Creativity recognizes that human being is perpetually and necessarily incomplete.
It is impossible to become oneself in any authentic way without committing the sin of originality. To be original is to return to origins, that is, to lose form in order to find it. So originality is at once a return and a departure.
In the grip of creativity we become strangers to ourselves with an urgent need to develop new forms of intimacy.
The discovery of a new form often depends on a reconstitutive act of grief and release.
Pessimism and complaining, representing the precise inner application at points of stress and opportunity of the energy of discontent, are important features of the creative process.
We do some of our most creative work when we lack the illusion of inspiration.
We think and feel in successive flurries of multiple simultaneous adjustments. This is what gives our thinking and feeling their creative verve and also the flavor of instability which reminds us just how delicately poised we are near chaos.
In order to create it is vital that we do not know what we are doing, but instead operate in a middle realm where our skill and our intuition collaborate in a project that extends imagination.
The looking for deep links may always call for a release from the concrete, the literal, a distancing and abstraction from the surrounding world guided by inner intuition. This would always carry with it a risk in terms of lack of attentiveness to immediate cues of danger. So its emergence requires a balancing act, a capacity to depart into an inner thought-feeling space and then flicker swiftly back to a more literal and concrete exterior oriented presence if required. Creative intelligence is a style of feeling thought, a motivational state as much as anything else.
Each new form of inner organization we achieve becomes in turn an organ which, in collaboration with others, enables us to do specific creative work.
Curiosity, the imp of our creativity, is a set of loose ends trying to learn to knit.
When we make something original, we often start from the end and head for the beginning. A glimpse of finished form not only inspires but requires beginning.
Every creative act is, in part, a renunciation of the solipsistic joys of its preparation.
Creativity is always a crime against the reigning order of misapprehension of the ordinary.
When, as children, we become aware that our parents are available to love someone of their own invention whom we happen not to be able to be, we enter into a complex predicament. We can make an effort to identify with the image of that other whom we are not and to take that other’s shape. It is hard enough to identify with ourselves and what is authentically available in us when it is new, when, simply by the dictates of development, we are half strangers to our emerging selves. The duplicity of an early act of impersonation introduces an enormous strain moment by moment as we have to try to train ourselves against what feel to us to be our natural tendencies. In addition, we feel as if we have to assume the guilt of introducing an alien egg into the parental nest. We feel we have smuggled one in that they would just as soon destroy, since it does not authentically continue their lineage, their particular species of person. This kind of feeling introduces loneliness, fragility, chill, flexibility and a special creativity and unease over creativity at the very core of our personalities. If we are realistic, we have to admit that no parent-child relationship, indeed, no love relationship throughout the course of our lives, is entirely free of the taint of this sense of needing to impersonate someone whom we are not. What is most peculiar, though, is that sometimes the graft takes in a way that produces new vigor and new possibilities. The dynamic of the false self, which destroys so many with its terrible strains, can also, on rare and important occasions, show the way to the exploration of new realms of the truth of the self.
Self-invention, self-detection and self-deception are modes that are close kin. Making up our own minds is where fiction and non-fiction meet.
By showing byways others have missed, the indolence of genius allows it forever to change the course of thinking and feeling.
When we withdraw more of our attention from outside, we can have an illusion of the sovereignty of inner simulation. In fact, we are changed a great deal in the process of our inner simulations, an ongoing habit we have of creating virtual realities that can have for us the force of the actual. This possibility of moving back and forth makes for much of the richness and of the agony of being human both. In our minds we play our ways down a host of pathways that it is utterly beyond us to describe in any clear and declaratory way, any more than a chess master could actually describe all the variations that have paraded through his mind in the process of having an intuition of a new gambit.
We all have need of a mystic librarian to guide us in our search for what is not written in any book, those key elements of ourselves without which books have no meaning. We need a guide to the blank unwritten pages of ourselves. We can have no idea where she is hidden, where she waits for us, because there is no catalogue to the mystic qualities of real people.
We use emotional fatigue to plead for release from intimate creative tasks that daunt us. We are all the while, however, shamefully aware that the only possible rest is in working at them.
Taking hold promises satisfaction, but it is letting go that brings us to the threshold of the sublime.