Göran Stille

(388 words)
(What is that stirs up in you, what words, ideas, images, thoughts instinctively come to your mind?)

How do I address the issue of me being creative? I believe I am creative. At least I generate new ideas all the time and look at things from perspectives I do not share with others. A distinguished man of science did once judge me as thinking creatively. Later on, this man became president of several prominent American universities. (Not at the same time.)

During some years I easily created images within my head. I thought they were illustrative of what was going on inside me. They helped me open to my emotions and their servants. That is interpretations of what these images meant to me. For years I have been stuck with these analyses.

During this latest year, these old interpretation have been loosening up their grip on me. I have found that now I may interpret the content of one and same dream differently and in varying perspectives.

One of these dreams shows me laying in the middle of a vast field. It looks like a field in the real world. The ground has been prepared for winter and has received a late autumn ploughing. I lay there, face down, in the mud. I do not know how I got to this place and why. In slow motion, I raise my head and glance over the edge of the nearest ploughed ridge. It is almost pitch dark around me.

While writing the above sentences, I occasionally fall asleep. I feel odd doing that. Last night, I slept many hours, so it is weird that I am tired. Does this way to approach my creativity cause me to feel tired. Does my body play me a trick? And what is to gain from this?

After all, I have difficulties in remembering dreams nowadays. Does this have something to do with what I revealed as possible this morning? All the time I produce many interpretations of what is happening with me. I suspect I use these descriptions as a protective layer, a cocoon. This coating makes it difficult for me to continue going deep with my self-reflection. Possibly, I better respect these signs as a border or limit. I better stop my self-reflections from going further.

(476 words)
(Free write about your creative struggle.)

Earlier today I found something odd about my previous writing. Or I better say my style of writing. My flow of words has been adequate to fill the demands of 500 words a day for near to 1250 days. But, my choice of subject to write about has not been free at all. Neither have the type of thoughts I present. I do hang on to these reflections and thoughts about myself that keep showing up in my head. They fill my head as a wasp of fireflies. They glimmer for a few seconds, land on the surface of my text and disappear. I have followed the motto ”just do it”. I invested a significant chunk of hope in that slogan. A desire that I will get out of my dependence on this style I writing. It has not happened, not yet. And near to a million words have been flowing under my verbal bridges.

This morning one of these fireflies presented herself on the screen of my computer. One of the fireflies started to lecture me by saying:

⁃ For you, the act of using a language and words are to a great extent intermixed with being able to live. At least to your feeling of being alive. This intermix originated when you were young and, for the first time, learned to speak. You involved yourself and your soul in pleasing your mother. You believed she was about to abandon you once more. So she did earlier, and at that time a deep wound was created inside you. At the same time, you began to pronounce words and form sentences. You learned to observe what you were doing. You told your mother what you saw. You watched for signs of dislike in your mothers face. And you adjusted your behaviours accordingly. Your ability to use words to find out and express what your needs were, became hampered.

⁃ You carried your art of reflecting on yourself into puberty. Then you picked up the habit of writing the same reflections and thoughts in a black notebook. You brought this addiction with you all through the years until the present age. At 75 years of age, you still perform a lot of self-reflection. You do it too much to be of use to you any more. And the ability to follow these corrective signals they carry is fading out.

⁃ So a significant struggle along your path towards acting out your creativity is to set aside the content you have mentioned. You ought to reduce the amount of self-reflection in your writing. At least avoid letting it dominate.

In conclusion: my first 900000 words of writing has not been a sign of creativity. It has been nothing but a preparation for the step I face now.

 

He lived through life,
with eyes, ears and a mind wide-open.

He never left his naive curiosity,
as others do when growing up.

He never reduced his impressions
or the number of alternate interpretations.

He filled himself with objects,
and fragmented memories.

He did never take something,
for real and as a fact.

He acted as if some extra thought,
could complete the jigsaw puzzle.

He acted as if he had to do it,
although he never believed he could.

He always ended up,
feeling not good enough.

Out there,
many miles away,
something was happening.
The noise from Stalingrad shook my cradle
At the time there was no turtle shield around my senses
Protecting me from vibrations and noises
created by the second world war.

Seventy-five years later,
still no shield.

In answering a question I recieved recently, I write the following letter. I have experienced you as an intelligent human being. Thus I avoid spelling out a solution in straight language. After all, a core thing in writing is ”show not tell”. So here it comes:

Some humans have a rich and sensitive interior. They could not survive without a ”turtle shell” protecting their interior. You can build such a shell by using a lot of bricks made out of ”mental stuff”. Each brick is a thought you construct in order to improve yourself as human. You fasten one thought to other thoughts using ”logic”. The result is that you may become filled with ambition. You feel a need for being more clever, smarter, better doing the things you think is right. Or you might even stretch yourself in doing what you have heard is the right thing to do. Behind building yourself such a shell might be an early event when you though your personal core was attacked or questioned. You may have an experience of feeling hurt or wounded. After many years, I have found that this might be the case for me.

When we write such a shell may turn into a jail. Most certainly we will experience a jail if we want our writing to come from our sensitive core. We may select an action strategy where we separate writing from what our personality needs. We may easily act this way as our surrounding society tells us to think that way. And they do it in big letters. Following this approach, we regard writing as a technology/method or a craftsmanship. It has nothing to do with our personality.

When writing the above lines, I suddenly realised I could as well argue the other way around. What I mean is that until now I have found that I mix writing with an urge for personal development. My texts are self-reflective up to the point of boredom and beyond. I have judged myself as doing the wrong thing following that approach. And I question myself; I thought of myself as an inadequate writer. But starting just now my perspective is changed. Mixing writing and personal development might be the right thing for me to do. It might turn out to be a way to reduce or dissolve my shell. Maybe this way is the only one that is within my reach.

Your friend in writing / Göran Stille

 

One thread through my history
I look back, and two experiences emerge from the background. One is these is a few minutes I encountered with a friend, Catharina, in late 2015. The other is those few minutes with another friend, Bengt, in 2016. I experienced these moments just like that. Immediately, I became curious and asked myself why they happened. But soon, I accepted that they were beyond understanding. At least, they were beyond my level of understanding. In a sense, there is no point in showing or describing these events. Such an act would never carry the values they have given me. I suspect that such an action will even reduce and freeze that space in me that I have established.
Since 1980, I have talked about the value I think that such empty spaces have to humans. That is for 37 years or almost half my life. But, I have not yet been able to change my pattern of action.

Just now
At this moment, October 2017, I believe that my worst enemy is myself. At least my ability to establishing empty spaces in my daily agenda. My overheated urge to be smart, intelligent has been running the show. I have mobilised armed troops in this battle. Old thoughts, attitudes, values and habits are the troops. I even consider them proven in battle.
Everywhere, the troops are now waving with white cloths. No single kind of troops won. I have found and respected an elementary zone of emptiness. This area is even free from ideas on how to maintain or expand it. It is free from teaching others how to get there. In fact, this might be a meaning of ”it is” that I cannot ever express or verbalise in any way.

At a distance
Regard your life as a continuum in both space and time. You have to establish a zone of emptiness somewhere in this continuum. A segment in your everyday agenda where your creativity can play. It is of value to you if you clean it from all of your previous ideas about what you need to do in and with that segment. Your history of ambition, intellect and emotions might well be your worst enemy. Try to align whatever guts you have in giving yourself respect for this empty segment in your living of your life!

I
Monday morning
My morning sleep was broke
The fog is still there
Outside they started to dig into the street
Renovating the waste piping
Their machinery made noise at seven thirty

II
Today we shift the location
for where we live.
Summerhouse to city living
Drove our car fully loaded
from west to east.
Leaving morning dew and a sea like a mirror
for the big city.

I started to think and lost control
What is civilisation?
Where is the best place to live?
Where we are going
or where we were yesterday?

III
Whenever it is crowded and messy to be a human
I fly away using words and thoughts,
always at some distance above the ground.
My conscious abandon me
pinches me from participating
in what is.

IV
She told me to set my goals
on a fair level
not where I thought I ought.
This advice, I have heard before
But kept it at a distant
Did not understand this advice
in my core.

She gave arguments
to support her advice
But I stopped her.
I heard what she said the first time
and was fully occupied
by taking it in emotionally.
I do not need being ambitious
to feel good enough.

A few creatures sat down on a hot wire. They initiated a conversation. They engaged in a difficult subject essential to their survival. They felt obliged to raise above the “mains wire” they were sitting on and engage all the intelligence they had.

 

Göran Stille

2017-08-13

Finally, I have realised that writing and exposing me to the Internet is a stiff challenge to me. Not just joy. Often, I load myself with possibilities and alternate ways to act. I also load myself with a lot of collected material. I store it in bookshelves and on hard drives. It gives me the joy to be curious but also stress and tension. What should I do with all this written material and ways to go. I have to face the fact that my capacity to value, decide and pull through does not handle the present situation.

During most of my life, my mind has been open in many directions. I am a character with a lot of curiosity. A lot of material ignites my interest. With eager, I assure avoiding the point where I still could make decisions. The result is that I collect and store a lot. It is high time to test the opposite way, to value, select and throw away. I need to start this process before it is too late. I have to do it before my kids get all this stuff on their lot. But, where are my guts to do the job? I need far stronger decisions and decisiveness than I have ever mobilised before.

I start by reducing my field of interest to what I am up to, writing. I need to reduce my focus even further. How does writing influence me as a person? My mode when writing? The things about which I write? The style I follow?

One thing is that there is a massive inflow of stuff to which I believe I need to attend. When I follow that, there will be a lot of items written about and the following question: what is the point? But my challenge is to take a grip on myself and move from point A to point B.

Point A means me in the present situation. I have a broad mind and an attitude that is not discriminative. Point B is to act selective and specific. My old way would be to identify weak elements in my character. Followed by blaming myself for not being able to solve this. Which in so many words is nothing but to escape out the window?

Well, there it is. Once, 25 years ago and in a symbolic language, I did show myself this helicopter view of what I do. Instead of taking the fight I escape out the window. Out there I struggle to see things my way, and my way only.

In conclusion, I should have told my mother how I felt at that moment back in 1944. At that time she did not to listen to my story. This rejection hurt me hard. Through my present writing, I now know the story and have the guts to tell it. At the age of 91, my mother died in 2007. Thus I cannot reach her face to face. I have to settle for the second best which is to tell the story here.  My story goes as follows…