I was having an argument with someone who’d accused me of being a ‘creativity conservative’ because I was not embracing various online tools that could ‘enhance’ one’s creativity and overcome the problem of lack of sensitivity to language that many who wish to be writers seem to display. Creativity and improvisation were also mentioned. As, too, was the act of group creativity within theatre and also in online communities.
Now, read on………….
If we’re letting the debate roll. I’d rather not split us into “creativity conservatives” and “creativity progressives”. I think that kind of labelling devalues people before they can say something.
And it’s a false dichotomy.
The act of group-creativity has been practised certainly within the Theatre field for some time now. Some of the best digital games writers I know came out of Children’s Theatre (eg, Simon Hopkinson – co-creator of Bananas in Pyjamas et al). Simon maintains that learning how to keep a bunch of pre-schoolers focused on a theatre work led him to discover the necessity of interactivity with that audience. From there it was a short leap to building interactivity into playstation games and online projects.
“Improvisation”? Well, there are 3 statements in my mind.
1. Dave Brubeck. “There are no wrong notes in jazz, their rightness is determined by what you play next…”
2&3 from Miles Davis.
To Herbie Hancock when Herbie couldn’t think of anything to play on the “Kind of Blue” session. “If you can’t think of anything, Herbie…don’t play anything.”
Hancock’s sparse playing is brilliantly apt. His use of silence gives me goose-bumps when I listen.
To John Coltrane on a later date, “John, you don’t HAVE to play every note you think of!”
Unfortunately (from my perspective) ‘Trane ignored that advice. But the brilliance of Miles’s work lies in his exact choice of which note to play, and at what moment.
In my main creative work as a writer (whether a screenplay or a book), editing is everything. “A bloody good story is what’s left when you leave out the bloody good bits!” Hemingway.
As I hope the above quotes suggest, the act of discernment – of critical thinking and critical judgement – is also essential in creative work.
What is a “creative act”? Presumably it’s an act that creates something recognisably new.
I tend to believe that “creativity” is by now hard-wired into our brains. We’re a species that survived by adapting constantly to changing environments. Something gave us the ability to respond to new stimuli with non-programmed responses.
So I don’t see how we can have “creativity conservatives”.
But I’m also aware that new means of expressing creativity constantly evolve through constant human playing with technology (from papyrus to paper, from ideogram to alphabet, from wood-block printing to moveable type to digital publishing.)
I am always conscious – as a writer – that my work exists within a field of interactions with other people, particularly when it comes to screenwriting. But even book-writing involves team-work & interactivity.
My concern is not to confuse playing with a new technology with necessarily creating something “creatively new”. But that act of play may give someone the skills to take the next step. The step that leads into themselves and then out the other side with something made new.
There is a felicitous phrase which I have always associated with the act of creation,
…a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM…
That phrase, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, (circa 1817) also informs my favourite opening paragraph for a novel. The novel is John Cowper Powyrs’, A Glastonbury Romance.
At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolical soul of the First Cause of life. (First Published, 1933, republished by Picador in 1975.)
Back to Coleridge and the origins of this vertiginous paragraph.
The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
Josephine’s gloss on the above.
There are 3 levels of “creativity” we can discover when we reflect.
The first, ”Fancy”, we encounter first. It is imitative. It feeds us images, sounds, ideas, phrases, movements (Depending upon which sense is preferred by our particular mind in its particular mode of creation.) I am a writer whose mind feeds her visual images associated with word clusters. You might be a dancer whose mind feeds her movements as responses. From his works (Kubla Kahn, The Ancient Mariner) I suspect Coleridge was like myself.
This is the level I must get beyond when I work. It feeds me other people’s words and images. I latch onto them and at first think they are original thoughts of mine. I have to let them go, for my own thoughts lie deeper than this surface dross. But these initial images may actually point me towards what lies deeper.
Which takes us to the Secondary Imagination. This is the level which most of us encounter in our creative work, most of the time.
It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate…
My personal history picks up an echo of the Primary Imagination and feeds me images that reflect the deepest, primary moment, interpreted through what I know.
Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell on creativity. “I may dream of a winged horse, but only because I have both experienced what wings and horses are.” (See his, A History of Western Philosophy.)
This is the moment when we recognise our own particular voice in our own particular art.
But there are moments we experience when we strike something beyond our own Self. Something speaks through us and we do not recognise it. But once it has happened we hunger after it again and again.
I remember my father, once, in his 80s. I found him standing, smiling, stroking the pine Hutch (or Kitchen Dresser) he had once made me. (He was a gifted carpenter.)
“What are you doing, dad?” I asked.
He smiled sheepishly, like a little boy.
“I was standing here admiring this, and then I suddenly remembered who made it!” he said.
Sometimes we look back at our work and, for a moment, can’t see ourselves in it. That’s when we’ve broken through.
I do respond to that suggestion – the whisper – that there is something eternal which our minds are shivering towards in their quest of Becoming. Something we are trying to both recreate and co-create within the Creative Act. It seems to me that we can paraphrase Coleridge.
From: a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM…
To: a repetition in the finite human mind of the first moment of the Big Bang, the moment when the universe ceased being potential and became actual.
The knowledge of that moment is buried deep within us, and within every other particulate moment of space/time within this universe.
Perhaps it is that hidden knowledge, that desire for reunion, which drives the need to create?
