The human journey, on every continent and in every age, presents human beings with the contrasting experiences of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, kindness and cruelty. It is widely believed that when we are children, we are so pliant and so teachable that many religious and educational practices use these contrasting life and death forces to instil their belief systems, claiming:
“Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll show you the man . . ..”
This saying is sometimes attributed to Aristotle, sometimes to Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and sometimes to self-appointed gurus who claim to be its source because they do not bother to research their materials or even know that they should. In these days of technological glamours, “likes” trump everything, especially the search for truth.
Even if we can never be sure of the quote’s source, we can identify its English language pronoun and noun. He, the pronoun, stands for children born with male genitalia, and man, the noun, is the name we use to describe the adult phase of that view of maleness.
Whenever I think about that sentence’s male-centredness, I also think about what happened to those designated “girls” and “women” while boys were being educated formally, in schools and churches, to become “men.”
Because of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley, because of the Bronte sisters, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte, and because of Jane Austen, here in the west we learn in our elementary and high-school English classes that girls and women were being domesticated, trained to serve, schooled to care for their fathers and brothers and husbands, molded to obediently meet the needs of home and hearth as the “Angel in the House,” certainly, but most especially, they were groomed to meet the needs of the boys and men they lived among.
I don’t believe I could write the above sentence without knowing that while others did their best to control and subjugate girls and women, Nature Herself taught us how to live within such strictures with more pleasure than pain. All we have to do is align ourselves with Her first principle: Creativity. This is not to say that creativity should replace the fight for equality for all peoples. Nor do I mean to suggest that making something can make up for the harm done by inequality. What I am saying is that Creativity makes the fight for equality more bearable because it feeds us at a fundamentally primal level. More than any other support, we need our primal energies to keep on keeping on.
Then as now, Creativity is an unstoppable source of energy that draws in the marginalized to the centre of Life. Creativity bolsters our commitment to causes; it is the impulse to make, MAKE, unshackled by the belief that we have no right to do so.
If we are lucky, whether we’re born with male or female parts, some combination of the two, or their absence entirely, we learn to harness the brutish nonsense that does its best to convince us we are less than. When we learn to harness the energies fueling limitations and use them to support our own purposes, we become makers of every sort. And, once we have had a creative, making experience, there is no going back. Madness and rage may descend for a time, but then a friend says, “Come to pottery class with me.”
Creativity is the finger in the dyke of madness.
Creativity says, “Forget labels and body parts, religious edicts and educational gridlock. Just make something . . . with your mind and heart and body and spirit . . ., a story . . ., a pot . . ., a dress . . ., an invitation to others to create. Make something that restores your belief in yourself and your cause, because Mistress Creativity assures us with every making adventure we undertake, “In My company, all is well, communities form, and peace reclaims the human soul.”
Whatever pronoun you choose, whatever your experiences before your seventh birthday, make something today and share it as you will.
And then, use the joy it brings to view your current challenges anew.
Until next time,
Jane