Author: Loren

Creativity and Encounter and The Delphic Oracle as Therapist

Rollo May believes that “Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.” The result of this encounter between the artist and his “world” view is the author’s vision:

The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet’s struggle brings forth an answer – meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist’s or the poet’s vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.

In other words, not only is each work of art an original, but the artist is constantly re-inventing himself because no two encounters are the same. For the best artists, their very interpretation of the world creates a new “world” view that affects their future work.

This encounter is much easier to observe in “realistic” artists because we recognize their subject. However, May offers some convincing evidence that the same encounter is present even in abstract artists:

Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey’s studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter.

All true artists must face this struggle, and some artists become obsessed with this struggle to bring their vision to life:

(Painter Alberto) Giacometti was rather devoted–"condemned," to use Lord’s fitting term-to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the world around him through his own vision of being human. He knew there was no other alternative for him. This challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a world of reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time you concentrate on it.

It is in their absolute devotion to their struggle with the world that artists acquire their reputation as being “different.” Yet, it is precisely this devotion, this obsession, which brings their vision to fruition and, in the end, helps all of us to see our world in new ways.

The symbols and myths that emerge from the artist’s vision

… bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative. It is a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur so well states. It is a road to universals beyond discrete personal experience.

By sharing these symbols and myths, the artist, if his vision is accepted as valid, helps to shape society’s new reality, enabling all of us to deal with nature and with our existence in more meaningful ways.

May, as Hermann Hesse suggested in his fairy tales, feels that artists may well pay a high price for their creativity because creative people

…are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the "divine madness" to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

The price they pay, though, is rewarded not only by the joy they feel when they fulfill their vision but by the insight they bring to the society as a whole.

May compares art to the Delphic Oracle, arguing that just as the Greeks used the Delphic Oracle to help them make decisions about the future, we can use artist’s visions to help guide us in our lives.

This chapter is thus an essay on the creating of one’s self. The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously. As Kierkegaard well said, the self is only that which it is in the process of becoming. Despite the obvious determinism in human life-especially in the physical aspect of ones self in such simple things as color of eyes, height relative length of life, and so on-there is also, clearly, this element of self-directing, self-forming. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When we become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, this becomes obvious.

Thus, if we are wise enough to invest our time and energy, the creative visions of artists helps guide our self-actualization. They accomplish this by affecting “…our hopes, our ideals, our images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time in the forefront of our attention. These ‘models’ function consciously as well as unconsciously; they are shown in fantasy as well as in overt behavior. The summary terms for this process are symbols and myths.”
May does not suggest that these artistic visions, by themselves, can lead to self-actualization or provide us with exact answers to the problems that face each of us. Instead, he points out that the value of these visions
…

is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message.

A Form of Spiritual Testimony

Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, at least for me, is “a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity.” The poem “The Layers” is precisely the kind of poem that helps us see that the spirit can endure, for Kunitz has lived a remarkable life, and when you read his “confessional” poems you see just how his spirit has endured throughout a remarkable life.

THE LAYERS

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Maybe you have to be older to appreciate this poem, but I find “The Layers” not only delightful, but insightful. Because we get caught up in our day-to-day life we tend to lose sight of the fact that we are continually changing and that we are not the person now that we were several years ago. Sometimes it takes but a single event to change us. A war, a divorce, an operation.

It is difficult to remain true to principles when struggling against forces that threaten to defeat you. For instance, fighting in a war can make you question whether human’s are basically loving in nature, and a marriage gone astray can make you question whether true love truly exists. You hope, though, that “some principle of being abides,” that you are able to remain true to yourself.

If you are lucky there is still a “will intact to go wherever I need to go” and you will be able to focus on the best parts of life, “not on the litter.”

Most of all, you hope that you will be able to remain true to your principles during the next transformation, the one that has already begun but is still waiting to be discovered.

Another Look at Creativity

I need a break from dealing with May’s book and, even more, a break from thinking.

As an alternative, here’s Stanley Kunitz’s introduction to Passing Through. It provides an interesting contrast in style to Rollo May’s Courage to Create, though they both seem to making the same kinds of claims for the value of art.

SPEAKING OF POETRY

The writer today, said Albert Camus in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, "cannot serve those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it."

How true! And yet one finds to one’s dismay that the poetic imagination resists being made the tool of causes, even the noblest of causes. The imagination lives by its contradictions and disdains any form of oppression, including the oppression of the mind by a single idea.

Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. This would seem to be an introverted, even solipsistic, enterprise, if it were not that these stories recount the soul’s passage through the valley of this life-that is to say, its adventure in time, in history.

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn. The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay. Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence. What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

In an age defined by its modes of production, where everybody tends to be a specialist of sorts, the artist ideally is that rarity, a whole person making a whole thing. Poetry, it cannot be denied, requires a mastery of craft, but it is more than a playground for technicians. The craft that I admire most manifests itself not as an aggregate of linguistic or prosodic skills, but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity. It disturbs me that twentieth century American poets seem largely reconciled to being relegated to the classroom-practically the only habitat in which most of us are conditioned to feel secure. It would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meanings cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.

Poets are always ready to talk about the difficulties of their art. I want to say something about its rewards and joys. The poem comes in the form of a blessing-"like rapture breaking on the mind," as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.

S.K.
1995

The Nature of Creativity and Creativity and the Unconscious

Rollo May tries to explain not only the nature of creativity but the conditions under which it emerges, relating much of what he says directly to what artists themselves have to say about their art. He sees the creative act as a dialectical relationship that takes place between two poles, the artist and an outside world. As a result, we cannot understand an artist’s work unless we understand both factors.

May sees the creative act as an intense encounter between the artist and the outside “world,” that is characterized by a “heightened consciousness.”
Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint-they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.

The result of this encounter is a work of art that reflects the characteristics of both the artist and his world.

However, May defines “world” a little differently than it is commonly defined:

World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing – specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.

Thus, each work of art is, almost by definition, unique for the world of the artist is in a continual state of flux.

If we are to believe May’s argument that

In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. "Creativity" to rephrase our definition, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.”

we can easily see why it is necessary to study an artist within the context of his time if we are to truly appreciate his works. We also understand the need to continually discover new artists who can help us to understand our own time. Although there may well be insights so fundamental to human nature that they are always valid, it is also true that the conditions of our time are changing so quickly that only contemporary artists can hope to adequately understand our own unique situation.

May emphasizes the importance of the unconscious in the creative act. He argues that the artist has to tap into his unconscious in order to create a new work.

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

This conflict is bound to occur not only in the artist but in the audience because of the tendency to preserve beliefs. Change comes only after the stress between what we believe and what is actually happening becomes so great that we have little choice but to change our beliefs.

May notes that if “we are too rigid, dogmatic, or bound to previous conclusions, we will, of course, never let this new element come into our consciousness; we will never let ourselves be aware of the knowledge that exists on another level within us.” You certainly don’t have to look too far into today’s news to see the dangers that exist when people are so dogmatic that they lose touch with reality.

Mass media, May argues, “presents us with a serious danger, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. This very fact throws considerable weight on the side of regularity and uniformity and against originality and freer creativity.” The danger of formulaic art is that it will merely re-affirm outmoded or clichéd beliefs rather than give us new insights into our world. In fact, that may well be one of the major attractions of escapist art. People like to be told again and again that they’re right, particularly if they’re not.

Of course, it’s not only readers that are often opposed to new forms of art,

Dogmatists of all kinds-scientific, economic, moral, as well as political-are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.

Society, as a whole, is opposed to change because it is too invested in the status quo. Little wonder it is so difficult for an artist to affect society. Little wonder, then, that great artists who were writing fifty or more years ago are just now being accepted by readers.

Of course, that would also suggest that most of us are living life in the rear-view mirror. Who knows what that may mean when we come to the next turn in the road?