FOLIOS Volume N. 7

How can creativity preserve an intrinsic value of humanity in a world that prizes efficiency? How can a theatre in a war-torn country be a source of spring for children in bomb shelters? How does a music school restore a sense of self in a country devastated by youth unemployment? These are just some of the beautiful questions that lie at the heart of the work of the Creativity Pioneers from Venezuela to Ukraine, South Africa to Sudan, and more, to whom this Folios is dedicated.

“The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life,” says poet, David Whyte, whose poetry and prose has contributed to the language that has been directional for the Creativity Pioneers Fund.

“How do I move from this place when I am stuck and besieged?” is a beautiful question urgingcontemplative inquiry posed by David to a somewhat dispirited audience in an auditorium in Johannesburg two years ago. I was in that audience too, dispirited just the same. In these times of enormous and enveloping troubles, what brought us in front of David that evening was a search for a way. A way that can only be illuminated by a poet.

David’s coordinates brought the audience to ground, a journey, as he defines it, of finding a home in circumstances and above all to facing the truth. That is the function of poetry. That is the role of poets, especially in disorientating times.

It is to the poetry of poets like David that we, as the Creativity Pioneers Fund, look to for alchemic language to articulate what the Creativity Pioneers are shaping in their communities and the world by asking and living the beautiful questions.

Here is my conversation with David, which I hope leads you on a journey inward.

LX: The last time I heard you speak was two years ago in Johannesburg. You spoke about how a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind and that really stuck with me. We, as the Creativity Pioneers Fund, have taken to the idea of the beautiful questions. It has profoundly shaped how we speak of the Creativity Pioneers Fund, and the work done by the Creativity Pioneers, as that of living beautiful questions thereby shaping a different world. How do you think of a beautiful question today? Has there been any evolution in what a beautiful question is considering what is happening in the world at this moment?

DW: Yes, a beautiful question is part of what I call the conversational reality, the fact that anything real is only where one thing meets another. It is where what I think is me meets what is other than me. And at the bottom of every conversation is a kind of invitation to understanding. And so, abeautiful question is a very foundational part of being alive. And just paying attention to something else or somebody else is a form of invitation. I think the beautiful part of the invitation and the beautiful part of the question is just realising how many consequences there are to meeting things properly.

LX: I love the idea of meetings things properly.

DW: Instead of pretending to meet but never really touching or being touched by things other than ourselves, the beautiful question is about paying real attention in silence. The beautiful question in a relationship is dependent on your ability to pay attention to the person you are with as if you areseeing them for the first time, even though you have been married to them for 20 years. It is the ability to allow the other to be themselves. There is a very powerful koan, a very powerful question in the Zen tradition, which is a simple statement made by a Zen teacher, which is that “not knowing is most intimate”. The most beautiful question is one asked as a form of paying attention rather than from wanting an immediate answer. Just the question, “who am I with right now?” said in the right way, magnifies our presence, magnifies the way we are paying attention to another person. It creates something really remarkable. My favorite lines of William Wordsworth at the moment are the three lines he says while in the mountains in the Lake District looking out and seeing a single cloud in the summer sky- “The earth was all before me. With a heart/ Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, I look about; and should the chosen guide Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,/ I cannot miss my way.”

It means that not knowing is real liberty. It is giving yourself freedom to manoeuvre. We often narrow our own identity by giving other people narrow names. We narrow our own territory by naming the territory that we are looking out upon. And in certain ways we are often trying to capture in a way that which is not possible of capture. The part ‘a heart joyous, nor scared at its own liberty’ speaks to how as human beings, we do get afraid of our own freedom. And often, when we feel the sweet territory of our own freedom opening up, we, ourselves, will be the first to close it down. We will be the first to feel that we do not deserve that territory. That we do not deserve that freedom. And so, there is always a socio-political aspect to working for freedom. It always has to go hand-in-hand with a very personal, soul-based understanding of what freedom means in the human heart. And it seems to me that real freedom comes from granting life to things and people other than yourself. This incredible sense of allowing. And it is very difficult to allow other people to be themselves if you cannot allow yourself to be yourself.

LX: What would you say the conditions are for a beautiful question to emerge? Is it what you have mentioned so far? Silence, paying attention, and being unafraid of the unknown?

DW: Immediately when you use the word condition, I think of a line by T. S. Eliot when he talks about the state that he is trying to get into: ‘Quick now, here, now, always – A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)’. What a beautiful question is costing us is any name that we have given to ourselves or to our fellow human beings, to a wife, to a husband, to a partner, to a colleague. Any names we have given them that are too small. And any names wehave given ourselves are too small. So, the powerful arbiter of making sure the question is a beautiful one, is ensuring that the question is asked in a profound form of silence, where you are not immediately trying to aggrandise the answer. It is when you allow things to speak back to you in their own voice.

I had this experience in a very practical way in the Galapagos Islands as a young naturalist. I had learned all of these Latin names for the different creatures under the delusion that I know what I amlooking at. But the Latin names did not give me any essence of what the creature was. I was asking false questions when I first went to Galapagos. I was looking at the surface coloration of everything really. And it was only after a few months there that the place started to speak back to me in its own voice. And once it started speaking back to me, it spoke to a part of me, inside myself, that I did not realise was there all along. I do often think there is a profound part of us that is, at all times,experiencing reality with a maturity and a sense of freedom but our surface personalities are terrified of it. That is why asking the beautiful question to begin with is so vulnerable because you start peeling away the surface skin, the surface name, the surface identity and finding something much more raw, much more free, much less afraid of death, both psychological and real death. And so, the first steps are always steps of vulnerability. The first real step is stopping the conversation you are having now. Not improving it, not ameliorating it, not re-engineering it and not taking a pause so you can start it again. It is about stopping it completely. All of our great contemplative and native traditions of being out in the wilds, in silence, are all about stopping the human social conversation.

LX: We met for the first time in 2019, and I have had the honour of hearing you speak on a coupleof occasions, and your work has been instrumental in how I have come to trouble my own identity.When we met in 2019, I would have told you that I am South African. And I think through this process of poetry, I am now uncertain that that is who I am. The idea of nationality brings on a lot of fear lately. My people have wanted so long to belong to South Africa because for so long we were made to not belong. And now I feel like we are over-correcting, eagerly claiming these things that we were historically deprived of. And just because we were deprived does not mean thatclaiming them now is right. At least right for me. I know my sense of nationality has been hard-fought for by many people I admire and love but what if I do not want it because I do not think thatis who I am. I think I belong to way more, something vaster.

DW: I think that is a very mature stance to take. And it will not be understood by certain constituencies, of course, who fought hard. But it is actually the ultimate place to get to. I mean, that same dynamic was, to a certain extent part of the Irish Revolution. The Irish had been conquered by the English. And where the Irish rebellion was against the conqueror, and all thepoets and writers of the Celtic renaissance in the 1890s and early 1900s were trying to give Ireland a proper mythic foundation so that their fight would not be just against the conqueror, but for something that lay deep down inside themselves. And of course, what lies deep down inside usbelongs to everyone, including the conqueror (including their own grief in being put in that place too by their own society). So, it’s a hard place to get to, but it’s ultimately, I think, where we are all trying to get to.

LX: Regarding this idea of false questions, when you look at contemporary life now, what are some examples of false questions both personally and politically?

DW: Oh my god, false questions are inscribed across the political heavens at the moment. The false questions Putin has of Ukraine and the false questions Trump has about the world. Someone likeTrump is so far off from having a real conversation with anything other than himself. He is just not even on the conversational map. The way we name things, here in the United States, the way we name who is liberal, who is conservative and what is most important for us, is not a realconversation. When you name things that are important to you in your twenties, you tend to findlater in life, especially in your sixties or seventies, that those names were surface names for something that was much deeper. If you hold the conversation at a deep enough level, even when you are 20 years old, you can find that 45-year-old maturity inside yourself. But it is always through paying deep attention in silence, so that things can fall away and the true importance of things can speak back to you. I mean, there are so many parents who, now, that their children are older, carry regrets about not stopping to spend more untimed time with them. Yes, your job as a parent is to look after them, to make sure they are fed and taken care of. But there is something much more important, there is the beautiful question: ‘what is this really all about?’ Will you ask the beautiful question early enough in the relationship? There are so many marriages which have fallen apart because the beautiful question was not asked. Quite often, a romantic relationship and marriage will turn into a logistical army of two. The only time you get back, is when you stop and drop down back into your bodies to find that love and affection again. So asking the beautiful question is really about keeping things alive. Keeping your relationship with the sky alive. Keeping your relationship with birdsong alive. Keeping your relationship with the work that you desire for yourself alive.