Disorderly Creativity
Issue 270
Welcome to Desk Notes. While digging through my files this week, I discovered a partly finished but completely forgotten essay. Unfortunately, for me at least, it revolves around my failure to remember a timeworn lesson, which is perhaps a subject that I could write countless pages without running out of examples. So: here’s a newly polished essay about creativity, and why what feels natural to me is, maddeningly, often the wrong solution. Thank you, as always, for reading.
Charles
For a long time, I resisted a truth about creativity. I would sit with a pen and notebook, or with my fingers perched over the keyboard, and ignore what I knew to be effective. Even though I understood that there are some commonalities, even consistencies, in how artists and scientists describe creativity—the mysterious birth of ideas, the shudder of insight—I dismissed those lessons, shrugging them off, partly out of stubbornness, partly because I wanted more control. What I wanted to believe when I sat down to write, what I wanted to maintain in my practice, was the principle that I could use intellect to kindle a creative moment, that I could generate a novel, wondrous outcome on the page with my willpower.
Over the years I’ve mostly allowed myself to jettison this desire for control, and to finally accept the truths that I prefer to ignore, yet this hasn’t been a straightforward change. My inclination is to be analytical, perhaps more than most people, regardless of the subject, and it is instinctive for me to fill my notebooks with lists, or to divide my ideas into categories, looking for symmetry and order and congruence. Right now on the desk beside me there are several notebooks, with each one serving a specific, discrete purpose, and this arrangement doesn’t really feel like a decision. So in many ways the desire to design, or manage, creative outcomes fits my proclivities, and learning a different way feels like I’m forcing myself to speak a new language.
I’ve never believed that this inclination for order contrasts with the desire to create, even though a moment of creation feels haphazard, chaotic, expansive, mysterious, whimsical, frenzied, passionate, playful, impulsive, almost bewildering in its birth. Rather than a contrast, in fact, it feels complementary, as if the chaos on the page is supported by the linear, logical thought that occurs when I’m not writing. The famous Flaubert quote—“be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work”—sounds perfectly factual in my mind.
With my temperament it isn’t exactly surprising that I would also attempt to reason myself into creative solutions. That I would seek an analytical, logical way to generate the novel idea, the unexpected conclusion, the next sentence. Yet there’s always been a flaw at the root of this method. It starts with my understanding that art is emotional, or dramatic, rather than intellectual. This is easy to overlook, especially if you’re in the habit of analyzing the world around you, but art—at its best—is deeper, more visceral, it exists to reveal what’s ineffable about life.
And this is why art can’t be simplified into its component parts, or reduced to ideas: a painting is more than a collection of brushstrokes, a story is more than a collection of scenes. Just as it is a mistake to distill a romantic relationship into a coherent, singular idea, cutting away all the messy, inarticulable emotions, it is a mistake, too, to distill art into a singular, coherent idea. Art that’s created from ideas rather than emotions is limited to the quality of those ideas—this makes a painting, or a novel, an intellectual project. But if you remember the times when art has stirred, upset, or confused you, when you’ve been shook by drama, the times when fiction has left you wordless but overwhelmed by sensations, it is another way of remembering that art’s purpose is emotive and dramatic rather than cerebral.
And when I remember this truth I also remember that I can’t really create with my mind. I’m not going to reach something novel, profound, truly meaningful, if I’m constricted to the part of my brain that’s logical and that’s built from what I already comprehend about the world. I’ll end up with pages of writing that appear flat, that are technically sound but emotionally silent.
How could I expect, of course, to reach an emotional conclusion through an intellectual process? The vibrancy, drama, and spirit that makes a story come alive won’t ever reach the page unless it is unfurled from somewhere closer to my spine, from a place that’s more mysterious, almost unknowable, in a way that feels right but that I can’t consciously state.
And it is worth noticing that the conscious part of my attention is such a minuscule portion of my mind—nearly all of my conclusions, nearly all of my ambitions and desires and fears and reactions and joys bubble upward from a process that I can’t observe. If I watch the fluctuating, disorderly impulses that rise within me, I recognize that I’m very much a passenger, hostage to the patterns that are perhaps more true than the ones that I can describe. Abruptly, I’m hungry, or tired, I find a conversation interesting, or banal, I’m stirred to push ahead, or I’m inclined to step backward, without ever having selected the tastes that feel so intrinsic to my identity. Perhaps this sensation is like being a lonely captain on the bridge of a battleship, looking at the instruments, watching the movements of the ship, giving some instructions, even though the mutiny occurred long ago—because the sailors around me don’t really seem to be following my orders.
Art, for me, comes through striving to reveal these inexplicable processes of life. There are many wonderful parts of the modern world to confront ideas and generate knowledge, but we approach art, cautiously, bewilderingly, to come closer to the sensibility of the artist. Desiring art because of its ideas, its credentials, is a bit like desiring a romantic partner because of their IQ—it isn’t exactly wrong, though it certainly misses the point.
This might leave someone who seeks creativity with a paradox. There’s a desire to create, but an awareness that you can’t think your way into solutions. You can’t will the eruption of a novel idea just as you can’t will yourself to sleep. That, it seems to me, is a recipe for stale creations, for creations that merely repeat the thoughts you’ve already had, what’s clichéd, what’s expected, what’s comfortable. The alternative is to seek out and cultivate the quieter, more mysterious parts of your mind. That probably requires silence, or at least a separation from the predictable. It might trigger a moment of dislocation, although I suspect that’s a way to kindle what you feel but don’t yet know.
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” —Friedrich Nietzsche