CREATIVITY wherever we begin, it is a beginning because there is a boundary between where we were and where we are now that we have begun... We have, in other words, begun. But what is it we have begun? What is it, I ask, have we begun? This was not written by Gertrude Stein. But it is a beginning which Gertrude Stein might have begun. In a conversation with Gertrude Stein, John Hyde Preston noted: "She talks freely and volubly and sometimes obscurely, as if she had something there that she was very sure of and yet could not touch it. She has the air of having seen in flashes something which she does not know the shape of, and can talk about, not out of the flashes but out of the spaces between when she has waited." (Brewster Ghiselin, editor, The Creative Process, New American Library, New York, 1952, p. 159) Our subject is creativity. And as anybody can tell, we have begun. Awkward beginning though it may be, we have... .....begun. Gertrude Stein herself said: "You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwords in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and if you let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won't know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing... I can tell you how important it is to have that creative recognition. You cannot go into the womb to form the child: it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole--and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come of itself--and that is creative recognition. Of course you have a little more control over your writing than that; you have to know what you want to get; but when you know that, let it take you and if it seems to take you off the track don't hold back, because that is perhaps where instinctively you want to be and if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry." (ibid., pp.159-60) And so we have already begun and can no longer call this a beginning, unless we are to consider ourselves beginning afresh with each word, with each sentence, and this may well be. Always beginning, coiling out a thought... stretching it out like a phrase of music. It snakes out, curls in the air like wisps of smoke, disperses, and is gone. And we begin again. It may be like that; or it may not. Mary Wigman, the choreographer, said of one of her dances: "My Pastorale was developed in the following way: I came into my studio one day and sank down with a feeling of complete relaxation. Out of a sense of deepest peace and quietude I began slowly to move my arms and body. Calling to my assistants, I said, 'I do not know if anything will come of this feeling, but I should like a reed instrument that would play over and over again a simple little tune, not at all important, always the same one.' Then with the monotonous sound of a little tune, with its gentle lyric suggestion, the whole dance took form. Afterward we found that it was built on six-eight time, neither myself nor the musician being conscious of the rhythm until we came to the end." (ibid.,pp. 79-80) These are metaphors. The word "beginning" is a delineation of a category, a description of a defined place, geographical or temporal. Birth is a metaphor for beginning. We are always and always in the midst of birthing. It is to these depths we dive, scrambling for air. To continue and to sustain... Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary, more commonly known simply as Joyce Cary, British magistrate to Borgu, Africa, turned artist and novelist late in life, said in a book about the creative process, Art and Reality: "...It is quite true that the artists, painter, writer or composer starts always with an experience that is a kind of discovery. He comes to it with the sense of a discovery; in fact, it is truer to say that it comes upon him as a discovery. It surprises him. This is what is usually called an intuition or an inspiration. It carries with it always the feeling of directness. For instance, you go walking in the fields and all at once they strike you in quite a new aspect: you find it extraordinary that they should be like that. This is what happened to Monet as a young man. He suddenly saw the fields, not as solid flat objects covered with grass or useful crops and dotted with trees, but as colour in astonishing variety and subtlety of gradation. And this gave him a delightful and quite new pleasure. It was most exciting discovery, especially as it was a discovery of something real. I mean, by that, something independent of Monet himself. That, of course, was half the pleasure. Monet had discovered a truth about the actual world. "This delight in discovery of something new in or about the world is a natural and primitive thing. All children have it. And it often continues until the age of twenty or twenty-five, even through- out life. "Children's pleasure in exploring the world, long before they can speak, is very obvious. They spend almost all their time at it. We don't speak of their intuitions, but it is the same thing as the intuition of the artist. That is to say, it is direct knowledge of the world as it is, direct acquaitance with things, with characters, with appearance, and this is the primary knowledge of the artist and writer. This joy of discovery is his starting point." (Joyce Cary, Art and Reality, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, 1958, pp. 15-16) I saw the form of this "essay" whole, as soon as I turned to that description of Gertrude Stein's conversation: "She talks freely and volugbly and sometimes obscurely, as if she had something there that she was very sure of and yet could not touch it." But years of interest in the subject of creativity, reading, cogi- tating, forgetting, re-membering...was preparation for the moment of insight. And then, from that moment on, it's all work, to keep that beginning alive, to help it grow into the coherent whole first perceived. 10% inspiration... 90% perspiration... And in the end, it may not work at all. That is the risk. The classic model for the workings of creativity is found in the story of Archimedes. Here is the story, recounted by Arthur Koestler in his book The Act of Creation: "Heiro, tyrant of Syracuse and protector of Archimedes, had been given a beautiful crown, allegedly of pure gold, but he suspected that it was adulterated with silver. He asked Archimede's opinion. Archimedes knew, of course, the specific weight of gold-- that is to say, its weight per volume unit. If he could measure the volume of the crown he would know immediately whether it was pure gold or not; but how on earth is one to determine the volume of a complicted ornament with all its filligree work? Ah, if only he could melt it down and measure the liquid gold by the pint, or hammer it into a brick of honest rectangular shape, or...and so on... "One day, while getting into his bath, Archimedes watched absently-mindedly the familiar sight of the water-level rising from one smudge on the basin to the next as a result of the immersion of his body, and it occurred to him in a flash that the volume of water displaced was equal to the volume of the immersed parts of his body--which therefore could simply be measured by the pint. He had melted his body down, as it were, without hammering it, and he could do the same with the crown... "Neither to Archimedes nor to anybody else before him had it ever occurred to connect the sensuous and trivial occupation of taking a bath with the scholarly pursuit of the measurement of solids. No doubt he had observed many times that the level of the water rose whenever he got into it; but this fact, and the distance between the two levels, was totally irrelevant to him--until it suddenly became bisociated with his problem. At that instant he realized that the amount of rise of the water-level was a simple measure of the volume of his own complicated body..." (Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, Dell Publishing Co., New York, 1964, pp. 105-106) The sequel to the discovery is well known. Archimedes immediately shot out of the bath tub, not bothering to dress, and ran through the town shouting "Eureka! Eureka!," ("I have found it! I have found it!) And hence this kind of creative discovery is sometimes referred to as the "Eureka" experience. Koestler defines this as an act of bisociation, meaning that something happening on one level--the problem of how to determine the volume of gold in the crown, for instance--is cut across, or connects up with, something happening on another level--the observation of the rising water-level. In the connection, the bisociation, is some new insight or discovery gained. Bisociation may also take place as one of the bases for how humor works. Koestler uses the working of laughter, which may occur when two levels of meaning collide to form a bisociation and demand a physiological "working off" of the tension created. Koestler em- ploys this model as a back-door approach to the creative process. He tells this story by way of illustration: "Two women meet while shopping at the supermarket in the Bronx. One looks cheerful, the other depressed. The cheerful one in- quires: 'What's eating you?' 'Nothing's eating me.' 'Death in the family?' 'No, God forbid!' 'Worried about mondy?' 'No...nothing like that.' 'Trouble with the kids?' 'Well, if you must know, it's my little Jimmy.' 'What's wrong with him, then?' 'Nothing is wrong. His teacher said he must see a psychia- trist.' Pause. 'Well, well, what's wrong with seeing a psychiatrist?' 'Nothing is wrong. The psychiatrist said he's got an Oedipus complex.' Pause. 'Well, well, Oedipus or Schmoedipus, I wouldn't worry so long as he's a good boy and loves his mamma.'" (ibid, pp. 32-33) Here we can see the two levels of operation as they come into collision: the cheerful woman's statement is ruled by the logic of comon sense: if Jimmy is a good boy and loves his mamma there can't be uch wrong. But in the context of Freudian psychiatry the relationship to the mother carries entirely different association. Koestler says that the creative act always operates on more than one plane, the bisociation of more than one level of understanding. Of course, that's oversimplifying things, and certainly oversimpli- fying Koestler's whole thesis, which is rooted in the complex workings of the entire biological organism. The subject of creativity is vast and complicated; many hypotheses, much conjecture, idea after idea... derives from the most profound of our mysteries... crucial to our survival... As the psychologist Carl Rogers says, "I maintain that there is a desperate social need for the creative behavior of creative indi- viduals." He goes on to say that "many of the serious criticisms of our culture and its trends may best be formulated in terms of a dearth of creativity. Let us state some of these very briefly: 1. In education we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose education is 'completed,' rather than freely creative and original thinkers. 2. In our leisure-time activities, passive entertainment and regimented group action are overwhelmingly predominant, whereas creative activities are much less in evidence. 3. In the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians, but the number who can creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed. 4. In industry, creation is reserved for the few--the manager, the designer, the head of the research depart- ment--whereas for the many life is devoid of original or creative endeavor. 5. In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, and the ideas we hold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity, toward stereotypy. To be original or different is felt to be 'dangerous.' "Why be concerned over this? If, as a people, we enjoy conformity rather than creativity, shall we not be permitted this choice? In my estimation such a choice would be entirely reasonable were it not for one great shadow which hangs over all of us. In a time when knowledge, constructive and destructive, is advancing by the most incredible leaps and bounds into a fantastic atomic age, genuinely creative adaptation seems to represent the only possibility that man can keep abreast of the kaleidoscopic change in his world. With scientific discovery and invention proceeding, we are told, at a geometric rate of progression, a generally passive and culture- bound people cannot cope with the multiplying issues and problems. Unless individuals, groups and nations can imagine, construct and creatively revise new ways of relating to these complex changes, the lights will go out. Unless man can make new and original adapt- ations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish. Not only individual malad- justment and group tensions but international annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of creativity." (Carl Rogers, "Towards a Theory of Creativity," in Creativity, P.E. Vernon, editor, Penguin Books, Ltd, Middlesex, England, 1970, pp.137-38) Now I take it that few like to be reminded of our plight, and it would seem that we certainly do not need to be reminded of how conformist our society is, what a dearth of creativity there is... But this truth must be faced, for to ignore it is to evade our in- dividual responsibilities. At the same time as we face the negative, we must acknowledge an underlying optimism: creativity can be nur- tured and developed; there are always solutions to our predicaments; our actions can and do make a difference. Stating the issue from another perspective, Rollo May, in his eloquent little book The Courage to Create, asks: "What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms and are fundamentally dependent on them rather than being merely a decoration for our work when science and logic have produced it?" He further says that "Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding--can participate in the constituting of reality-- only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-world relationship." (Rollo May, The Courage to Create, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1975, pp. 150,161) This is a beginning. A compilation of viewpoints. "she has the air of having seen in flashes something which she does not know the shape of, and can talk about, not out of the flashes but out of the spaces between when she has waited." This is a beginning which we have begun again and again The novelist Dorothy Canfield said of the process of her writing: "No two of my stories are ever constructed in the same way, but broadly viewed they all have exactly the same genesis, and I con- fess I cannot conceive of any creative fiction written from any other beginning...that of a generally intensified emotional sensi- bility, such as every human being experiences with more or less frequency. Everybody knows such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply, when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child's eyes moves you to tears, or an injustice reported in the newspapers to flaming indignation, a good action to a sunny warm love of human nature, a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair. "I have no idea whence this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it beings to rise in my heart, I know that a story is hovering in the offing. It does not always come safely to port. The daily rou- tine of ordinary life kills off many a vagrant emotion. Or if daily humdrum occupation does not stifle it, perhaps this saturated solu- tion of feeling does not happen to crystallize about any concrete fact, episode, word or phrase... "The beginning of a story is then for me in more than usual sensitiveness to emotion. If this encounters the right focus (and heaven only knows why it is the 'right' one) I get simul- taneously a strong thrill of intense feeling, and an intense desire to pass it on to other people. This emotion ay be any one of the infinitely varied ones which life affords, laughter, sorrow, indig- nation, gayety, admiration, scorn, pleasure. I recognize it for the 'right' one when it brings with it an irresistible impulse to try to make other people feel it. And I know that when it comes the story has begun..." (Ghiselin, Op. cit., pp. 168-69) The story has begun... But there are many obstacles, "the humdrum of everyday life," the distractions, the cultural barriers errected to ward off the "dangers" of creativity. Joyce Cary tells a beautiful story: "A great deal...of that spiritual and perpetual joy that children bring to us is just this power of seeing the world as a new thing, as pure intution, and so renewing for us the freshness of all life. But they always lose this power of original expression as soon as they begin there education. A small girl of seven once asked me if I would like a drawing. I said yes. She asked 'What shall I draw?' 'Anything you like.' 'Shall I draw you a swan?' 'Yes, a swan;' and the child sat down and drew for half an hour. I'd forgotten about the swan until she produced the most original swan I'd ever seen. It was a swimming swan, that is, a creature designed simply to swim. Its feet were enormous and very carefully finished, obviously from life. The whole structure of the feet was shown in heavy black lines. The child was used to seeing the swans on a canal at the end of her garden and had taken particular notice of their feet. Below the water the swan was all power. But for the body she gave it the faintest, lightest outline, neck and wings included in one round line shaped rather like a cloud--a perfect expression of the cloud-like movement of the swan on the surface. "I was admiring this swan when an older child in the room, aged thirteen, looked at the drawing and said contemptuously 'That's not a bit like a swan. I'll draw you a swan,' and pro- duced at once a Christmas-card swan, of the commonest type. "Yet the second child had all the qualities of the first, intelligence, sensibility. A few years before she had the ability to see for herself, to receive the unique personal impression. She had lost it by the education which emphasises the fact, measurements, analysis, the concept. Education is, and must be, almost entirely conceptual. And the concept is always the enemy of the intuition. It is said that when you give a child the name of a bird, it loses the bird. It never sees the bird again, but only a sparrow, a thrush, a swan, and there is a good deal of truth in this." (Cary, Op. cit., pp. 48,49) "It is said that when you give a child the name of bird, it loses the bird..." Mary (M.C.) Richards, in the book Centering: "A creative person. Initiating, enacting out of personal being. Using his lifetime to find his original face, to awaken his own voice, beyond all learning, habit, thought: to tap life at its source." (M.C. Richards, Centering, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1969, p. 43) In an article on the creative process, historian Albert Rabil recounts the findings of psychologists: "Psychologists delineate five stages in the creative process: Preparation, incubation, illuination, elaboration, and verification. "Preparation involves mastery of subject matter, technical skills, materials and tools--whatever is needed for a person's field of work. That creative spark, the illumination, comes, wrote Nobel Prize-winning brain physiologist John Eccles, 'only to a mind that has been prepared by the assimilation and critical evaluation of knowledge in its field.' Important creative ideas rarely pop into the minds of the merely ardent, well-intentioned, or unconventional. They need to be thoroughly prepared for. Creative persons, though, need more than preparation in a specialty. They need to be intimately acquainted with related fields, cross-fertilized for hybrid vigor... Arthur Koestler...goes so far as to say that the evidence indicates that 'all decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.' A poet who is familiar with music or social conditions, say, or a historian who understands agriculture and mining is better prepared to see his own work in a fresh perspec- tive. It helps move a person out of parochial and traditional patterns. "The second stage, incubation, involves a relaxation of the conscious rational self. Conscious thought focuses the problem nicely and heightens the tension. But it is blocked by established methods, codes, and assumptions from sliding outside the routine. After preparation, the creative process demands that one relinquish con- trol, relax, allow deeper forces to come forward. After incubating, if one is lucky there follows the moment of illumination. This is the 'Eureka' experience which reorders a part of reality, or if it is creative enough creates a fundamentally new reality. The fourth stage in the act of creation is elaboration. Here the mind returns to a conscious state and works out the illumination in persuasive detail. The last stage is verification. The insight and its detailed elab- oration need to be tested, refined, and subjected to critical scrutiny." (Albert Rabil, Jr., "How Does Creativity Happen?", Search, Winter, 1977-78) Here is a description of Martha Graham, written by Merle Armitage in 1937: "It seems safe to assume that here fundamental aim is to allow the power and energy of the living world to filter through and animate her work... In certain figures and movements Graham seems to uncover stratas of memory, floating just below consciousness... Her imagination frequently con- jures forms which seem utterly impossible of plastic realization. Yet by force of conviction and an amazing technique they become highly communicable. She has singular mastery over life--an almost mesmeric power, and a nobility which demands respect... Everything she does falls under the scrutiny of her own devestating self-criticism..." (Merle Armitage, editor, Martha Graham, Dance Horizons, New York, reprint 1966) we have done nothing more than make a beginning but wherever we begin, it is at least a beginning because there is a boundary between where we were and where we are now that we have begun and that boundary marks the shoreline between our walk upon the solid earth and our plunge into the depths it also marks the boundary between something which has just ended and something that has just begun but the boudary is not so much a boundary as it is simply a change, and change is the marvelous constant of our lives in our beginning, as the text for the 14th-century musical palindromes went in our beginning is our end "Creativity can be fostered and nurtured. It can be learned by all of us, heightened, though long fallen into disuse. "Creativity includes the ability to: *WONDER, BE CURIOUS *BE OPEN TO NEW EXPERIENCE, SEE THE FAMILIAR FROM AN UNFAMILIAR POINT OF VIEW *CONFRONT COMPLEXITY AND AMBIGUITY WITH INTEREST *TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCIDENTAL EVENTS IN ORDER TO MAKE DESIRABLE BUT UNSOUGHT DISCOVERIES (CALLED SERENDIPITY) *MAKE ONE THING OUT OF ANOTHER BY SHIFTING ITS FUNCTIONS *GENERALIZE IN ORDER TO SEE UNIVERSAL APPLICATIONS OF IDEAS *SYNTHESIZE AND INTEGRATE, FIND ORDER IN DISORDER *BE INTENSELY CONSCIOUS YET IN TOUCH WITH UNCONSCIOUS SOURCES *VISUALIZE OR IMAGINE NEW POSSIBILITIES *BE ANALYTICAL AND CRITICAL *KNOW ONESELF, AND HAVE THE COURAGE TO BE ONESELF IN THE FACE OF OPPOSITION *BE PERSISTENT, WORK HARD FOR LONG PERIODS, IN PURSUIT OF A GOAL, WITHOUT GUARANTEED RESULTS." (Duane Preble, Art Creates Us Creates Art, Canfield Press, San Francisco, 1976, p.10) ********************************** In the summer of 1936, James Agee, author on assignment from Fortune Magazine, and Walker Evens, photographer on "loan" from the government's Farm Bureau, lived with three families of tenant farmers in Alabama. They were assigned to write a documentary article about the lives of these families. They immediately knew that such an article, to appease the consciences of the middle and upper-middle class white readers of the magazine, would be impossible. The result was one of the most magnificent and powerful creations of this century, a book of almost 500 pages so poignantly rendering in photographs and text the lives of those families that to read it with care is to havd one's consciousness altered irrevocably. Any number of passages from the book would illustrate and serve as model for all of the principles of creativity that have been hinted at so far. But one passage in particular strikes at the heart of the matter, in that volubility and sometime obscurity of language for which Gertrude Stein was known. Agee is talking about the conditions of perception, the sensibility of being, in which he and Evans spent that summer: "The dead oak and pine, the ground, the dew, the air, the whole realm of what our bodies lay in and our minds in silence wandered, walked in, swam in, watched upon, was delicately fragrant as a paradise, and, like all that is best, was loose, light, casual, totally actual. There was, by our minds, our memories, our thoughts and feelings, some combination, some generalizing, some art, and science; but none of the close-kneed priggishness of science, and none of the formalism and straining and lily-gilding of art. All the length of the body and all its parts and functions were parti- cipating, and were being realized and rewarded, inseperable from the mind, identical with it: and all, everything, that the mind touched, was actuality, and all, everything, that the mind touched turned immediately, yet without in the least losing the quality of its total individuality, into joy and truth, or rather, revealed of its self, truth, which in its very nature was joy, which must be the end of art, of investigation, and of all anyhow human existence... "This lucky situation of joy, this least illusion of personal wholeness or integrity, can overcome one suddenly by any one of any number of unpredictable chances: the fracture of sunlight on the facade and traffic of a street; the sleaving up of chimneysmoke; the rich lifting of the voice of a train along the darkness; the memory of a phrase of an inspired trumpet; the odor of scorhed cloth, of a car's exhaust,...of pork, of beeswax on hot iron, or young leaves, or peanuts; the look of a toy fire engine, or of a hundred agates sacked in a red cheesecloth; the oily sliding sound as a pumpgun is broken; the look of a child's underwaist with its bone buttons loose on little cotton straps; the stiffening of snow in a wool glove; the odor of kitchen sopa, of baby soap, of scorched bellybands; the flexion of a hand; the twist of a knee; the modulations in a thigh as someone gets out of a chair: the bending of a speeding car round a graded curve: the swollen, blemished feeling of the mouth and the tenacity and thickness of odor of an unfamiliar powder, walking sleepless in high industrial daybreak and needing coffee, the taste of cheap gin mixed with cheap ginger ale without much ice: the taste of turnip greens; of a rotted seed drawn from between the teeth; or rye whiskey in the green celluloid glass of a hotel bathroom: the breath that comes out of a motion-picture theater: the memory of the piccolo notes which ride and transfix Beethoven's pastoral storm: the odor of a freshly printed newspaper: the stench of ferns trapped in the hot sunlight of a bay window; the taste of a mountain summer night: the swaying and shuffling beneath the body of a benighted train; the mulled and branny earth beneath the feet in fall; a memory of plainsong or of the first half hour after receiving a childhood absolution; the sudden re-realization of a light-year in literal, physical terms, or of the shimmering dance and diffuseness of a mass of granite...: in any rare situation which breaks down or lowers our habitual impatience, superficial vitality, overeagerness to clinch conclusions, and laziness. We were at this time, and in all the time surrounding it, in such a situation; nor could we for an instant have escaped it, even if we had wished to. At times, exhausted by it, we did wish to and did try, but even when our minds were most exhausted and most deafened such breath as we got, and subsisted on, no matter what its change of constituence and odor...was the breath of the same continuous excitement whose nature seems to me not only finally but essentially beyond the power of art to convey." (James Agee & Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ballantine Books, New York, 1966, pp. 203-206) Here, then, is our beginning: in the creative transformation of what at first appears to be ordinary into the actual perception of the actual extraordinariness of all our experience. Mark this boundary and make a beginning of your own....