As a poet, I've sometimes felt a sense of being joined in my work by a spirit or a muse. Of course, flow experience--the intense, creative focus when one is not conscious of time or events outside the door--feels spiritual. At times, it's been a terrific struggle. In its pursuit, I've gone through seismic changes. In retrospect, it's been soul-making. Occasionally, I've had work that felt inspired, meaning in spiritus. So I ask what is the connection between spirituality and making art?
The poet Federico Garcia Lorca named and invoked the Duende, and the Duende created an almost atmospheric change. Neither muse nor angel, it was not a spirit (according to Lorca) as much as a struggle. The Duende did not bring gifts or even a livelihood. It lent brilliance at the same time that it caused anguish. He said it was "communication with God through the five senses." Lorca also explained:
...the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work....Edward Hirsch has written much about Lorca's concept of the Duende, and he offered the example of the singer Billie Holiday. The spirit seemed to rise from under the feet, in darkness, and quickens in proximity to death. It turned out that Carl Jung had his own spirit that he called the "Spirit of the Depth." Jung's spirit also represented an extreme psychic struggle.
Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks....
According to Gerhard Hauptmann, "Poetry evokes out of words the resonance of the primordial word." This quote appears in Carl Jung's essay about psychoanalysis and poetry. Carl Jung has indelibly marked the understanding of the human psyche and art with his concepts of dream work, the collective unconscious, and archetypes, and he was heavily influenced by Gnosticism.
In an introduction to Gnosticism, Stephan Hoeller explains: "[it] is the teaching based on Gnosis, the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means." Gnosticism, instead of blaming man, attributes suffering of people in the world to a flawed design.
