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| Before the Beginning |
I guess we all have some inkling as to
where our strengths lie. But for assessing strengths and weaknesses,
we always need to make reference to scale: where do I lie on the
patient/impatient continuum, for instance; am I more logical or more
intuitive; maybe even, do my strengths lie toward leadership or
“followship?” Am I creative, or its opposite?
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat,
Pray, Love did a TED
talk recently on the foundations of creativity. That her novel
would vault her into what are dizzying heights in literary
achievement was as much a surprise to her as to everyone else, she
said. She went on to talk about the act of writing fiction (in her
case), the frustrations (many) and the triumphs (not so many), but
what interested me was her delving into possible sources of that
strength or inclination we call “creativity:” where it comes
from, how it does or doesn’t ignite the fervour, fuel the energy
that leads to great paintings, great sculptures, great poetry, great
fiction.
She
talked about the loneliness of the creative endeavour, how we place
all the credits and debits of a work of art on the artist-person.
There was a time in Greece and Rome when creativity was seen as an
endowment from an outside source, like a muse or genii inspiring a
selected person for a given purpose in, for instance, the sculpting
of David or the
writing of Virgil’s Aeneid.
I
immediately thought about the prevailing theology surrounding the
origins of our Bible, i.e. God as the inspiration energizing certain
people for the writing of specific volumes. Given this paradigm, the
human with the pen or the chisel or the wheel is a partner in a
creative process, a conduit for inspiration originating elsewhere.
Inspiration.
Literally “a breathing in.” The choice of that word to connect
art with its practitioners seems fitting. If you’re a Christian
doing Christian work with fervour and conviction, it’s probable
that your conviction and fervour came from “breathing in” the New
Testament and the spiritual “air” that permeates your church. The
idea fits: wander off to breathe in alien air and that
“inspiration” is bound to lead you down a different pathway. I would
contend that most artists “breathed in” art well before they
picked up their tools of choice. The genii or muse, in that case,
being very human; creative inspiration handed down generation to
generation, built upon and adapted by each.
The
work
that creativity requires was probably touched upon less than I’d
hoped in Gilbert’s talk. An exercise I’d do with students who
were asked to write but hadn’t a clue how to get started was to
have them jot down one word selected at random, “grass,” for
instance. Next we’d add an adjective, like “green,” or
“spikey.” Next, we’d add a verb, “waving,” possibly, and as
we built on our start, an image would begin to take on a life of its
own. “In Grandpa’s pasture on a summer day, the green, spikey
grass would wave to me in the heat of the afternoon, and I would go
out to greet it.” It begins with work, even if it’s just the
writing of a single word, and then a bit more work, and a bit more
and suddenly, even a little work begins to “inspire,” we breathe
in the joy of having begun, and with each new inspiration, the air
becomes richer, the breathing easier, the energy rises.
Maybe
that’s what makes even the most skeptical of us capable of creative
greatness. Maybe that’s all that creativity really is. What do you
think? Maybe un-creativity is simply a hesitancy or refusal to write down that
first word, pick up that lump of clay, dip that brush into the red
ochre and make a tentative but bold mark on the canvas.
Or maybe we’re hooped unless a
genii creeps out from under the wallpaper and . . . does what?
P.S. We can hardly talk about work
without mention of technique. No good starting a sculpture until
you’ve practiced chisel behaviour; better to know a bit about
sentence structure and tenses before committing a great story to
print. Next post on Readwit will be about that.
