By TERYL FAULKNER

Like the Tasmanian Devil, I’ve been propelled through life by a series of personal tornadoes. My handbag has teemed with pens, pencils, and parts thereof, with decaying dinner mints, tufts of lint, tea bag slips, tea bags, receipts, torn letters, bus tickets, train tickets, dusty Kleenex, quarters, pennies, and crumpled red ten-cent Canadian Tire bills.

The same unrelenting force has sucked socks, books, nickels, notes, business cards, empty mugs, and more dusty Kleenex to the centre of my bedroom. My refrigerator has harboured veggies and leftovers until spinach, sprouts, and last month’s penne pasta emerged smelly, slimy, and fuzzy. Bills and library books have floated in a dimension all their own – one without access to due dates. Walls, curtains, and gardens have been abandoned, half-painted, half-stitched, half-planted. 

In my working life, I never called myself a real writer. I had no rhythm of production, no healthy tension to my work and, you guessed it, no finished work. I would scrawl excitedly through journals, spatter New Times Roman across empty computer screens, plaster post-its, backs of envelopes, torn newsprint, and corners of notebooks with character sketches, query ideas for magazine articles, musings on the meaning of life. I was ruled by free association, streams of consciousness, and arcane translations of gut to paper. I made messes. I forgot most of what I’d thought, read, and written. Inchoate, unintelligible, and crude, my work dissolved into the chaos of my daily affairs. 

Eventually, I contracted a mysterious illness. A strange complex of vague symptoms puzzled doctors, friends, family, and me. Chest and liver pains kept me awake at night; by day I wore cover-up to hide the yellow tinge to my skin. My condition persisted through the next few years and was never medically diagnosed. 

The way I see it now, chaos had started at the outer limits of my life and burrowed its way inward, until it finally penetrated my body. I felt distinctly "not me," "out of sorts," "dis-ordered." I felt my lungs couldn’t breathe because my diaphragm was clamped on too tight. And that my liver couldn’t cleanse because its portals had swollen shut. And that my intestines had come undone because my heart was deprived of oxygen because my lungs sat panting atop a discouraged diaphragm. I felt as though my various bodily systems had been displaced and now struggled to align themselves back into a sensible "me."

I’ve come to understand my illness and the slow steady healing that ensued as a creative drama. According to Nietzsche, the creative process is driven by two opposing human tendencies. The Apollonian tendency prefers reason, order, and control; the Dionysian favours passion, disorder, and spontaneity. Normally, Apollonian control wrests Dionysian disorder into meaningful, complete, creative work. But what if the two aren’t cooperating? Left to its own devices, the Apollonian urge will compulsively organize the same material over and over again. A handbag governed solely by the Apollonian would produce neither fresh scraps, nor new dinner mints. Indeed, old dinner mints would remain pristinely wrapped in this handbag of no decay. No lint surprises, no freshly shattered pens, no new money. Rather, this pathological handbag would exercise a sterilizing degree of control over its contents. 

The disaster of a handbag abandoned to Dionysian disorder has already been described. "If we were to live in the pure Dionysian," explained a past professor, "We couldn’t even tie our shoes." Life would proceed as one pulsing mass of chaos – not unlike my refrigerator, my bedroom, my work, my body. 

In falling ill, I had slipped from the healthy rhythm and balance of the creative process. I was all untied shoes. 

I now see the healthy body as the ultimate demonstration of the Appolonian/Dionysian creative process. Madly prolific, the body produces billions of new cells each day, while masterfully reigning each one into the (more or less) harmonious whole that is the self. Organisms . . . organize. A dash of order, a pinch of chaos, and the body grows, healthy and ingenious. 

Mozart’s creative genius evidently worked much like the healthiest body’s. He would conjure entire symphonies in his head while travelling or feeding his cat, then transcribe them fully formed onto blank pages. His creativity was a perfect marriage of Appollo and Dionysus.

Beethoven, it seems to me, worked more like the healing body under stress. In a creative fever, his Dionysian muse would throw up bits and pieces of musical inspiration. In the end, researchers marveled at how he produced such masterpieces from so many seemingly unrelated fragments. He must have, at some point, taken control of that marvelous mess. Only with such Apollonian discipline, could Beethoven have worked such chaos into the harmonious whole of a symphony, a concerto, a sonata.

In the case of my own turbulently Beethoven-like body, I found there were things I could do to foster a better relationship between Dionysus and Appollo. I could nurture: a few drops of milk thistle for the liver, a cheery organic apple for the lungs. I could encourage: a festive flower skirt to celebrate life, a bright green sweater for vitality. I could even, on a sunny day, wrap a blue feather boa around my neck, and wave its ends in the air like the pom-poms of a zealous cheerleader.

To address the chaos around me, I reached into the darkness for the eyes of my personal tornadoes. Slowly, patiently, I began to attend to my handbag, my bedroom, the refrigerator. Fragments of writing emerged from all those places (the refrigerator not excluded), and I saw them for what they were: incomprehensible, albeit passionate bits of Dionysian spontaneity. As I collected stray pieces of my life and work, my mysterious illness receded into the background and I began to feel myself again, a purposeful whole.

I still struggle with pen lids, slimy sprouts, due dates, post-its, and organ function. But as I feel around for the healthy tension within – order/chaos, reason/passion – my daily affairs, my work, and even my handbag begin to make sense. 

"Creativity," says Rollo May, "is neither rational nor irrational. It is neither logical nor emotional, ordered nor chaotic. Rather, it is suprarational, a process that fully engages opposing human tendencies." 

It’s a fresh dinner mint – tossed into the handbag and savoured the next day.