If, as I claim, creativity is our birthright, what goes wrong? I think there are two main obstacles, the individual and the social – egotism and acculturation. Creativity is as vulnerable as love to egotism. Articulating our neuroses may or may not be helpful as therapy, but is by itself likely to offer little to anyone else and, more importantly, is not impelled by an outward-looking imagination – it’s just maundering on about yourself. ‘The painter’s brain must be changeable according to the variations of the objects that present themselves to it,’ says Leonardo da Vinci. The brain (consciously and unconsciously) controls the brush, and if the artist, desensitized by his ego, fails to engage and treat with ‘the variations of the objects’, and is instead fixated on his own pre-occupations, he will be spun down the plughole of his own self-absorption where we are not obliged to follow him.
“The workman must be dead to himself while engaged upon the work,” writes David Jones, “otherwise we have that sort of ‘self-expression’ which is as undesirable in the painter or the writer as in the carpenter, the cantor, the half-back or the cook.” What the artist is is not frankly worth making a song and dance about; rather what the world is as recreated by that artist’s individual haecceity. Manet, dying in agony of tertiary syphilis, did not paint his gangrene, his amputated leg or his pain. Harsh as it may sound to say it, the world did not become a less magical place because he was dying so torturously, and he had the courage to know it. He painted flowers.
Our individuality ensures the work’s individuality. Every art work has always been uniquely expressed. That is our inescapable nature as subtly differentiated creatures. There is no need to strive to express one’s individuality or to congratulate oneself on it – it is an unavoidable condition of existence and everyone else has it too.
And, in any case, creativity is always a collaboration. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age.’ Whether in the creativity of cell-growth or the creativity of a poem, the force cannot operate without us, nor we without it. As St Francis pointed out, we ourselves are blind: it is only with the help of the light from the sun or ‘Brother Fire’ that we can see. We are not independent creatures beaming sight-rays from our eyes through a passive universe. Creativity is pre-social, but it is never solitary. It is not a heroic assertion of self, but a re-telling of the universe through oneself. The rocks shape the river, and the river shapes the rocks.
Walt Whitman is a poet who fills his pages with himself. But in Song of Myself – a brazen enough title – his self-expression is a great affirmation of the universe rooted in STA awareness and love, an appreciation of himself as a part of nature (and of all nature as a part of himself), not as a solitary, in-static individual talking about himself. ‘Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.’ He does not admire himself above anything else. He admires everything – and himself because he is a part of it.
Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is it that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.
My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.
I believe in those wing’d purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.
…
The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife:
And these tend inward to me, as I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
In creativity (as in any activity) we respond to nature – this is culture. A response to culture is what I term ‘acculturation’ – the process by which each of our activities, layer upon layer, becomes successively further removed from the fundamental STA reality of nature. This acculturation cuts us off from our natural creativity, which is either stifled or perverted. Bomb design is zombified creativity, purged of praise and love. Much advertising work is the same. Fancy may be present in abundance, but a narrowing pragmatism or commercialism has taken the place of free imagination, rather as when a composer is forced to write propagandist marches for a tyrant.
There is little recognition of the value of creativity in society. Consequently, it is often relegated to a fringe activity in schools, which are dedicated to training apprentices for the workplace (adulthood being understood as a primarily economic issue) rather than to educing the innate qualities and abilities of the children. We are back with the notion that art is not serious unless it is shown to have real economic worth. But in fact the reverse is true. Money frivolises many pursuits, including art. Rab drew his picture with a fierce concentration and singularity of purpose; earnestness and fun were synonymous. An artist who is aware of reward, reputation, other people’s opinions has shattered that unity.
Where creativity is appreciated as precious, we have, perversely, persuaded ourselves it must be rare, ordaining a priesthood of artists and robing them in all the paraphernalia of academic study, galleries, private views, swooning notions of misunderstood genius, achingly self-conscious arts programmes. Art is no more the preserve of ‘artists’ than eating is the preserve of restaurant critics. All talent is latent. It is only the work that brings it into being – the work which, as Rab has shown, is innate in all of us. ‘I don’t reckon the artist to be an extraordinary man,’ says Cecil Collins. ‘The artist is what’s going on in everybody, but focussed to a point of intensity.’
Making creativity somehow ‘exceptional’, bandying around words like ‘talent’, ‘genius’, ‘vocation’ alienates not only those repelled by such irrelevancies but the shy, the timid, the disadvantaged, those who doubt they possess this mystical ‘genius’ and so don’t ever try, who just watch telly instead. But in Coleridge’s eyes, ‘genius’ is simply the capacity for seeing the world with the eager innocence we had as children – joyous but not frivolous, serious but not worldly. The artists are simply the ones who carried on, who kept their inherent flame of creativity alight from childhood into adulthood. The ones who weren’t distracted and never fell away. That is still open to all of us.
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