Dr. Jane Turner speaking recently on Radio National’s Encounter program:

Certainly there’s been quite a lot of work about the ages of children and how they cope, and also after bereavement. There are loosely three stages that cover the issues: so the first stage is up to about 8 years of age, and up to about 8, children believe in magic. We give them a birthday cake; we put candles on and tell them to blow out the candles and make a wish, you know, we’re encouraging them to believe if they want something and wish for it, they can make it happen.

Now the corollary of that is young children don’t believe things happen by accident. So if something bad happens, it’s their fault. It’s because they bit their sister or they were naughty or they played outside when they shouldn’t have. They are also very fearful. They’re the centre of the universe, you know, the moon comes out at night to give them pleasure. And if bad events don’t happen by accident, they become very fearful that if one parent is ill, maybe the other parent would be ill. Who will be there to look after them?

The whole episode, Give Sorrow Words: Cancer and Communication, is deeply moving, both sad and strikingly beautiful, and I highly recommend you check it out. But this one particular section of the program stood out. Infact it provided a lot of clarity, and a lot of developmental concern. I realised on some level that I hadn’t grown out of this belief, that in a real sense I do tend to assume if something goes wrong that I am being punished. Still. Even now as a twenty-something… If the car breaks down, if the feedback is crummy, if the relationship implodes, I ask myself, “Why me?!” Not merely in the spirit of frustration, but with a genuine expectation that there is a reason, that there is a cause for this effect.

[ad#adsense250]This is surely why I am so preoccupied with ideas of predestination versus free will. I can’t make a compelling case for predestination on the page – I really can’t, but it still dominates so much of my worldview. It just seems that life is a confusing combination of things I can control and things I can’t control, things that can be reproduced and things that cannot. The planet is subject to natural laws and seasons, there is a certain ebb and flow to all kinds of thing, a sense of order. And when things are going well it can be deeply comforting to think there is some rhyme or reason to it all, some force steering things. Of course, as Dr. Turner notes, what is comforting during the good times can be perplexing, even devastating, in the bad.

It doesn’t help though that sometimes things happen that seem so profoundly unlikely as to be laughable. The kinds of ‘series of events’ you would include in your novel except that nobody would believe them, even though they happened. Strange impulses to go to places you wouldn’t normally go to and do things that you wouldn’t normally do. I find when I take these impulses, inexplicable things happen. (Like the time I felt this strong impulse to go to a cafe I never went to because I felt awkward and out-of-place with their regular clientile; I didn’t have time to look at the sandwich board before I heard ‘John!’ and an old friend I hadn’t seen in a year appeared. The perplexing part isn’t the encounter, so much as the feeling that preceded it. I could’ve easily invented a meaning after a chance meeting, but that the feeling came first, the feeling inspired the action. The action was severely out of character.)

I feel as though I am deeply rooted within my creative work. I usually have to work at the things I produce. I have an understanding of my own sense of ‘voice’ and personal conventions. But there have been times when work seems to have originated from outside of me, things that I would re-read and go, “Huh? I wrote that?” Things that I would scribble down onto pieces of scrap paper feverishly as if I was performing some sort of impromptu personal exorcism. I have had a third party evaluate one such piece and he suggested that it was a metaphor for a part of my life. He went on to suggest that perhaps the trauma associated with the experience prompted my subconscious mind to ‘cloak’ the output. I can’t dismiss this theory, but still I wonder…

Most of the creative materials I encounter encourage belief in some sort of external factor or force. This can be as abstract as the idea of ‘inspiration’ or as scientific as the untapped power of the subconscious mind. It can be associated with religious ideas, belief in a God (“the great creator”) in a literal sense, as in the case of Julia Cameron’s work. Elizabeth Gilbert proposes a similar idea, not because she believes it is necessarily true that there are paranormal ‘muses’ but for more practical purposes. She explains that this helps artists disassociate from their work, when the work is bad they can’t take all the blame and when it’s good they can’t take all the credit. This keeps us grounded in process rather than fixated on product. It is interesting that here we are citing paranormal forces to shield us from fear and hubris. We’re still expected to believe in magic, this time as adults, but to derive a different meaning from it.

That’s probably the chestnut here. Believe in whatever won’t drive you crazy; believe in whatever works (even if it isn’t technically true, or can’t be proven). Embrace the placebo effect if it results in your symptoms vanishing.