Imagination
Imagination is a muscle. An owlbear-level hero adapts to overcome challenges, building decent gyms from kitchen items, junkyard scraps, and fallen logs.
It’s also a question of survival. Whether you’re slipping into a book where you can be a dragon because your parents are screaming at each other, or you’re a deployed soldier who cracks open the Lord of the Rings because the world is full of explosions and people dying, I understand you. I suspect the people with the wildest imaginations needed to build a place in their heads where they felt safe. Where there are clear heroes and clear villains, without the murkiness.
Full disclosure: this post talks a bit about your fitness journey, and a shit-ton about your mythic journey. Hey, take a look at that spreadsheet: we’ve got grief, discipline, and sacrifice coming up, heavy topics deliberately paired with diabolical workout techniques designed to bruise your body and mind. Here we have a moment to breathe, relax, and build our fantasy world.
Even so, I’ve self-indulged recklessly, adding new characters, settings, and deepened relationships in our mythic story. Why have I skewed the precarious balance between workout tips, anecdotes, and the fantasy story? Because it’s the imagination post. Also, it gave me joy.
Created by the reckless imagination of a mad wizard, and midwifed by Marlene Andersson, monstress extraordinaire, the owlbear is a creature of pure muscle and magic.
The owlbear’s feathers may dazzle but ultimately imagination is not magic – it’s just one component of the larger creative process which also includes the ability to focus intensely, and apparently each of us has a mental bureaucrat, up to his elbows in your brain’s sock drawer, tagging, folding and filing things away as interesting.
The owlbear collects branches and foliage to pad her nest—creative people do the same thing, building shrines of images, knowledges, words, and experiences. So if you’re serious about getting in shape, build your nest. That means getting curious about fitness blogs, reading a book or two on the subject, getting a decent cookbook, and watching other athletes to see their moves. Steal my ideas, combine them with your circumstances, and make something new.
Case in point: a homemade workout brought to you by the dedicated athletes of the Log Gym.
Leg workout. Difficulty: owlbear
5 sets of 10-15 Stump Jumps
5 sets of 10-15 Squats
5 sets of 10-15 Deadlifts
5 sets of 10-15 Lunges
5 sets of 10-15 Calf Raises
5 sets of 1 min Lower Ab “planks”
5 mins stretching
But working out with a strange object is only the tip of the imagination iceberg. Find stealthy windows in your day to grab a workout; like in the gap between breakfast and first lunch. Also, people who commute by bike may find they trample an orc or two en route. Get wild in your spice rack to boost those limp lettuce leaves and boiled eggs. Caught in an interminable zoom meeting? Turn off your camera and hammer out some bicep curls.
Ultimately, creativity is not what it appears to be: the magician pulls the rabbit from the hat and it’s like she created it from nothing! But the rabbit was always there, stuffed up a baggy sleeve. Creativity is not creating something from nothing; we are builders, heaping ever upwards, redefining, rediscovering, reapplying, or reinterpreting the work of our predecessors.
With that in mind, let us return to the mythic world; today’s journey is a series of audio posts—let my soothing voice wash over you. Last chapter, you and Max finally made it to the Forest of Thorns en route to distant Daganthor. The forest is the rumoured home of the mighty owlbear and each step bring you closer to confrontation; you rack your brains – without imagination, you could never beat such a monster.
Vulnerable, alone, exhausted. Seems like that describes all of us these days—here in Paris we’ve been in a state of complete or partial lockdown for nearly a year. Still, sometimes the Log Gym brings us together for workouts that strain the body and imagination. One logger, Blake, who runs a philosophy club, and has a decent set of quadriceps, confessed: “Matt, after months of lockdown, I’m just really not feeling the home workouts anymore.”
Turns out his home gym was just a sad corner with a yoga mat. Hey, you can get a lot of shit done just with bodyweight, and yogis are often in incredible shape, but no wonder you can’t muster enthusiasm for a home gym that’s so austere even monks who’ve sworn vows of poverty think you’re being a martyr.
At the bare minimum, all you really need is a weight that can function like a dumbbell, and a weight that can function like a barbell. You can do a huge percentage of the bodybuilding motions just with these.
For a dumbbell, consider making a Bag of Books as a simple, writer-friendly technique. You can also use water bottles, paint cans, encyclopedias, resistance bands, kettlebells, bricks, or just get a dumbbell. Hey, voila, now you can do bicep curls, front, side, and rear delt raises, shoulder presses, forearms, triceps extensions—basically one Bag of Books will bring your arm and shoulder day together.
It’s not rocket surgery
For barbells, anything that’s reasonably heavy and you can hold in your arms is useful to squat. You can do most leg exercises with a same-size friend on your back, as we did at the log gym before Corona virus. Flip a giant tire; lift a log, a stone, a water jug, a heavy chain, or lash water bottles to a broomstick with rope. You can do chin-ups from tree branches or at outdoor gyms or from the edge of the bed in your Parisian shoebox apartment. I even saw a video on Instagram of a woman training her quads while carrying a goat. And look—just one big weight opens up your squats, lunges, deadlifts, calf raises, bench press, bent-over rows, shoulder presses and shrugs.
Irregular-shaped objects are more awkward in your hand and they force you to compensate with your core strength. A combination of bodyweight exercises and a couple improvised objects will take you extremely far. An owlbear-level hero does not accept the lack of a gym as an excuse.
Moving from the mountain to the forest, Max found his strength irrelevant. Similarly, when I transitioned from sailor to writer six years ago, there was no magic wand to wave and make things easy. Like slaying an owlbear or building a less austere home gym, the path to becoming a more creative person is a gradual one.
I began my artistic journey as a repressed veteran whose brain was a system of whirring cogs. Since then, l’ve built an artistic life by writing every day, reading, taking courses, travelling, attending workshops, and hobnobbing with writers. My first readings—performing on stage—probably sounded much like military briefings, but since those days I’ve performed on many stages in different countries alongside gifted poets, performers, actors, scholars, writers, and bullshitters. Somewhere on the journey, I learned to take inspiration from the artists around me: consider the wild imagination of Alison Koehler, an artist who assembles shards of stained glass while reading poetry. Look at Lala Drona’s interpretation of our dystopian present. Or Ed Bell’s brainchild, the Aeneid, a curated series of performances that reinterpret the classic.
I was building a nest! Padding my idea-babies with the brains of more creative people. I’ve worked alongside brilliant editors at In/Words and PLU, and when I was the artistic director of VERSeFest, I had the pleasure to meet dozens of world-class writers and poets. At some point, my performances on stage got more familiar—it was just like telling stories around the campfire—and the pressure dissolved. Then it got weird. On a stage in Bath, I pantomimed hosing down an aroused Bigfoot. In Ottawa, I read a testicle eulogy. Before a crowd in Paris, I acted out a race between two vibrators buzzing on a linoleum floor. And for the recent video montage, PLU Presents, I created an unlikely hero: a tomb raider with a dead wizard lodged in his ass.
Yes, I’ve got the maturity of a six-year-old, but it’s easy to connect with people when you make them laugh. It’s been a long, curious journey which has forced me to soften many times and grow new brain lobes; at some point I became a creative person, and I believe the path is open to everyone.
Imagination is the root of empathy. We can’t feel for another person unless we can imagine ourselves in their place. So the fantasy writer’s challenge is unique. To imagine the shared humanity of characters that don’t even exist, could never exist.
My students at the French War College know that I’ve had a creative transformation. Calling them students feels strange. Super-humans would be more appropriate: infantry, pilots, high-level administrators, police, artillery officers, ship captains, divers and doctors. I flatter myself to think that if I had stayed in the military I would be like them—top of my game, mid-career, getting mentored by Generals.
Suddenly the mentors are all saying the same thing: if you want to be a senior leader, you need to develop creativity. Only problem is that the systems of laws, bureaucracies, structure, drill, and obedience to authority don’t foster a culture of risk-taking where a creative person can push the cultural boundaries. And how can you process your experiences when you’re busy hurtling from airplanes and getting shot out of cannons?
OK, the first creative writing exercise was a catastrophe, but at least I learned something; as per usual, my students forced me to examine my assumptions and check my ego at the door. The ability to write a fairy tale about an owlbear is not a practical kind of creativity, not the kind they need. What they need is the creativity to improvise and make change in their worlds of catching crooks, flying planes, and killing.
Two insights emerged. First, creativity is not a force for good—it’s just a force, and it can be bent as easily towards love as domination. Second, without the discipline to persist on your goals and projects, creativity is just hot air flapping from an owlbear’s wings.
For the next exercise with the superhumans, I asked them to list the top five barriers to creativity. It could be a horrible teacher, a brutal parent, a system, a culture, whatever you like.
You know what they wrote? The infantry, the pilots, the gendarmerie, the artillery officers? Nearly all of them wrote that the biggest barrier to creativity is fear. Fear of making a mistake, and fear of looking foolish.
There’s no such thing as creativity, one soldier explained. There is only courage.