The Third Body and the Material World
Image created by the author using the DALL·E text-to-image generation tool.
1.
It's been over two weeks, but I'm still basking in the afterglow of my son's wedding. Peter and his wonderful fiancé, Alexandra, married in Hood River, Oregon, late in the afternoon on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River. It was a magical event.
My wife, Deena, and I had been worried about the wedding, as parents often are. The ceremony was set to be held outdoors, so we'd been tracking the weather for weeks, hoping for a sunny day. We were also nervous about some of the wedding details. From the beginning, Peter and Alex had told us that they would not have a traditional wedding. He's an interior environmental designer at an architecture firm and she's an art educator and writer, so it’s not surprising that they wanted their wedding to include their distinct family traditions, beliefs about marriage, and personal aesthetics. They also wanted to create an environment where their family and friends could unite into a cohesive community. However, their plans for making all of this happen weren't always clear to us.
On the day of their wedding, the temperature reached 86 degrees, and the sky behind the sunlit hills displayed a lovely shade of blue. Their invited family and friends surrounded them on the grassed tiers and open lawn around the chuppah. A small group of friends and family read passages from our wedding and Alex's parents’ wedding, and various poems. Some also shared special stories about Peter and Alex. As the couple exchanged the vows they had written—each vow beginning with the end of the other's last vow—their love for one another and the love we all felt for the two of them was palpable in the warm air. At the end of the ceremony, in accordance with their wishes, Alex's grandfather invited us all to say in unison: "As your community, we now pronounce you joyfully wed."
A little later in the evening, I gave a toast that included this poem by Robert Bly:
The Third Body
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
I am confident that my son and new daughter-in-law will enjoy a long, loving, and successful marriage. Why? Because they’ve already made the imaginative leap necessary to bring the “third body” Bly describes into existence. Their wedding, which powerfully expressed their values, beliefs, aesthetics, passions, and tastes in every detail, began as an imagined space and event—one that required time to develop, refine, and materialize. It was the inaugural creation of their third body.
2.
We humans excel in the art of mental time-traveling. Our imaginative capabilities enable us to hopscotch from the present to the past, and venture into the future. We have the power to revisit, reimagine, and reinterpret both personal memories and historical events. And, we can anticipate, explore, and act out future events. We can even fabricate entirely new realities. This capacity for 'time-travel' assists us in gaining fresh insights into how the past influences the present, making more informed decisions, anticipating and planning for what may lie ahead, and taking proactive measures to address emerging issues while seizing potential opportunities.
Imagination is “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.”* We often treat the words "imagination" and "creativity" as synonyms, but there are important differences between the two concepts. Imagination is the driving force behind the creative process, art, and ultimately human connection. It provides the raw material for new ideas and innovations—it serves as the spark that ignites creativity. However, the things we imagine never have to leave our head to have value.
Creativity is the ability to conceive something new or to enhance an existing idea and express it. Imagination provides the raw material for creative thinking, while creativity involves the purposeful application of imaginative ideas. It is the act of transforming abstract thoughts and imaginative concepts into tangible creations.
The concept of “productivity” is deeply embedded in the concept of “creativity.” The English word “create” comes from the Latin word “creare,” which originally meant “to make grow” and later came to mean “to make.” Bringing ideas to life is challenging. As the music producer Rick Rubin notes in his book, The Creative Act:
Turning something from an idea into a reality can make it seem smaller. It changes from unearthly to earthly. The imagination has no limits. The physical world does. The work exists in both.
The bridge between what you see and experience in your mind and what you create to enable others to share your vision is your creative practice—the rituals you perform to coax your ideas out of their perfect state in your head into the world of constraints, compromises, and judgment.
...artists tend to develop a kind of creative mechanism—a conceptual approach—that allows them to be led by new ideas and surprise themselves without deviating from their own artistic principles. As an artist, you’re always studying your environment, absorbing sensations, memories of how things work and don’t work. The goal is to create a practice that allows a constant recalibration between your imagination and the world around you.”
—Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist
Creativity is what we make of our imagination, of our thoughts, of our self. The way forward is always through the work.
3.
Imagination is commonly thought of as something that lives within us, more precisely in our heads. But the body also participates in creative imagination, as does the material world around us. In my article, “The Brain, the Body and the Mind,”** I discussed the crucial role bodily sensations play in our thought processes, decision-making, and creative work. In the rest of this post, I want to focus on how interacting with the material world can expand your imagination.
Transitioning from the comfort of one’s imagination to the limitations inherent in the material world is challenging. As Rick Rubin stated, our creative ideas seem smaller as we start expressing them in tangible forms. However, rendering our ideas in the physical world also enhances your imagination. The resistance we encounter from the materials in our chosen medium sparks our imagination. In his essay, “Representation & the War for Reality,” the writer and philosopher William Gass explains:
Things give rise to thoughts, thoughts do not give rise to things, except secondarily as plans for action.
—William H. Gass, “Representation & the War for Reality”***
We move from uncertainty to invention by making, by engaging with the materials in our chosen medium of expression—testing their limits, experimenting with new tools, and developing new ways of working with them. As theater director and educator Lorne Buchman puts it, we “make to know.”**** It’s easy to assume that the act of creation is the imposition of your will on your raw materials. This notion has been the prevailing creative paradigm in Western culture since the portrayal of the Creation in the book of Genesis. But creating in the physical world is a two-way conversation.
Our creative work begins with a “pure” (or “unearthly,” as Rubin describes) mental image of what we want to achieve—the form that we aim to impose in the material world. Once we begin making, we perceive the image anew as it morphs into its physical (or “earthly”) form. Its new form is influenced by the unique properties of the material and our sensory understanding of both the material and form. The interplay between pure and material forms lies at the core of this quote attributed to Michelangelo: "The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."
I would like to conclude by revisiting Bly's poem. The third body he describes is not an abstraction, but a shared imaginative space (akin to the book they share). Bly writes: “Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know. / The man sees the way his fingers move; / he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him. / They obey a third body that they share in common.” As long as they are both alive, the third body lives inside of them and as a presence in their lives. It’s the space where their past, present, and future all co-exist, despite their failings and losses. It’s a safe-house for their hopes and dreams. As Peter and Alex have already discovered, it’s also a creative space for both imagining and building a long, loving, and joyous life together.
Footnotes
* As defined in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.
** The article is the conclusion to my series on the extended mind and creativity. The series begins with “Working Outside Your Brain.”
*** The essay was originally published in Salmagundi magazine (No. 55, Winter 1982) and is included in Gass' essay collection Habitations of the Word.
**** See my article “The Way Forward” and Buchman’s book Make to Know for more on this concept.