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Essay

Borderlands of creative imagination

Nighat Gandhi
(continued from last week)
The writer's tender and tentative imagination, when placed under such pressure buckles into mediocrity. The pressure to be ceaselessly profitable can only end in mediocrity. Pressured writers can't moodle happily, at least not for long. When you can't moodle, you can't be at peace with your creative restlessness, and when you can't be at peace, you end up surrendering your deep-driving creative desires at the altar of efficiency, popularity and profitability.
Why doesn't competition make the writer a better writer? Pressure and competition are good but how much of a good thing is good? We can't dwell in our imaginal world saddled with fears of failure, publishing anxieties, and yearning to climb the bestseller list. Transmuting imaginal images into words requires discipline and ease that is inner-directed, even though it is self-imposed. This discipline is sustained despite occasional
doubts and fears about success. I'll confess: the fear of not being good enough often numbs my psyche. This modern fear is particularly crippling. It casts thick, impenetrable veils. It is only when I transcend such fears that 1 unveil the riches of my imaginal world. Only then do I write fearlessly and write beyond my gender, my ethnicity, beyond social, cultural and religious pigeonholes society loves to plug me into. Beyond all the conditioned envelopes that carry addresses defining and limiting me. When fears of not making it vanish, veils drop. This doesn't happen as often as I would like it to, but when it does, it is state of the art! The ultimate unveiling, a most dazzling union of myself with my truest, imaginal self.
Philosopher and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm believed personal well-being could not be achieved in the absence of essential personal truths, that is, without coming to know oneself well one could not hope to achieve psychological well-being. He discussed the concept of psychological well-being at length
in the book Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, which he co-wrote with D. T. Suzuki and De Martino: "To become conscious of what is unconscious and thus to enlarge one's consciousness means to get in touch with reality, and—in this sense—with truth. To enlarge the consciousness means to wake up, to lift a veil, to leave the cave, to bring light into the darkness." And then Fromm posed an important question: "Could this be the same experience Zen Buddhists call enlightenment?
Yes! Imaginal knowledge received from the alam-al-khayal in a writer's conscious mind become the words she writes, making writing her source of creative enlightenment, which brings in its wake a most profoundly felt, yet painfully arrived at sense of well-being. Fromm from the 20th century and Ibn Arbai from the 13th would agree.
(concluded)
NIGHAT GANDHI HAS LIVED IN BANGLADESH AND PAKISTAN AND NOW IS BASED IN INDIA.