem Mythopoeia. 2nd ed. Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Zhuangzi. Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. Translated by Burton Watson. Columbia University Press, 1964.

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