Karen Nilsen

Owning Your Shadow Part 2

Link to video on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/Dpv6g992iVM

My mom said some strange things in the months leading up to her death.  Being an odd person myself, I listened to everything she said with an open mind, and I am glad now I did, as she shared many treasures, insights that I have returned to again and again in the decades since her passing.  For instance, one week before she died, she told me that I needed to buy the box set DVDs of the Star Wars original trilogy.  This was strange to me at first because neither Mom nor I had ever been intense Star Wars fans.  Lord of the Rings was more our cup of tea.  Certainly the fact that Mom didn’t even own Star Wars on VHS or DVD at that point was telling.  She read books voraciously and watched movies voraciously and owned hundreds of both, and no Star Wars amongst them.

Anyway, a few weeks later, I was in the store and noticed the Star Wars DVD box set with a bonus disc—this was early 2005, so whatever box set that was.  Remembering what Mom had said, I bought it and one weekend soon after, watched the movies back to back, then the interviews and various featurettes, all the while haunted by Mom’s lingering presence.  As a result of this experience, I developed a great appreciation for George Lucas as an innovator in his field, a risk-taker who had the foresight to understand merchandizing and other creative income streams long before such things were commonplace, much in the same way I admire Charles Dickens not only as a storyteller but as a businessman with uncanny instincts.  Creativity comes in many, many forms.  I think all of us tend to compartmentalize impulses such as creativity in response to the ever increasing complexity of our environments, and although it’s an understandable impulse, it leads us to limit ourselves and others before we even get started.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they aren’t creative, even though they started their own businesses.  It takes creativity to start a business, all right?  Creativity is basically the ability to solve problems.  As a fiction writer, I started telling myself stories as a child to solve the seemingly insurmountable emotional problems I faced.  I think many artists get started in much the same way.

All right, back to Star Wars.  One of the most interesting things I learned about how George Lucas developed the concept of Star Wars was its relation to Joseph Campbell’s work with archetypes and myths, specifically the hero’s journey.  Lucas followed this classic story arc in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi with an almost mathematical precision, making the original Star Wars trilogy a perfect way to reconnect with basic archetypal drives.  Whenever I’m between writing projects and need a jolt of adrenaline to my sluggish subconscious, I watch the original Star Wars trilogy.  I also watch Disney’s Fantasias, both the original and Fantasia 2000, as well as their classic fairytale collection—my favorite of these is Sleeping Beauty, partly because it incorporates large swathes of Tchaikovsky’s ballet of the same name and partly because of the animation style and partly because of the story and character development—as a bonus at the end of this episode, I’ll read a blog post I wrote years ago about Sleeping Beauty and why I love it so much.  Right now, I’m re-watching some of Stanley Kubrick’s films and reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a collection of dark fairytale retellings, to get my subconscious in the proper mood to continue work on a gothic fantasy novel I started last year.

Anyway, as I hinted, I believe Star Wars and some of Disney’s cartoons hold so much archetypal power because of the music and imagery.  Because written and spoken language constructs so much of shared human reality, we all suffer a certain amount of word fatigue.  This is particularly true for writers who attempt to use language in original ways to express their creativity.  I spoke about perfectionism and writer’s block in the last episode.  I believe word fatigue can also be a form of writer’s block.  One of the best ways I’ve found to overcome word fatigue is working on a jigsaw puzzle after a stint at the keyboard, particularly jigsaw puzzles of antique maps or fantasy art.  Examining a painting, a purely visual art, in the minute form of jigsaw puzzle pieces, helps my brain recover its words so I can return to the keyboard refreshed.  This same process works on a much larger level by watching movies such as the original Star Wars trilogy or Fantasia between finishing one novel and starting the next.  I also reread fairytales and other deeply archetypal stories and pore through fantasy art books while listening to music.  The works of genius fantasy painters such as Michael Whelan and Kinuko Craft capture our archetypal souls and reflect them back to us, much as gifted musicians can return us to a place of no words, just pure emotions.  I also study the symbolism of Tarot cards and then make collages.  I just finished a collage of the Underworld, which started with me pairing a grocery store ad depicting a pomegranate and a cartoon image of monsters dressed in modern attire in an urban scene, crossing the street and talking on their cell phones—I believe it was a New Yorker cover, though unfortunately I can’t remember now.  I collect scrapbooking materials from many different places, cut out the images that intrigue me, and then burn the remains, so it’s hard to remember where all the images come from.  I also keep a dream journal when it seems particularly useful.  I don’t write down all my dreams, not even close, just the ones that seem to communicate a special message that I want to puzzle over further.  The act of writing these images down, putting them into words, helps me remember them longer and think about them in a different way, which can sometimes lead to important insights.

So these are all the ways I reconnect with my subconscious when I need its creative adrenaline to fuel the start of a new project or continue an ongoing one.  Aside from movie dialogue, music lyrics, and the text of dreams and fairytales, most of these methods bypass words entirely, which can be such a relief to a beleaguered writer’s brain.  I don’t know how this might work for other creative types—for instance, perhaps visual artists enjoy reading novels to recover from too many images crowding their minds?  My mother, who was a painter, a potter, and toward the end of her life, a fiber artist, loved novels, histories, and true crime stories, so I sense there might be something to this idea, that those of us who labor in one art regain focus sometimes by playing in another art form.

One never knows how or what type of exposure will affect one’s subconscious, which is why it’s so important to get out and experience a wide variety of different places and activities as budget and time allows.  For instance, I love visiting antique stores and junk shops—sometimes I buy items, but more often, I just go to browse.  A year or so ago, I came across a creepy carnival mask in one of these stores, and the idea for a story popped into my mind, the same novel-in-progress I mentioned earlier when talking about Stanley Kubrik and Angela Carter.  Such inspirations can even happen at the most prosaic of day jobs.  Over 15 years ago, when I was putting the finishing touches on The Witch Awakening and tearing apart the first draft of Tapestry Lion, I worked as a secretary/receptionist at a program with a phoenix in its logo.  One morning after seeing this phoenix for over a year on the company letterhead, posters, etc, I woke from a dream I couldn’t remember with a vision in my mind—the vision turned out to be the pivotal scene of The Landers Saga.

I knew in that moment that I was indeed writing a series and that it would have four novels:  The Witch Awakening, Tapestry Lion, Phoenix Ashes, and The Curious Fear of High and Lonely Places.  I knew in that moment exactly how I needed to fix Tapestry Lion, the novel I had struggled over for five years because of significant personal loss and extreme stress during that time.  I didn’t have an outline—I’m not much of an outliner, which I’ll get into in a minute—but images, images which seared me to my bones and that I had to capture in words.  The details would work themselves out in the writing process, but those images had me in their grip until I could get them out and on the page.  If I’m not creating, if I’m not telling a story, I don’t feel fully alive, and I have arranged my life as best I can to facilitate a regular creative routine.  It’s not a life that many people understand, but that’s okay.  I don’t need them to understand in order to be happy and grateful for what I have.

I encourage writers who want to engage more fully with archetypes to study stories like Star Wars—it certainly has helped me—but I wouldn’t recommend stopping there.  While the original Star Wars trilogy is a great story, it has its limitations.  For instance, I quibble with its language around emotion.  This is not a criticism of Star Wars specifically, but of our culture in general.  I believe modern society is a gift in many ways—we have so many conveniences now that our ancestors couldn’t even have dreamt of.  However, those same conveniences have perpetuated an illusion of control that we simply don’t have and will never have.  We have a great deal of unacknowledged anxiety around this illusion of control.  I remember all the screwy advice I got when I quit my day job to finish Phoenix Ashes.   I had planned to quit my job for a couple of years for a variety of reasons, had saved up a little money to do so, even had a day job lined up for the summer.  However, many mostly well-meaning people around me just couldn’t understand what I was doing.  I told them what I’ll tell you now.  The security of a job, any job, is an illusion.  That job could be gone tomorrow, and in the United States at least, there’s not much of a safety net for most people as I had suspected and then found out for sure last year when I was laid off.  And that’s just a job.  Death can come at any time, even with all our annual check-ups and drugs and other modern conveniences.  My mother died at the age of 56—I wish she’d had more time.  She was an amazing artist.  My dad was an amazing artist too.  Now they’re both gone, but they both left a remarkable creative legacy, and I feel blessed to have had them in my life for as long as I did.  Thank God they fit as much as they could into the time that they had.  Neither of them ever made a lot of money, but they left the world a far richer place in all the most important ways, and I live by their example.

As artists, we must seek catharsis and awe, not distraction.  We must live with our full emotional range, and that can be a frightening task for many of us.  I cry frequently over movies and books, and if others are around me, they often apologize to me for my tears, as if they did a bad thing by encouraging me to see a film that made me feel something.  It’s well-meant, but rather silly to me.  I love crying at movies just as much as I love laughing.  I wrote my novels because anger and grief drove me.  I wrote my novels to connect with my passion and intense desire to engage with my inner life and bring it outwards.  I published my novels because of my joy in the world I had created, but also because I was frustrated with my day job and jealous of authors who didn’t need day jobs to support themselves.  It’s okay to be angry.  It’s okay to be sad.  It’s okay to be jealous.  It’s okay to be happy.  Emotions in and of themselves are states of being, not doing.  Emotions are fuel, energy to be channeled into actions.  A car can have a full tank of fuel, but if you don’t turn the key in the ignition, that fuel just sits there, existing in its liquid state.  The fuel won’t be transformed and used to power the car unless you take an action.  If your action involves driving that car recklessly and perhaps hurting yourself and others, it’s not the fault of the fuel.  So it is with our more difficult emotions, such as anger, jealousy, and sadness.  They’re just fuel.  It’s what you do—or don’t do—with the fuel that deserves a moral judgment, not the fuel itself.

Many of us struggle with identifying and fully feeling our emotions because of how we grew up.  For instance, if there were toxic expressions of anger in our families, if only certain people were allowed to express anger while others were punished for even feeling anger, much less expressing it, then we will most certainly struggle as adults with our anger.  If we grew up in stoic families, families which feared emotion as a loss of control, we’re going to struggle with losing control creatively.  It’s impossible to experience the thrill of inspiration if we can’t let our conscious minds lose control and wander occasionally.  It’s okay to have no idea what comes next.  It’s necessary to have no idea what comes next sometimes—such mental silences leave the door open for the muse to whisper her wonderful intuitions.  I’ve had characters show up in a scene while I’m writing, characters I had no idea existed until that moment.  Characters who sometimes go on to upset the whole narrative in a glorious mess.

I love these moments—if I have no idea where the story is going next, it energizes me to keep writing and see what happens next.  When I wrote The Witch Awakening, I had no idea it was the first book in a series.  I didn’t even know how it was going to end until I reached the last couple chapters.  Years later, when I had completed the series and went back to reread The Witch Awakening, it shocked me to realize how my subconscious had sprinkled so many hints and symbols of the ultimate end of the series in The Curious Fear of High and Lonely Places throughout the narrative.   There was one scene in particular that one of my early readers thought I should cut—I remember telling her I couldn’t cut that scene, but I couldn’t explain why at the time.  That scene carried the symbolic weight of the series that my conscious mind had no idea I was writing at the time.

My hope in this series about archetypes is that everyone experiences such moments of being one with the creative flow and having no idea where it’s going next.  Such moments render the act of creation magical.  All right, as promised, I will read my blog post about Sleeping Beauty:

My favorite animated fairy tale has to be Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (a close second would be The Last Unicorn—highly recommend that animated film as well).  Anyway, I love the angular, elegant, highly stylized animation of Sleeping Beauty–it has a different look from most other Disney movies.  I love the character development.  Of all the early Disney princes, Prince Phillip stands out as one of the few who actually gets his own story arc and a distinctive, wisecracking personality as opposed to just being a prop Ken doll prince (I don’t think the poor princes in Snow White and Cinderella even have names–they’re just there to show up at the end and pose with the bride on the wedding cake).  Briar Rose/Aurora comes across as a bit spooky (in a good way, as in being dreamy and mystical), the fairies, especially Meriweather, make me laugh, and the scene where the two kings get drunk is classic.  And then there’s Maleficent — best Disney villainess ever.  She has a pet raven, crashes parties with a big bang, is wonderfully sarcastic, and turns into a dragon–what more can you want?  My mother gave me an eyeglass case with Maleficent on the lid that I treasure to this day, even though it’s falling apart–she bought it on our last major shopping trip together.  That year was the year for Disney villainesses to shine, when all the Goth merchandise took off in a big way.  I remember seeing Maleficent’s picture on a shirt with “Ultimate Goth” printed beneath it on that shopping trip.  My sentiments exactly.

But as much as I love Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, it doesn’t tell the whole story.  Most versions of “The Sleeping Beauty” don’t tell the whole story, and I think that’s a shame.  Case in point:  I have an absolutely gorgeous picture book of “The Sleeping Beauty” written and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman (her paintings for “Saint George and the Dragon” won the Caldecott award–if you’ve never seen this book, find it).  Like almost all versions of “The Sleeping Beauty” out there, this one ends with the prince waking up the princess with a kiss and a wedding.  Sigh.  Given how wonderfully gothic and creepy Hyman’s illustrations can be (her painting of all the poor princes stuck and dying in the thorn hedge still gives me nightmares), I would really liked to have seen how she illustrated the original ending of the story.

Charles Perrault’s ”The Sleeping Beauty” doesn’t end with the happily ever after kiss and wedding.  No, in Perrault’s version, the prince’s mother turns out to be an ogress (perhaps she inspired Maleficent).  The prince, fearful of his mother’s temper, keeps his marriage to Sleeping Beauty a secret.  He and Sleeping Beauty produce two children (Dawn and Day) before his mother discovers her son’s big secret.  She is not pleased, and when the prince goes off to war, Mommy-Dearest-the-ogress goes to the palace cook and tells him that she wants her granddaughter Dawn to eat for dinner (with ”a tasty sauce” no less).  The cook can’t bring himself to kill Dawn, so he hides her and serves a lamb in her place.  The ogress then demands little Day for dinner and finally Sleeping Beauty herself.  The cook hides them all and somehow fools the prince’s mother with various poor animals sacrificed in their stead and his amazing sauces.  Eventually, however, the ogress discovers the trick.  She orders that the cook, Sleeping Beauty, and the children be thrown into a huge basin filled with snakes, vipers, toads, and “a few spiders.”  Just at the moment that Sleeping Beauty is about to be hurled into the “squirmy, loathsome basin,” the prince returns from battle and saves the day.  In a fit of fury, the ogress throws herself in the pit, and the remaining characters live happily ever after (I don’t know about you, but just being alive after everything they’ve endured would make me happy).

All the remarks in quotes in the previous paragraph come from The Fairy Tale Book:  A Deluxe Golden Book published by Simon and Shuster in 1958 and translated from French by Marie Ponsot.  It was my mom’s book before it was mine, and it’s a wonderful fairy tale book in the sense that reading it probably helped develop my warped sense of humor.  I had forgotten until reading ”The Sleeping Beauty” out loud a few weeks ago to some friends how cleverly written the fairy tales in this book are.   For instance, here’s the paragraph right after the prince awakens Sleeping Beauty:  ”Meanwhile, the other sleepers had wakened, too.  Since they were not falling in love, they were all very hungry.  The maid of honor announced, firmly, ‘Dinner is served.’”  The whole story is full of such dry wit–the bit about the “tasty sauce” in particular made me howl with laughter.

I suspect that Charles Perrault based his “The Sleeping Beauty” on an even earlier tale–there are too many similarities between it and “The Handless Maiden” to be a coincidence.  To read ”The Handless Maiden,” I recommend Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves.  Estes relates “The Handless Maiden” in Chapter 14 and then does an excellent job breaking down the archetypes and discussing their possible meanings, both ancient and modern.

As a perpetual insomniac, the tale of Sleeping Beauty has always held great charm for me–some nights when I’m tossing and turning, I think it would be nice if all I had to do was prick my finger to fall asleep.  And I’d much rather have a handsome prince as my alarm clock then the shrill, plastic apparatus I have now.  Sorry Timex.