Did you know that the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, is the mother of the Muses, the goddesses of art, music, and creativity? Apparently Zeus went looking for Mnemosyne, and…dot dot dot…the Muses were born.
For the moment, I’ll overlook the fact that they “hung out” for nine nights, resulting in (a year later), nine babies being born over the course of nine days. That’s a whole different set of birds and bees than I learned. I’m glad I’m not Greek.
The moral of this story is that Memory is very fertile. Puns aside, the stories hidden inside of us are rich soil just waiting to spawn creativity.
Thinking about this myth, I started reflecting on my two most intense times of remembering. One was the time period after my second miscarriage. The other was tied up with a period of deep depression and disillusionment several years ago. Both experiences were characterized by serious questions, allowing myself to look at and feel things from my past, and opening those processes up to a few close friends.
So that turned into prolific creativity, right? Umm, no. Actually, it turned into a really long dry spell where I could barely even write blog posts. I don’t even have much in my journal after that.
Mnemosyne tells me why. After the union of god and memory, there was a long, silent gestation before the muses were born. And I think that’s what happened to me. I opened up my memories to God, and then I had to wait. And now I’m getting to the part where the creativity is starting to come to fruition.
I’d love to hear your stories of how memory has given birth to creativity.
Image by rubber bullets with a CC license
I like the idea of the dry spells being a time of gestation, of things happening that we don’t always have access to.
My creativity rarely has anything to do, directly, with things I am caring about or working through. When I try to be creative around such things, the results are stilted, dull, contrived.
Sometimes it’s the most stylized efforts that work… like when I rewrote the story of Narcissus along with The Crow and the Pitcher.
Musically, my best work is usually quite arbitrary and random — I start with a meter, a rhythm, a mode, a motif — maybe spelling a word with musical notes. If I start with an idea, it rarely goes anywhere beautiful or meaningful — songs with words have been especially hard, although I have a few that have finally worked out well, some over the course of years of mostly dry spells.
And as far as art goes, I have no idea! I can make lovely pictures of real things when I want to. I don’t often want to. I can make lovely stylized things — bookmarks, wedding program covers, name poems — with spirals and ivy leaves and other folky decorations. I can make lots of apparently random doodles — sandwiches, dancers, strange faces, wedding dresses — and sometimes one of them — the more stylized the more likely — evokes something meaningful. But again, if I try to draw something that means something, it usually fails.
I have often wished that I had a more direct connection between meaning and caring and works of art, so that my heart could draw, compose, or write directly.
A psychologist here. Research on memory tells us that emotion potentiates long-term memories. Somehow, the emotion makes memories stronger. That said, a series of studies of the 9/11 attack in lower Manhattan in 2001 showed that people who, for example, lost a loved one in the attack were no more likely to remember the details of that day than were people who did not suffer a loss of a loved one or of someone they knew. However, they remembered different things. Those who lost loved ones remembered their emotions, their personal experiences. But other people remembered more of the facts.
Psychologists of memory tell us that there are two types of memory–declarative memory (remembering facts) and episodic or procedural memory (which codes memories even without our consciously trying. to remember. Basically, the procedural memory was better with emotion, but not the declarative memory.
In another study, people in downtown Manhattan (close to the attack) and people in mid-town Manhattan (more than three miles from the attack) were tested on their memories of the day. Two major differences arose: (1) the downtown folks reported more smells, sounds, feelings, but the midtown folks reported mostly facts; and (2) both being in functional MRIs during the recall, different parts of the brain were activated in the memories. The downtown folks had hippocampus (responsible for coding things into long-term memory) AND amygdala (the structure that processes fear and anger) activated. The midtown folks only had hippocampal activity.
The point of these for creativity is that the types of memories can be stimulated by different types of retrieval cues. If the cue is emotional, different memories are likely evoked than if the cue is content-based. Emotional memories can often interfere with memories. Strong emotion tends to unfocus most people’s thinking. But emotional attachments to memory fade with time (unless we continually rehearse emotional experiences, which often happens with PTSD). It makes physiological as well as psychological sense that time for incubation might be required after an emotion-loaded memory. Not so much if the memory is recall of procedure or facts.
Yeah, Marcy, I don’t do too well trying to create art out of a specific memory either. I guess my thinking is that when we process memory (as opposed to sealing it off in a bubble), it goes into the soil that our creative work grows from. I’ve also often wished that I could tap directly into specific places in my heart. No such luck.
Dad, thanks for all the great input. I like that perspective on why we might need gestation time after emotional experiences. thanks!
Interesting! As an adolescent and college student, when I was at my most prolific, I think I probably fell into that annoying “writer-y” camp of constant awareness, even in the middle of a bad experience, that “at least this will make for some great writing.” I am sure that I tried to capitalize on the freshness of those experiences long before I had given myself the gestational time to digest and analyze and draw significance from them (which undoubtedly led to my oeuvre of mediocre poems about my tortured soul and inevitable comparisons to black coffee and whatnot). But I have felt the opposite in my adult years, veering away from writing on the emotionally affecting elements of my life, and I wonder if it’s out of an innate respect for Mnemosyne’s process or just a generic fear and laziness.
Daddy, I love your comments on this. Very fascinating studies on 9/11! That’s terrific. I hadn’t heard that research before.