LitLetter 228: Journey, continued...to the Source of the River Alph
Or: creativity is better practised than analysed
There is a sort of cyber code buried deep within my brain. It causes me to define purpose more than other people whom I have observed. Yet defining the why? of something can limit the actual doing of the thing. If I think back over years I can call to mind people who may even have become irritated or impatient with me as I sought to understand context, background, say, rather than moving on, quickly and confidently, in the doing.
Creativity is a case in point. Here I find myself, now, defining creativity to the detriment of being creative first! It seems more important to me to understand the origins of creativity and its purpose than to be creative in the now. My writing seeks to analyse creativity, not to write creatively. Where is a novel, a series of podcasts, a dramatic dialogue, a story? Does my predicament ring a bell with anyone reading this?
I feel I am scratching at a surface that will reveal a truth sometime perhaps soon, and close by. I had this feeling recently watching a technician in a palaeontological laboratory scratching at a 250 million year old fossil. Scratching with a dental probe at the skeleton of the head of the long dead animal, finding it hard to differentiate between bone and the surrounding sedimentary rock in which it is embedded. The revelation of the truth for me may also be a slow unveiling, not a blinding flash, an epiphany. The discussion of creative imagination and the production of a piece of imaginative art for me could be light miles apart, or just round the corner. If merit lies in time spent in concentration on a topic, if results are achieved in extravagance of thought, then I will in the end be successful. I am inspired by the likes of Stanley Kunitz whom I have mentioned in recent posts, as here:
At my age, after you’re done – or ruefully think you’re done – with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of birdsong and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
Reflections, Stanley Kunitz
‘An art so transparent you can look through and see the world’. That must be close to a goal definition for most creative spirits.
For me, unsure that what I am writing is background or foreground, my reality is enhanced by the experiences of David Hockney, as described by Martin Gayford, in the book (Spring Cannot Be Cancelled) I mentioned at the end of the previous post. For Hockney ceaselessly interrogates the creative imaginative impulse – while decorating the world with a continuous flood of drawings, paintings, sketches, and so on, using different media, modes of display, perspectives, and so on. It may be a practice worth copying, this focus Hockney (and other artists) has, that of finding a topic and concentrating on it solely, to the exclusion of other topics. Twenty, thirty, forty, paintings of water, even more, and the sum total is a smorgasbord of thinking AND doing. Just where I know I ought to be, and am not. How to get there? that is the question.
What follows here is one of the most creatively imaginative poems ever written, and acknowledged to be so. It is Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge said he wrote it after waking from an opium-induced dream. He was interrupted by the famous (though forever unnamed) ‘person from Porlock’, from a small village on the north Devon coast. I have no idea (though I doubt it) that Coleridge wrote fifteen versions of this poem a la David Hockney’s practice. It generally seems that writers write once then edit perhaps several times; they seem not to gain benefit from a repetition of their art on a single topic. Should I follow the opium route to creativity?!
The Romantic period spanned roughly 1800-1850. It was illuminated by six major poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats) who rebelled against the forms of poetry from the 17th century, which had been based on epics, odes, satires, elegies, and songs. Generally, romantic poets used natural themes, imagination, mysticism and mythology to represent their thoughts and ideas.
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
The geography of the place is almost beyond imagination. A pleasure dome built, girdled round with walls and towers, next to Alph the sacred river, sacred perhaps for it sank into the earth into caverns not yet measured by man. And the river itself is thrown up out of the ground by subterranean forces, all these analogies representing the power, force and excitement of the natural world. Then Coleridge envisions an African woman whose song and music, could it but be revived within him, then he would rebuild in air the pleasure-dome. And he would be recognised as a god-like figure, having fed on honey-dew, and drunk the milk of Paradise. Sometimes we feel a loss of a dream at waking, a dream we were perhaps wrapped up in, and enjoying, and then the rude awakening. And the pining for the ever diminishing views of dreamland in our heads, until nothing remains. Imagine how frustrated Coleridge must have been by the interruption of the ‘person from Porlock’!
A quite alternative view of the genesis of creativity comes from Steve Jobs who had this to say:
‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.’
In other words, joining the dots. Almost as natural as breathing, certainly without obvious thought. Jobs suggests creativity is an innate talent, perhaps unavailable to some, if not most, of the population. I think creativity is available - with a stretch. Joining the dots is something I think I do in analysis. And I know where that goes for me!
Quo vadis? for creativity for Ian? I like the artists’ way, painting the same image over and over, perhaps with slightly different perspectives. Try this approach with words, not paint? Hmm…can it work? I’ll let you know.