Dear Gentle Reader,
I’ve been thinking of the word “surrender” of late. Perhaps because of the unsurrendering nature of our era. Perhaps because I’m searching for a different way into art and life. A different way to be.
Surrender is a word soaked with negative connotations. To surrender is to be weak. You surrender when you have no more will to fight, when you lack strength, when you lack belief. Surrendering can seem like a character flaw, especially in victory-at-any-cost America. Never surrender, never give up. Persist, resist, insist.
But surrendering isn’t necessarily about giving up, or weakness, or passivity. The act of resignation, of ceding, can be an act of opening oneself up, of receptivity. It can be as brave and bold as any victory.
It’s a paradox: a collapse that invites fullness. Sometimes you have to give up power to gain power. Sometimes you have to lose the argument to win the argument. And that in turn changes the rules of power and the nature of winning.
“The creative self,” wrote the poet Jane Hirshfield, “[asks] the surrender of ordinary conceptions of identity and will for a broader kind of intimacy and allegiance.”
In Hirshfield’s terms, surrender becomes a radical, transformative act. A redefinition of ego and will and success.
Surrender dissolves the ego so that you can serve something beyond yourself.
When we surrender ourselves to our art, we allow ourselves to soften. Surrender invites us to give ourselves up to something larger, to meld with wonder and awe. Surrender creates intimacy and expansiveness at the same time. It sparks curiosity, exploration. It’s the equivalent of going to sleep: by sinking into an unconscious state, we allow dreams to fill us. We give up trying to change and control things. The rigidities of expectations, desires, and aspirations melt away.
“I think surrender should be an active verb,” said the musician Brian Eno. He says that we generally think of surrender as being a passive state of submission, but if we think of it as being an active choice, a word of passion, then it’s transformed. Eno says that when you surrender, “you know you’re not in control anymore and that makes you more alert.” The surfer doesn’t try to control the wave, but to balance control with surrender, he says, because it’s only with surrender that the surfer can feel the wave.
Eno believes that we have a human need for surrender so strong that it’s at the center of religion and art. It’s at the center of love, as well, for love only succeeds with mutual surrender. Surrender dissolves the ego so that you can serve something beyond yourself. Surrender creates new spaces of being.
Think what would change if you allowed yourself to surrender in a conversation. What if you committed to listening, to let another’s words and spirit rise up and take you instead of focusing on your point of view, your needs. What if you decided not to try to win the next argument you find yourself in? What if you decide not to be the star of the conversation?
The same goes for creating art. You often hear a writer comment on how the characters of their story took over at a certain point. What they’re saying is that they surrendered to the story. They followed the scents of the story through the jungle instead of taking a machete to forge a trail they mapped out. The outline, the plan—the victory that’s been designed—succumbs to something greater, something truer.
“All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling,” wrote Blaise Pascal.
Or it begins again, but better. Reason too easily becomes stiff, following well-hewn pathways, seeking to be right, but reason is best when it’s flexible, not seeking to determine, but to find. Surrendering.
The Rundown
Reading: Envy, by Joseph Epstein (because to write is to reckon with envy)
Listening to: Brian Eno's Music for Airports (because in his creation of "ambient music," he stripped away all of the usual markers of music, such as rhythm, beats)
Lusting for: Sitting in an airport and waiting to get on a plane.
Inspiration: "I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender." ~ Brian Eno
Random question: Is there a theater playing movies of all of our dreams when we die? And if so, can we sit in the audience and watch?
Photo prompt: Bright Lights, Small City