THE DIVINE FEMININE

       Women are about to change the world

A call to arms.

one line synopsis

Women bringing the world to balance and healing through their own inner power.

one paragraph synopsis

Once the Feminine and the Masculine in harmony ruled a beautiful world, but women were overthrown, and the world descended into brutal chaos. Now we are returning to re-establish the balance of the Feminine and call back our partners to evolve with us in harmony and heal this sick and torn world.

A proposal for an emotionally-charged documentary film and healing journey

                                                                                  written by

                                                                        JOSEPHINE EMERY

How can we live in our authentic femininity and masculinity?

How can these two essential energies live in balance, harmony and equality?

We come from a history of negation of the Divine Feminine and the oppression of women: from sexual abuse to financial oppression. These oppressions remain for so many women, across cultures. How can an individual woman robustly engage with these issues, and through these understandings, live powerfully in every aspect of her life, for herself and others? How can she create for herself a life, and a world, where she can live in partnership  – as the Divine Masculine appears out of the shadow of the domineering masculine? And as the re-emergent Androgyne third gender returns to embrace both Masculine and Feminine?

Climate change, hunger, poverty, war and terror, dispossessed peoples, oppression, mark the ending of the world’s old paradigm of masculine dominance.

Now – in traditional cultures, western cultures, third world cultures – a driving force for change is women. Women coming forward not with anger and violence, but with love, patience, understanding and an absolute refusal to bow to the pressures of the old male dominance patterns.

These are women who often live and speak from a sense of personal spiritual power, a power grounded in feminine knowledge.

Women’s spirituality – rooted in the lived experience of being a woman – is the force that drives the new generations of women to create a world that makes sense to them: where nurturance, not dominance is the focus.

In this film we interview leading spokeswomen – writers, counselors, public figures – for the New Paradigm. We hear from women whose lives have opened up into new possibilities as they shed the old story of oppression and embrace the new.

We interview men who are stepping forward into their sense of the Divine Masculine. We speak with leading transgendered spokespeople who are already living the re-emergent Androgyne in various ways.

Using the stories and myths of Atlantis and other Feminine-principled cultures – and the archaeological findings of Marija Gimbutas and others – we tell a powerfully emotional story of how our world was once a world of nurturance, balance and respect. A world torn apart – Eden destroyed – and the descent into warfare, division, the subjugation of women and now the imminent destruction of the biosphere. Our story takes us on a healing journey that begins with the wrenching apart of the feminine and masculine, and the crippling of the all-embracing third gender, but then reunites these elemental principles once more and shows us the way we can heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.

………………………………

Why is this film important?

The aim of The Divine Feminine is to transform the world through the power of women.

The Divine Feminine focuses the individual energies of millions of women into a laser beam of transformation and change.

All around the world women have had enough. We’ve had 10,000 years of male dominance and what have we got to show for it? War, pestilence, violence, climate change, a degraded planet, starvation, disempowerment…the list goes on and on. We’ve had enough. We’re standing up to the bullies and taking back our birthright as the nurturers; as the ones who always clean up the mess they make. We’re here to heal ourselves, our children, our loved ones, and the planet…and we invite the men who care to join us. We’re making our stand in the name of our own feminine principle: the Divine Feminine. Join us.

Key messages.

Women can save – and are saving – the planet by their spirit and actions.

The subjugation and disempowerment of women is not a natural force, but the inevitable outcome of the loss of balance between male and female. This imbalance has led to the serious situation we and our planet now face.

The situation can be remedied – and is being remedied – by the re-empowerment of women within their own right.

Feminine spirituality is as valid as masculine spirituality. It is Goddess-centred and its myths and rituals are based around women’s perception of their bodies and their processes. This feminine spirituality is deeply embedded in our primal memories – embodied in such as the myth of Atlantis. These stories are now resurfacing and being acted out through feminine-spirit-based healing and ritual

………………………………..

                                 JOSEPHINE EMERY:  A PERSONAL STATEMENT

I am making this movie as the culmination of my life’s journey – and my lives’ journeys.

This life of mine has been an extraordinary one. I set myself an enormous obstacle to overcome when I chose to return. I set this lifetime as the one where I fully grasped the Goddess and Priestess power that I had relinquished a long, long, long time ago.

To live that power to its full I had to be born male and – as a mature adult – become female. I had to learn what it was like to walk the earth as a man and then as a woman in order to fully know the dreadful division that has split human energy asunder over the millenia. I had to step knowingly back into my original life energy as the Androgyne, the Berdache: the one who sees because they know both male and female.

Stepping into the full force of my energy flow has also steeped me in many of the lives I had previously lived…and am still living: for time is not linear but an infinite and ever-opening rose of unknowable dimensions.

I chose my path in this lifetime as a writer and story-maker so that I would be able to open to others the wonders, the challenges and the transformative power of a life that holds Masculine and Feminine in balance. There have been times when I let the balance slip – now one way, now the other. There were far too many years when I refused the Call to step into my power…and I suffered for that refusal.

To write this movie I left the city and once again embraced country living. Here I live in the eternal moment and in that moment the presence of the Divine is all around me.

I feel my supernatural helpers with me: the spiritual forces of Light that first revealed themselves to me as a small child on an isolated outback farm. In their presence I reconnect with the earth. I arrived in late winter and began nursing the garden into the beauty of spring. My years of city living were over. I was returning home, at the end of all my explorings and – as TS Eliot – said, “…knowing the place for the first time…”

This documentary is part of that story.  The story of the awakening of Goddess Energy.

Today, just before I began writing, an echidna waddled in through the vegetable beds I had prepared. She calmly ignored me and sniffed out the ants she likes to eat. She rustled into the flower beds and came out next to my feet and there acted as if I did not exist.  Or perhaps, knowing that I did exist but only as another entity of nature like herself and like the ants and grubs she sought. She dug down amongst the roots. I watched her little spade claws heave the dirt out past her rippled, glossy, spined body.

I returned to the computer knowing that, once again, the Goddess had blessed me – as she has done at other times in my life. Most notably when she sent a snake to slide past my bare feet as I sat meditating on sand-dunes by a winter’s beach, wrestling in my mind with the need to call on Her for a sign. She spoke through the snake. She spoke through the echidna.

Now she speaks through me to you through this movie.

YOUR MONEY: YOUR MOVIE

MY CROWD-FUNDING PITCH AT THE WHO WANTS TO BE A TERRORIST LAUNCH

In 2007 I’d not heard of Dee McLachlan or Andrea Buck or their movie, THE JAMMED. But I live next door to an independent cinema. I write movies myself. I keep my eyes open. I went in, sat down, the curtains opened…and I was spellbound. This was the best directed Australian movie I had seen in decades. Not a shot was wrong. It was a thriller and the tension was palpable. The script was tough, tender and knowing. This was pure, genuine movie storytelling. I went back for a second viewing and then took movie-industry friends the third time.

Shot on a tiny budget, THE JAMMED went on to be both a commercial and critical success. It looked like this team was on its way. Yet they found it impossible to raise finance for the next picture. They were about to go under. Dee and Andy’s own lives have been well publicised. Here they were, bucking all sorts of social stigma to raise their family, to cope with huge personal change in their lives, and to go on making superb motion pictures.

And, just at that time, I had come into some money through my dear, deceased mother’s estate. I needed to make some investment decisions.

I looked at their scripts. I knew that for an Australian movie to return its investment locally it would need to come in under $1M. I checked my network for who might have seed money to keep them going. I could only find one person: me! I looked back at their scripts. There was one – really only a treatment – about two young men, one Australian-born and one Arabic-born, caught up in the world of media-exploitation of the fear of terrorism and its evil siblings: racism and cultural paranoia.  This story took those issues head-on. And the budget promised – via digital capture – to be below a million dollars.

So I put my money into it. It was the first money in fact, and it kept their heads above water and got some vital early footage shot. The script kept shifting its focus. It became a comedy. The title changed a number of times. But the essential theme of a media-saturated world that turns every eventuality, every trauma and crisis, into mass entertainment stayed the same. Eventually the script became: WHO WANTS TO BE A TERRORIST.

In making my investment decision I was certainly aware of the bottom line, of the likelihood (or otherwise) of ROI. But my concept of Return On Investment has never been in purely financial terms. I do think in terms of social capital, and emotional and spiritual capital as well. Ideas that were afloat in the 1920s but are very unfashionable in the brave new world of the 21st Century. It’s a world with a well-suited atheism as its creed. There is no God, there is only The Market.

And I do think in terms of risk. Without it there is no growth, no change. There is only stasis. We can go on making the same Australian movie over and over again. Or we can risk change and growth.

I also think that for all of us involved in, engaged with, the Australian movie and media business, and endlessly arguing how to get better product onto the screen, there is one simple, argument-silencing action you can take. Put your own money where your mouth is! Invest in your local movies. And that is so much easier now with online, crowd-funding. Participation is just a click away. And it doesn’t require much of your cash at all. It’s a gesture which can become a film-financing revolution!

Here is the link.  Who Wants To Be a Terrorist.

Kick-Ass Chicks With Guns

JOSIE DOES A HIGH CONCEPT MOVIE WORKSHOP

 

I was quite surprised to be chosen for the Screen Australia, Michael Hauge, High Concept Movie Workshop.  I’d needed three ‘high concept’ movie ideas and thought I was clean out of ideas.

My mind soon threw up the usual recycled images from other people’s movies and stuff from the darker recesses of my own psychopathology. Bottom drawer material.

But I knew that somewhere in all that mental detritus would be something. And I knew that at this stage I didn’t know what it was.

All creative artists know the power of living with uncertainty. We know that without this ability we can achieve nothing. That we really do have to keep risking everything if we are to achieve anything. We do have to make fools of ourselves in order to discover our wisdom. Our wisdom is in knowing that foolishness is the first step upon the path.

A year earlier I’d written an essay about Road Movies for the AFTRS Lumina Journal.

I wrote,

The Road Movie is existential. In it we don’t have time for the God question. We have to keep moving. We have to react to circumstances that seem to come randomly at us – yet are probably called up by our own, inner turmoil.

Writing that I’d had a vision of a woman at the wheel of a big truck, pursued by she-knows-not-what. Only that she must keep driving and driving and that death is stalking her and that the load she carries is dangerous in the extreme.

I took the vision, that image, and played with it and saw her as a soldier, her truck loaded with explosives, pursued by her own side.

The story was short of at least two characters: the Villain and the Helper. I let the Villain sit. I visioned her Helper.

Only her sister can help her, but they have nothing in common.

I was embarrassed by its raw simplicity. It had shed all intellectual/existential pretension to reveal itself as story: pure and simple. And when I applied Michael’s High Concept story template to it I could see how it would work and I knew my Villain.

I’ve always had my own story templates in my head and have disdained ‘working to a formula’: afraid it would bury my philosophical concerns about the human condition. But I wrangled the story into his 6-stage plot structure, all in one-and-a-half pages.

His structure filled the gaps between the ‘turning points’ in the old 3-Act Screenplay structure. It was a left-brain structure that focused right-brain thought.  It forced me to find actions, not words, to drive an action movie. The ‘strait-jacket’ of a template became a release into marrying form with function. It gave me the key to transform movie roles traditionally reserved for men: ‘Die Hard’, ‘Speed’, but with the hero a woman. A role model for young women today, seizing power from the patriarchy.

Or, as Michael said of it: ‘Kick-ass chicks with guns!’

CHINA HEART

China Heart is my first outing as a transmedia/ crossplatform producer. It debuted at Chinese New Year in Sydney. What have I learnt from the experience? Well, again I’ve had confirmed that ‘Story Is Everything’. Until I had Annette Shun Wah aboard as writer/director there was no ‘China Heart’. Annette brought passion, empathy and her own deep story to the production.

Digital media are strongly visual media. Tatiana Pentes had the right visual style for this production. She made it throb with beauty.

I worked for d/Lux Media Arts to realize it. Hitherto an organization known for curating media arts d/Lux – and its dynamic Director, Tara Morelos – discovered that ‘curating’ in the on-line world also means ‘producing’.

The architecture and the code came from The Project Factory. It was a move in new directions for this organization, also.

The project was built for The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney’s wonderful museum of technology.

It was always Annette’s and my desire to have this mobile phone experience also spill out into the streets. Thus we organized an art installation of wonderful historical photographs in Albion Place, Sydney. And we envisaged the climax of this tour/game/immersive experience as a live scene from Chinese Opera delivered in Sydney’s beautiful Chinese Garden of Friendship.

LIFE IS NOT A JOURNEY…I AM NOT MYSELF

 

Henrik Ibsen,  Peer Gynt, Act V.

[Peer  Gynt takes an onion and pulls off layer after layer.]

………………..

[Pulls off several layers at once.]

What an enormous number of swathings!
Isn’t the kernel soon coming to light?

[Pulls the whole onion to pieces.]

I’m blest if it is! To the innermost centre,
it’s nothing but swathings—each smaller and smaller.—
Nature is witty!

[Throws the fragments away.]

The devil take brooding!
If one goes about thinking, one’s apt to stumble.
Well, I can at any rate laugh at that danger;
for here on all fours I am firmly planted.

[Scratches his head.]

A queer enough business, the whole concern!
Life, as they say, plays with cards up its sleeve;
but when one snatches at them, they’ve disappeared,
and one grips something else,—or else nothing at all.

Looking back at my finished memoir now, I have discovered more layers that need to be peeled away. But Peer Gynt’s onion came to an end. There was nothing left. Yet I find that my own inner onion goes on and on.

I shall switch metaphors. Writing my memoir has been like plunging into a Mandelbrot Set. The deeper I go, the more each element in it opens up to reveal greater and greater dimensions of both beauty and terror. A ride into this fractal set is a ride that challenges everything. And, unlike Peer Gynt’s onion, it is bounded yet endless.

This gives the lie to the idea that, ‘life is a journey’. It challenges the subtitle of my book, “A Personal Journey From Man to Woman”. Journeys take place in linear time. But the life I have discovered is one of a flowering, a constant opening up within an endless ‘moment’. It runs differently to my first intimation of it when I read Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’.

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane.’

‘And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must we not all have been here before?

‘ — and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane—must we not return eternally?’

For the Self that returns to meet itself is different to how it was at that first meeting. We cannot return unchanged and be our previous self. When I now come back to face a memory I had previously interrogated I find new depths within it, new revelations and insights. I am no longer myself. 

The journey that is not a journey goes on.

 

Zoom into the Mandelbrot Set here

 

 

 

 

EGO MEETS SELF

 

 

I thought that I was striving towards becoming the person hidden inside me.  But when I got there I found a person who was not striving to be someone else. So I could not recognise her as, “Me”. My concept of “I” or “me” was predicated upon striving. For many years I was a man striving not to become a woman. Then I flipped and became a man striving to become a woman.  Now I suddenly find myself as a woman with no striving to do. I can’t cope! 

 

What do I do with the past that is embedded deep within me? There are memories that are important to my core sense of being, but there are also feelings and reactions that are no longer suitable for my life. I have no need to be secretive. I have no need to be guarded and quick to take offense. I have no need to be closed. There is no need to seek out people who will close themselves off from me. All that has gone.

 

This recursive mental loop that is “I” tries to dip back into memory and feed upon that constant stream to strengthen itself. “I”, the ego, the sense of who I am can only keep itself alive by cannibalizing my past. Those old synaptic links wave frantically: trying to call something into their maw. But “I”, or “It”, don’t/doesn’t want to go there any more. They’ll have to go hungry, wither and die.

 

That’s it! There’s stuff dying inside me. It’s like a forest fire has raged through me. Nights of sweating fevers and hideous dreams and hours watching the digital clock blink over. I’m now burnt out. The crunch of burnt grass beneath my feet. Blackened tree trunks and the frail bones of animals that didn’t make it clear.

 

And here, on this gaunt and twisted limb, a tender shoot of translucent green, its tip glistening toward the sun. And here another, and another, A fuzz of the palest green now coating the black. In the soot and ash soil, tiny shoots breaking through and beginning to uncoil.

 

This is the new ME growing out of the remains of the old.

 

And that old ego turning back on itself and sniffing this new life and not recognizing it. “This is not Me!” it says. Self and Ego meet and do not recognize each other.  They circle warily. 

 

“Who are you?”

“I’m you. You’re me.”

“No you’re not. No, I’m not! I’m not like you at all!”

“You never wanted to be me?”

“I never knew it would happen. I thought it was just a fantasy. One I hated! One I wanted to get rid of – and yet couldn’t. It was like I needed to have you hiding away in me. That was important to me. But it was a…a thing I was ashamed of. I didn’t want it to be seen!”

“Well, here I am, and you and I are going on a journey together. We’ll get to know each other on the road.”

“A journey! I’ve always loved traveling. How did you know?”

“Ahh! I know a thing or two about you. Just follow me.”

 

 

WOMAN, SPEAK!

THE BITCH PITCH SISTERS…WOMAN, SPEAK!

How do we make people respond to our bidding? How do we sell the customer a product or get the investor to back our concept?

How do we make them listen and respond as we want?

Let’s hear how Samuel Coleridge told it back in 1798.

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

Mayst hear the merry din.’

He holds him with his skinny hand,

“There was a ship,” quoth he.

Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’

Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye –

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years’ child:

The Mariner hath his will.

ST Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798.

He only utters four words and the Wedding Guest is hooked.

“There was a ship…” Why is he hooked? Because the Mariner’s look and voice ring with authenticity. He has lived his story and the listener sees it and hears it.

For women, though, we live in a world where the male voice is the voice of authority – even of authenticity. From Maggie Thatcher to Julia Gillard what we hear is a conflicted voice trying to create for itself a self-conscious, ‘image’.

As  Dr Louise Mahler, puts it…

“Many of us are hindered by the psychic-vocal-prison of our culture, and further restricted by the solitary-vocal-confinement of our organizational and social contexts, in which vocal discovery is antithetical to dominant visual, patriarchal and linear thinking. This reinforces poor habitual patterns and works against coherence…” Ph D. abstract.

It was in working with Louise – and Speech Pathologist, Jocelyn Priestley – that I finally freed my true, inner voice: my female voice. I discovered that voice comes not just from the throat and tongue but from the whole body and mind together. We speak from our hips as much as from our lips!  Don’t believe me? Go Youtube Elvis.  In this clip Ann Margaret also shows how a woman can free her voice and her body.

Watch how Doris Day spreads her legs as she hits ‘Now I shout it from the highest hill!’ in ‘Secret Love’…standing, or on her horse. A human being is also a sexual being.

But as I worked with Louise in other settings I began to realise that once we had mastered Voice we needed something to say. A voice is not just breath, it is also words. Who writes our scripts for us? Are they written by men?

“Red River” is a great movie about the relationships between men. But when the unfortunate Coleen Grey or Joanne Dru have to speak their lines…they’re in trouble! Either breathing sweet, powerless sexiness or sounding out short, sharp, angry sentences before slapping Montgomery Clift’s face. Compare their lines with John Wayne’s homespun oratory. He doesn’t need to slap anyone around to get his way.

It’s time now for women to get out of the saloon and lead the cattle drive and we need to do it with the authority of our own, female voices. The way it sounds and the ideas it expresses need to be as one. Joan Crawford almost got it right in ‘Johnny Guitar’, but the male scriptwriter wouldn’t let her stand alone. There are two conflicts in this scene: Joan v. Sterling, and the scriptwriter’s need to hold her back and not let her power run its true course.

The way we express our ideas through how we marshal our words is the content shaped within the form of voice. It is the wine in the bottle of voice. It is the actress and the script.

Louise opened up my voice. But the marshaling of words is what I’d been doing for fifty years. Getting the right words in the right order to create the best effect. In short stories, journalism, novels, screenplays and – above all else – in ‘Pitches’. Those terrifying moments when we have five minutes in which to secure a big development deal…or fail. To get the cowgirls to commit to the drive, or go it alone…and be stampeded by the herd.

Seeing that – and knowing the synergy that flickered between us when we worked together -  I knew what Louise and I together could offer to other women.

Thus were born, THE BITCH PITCH SISTERS. Dr. Louise Mahler and Josephine Emery. Music and words. Form and content. The bottle and the wine. Our vision is to liberate women through mastery of The Pitch. Bring to us your unformed ideas, your new product and service descriptions, your interview rehearsal or your team focus speech – or just your own voice – and we will work with you to transform both it and you. Let the real you Speak!

We’re planning our Maiden seminar for November. If you’re a woman who wants to change her voice and her life then register your interest now. with Dr Louise Mahler or Josephine Emery.

Let’s go out with George Clooney’s Auntie Rosemary!

The Real Possibility of Joy Cover

The Real Possibility of Joy Chapter 10

To The Island

Failure, creation and the infinite I Am.

I was having an argument with someone who’d accused me of being a ‘creativity conservative’ because I was not embracing various online tools that could ‘enhance’ one’s creativity and overcome the problem of lack of sensitivity to language that many who wish to be writers seem to display. Creativity and improvisation were also mentioned. As, too, was the act of group creativity within theatre and also in online communities.

Now, read on………….

If we’re letting the debate roll. I’d rather not split us into “creativity conservatives” and “creativity progressives”. I think that kind of labelling devalues people before they can say something.

And it’s a false dichotomy.

The act of group-creativity has been practised certainly within the Theatre field for some time now. Some of the best digital games writers I know came out of Children’s Theatre (eg, Simon Hopkinson – co-creator of Bananas in Pyjamas et al). Simon maintains that learning how to keep a bunch of pre-schoolers focused on a theatre work led him to discover the necessity of interactivity with that audience. From there it was a short leap to building interactivity into playstation games and online projects.

“Improvisation”? Well, there are 3 statements in my mind.

1.  Dave Brubeck.  “There are no wrong notes in jazz, their rightness is determined by what you play next…”

2&3 from Miles Davis.

To Herbie Hancock when Herbie couldn’t think of anything to play on the “Kind of Blue” session. “If you can’t think of anything, Herbie…don’t play anything.”

Hancock’s sparse playing is brilliantly apt. His use of silence gives me goose-bumps when I listen.

To John Coltrane on a later date, “John, you don’t HAVE to play every note you think of!”

Unfortunately (from my perspective) ‘Trane ignored that advice. But the brilliance of Miles’s work lies in his exact choice of which note to play, and at what moment.

In my main creative work as a writer (whether a screenplay or a book), editing is everything. “A bloody good story is what’s left when you leave out the bloody good bits!” Hemingway.

As I hope the above quotes suggest, the act of discernment – of critical thinking and critical judgement – is also essential in creative work.

What is a “creative act”? Presumably it’s an act that creates something recognisably new.

I tend to believe that “creativity” is by now hard-wired into our brains. We’re a species that survived by adapting constantly to changing environments. Something gave us the ability to respond to new stimuli with non-programmed responses.

So I don’t see how we can have “creativity conservatives”.

But I’m also aware that new means of expressing creativity constantly evolve through constant human playing with technology (from papyrus to paper, from ideogram to alphabet, from wood-block printing to moveable type to digital publishing.)

I am always conscious – as a writer – that my work exists within a field of interactions with other people, particularly when it comes to screenwriting. But even book-writing involves team-work & interactivity.

My concern is not to confuse playing with a new technology with necessarily creating something “creatively new”. But that act of play may give someone the skills to take the next step. The step that leads into themselves and then out the other side with something made new.

There is a felicitous phrase which I have always associated with the act of creation,

…a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM…

That phrase, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, (circa 1817) also informs my favourite opening paragraph for a novel. The novel is John Cowper Powyrs’, A Glastonbury Romance.

At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolical soul of the First Cause of life. (First Published, 1933, republished by Picador in 1975.)

Back to Coleridge and the origins of this vertiginous paragraph.

The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

Josephine’s gloss on the above.

There are 3 levels of “creativity” we can discover when we reflect.

The first, ”Fancy”, we encounter first. It is imitative. It feeds us images, sounds, ideas, phrases, movements (Depending upon which sense is preferred by our particular mind in its particular mode of creation.) I am a writer whose mind feeds her visual images associated with word clusters. You might be a dancer whose mind feeds her movements as responses. From his works (Kubla Kahn, The Ancient Mariner) I suspect Coleridge was like myself.

This is the level I must get beyond when I work. It feeds me other people’s words and images. I latch onto them and at first think they are original thoughts of mine. I have to let them go, for my own thoughts lie deeper than this surface dross. But these initial images may actually point me towards what lies deeper.

Which takes us to the Secondary Imagination. This is the level which most of us encounter in our creative work, most of the time.

It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate…

My personal history picks up an echo of the Primary Imagination and feeds me images that reflect the deepest, primary moment, interpreted through what I know.

Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell on creativity. “I may dream of a winged horse, but only because I have both experienced what wings and horses are.” (See his, A History of Western Philosophy.)

This is the moment when we recognise our own particular voice in our own particular art.

But there are moments we experience when we strike something beyond our own Self. Something speaks through us and we do not recognise it. But once it has happened we hunger after it again and again.

I remember my father, once, in his 80s. I found him standing, smiling, stroking the pine Hutch (or Kitchen Dresser) he had once made me. (He was a gifted carpenter.)

“What are you doing, dad?” I asked.

He smiled sheepishly, like a little boy.

“I was standing here admiring this, and then I suddenly remembered who made it!” he said.

Sometimes we look back at our work and, for a moment, can’t see ourselves in it. That’s when we’ve broken through.

I do respond to that suggestion – the whisper – that there is something eternal which our minds are shivering towards in their quest of Becoming. Something we are trying to both recreate and co-create within the Creative Act.  It seems to me that we can paraphrase Coleridge.

From: a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM…

To: a repetition in the finite human mind of the first moment of the Big Bang, the moment when the universe ceased being potential and became actual.

The knowledge of that moment is buried deep within us, and within every other particulate moment of space/time within this universe.

Perhaps it is that hidden knowledge, that desire for reunion, which drives the need to create?