Elan Vital: Eliciting the Creative Act

Autoethnographic practice and the Transformagram pedagogies that I have developed for courses at Creighton University elicit the elan vital. This term was used by Ira Progoff in his book At a Journal Workshop. But this term can be traced back to Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian Poet whose letters were published in Letters to a Young Poet in the early 1900’s. Rilke was inspired by Henri Bergson, a French philosopher, who wrote Creative Evolution. Creative evolution was understood to have an elan vital that gave directionality to the creative act and becomingess.
 
Autoethnography engages practitioners in the creative act that encapsulates the potential to transform. Rilke’s letters give advice to a young poet. He says that we need to go within.
“There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out if it is spreading its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write?” (Rilke, p. 18).
 
Rilke goes on to suggest that the young poet draw near to nature and express what he sees, loves, and even what he loses. These suggestions take us to the heart of the creative act that is brought forth as we contemplate our environment and our relationships. The depth and everlastingness of creative work comes from the necessity we feel to express ourselves. Performing the creative act is an essential part of living. It is also essential in learning. “Everything is gestation and then bringing forth” (Rilke, 29).
 
The following passage is particularly relevant for my lifework that has been interconnected with resolution processes. When we are searching and questing for a solution, we hope to find the answer. But Rilke counsels to live the questions now.
“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient in all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” (Rilke, p. 35).
 
However, finding life’s answers is often a difficult task. Rilke encourages the young poet as he faces the difficulties that are shaping his life. His letters provide guidance to support the young man’s becomingness. This passage in his letter provides us with a sense of wanting to grow and experience a life of greatness as well as the inevitable difficulties that will be presented if we are indeed destined to grow great. “Do you remember how that life yearned out of its childhood for the “great”? I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult, but for this reason too it will not cease to grow” (Rilke, p. 72). The elan vital provides us with the generative and creative energy needed to grow wise and to grow great. Rilke died in Switzerland after living in Valais. Here is a link to a museum in Sierre dedicated to his lifework: https://fondationrilke.ch/en/the-foundation/
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Here is a link to the book: https://monoskop.org/images/5/55/Rilke_Rainer_Maria_Letters_to_a_Young_Poet.pdf