The Creative Person

September 16, 1979
Lakeland?

The Creative Person

This is not a talk about people, playwrights, artists, sculptors, or composers, although many of these have been immortally creative. Creative persons can be inconspicuous as well as famous. [note in margin: I’m not talking about ingenuity or skill, artistic ability, or decorative inspiration; a deeper level – admirable qualities I wish I possessed.]

First of all, I want to share with you how this talk came about. Patty called me for a title to put in the Beacon. I told her I did not have one yet. But as I don’t like the phrase “to be announced,” I called her back in an hour or so and said my title would be “The Creative Person” with very little notion of how I would handle the subject.

Then, 2 hours later someone gave me the house organ of an old oil company which had a feature article, “Creativity – the human resource.” Great! Then looking over a book shelf, Rollo May’s The Courage to Create popped out at me. Last Sunday Al Esk. gave me a copy of the Emory University alumni magazine which carried an article “Art and Faith” by Robert Detweiler. Although I do not normally read the Miami Herald, I did later that day, and lo, there was an article “Creativity – It Boils Down to Hard Work.” Add some of the insights of Abraham Maslow, a couple of poets, and Genesis – Voila! This is a patchwork quilt sewn with my own thread. Maybe that’s creative – maybe not.

What is creativity? Webster’s indicates that it is bringing into being – to cause to exist.

In the superb myth of Genesis (2/7), the old scripture says “and Yahveh formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” That is not history. It is mythic poetry as an ancient people tried to explain the marvel of creation – how the world and all that is therein came to being.

Rollo May (p. 40) in his treatment of creativity points out that we must get below the surface. He says we are thus not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting or other forms of filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do on week-ends. This is not to discount the gratification the hobbyist experience nor the usefulness of what is made.

May says the first thing in a creative act is that it is an encounter. The artist studies a landscape, the sculptor a block of marble; Shakespeare encountered old legends in ancient history. Sometimes, as with abstract artists it is an encounter with some inner vision.

This encounter is not just looking. The creative act calls for intensity. The 19th century English Jesuit and poet, General Manley Hopkins, spoke of the “inscape” as opposed to the “landscape.” To Hopkins the inscape was a “coming together, moved by encounter and intensity into a unity of source.” (of vision)

There are many psychological theories about why there should be creative persons. Some would believe that it is an engaging of our subconscious with the creative vision erupting out of unresolved and submerged conflicts or needs.

Others, Maslow, for example, think of the creative act as occurring when there is a transcendence of self, a loss of ego or ego needs, or as he calls it, “total fascination with the matter at hand”, and is a characteristic of what he calls peak experience. Rollo May thinks of the latent powers of the self being realized in the creative act.

Still others believe the creative person tries to deal with his/her own inevitable death by creating that which will survive death, to reach beyond one’s death. Robert Detweiler, in the article I referred to, was struck by the exhibit in the Jewish Museum and Memorial in Prague, Czechoslovakia. It told of the story of tens of thousands imprisoned at Theresienstadt, there waiting to be shipped to the extermination places, or in some cases, the work camps. A place of transient confinement, hopelessness, and despair.

Yet “under the literal shadow of death, maintained an artistic existence.” Inside the concentration camp, they produced plays, held musical recitals, composed poetry, sketched and painted when they could find the materials.” Art against death.

Now I can’t choose among the theories, and single one out. There is probably some truth in all of them.

But the encounter with the inner vision or the source, and the integrity with which one is engaged, can never be shared unless the creative person works to produce it. Someone wrote, “Inspirations are a dime a dozen.” But the creative act is realized through skill, stubbornness, patience, and hard work. Maslow wrote, “People who create are good workers.”

Consider Michelangelo’s arduous labors when doing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Or Beethoven whose creative vision, talent, and capacity for hard work were face up against a most cruel turn of the screw for a composer or musician – deafness. Inspiration without perspiration is not creative.

Are there certain characteristics creative persons share? Or is the creative nature beyond description?

I said at the beginning that one of the patches in this patchwork quilt was a publication of one of the large oil companies. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the corporation they put together a traveling exhibit, “Creativity – the Human Resource.” The company had difficulty putting the exhibit together because the museum they contacted seemed to have difficulty with the conception of creativity. The museum told them that museums traditionally deal with the product of creativity – artistic, scientific, historic – not with the engendering process.

But in putting the exhibit together “certain actions and attitudes of mind became too apparent.” Just one or two points are listed, the comments I have added:

Creative people challenge fixed assumptions.

Maslow writes (p. 93), “Common sense means living in the world as it is today, but creative people are people who don’t want the world as it is today, but want to make another world. And in order to be able to do that, they have to sail right off the surface of the earth to imagine, to fantas[ize], and even to be crazy or nutty and so on.”

There can be many illustrations, but I’m thinking of that delightful wall poster showing two caterpillars on a twig gazing at a beautiful butterfly. One caterpillar remarks, “they’ll never get me up in one of those things.”

“Creative persons discern previously unseen patterns and then see in new ways.”

Rollo May writes of a study made of creative persons (recognized by their peers). A control group of “normal” persons was included. The researcher showed both groups a series of Rorschach cards, some of which had orderly, systematic designs on them, and others disorderly, [a]symmetrical, and chaotic. The “normal” people selected the orderly, systematic designs as the ones they liked most. They liked their universe to be “in shape.” But the creative persons selected the chaotic, disorderly cards – they found these more challenging and interesting. They could be like God in the Genesis myth, creating order out of chaos. They chose the broken universe to encounter it and form it into new order. [marginal note: Chesterton: “the function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, but settled things strange.”]

“Creative persons take risks. They struggle against that which limits them. They do not live in the past, or apart from the past. They live out of the past. [marginal note: myth of Prometheus – stealing fire from the gods – for benefit of humans, for this creative gift he was tortured eternally]

But what about so many of us who are not the creative persons, who may lack the vision, intensity, skill, and persistence to deserve the name “creative person.” I was thinking of myself and others, who at best may have or had creative aspects to some of our experiences. We share the heritage of creative persons.

Robert Detweiler in his article gave a clue that the process of art is to create “a special kind of focus through which we see ourselves revealed in a new way.”

Shakespeare does this for many of us. We see ourselves revealed. Our national Declaration of Independence, a great creation then and through the years, has been a lens through which again and again we have seen ourselves revealed. [marginal notes: in the powerful and sensitive and accurate verse and dialogue, indecision of Hamlet, cruel/ethical dilemma of Brutus; the gap between our professed ideals and the way we behave]

Interestingly enough both Detweiler and Rollo May use Picasso’s Guernica as an example of this focus. Like them, I have gazed for long periods at Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso’s creation was an expression of outrage at the bombing by Fascist planes of the undefended town of Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War. Many of you have seen it and felt the horror of splintered/fragmented human beings, distortion, horror, despair - “a warning that men and women can lose their humanity.” [marginal note: 1937 – prophetic of the terrible years on the horizon]

The creative person nudges our complacency, portrays us as we are in comparison with what we could be. This happens, not with didactic teaching or a set of commandments but only by confronting our senses and our minds. There’s not a word in Beethoven’s Appassionata, but there is (to me) strength over pain and an heroic rebuff to those who are either faint-hearted or malicious.

James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has the hero write in his diary,

“Welcome, o Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

The creative person creates the conscience we may not have or are not aware we have.

Willis Eberman, in his poem THE ARTIST, expresses for me what I owe the creative person:

No community altogether knows its own heart. The artist must tell it, must reveal what the average surmise; must make music or murals from the mass of inarticulate life. The secrets that she must utter are their own, not the hero. She gives no remedy, only the song, the poem, the soft articulate wind of art against the strings of the communal heart. Only then will she fulfill her reason for being born:

To administer
love, though it may bring their
displeasure
is her lone business and their revelation.