Art and Creative Process - Quareness Series (60th "Lecture").
The 20th century Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky once wrote - "If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it becomes automatic....which eats away at things." Both he and Martin Heidegger (German Philosopher 1889-1976) sought to oppose poetry to prose for the purpose of the return of perception, for the refreshing of the language that captures perception, and ultimately for the clarifying of our very humanity. He also wrote that "in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art."
In this regard the restoration of those capacities that are most innately human is seen as accomplished through "enstrangement" which seeks to emancipate the work from the leaden forms of the past by describing things as if seen for the first time, by telling stories from unusual points of view, or by placing things out of context. And in this way the art of enstrangement is the most consequential social act....it is what art has to give (without apology) to the social. He saw poetic language, for example, as fundamentally different from the everyday language we use...."Poetic speech is framed speech. Prose is ordinary speech - economical, easy, proper, the goddess of prose (dea prosae) is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the direct expression of a child. Such difference is the key to the creation of art and the prevention of over-automatisation, which causes an individual to function as though by formula."
This "defamiliarisation" of that which is or has become familiar or taken for granted, and hence automatically perceived, serves as a means to force individulas to recognise artistic language. And with the defamiliarisation comes both the slowing down and the increased impeding of the process of reading and comprehending, as well as an awareness of the artistic procedures causing such. Shklovsky again...."In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures
compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark - that is, we find materials obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatised perception. A work is created artistically so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception." Like Aristotle is reported to have said...."poetic language must appear strange and wonderful."
Why is the greatness of a work so often tied to its complexity? It may be because the difference between a simple folk melody or a hymn and the work of art that say a Bach or Beethoven will then make of this tune, is simply that the artwork is vastly more complex? Both the folk tune and the Beethoven sonata ultimately confirm the same laws of tonality and harmonics of the diatonic. The difference is that Beethoven will test the limits of the diatonic, or work against the expectations of the diatonic for dramatic effect, or even leave that confining form for brief and startling moments. In addition to admiring the performance of difficult feats, we also tend to admire such complexity because it seems to be telling us something both true and more complete about the world in which we live. The Beethovan sonata is more adequate to our sense of the real than the simple folk tune. As per the English professor and literary critic John Frank Kermode in his "The Sense of an Ending" - artistic innovation tends to abandon, make more complex, or subvert conventional formal expectation, mirroring how the rendering and extending of a premise is much more emotionally and intellectually rich and more ambitious as it seeks to be larger and more encompassing.
Difficulty comes with complexity but is also about the risk of moving outside of the familiar. The virtue of the difficult (or experimental) is that while it keeps the necessary stability of our "closure" it also keeps that closure from becoming something deadening. The problem that art helps to face (and great art helps to face best) is the problem of creating social stability without creating a state of administered conformity - art helps us to think what it would mean to live together as a whole and yet be fully human as individuals. Shklovsky helps us to see that it is possible to imagine a more powerful human and indeed social function for the "uncanny" understood as the enstranging force of innovation. For him, the imagination works through art to exploit the opportunity that enstrangement has provided....the imagination makes the world bloom through the moment of enstrangement. And he fleshed out this concept in his "Art as Technique" where he argued for the need to turn something that has become over-familiar, like a cliché in the literary canon, into something revitalised...."The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important."
"It is the polarity and the integration of these two modes of consciousness, the complementary workings of the intellect and the intuitive, which underlies our biggest achievements." - contemporary American psychologist Robert Ornstein (The Psychology of Consciousness).
Creativity can perhaps be defined as the ability to break through to new understanding or expression beyond what was experienced before. And this process involves an expansion of awareness and a shift into a new way of seeing things. Creativity is also integrative using "both kinds of knowing" (logical and intuitive) appropriately and allows for a vision which we can apply to everyday life....
"imagineering" as Walt Disney called it. You can have an inspiration or vision but it will die in the cemetary of ideas if you don't apply your logical and practical side. The idea is only the first step in a chain of events.
"Breakthrough takes place in every discipline and every field of life. Studies of the phenomenon in science, art and religion describe five major steps in the breakthrough process - first comes commitment when a person seizes a notion or idea with a desire for something currently unknown or unavailable, then at some point that idea or possibilty turns and seizes the person at which point a once novel notion becomes a passionate and ultimate commitment." - contemporary American author Joseph Chilton Pearce (Breakthrough into Insight).
Pearce's second step is service (searching to find our own truth). The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung threw himself into such a search at a time when he was greatly confused and full of doubt, describing the experience thus - "The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life - in them everything essential was decided. It all began then: the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime's work."
The third phase of this breakthrough process is a period of gestation, characterised by being stuck, dryness and disappointment....a dark night of the soul. It's at this point that many individulas fall into the obsessive-compulsive trap of forcing the muse or pushing for intellectual solutions by trying to "figure it out" with the mind running around in the old grooves of the known, leading nowhere except deeper into the problem. Here the rational mind must surrender....it simply does not have the answers and must now renounce control....as Einstein said "imagination is greater than knowledge."
The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) in writing about the gestation period pointed out that...."all progress must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion, wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating. There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them will come the summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything."
This lack of expectation or state of surrender is a clear field in which the mind stops struggling and becomes fertile soil for the next phase - breakthrough - which happens in a flash of light illuminating the darkness. We have many stories of sudden insight or blinding revelations. Take for example this report of the 19th century Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton's discovery of the quaternion theory "in a single instant as he idly crossed a bridge into Dublin while taking a walk to get away from his insurmountable problem. He had spent fifteen years of steady, diligent, generally heartbreaking pursuit, before that insight-revelation flashed into view." (The bridge in question over the Royal Canal today sports a commemorative plaque).
This breakthrough can also happen in dreams, as in the case of August Kekulé's (19th century German scientist) discovery of the benzene ring. He had exhausted himself trying to solve the problem, but in the relaxed dream state the answer presented itself in symbolic form: a serpent devouring its own tail, the archetypal image of the "ouroborus" (which for Jung symbolised the paradox of life and death).
Pearce's fifth and final stage of the breakthrough process (the result of the previous four - commitment, service, gestation and breakthrough) is translation or application into useful form which cuts across all areas of activity and can include everything from creating a new recipe to living out a spiritual revelation. As he says - "the nature of the breakthrough is determined by the nature of the search, and by the depth of passionate commitment given it." Here again we have the historical examples of Hamilton spending fifteen more years in the practical translation of his mathematical theory after his earlier moment of insight, and Jung taking a lifetime to bring forth the discoveries and insights gained during his searching "self-experiment" mentioned earlier.
Final Comment.
There's some evidence today that writing with one's weaker / non-dominant hand can trigger many breakthroughs, whether brought about by force of circumstance (e.g. broken arm, stroke, or other sudden disabling injury) or deliberately proactively deployed. In doing so many observed individuals have apparently experienced deep inner changes, opened undeveloped dimensions of their personalities, and uncovered buried talents!
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
November, 2015.