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The Captive Heart
By Honora Foah
President, Mythic Imagination Institute
Copyright © 2011
Honora Foah is the President and Creative Director of the Mythic Imagination Institute and Creative Director of Visioneering International. Currently, her main concentration is on the Mythic imagination project Creativity in Captivity and her own performance cycle, Recombinant DNA. More about Honora Foah
There is a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry where he talks
about the wilderness inside the domestic country of
marriage. I have always loved this poem and hope for it to
be the way of our marriage, Dahlan and me. I guess when
most people think about wildness in marriage, sex might be what comes to mind, but it seems to me that sex is part of the domestic bond, or at least an important borderland or bridge.
For me, the wilderness inside is the place where you are
free, where the captivity of marriage, the captivity of any
relation is quieted and the wild thing that soars up in us
when we simply are ourselves, becomes uppermost. And it is in that wildness that the force that invents, that makes, that creates has its source.
All creation is a part of a captivity. We usually start with a
problem or a challenge. Our wildness hits against that wall and begins to ascend, sticking its fingers and toes into any crevice, looking for a way out or around or through. Survival energy kicks in. And joy. Because this is what we are made for.
We are the animal who can live anywhere and invent a way to survive. Look at the incredible variety and beauty of what people have made.
We are the animal that can live on top of a sliver of land
above a fjord during Norwegian winter. We are the animal
that can build shelter out of earth, grass, wood, stone,
moss, steel, brick.
We are the animal that can blast itself into the vacuum of
space where we cannot breathe and find a way to breathe. We are the animal that can write an opera in the midst of a concentration camp. This is our wildness, our wilderness, our freedom.
Our new project, Creativity in Captivity is a celebration of
this amazing aspect of humanity. When we did the concert
Testaments of the Heart last fall, which was music written in the concentration, internment and POW camps of World War 2, many of the people who attended spoke to us about the shock of it—to see what people were capable of under such conditions. Many in the audience had come to mourn, as of course, we all do, but it was an odd feeling because the music was all so interesting and often fun and even funny—it was a celebration of the wild creative will to survive, and to survive as a complete human being. For some, their creative work was a way to physically stay alive, to find a will to live. But many died anyway—they were being systematically murdered, there was nothing to do— yet they did stay alive until their deaths, in the soul that was still able to create, and they have also stayed alive by sending their music after them into our lives.
There are so many captivities to mourn in this world, from
prisons to paralysis, from prostitution to intense phobias,
but mourning is not the main purpose of Creativity in
Captivity. The purpose is to look backwards and forwards at our species and celebrate and activate the driving wildness inside of us that makes a survey of the human endeavor such a wild ride.
The wilderness in the heart of captivity shows itself in the
wild creativity of survival, in the will to live physically and
spiritually.
