The Forbidden Inner World

for jenni, who wrote that she was concerned about writing 'fiction' for NaNoWiMo:

The Forbidden Inner World –
from Deena Metzger's “Writing for your LIfe”

… when we inhabit this inner realm, when we are with ourselves, we are participating in a vast underground world of common understanding and communality some of which may have been with us from the very beginning of time. What Carl Jung calls the collective unconscious-what I like to think of as the creative unconscious (in its communal aspect) or the imagination (in its personal aspect)- is the sea of internal and eternal values, images, cultural memories, and experiences that inform dreams and creative work while, just as often challenging the prevailing modes of the state, the society, or the community in which one lives.
    Another contradiction: while this world we are discussing can be contained within us, it is also vast, endless, and complex. It is the world of worlds. It is the infinite. To enter it is to come to know something of it and to learn of the boundlessness of the self. To go within, therefore, is never a diminishment. To stay adamantly without is always a limitation, for the self, the inner world, the imagination, all open out into everything that has ever existed or can ever or may ever exist.
    The inner world is for each one of us-novelist, diarist, or diplomat- in our equally ordinary and extraordinary lives the essential territory where everything that might be known resides until it can be called forth into the public arena. Credited or not, the images, inspirations, drams, nightmares, intuitions, hunches, understandings that arise from the inner world are the prima materia from which everything, including ourselves, is constructed. To be willing to live within the imagination is to commit oneself to the gathering together of the pieces that might begin to form a self. To avoid this territory is to avoid the encounters that might validate, inform or enhance one’s experience.
    Yet the truth of the matter is that just as the inner territory is proscribed, the self in modern times is also under assault. To go inside is considered solipsistic, narcissistic, small. The smaller intimate history of individuals or marginalized peoples and culture is not extended the dignity and value accorded to the history of nation states and canonized philosophic or religious movements. Autobiography, journal writing and life history are considered lesser forms when compared with the grand sweep of novels, elegies, epics and biographies of public people. Confessional writing is degraded by the very term used to describe this revelation of one’s most intimate story, while objectivity, distance, detachment and impartiality are valorized. Similarly, the professional writer is often applauded merely for commercial success, while the one who writes primarily for himself or herself is diminished, no matter what the content of the writing, the quality of the search, and the dedication of the effort. The public has prestige over the intimate, the domestic, the interior, yet both the professional writer and the most private journal keeper suffer the same terrors, engage in the same struggles, impost the same disciplines in the encounter with creativity.
    Because the inner exploration is so essential to every creative life, we must challenge these attitudes and risk the exploration of  these forbidden realms. For despite the prevailing judgments, it is clear that vitality, zest, the very life force itself lie inside and ar not to be dismissed, tha what is acceptable never has th range of what is still unknown and unexplored, and, finally, that it is the unique vision and exploration, our own subjectivity, that we all secretly seek and cherish.
    And so, novice and expert alike, we journey into this territory of the imagination. Like any unexplored territory, it will, each time, turn out to be both strange and familiar. And we go into it, each time, as if we have never been there before and also as if we are coming home.

Re: The Forbidden Inner World

awesome awesome ~ thank you!