Dystopia is the birthplace of creativity

This reflection is inspired by a dream I had recently.

In the dream, I witnessed a sudden apocalyptic peeling back of a valley from the surrounding mountains. Everybody, including rescue personnel and community, ran towards the theatre of dystopia. I found myself turning around, against the surge.

These days I have been in a return movement, much like in my dream. The morning after the dream I was scheduled to give away the last of my traditional dance costumes to another dancer. As I was at her school, I was in the milieu in which my journey began fifty years ago (that was some years before her birth!). Although her school is in suburban Australia and my dance began in Chennai in India, it was the same dance steps, the same young and sweaty bodies repeating the movements, and the same longing parents with their faces plastered on glass windows.

The teacher was delighted to see me. Out of respect, she invited me to dance at an upcoming event. She wished for her students and community to witness an erstwhile "Guru" of the tradition. As much as I was moved by this invitation, I also felt panic rising within me. I found myself saying with some ferocity, “Oh the person who danced like that is long dead!”

We laughed at this outburst, but I meant every word. I realised then that a return journey is also about facing ghosts of past lives and selves. These pasts inevitably fling their tentacles to pull you into their world as you try to flee past them. Hence the importance of making oneself small, the dwarfish Body of the archetypal realms. Camouflage, veils and elusive manner are essential in a return journey. These also happen to be traits of the earliest invocation of creative intelligence—the feminine as the Divine.

Perhaps I am not alone in experiencing reality as dystopian. In a recent discussion with a couple of women in my programs who kindly came to visit me, they shared their sensations of incongruency between narrative and experience. It is as if we perceive the apocalypse that is in our midst already, but we still speak in the same tongues that lie buried in the ruins. We speak of progressing beyond, a New Earth, or a new technological cosmos all predicated upon what we have progressively built from the past as knowledge.

In archetypal stories the apocalyptic is always unforeseen. And it is a dissolution without possible futures. Of course this makes complete sense. If we can predict an apocalypse, and overcome it with solutions, then it is not apocalyptic! Archetypal apocalypse is generally the culmination of a period of Hubris, which is the confidence in absolute mastery and control of Nature.

The usual archetypal narrative is that a noble king wishes to be more powerful and invokes the Divine. He asks for the boon of immortality which is denied to him. The laws of primordiality, to which even Gods are subject, state that no material manifestation can be immortal. The invoker cleverly asks for a boon where he thinks he has covered all eventualities and thus effectively makes him immortal.

Usually the boon looks something like this: “may no man nor beast, no weapon, no disease, and no natural event be the cause of my death.” The Divine gives him this boon and he now assumes he is equal to God as he is immortal. He progressively becomes demonic and brutal, ravishing Earth and inflicting suffering on all life. The Gods decide to end his reign. They call upon, wait for it, the Goddess.

Time and again, the seekers of immortality do not factor in the feminine because they do not consider any threat from, what they consider, a weaker and lesser energy. Even when the Goddess arrives, in some stories the king flirts with Her or mocks Her. The Goddess vanquishes the king not just because of his underestimation of Her prowess but because he simply cannot recognise the nature of Her being. She baffles him. The feminine here is not the dualistic opposite of the masculine. She is Nature (Prakrithi), the primordial intelligence of Body. The earliest war Goddesses come from this dystopian encounter between Hubris that assumes knowledge of all possibilities, and Nature that is infinite and eternal.

In descriptions of these encounters, the war is a dance initiated by the Goddess. Aigiri Nandhini, one of the most beautiful invocations to the warrior Goddess, speaks of

“The celestial dancer manifests the inner wisdom of the battle through Her rhythms…" [1]

It is not military and strategic knowledge that decimates dystopian Hubris but something unexpected, and unaccounted for in our deliberations for a solution or prevention. No king would think of asking for protection from a dancer! It is what we reject as being of no value that simmers with volcanic power and with brutal suddenness, and may cleave our world in two in a moment of beauteous dance. If cataclysm itself is an unexpected event that shakes our foundations of the known, then it follows that the known cannot provide us with a "solution" to this unprecedented event.

There is an interplay between cataclysm and creativity. The creative imagination is unshackled when the known is vanquished. The creative imagination is shackled by narratives of knowledge that curate Reality. The archetype of the captive waters having to be released is the essence of Rta or the unfolding movement of Reality that cannot be managed and curated. Another invocation is that of a herd of cows (cow is the archetype of Body and Earth) imprisoned in a cave by people called Panis, who are thieves who masquerade as priests. It is Indra, the earliest dancing Deity of the post-Goddess era, who is their mortal enemy and who must liberate the cows from their clutches.

Panis are transactional people, who adhere to exchanges for benefit. Their world, like that of the immortality-aspiring king, is a predictable one because self-interest shapes their narratives. Indra, whose name also means soul, must use His lightning bolt to release the waters/cows from the asphyxiating hold of this stagnant Reality. The ancient dancer, Apsara, is said to be the lightning bolt. It is a sudden and explosive movement that frees us from the throes of the prison of the known.

In ancient Greek theatre there is a plot element called deux ex machina. Literally this means God on a machine. It refers to the moment in a story when an intractable situation is resolved by the descent of a God into the scene using a crane-like device. Today deux ex machina is not considered a sophisticated dramatic ploy for it implies that the playwright is unable to find a way of solving the plot from within the narrative.

A cataclysm itself is a deux ex machina moment. It is a shocking event, like the king’s encounter with a fierce feminine that belies all his previous experience of women. Ancient mythologies use narratives of meteor strikes to invoke these moments. Cataclysms are not always natural events. They are also events of Consciousness, as in the many archetypal stories of great floods. Water is a universal archetypal invocation of Consciousness and the stories of floods found in many ancient cultures signal radical transformations of Consciousness impelled by forces from within. A deux ex machina did not always descend via a crane, they could also rise from a trapdoor from underneath the stage and appear suddenly in the midst of the scene.

The Goddess that intervenes may also be the Goddess that ends. Creation and destruction are not two sides of the same coin, they are the same. Indra unleashes the waters that wash away Pani’s world in an exuberance of creative flow. Creativity is the dance of freedom from what has been. It is the dance that births the unexpected, what we do not yet know. Creativity balances the known so that it finds its place in the more expansive vessel of mystery. This new location of the known decimates Hubris.

As our treasured narratives of meaning, freedom and soul are revealed as juggler’s trickery, we are told to rush to the ravine where the earth has peeled and to wait while the "knowers" deliberate. To me their diatribes echo in the caves where Panis imprison their cows. Rushing in the other direction, I am wrought with guilt. What about “saving” the world? What about being better? What about service to hallowed values? What about right and wrong?

As an artist, creativity has nothing to do with any of the above questions. Creativity for me is the returning dance towards an ancient seed, long-forgotten but patiently waiting. It is not a return to the historical or even ancestral past which we usually mine for solutions to the future. The archetypal return is to Prakrithi, Goddess of primordial beginnings. When I return to seed, the tree will blossom of its own accord, in accordance with Nature’s primordial creativity. All I must do is relinquish my costumes and become sky-clad like the ancient Goddess.[2]

[1]: Aigiri Nandhini verse 9 line: Suralalaana Tatatheyi Tatheyi Krta-Abhinayodara Nrtya-Rate

[2]: The ancient Goddess is described as dig vastram or sky-clad or naked like the oceans which reflect the sky.