Down the Creativity Rabbit Hole

When I was writing recently about Mary Shelley I fell down that Internet rabbit hole of related links. The Internet is a dangerous place for anyone who has attention deficit disorder - and I think that includes almost all of us.

Maria Popova writes the fascinating BrainPickings website and if you read any post there you will find it filled with links to other posts and sources and images. It is its own rabbit hole. She posted that creativity is combinatorial. That's a new word for it.

It means that being creative we use all of our accumulated "knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration and combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something" we then believe is new and our own, original idea.

Albert Einstein called that “combinatory play” and he was known for coming up some of his best ideas violin breaks, walks and bike rides.

When I take a deep dive into the many links rabbit hole, the real value for me only happens when I actually start writing.

Oliver Sacks said that “The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing… a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.” Sacks was thinking about storytelling and the river of consciousness in the psychology of writing.

"If imitation plays a central role in the performing arts, where incessant practice, repetition, and rehearsal are essential, it is equally important in painting or composing or writing, for example. All young artists seek models in their apprentice years, models whose style, technical mastery, and innovations can teach them. Young painters may haunt the galleries of the Met or the Louvre; young composers may go to concerts or study scores. All art, in this sense, starts out as “derivative,” highly influenced by, if not a direct imitation or paraphrase of, the admired and emulated models. 

When Alexander Pope was thirteen years old, he asked William Walsh, an older poet whom he admired, for advice. Walsh’s advice was that Pope should be “correct.” Pope took this to mean that he should first gain a mastery of poetic forms and techniques. To this end, in his “Imitations of English Poets,” Pope began by imitating Walsh, then Cowley, the Earl of Rochester, and more major figures like Chaucer and Spenser, as well as writing “Paraphrases,” as he called them, of Latin poets. By seventeen, he had mastered the heroic couplet and began to write his “Pastorals” and other poems, where he developed and honed his own style but contented himself with the most insipid or clichéd themes. It was only once he had established full mastery of his style and form that he started to charge it with the exquisite and sometimes terrifying products of his own imagination. For most artists, perhaps, these stages or processes overlap a good deal, but imitation and mastery of form or skills must come before major creativity."

Oliver Sacks makes a creative note on the run
(Photograph by Lowell Handler from On the Move)

Staying within the BrainPickings universe, I then turn to poet Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. 

Rilke saw creativity as more than just putting down memories.

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Musician poet Patti Smith says of the creative process in songwriting:

It’s a channeling. Burroughs always called it a shamanistic gift. Sometimes I feel I am channeling someone else. Part of it is experience from performing and understanding that, as a performer, one has a mission, like Coltrane, to take your solo out to talk to God, or whoever you talk to, but you must return. So it has structure. That’s one way that I write. Others take quite a bit of labor. Often the simplest song is the hardest to write. “Frederick” was very hard to write because in its simplicity I also wanted it to be perfect.

Oliver Sacks says that many creators don’t make the leap from mastery to “major creativity” or what Schopenhauer considered to be the distinction between talent and genius. Many of us would be quite satisfied to reach a level of mastery. I think that "genius" is used much too casually these days.

Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement — such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind? 

It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.

As a teacher, I have always been very impressed with students who can make connections from course content to their own lives, current events and other courses. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

My talent is making connections. That’s why I’m an essayist. It’s also why my technical work is structured the way it is. How do the parts of the snail shell interact? What are the rates of growth? Can you see a pattern? I’m always trying to see a pattern in this forest and I’m tickled that I can do that. … I can sit down on just about any subject and think of about twenty things that relate to it and they’re not hokey connections. They’re real connections that you can forge into essays or scientific papers. When I wrote Ontogeny and Phylogeny I had no trouble reading eight hundred articles and bringing them together into a single thread. That’s how it went together. There’s only one way it goes together, one best taxonomy, and I knew what it was.

Oliver Sacks writing in his seventies (Photograph by Bill Hayes from On the Move)

          

Deep Play

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

I heard on a radio program that some study on learning found that, not surprisingly, the deepest learning/teaching method is play. That is, when we learn something that we find engaging and fun to do and we forget that we are learning, it is more deeply learned and remembered.

A term that is sometimes associated with this is "deep play" and we have to do it it  to survive and grow intellectually and spiritually.

Children are best at deep play. Watch children playing on the beach or in a sandbox at building something. We seem to lose some of our ability for this kind of play as we get older.

This is a state of play when an activity almost puts us into an altered state of consciousness. All our senses are engaged. Time stops.

Of course, teens and adults do it too. "Play" is a loaded word because we often see it as almost the opposite of learning: "Stop playing around and get serious." We get lost in a book or working in the garden or in playing a sport or video game.

I was making a rock path in my garden last weekend and totally lost track of time, only realizing that about six hours had passed because my wife called me to eat dinner. I wasn't "working in the garden." I was playing. I'm sure I was learning too, although I never gave a thought to that and didn't sit down later to determine what I might have learned from the path project.

Sports are not a significant part of my daily life these days, but athletes often experience the "in the zone" experience of deep play. The more "playful" acts of swimming, hiking, scuba diving and other sports must contain at least some times of deep play.

My wife says it happens to her when she is cooking. I find it when I write poems and I fall into a deeper state where I feel more balanced, creative and focused.

I had found the book Deep Play  at the library and was attracted by that title. It is by Diane Ackerman (see this short post) and she focuses more on how adults engage (sometimes to the point of rapture and ecstasy) in deep play. Ackerman uses the term "deep play" while others use the terms "flow" or "the zone." I discovered that anthropologists call this "sacred play."

Sacred may seem a strong word to use, but when the intensity of concentration is that high it may border on ecstasy, another word that has not only sensual but also religious connotations.

When I was a teenager, I went surfing. I wasn't very good at it - too much fear, I think. But when I did it, I was completely involved in it. I lost track of everything else that was not about staying on that board and staying alive. When I had that rare perfect ride, there was definitely ecstasy.

When I was older, I sometimes found that again when skiing, especially on the rare occasions when I was alone on a mountain.

One of the attractions of play is that it requires freedom. It is your choice to play. Even though much organized play has rules and competition, it is outside our ordinary day.

The competition may not be another person. You might compete against a mountain in climbing, or yourself in running or walking. I can imagine that the isolated freedom of scuba diving, parachuting and hang gliding must contain this deep play.

To move play into the sacred, as in "rapture," means, literally, being “seized by force.”  That seem almost frightening - like that fear I felt surfing a wave. Consider the words that have the same root: rapacious, rabid, ravenous, ravage, rape. Even raptors, those birds of prey, have something of that in their plunge from the skies. Ackerman says that "rapture is vertical, ecstasy horizontal. Rapture is high-flying, ecstasy occurs on the ground."

Have you heard of the phrase "oceanic feeling?" I was attracted to that "ocean" aspect initially, but it is really about a sensation, an energy, a bond with the external world that is described in religions but is not an article of faith. We hear the word "spiritual" used a lot today rather than "religious" by those who feel these sensations and bonds but don't attach them to any formal religion. Some proponents of this say that you can "justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, regardless if the adherent renounces every belief and every illusion."

Freud popularized this phrase in his writing but could not sympathize with such feeling. It was something he could not find in himself.

The alternate reality and timeless quality of deep play is so attractive. Past and future vanish briefly, along with needs, expectations and worries, even though in many ways your awareness is heightened. This is not some dreamy, drug-induced alternative.

Ackerman explores the types of experiences that offer entry into this space. You can be taught some of these practices (meditation, yoga etc.) that heighten the unconscious conscious.

There is a Zen-like nature to the challenging idea of being able to to bring yourself into deep play so that you are conscious to the point that it becomes unconscious.

I wonder what you do that completely envelops you trance-like in the moment. Care to share in a comment here?