Category: Longer Works

The Nature of Creativity and Creativity and the Unconscious

Rollo May tries to explain not only the nature of creativity but the conditions under which it emerges, relating much of what he says directly to what artists themselves have to say about their art. He sees the creative act as a dialectical relationship that takes place between two poles, the artist and an outside world. As a result, we cannot understand an artist’s work unless we understand both factors.

May sees the creative act as an intense encounter between the artist and the outside “world,” that is characterized by a “heightened consciousness.”
Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint-they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.

The result of this encounter is a work of art that reflects the characteristics of both the artist and his world.

However, May defines “world” a little differently than it is commonly defined:

World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing – specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.

Thus, each work of art is, almost by definition, unique for the world of the artist is in a continual state of flux.

If we are to believe May’s argument that

In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. "Creativity" to rephrase our definition, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.”

we can easily see why it is necessary to study an artist within the context of his time if we are to truly appreciate his works. We also understand the need to continually discover new artists who can help us to understand our own time. Although there may well be insights so fundamental to human nature that they are always valid, it is also true that the conditions of our time are changing so quickly that only contemporary artists can hope to adequately understand our own unique situation.

May emphasizes the importance of the unconscious in the creative act. He argues that the artist has to tap into his unconscious in order to create a new work.

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

This conflict is bound to occur not only in the artist but in the audience because of the tendency to preserve beliefs. Change comes only after the stress between what we believe and what is actually happening becomes so great that we have little choice but to change our beliefs.

May notes that if “we are too rigid, dogmatic, or bound to previous conclusions, we will, of course, never let this new element come into our consciousness; we will never let ourselves be aware of the knowledge that exists on another level within us.” You certainly don’t have to look too far into today’s news to see the dangers that exist when people are so dogmatic that they lose touch with reality.

Mass media, May argues, “presents us with a serious danger, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. This very fact throws considerable weight on the side of regularity and uniformity and against originality and freer creativity.” The danger of formulaic art is that it will merely re-affirm outmoded or clichéd beliefs rather than give us new insights into our world. In fact, that may well be one of the major attractions of escapist art. People like to be told again and again that they’re right, particularly if they’re not.

Of course, it’s not only readers that are often opposed to new forms of art,

Dogmatists of all kinds-scientific, economic, moral, as well as political-are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.

Society, as a whole, is opposed to change because it is too invested in the status quo. Little wonder it is so difficult for an artist to affect society. Little wonder, then, that great artists who were writing fifty or more years ago are just now being accepted by readers.

Of course, that would also suggest that most of us are living life in the rear-view mirror. Who knows what that may mean when we come to the next turn in the road?

The Courage to Create

Inspired by Hesse’s tales, I decided to re-read Rollo May’s The Courage to Create. May, an existentialist psychologist, is one of the few modern psychologists that I actually enjoy reading, perhaps because he often sounds more like philosopher than a psychologist or perhaps because he spends as much time exploring exceptional people as he does disturbed people. Whatever the reason, I constantly find his books inspiring and insightful. The Courage to Create is particularly fascinating because it is devoted to the field that I have devoted much of my life to. It is well worth reading for anyone interested in literature, or the arts in general.

May explains the importance of courage in life by arguing that “a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day. These decisions require courage. This is why Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological -it is essential to our being.” In other words, it takes courage do become fully human. It takes even more courage to challenge our common perception of reality.

Although people seldom think of artists as courageous, May makes an interesting distinction between moral courage, the kind of courage most people think of, and creative courage:

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

When we consider how difficult and alienating it is to see the world differently than our neighbors (consider those who publicly condemned the popular bombing in Afghanistan), it is easy to see why it takes courage to suggest new ways of seeing reality. Any teacher who has tried to teach literary works that challenge the morals of their district’s patrons will realize how much more courage it must have taken to have actually written those ideas.

While May argues that the courage to create is a necessary part of all aspects of society, including technology, business, and teaching, he also argues that those who:

… present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists-the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images-poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations. The symbols only dreamt about by most human beings are expressed in graphic form by the artists.

Those of us drawn to art may not be able to articulate this new vision of life, but we certainly sense that we are seeing something new, seeing life in a new way. It is this feeling that brings us back to these works, brings us back until we either integrate them into our own life, or reject them. In this sense, we, too, are participating in the creative act.

May argues that artists are, ultimately, rebels, perhaps the most dangerous rebels of all because they constantly challenge the status quo. "Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. Thus are they the creators of the "uncreated conscience of the race." The artist’s audience, of course, becomes equally dangerous because once it recognizes the brilliance of the artist’s perception it is bound to participate in his rebellion, perhaps by the very act of experiencing his art.

Whether we are the artist or the artist’s audience, May argues that there is a profound joy that more than compensates for the anxiety we feel when we rebel against the status quo:

Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that: we are helping–to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. We can then say, with Joyce, Welcome, O life! We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of the race.

The Price of Art

Anyone who enjoyed Steppenwolf or Siddhartha should find The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse fascinating. These tales offer considerable insight into Hesse’s philosophy of life. The introduction by Jack Zipes, the translator of the tales, is quite informative about Hesse’s life and philosophical ideas.

My favorite tale was “Augustus” which questions whether it is better to be loved by everyone or to love everyone. Like any collection of short stories collected over a long period of an artist’s life, some are bound to be more interesting than another.Personally, I found the tales examining the life of the artist fascinating, while the tales about nationalism and war seemed dated and somewhat didactic. As Zipes points out in the introduction:

Most important, Hesse began to replace the Pietism of his parents with his own personal religion-aestheticism. If there ever was a creed that he devoutly followed, it was the German romantic Novalis’s notion that "Mensch werden ist eine Kunst"-to become a human being is art. For Hesse, art-the ultimate self-fulfillment meant connecting with a profound, essential feeling associated with "home." But this home was not the home of his parents. Home was something intangible that was linked to aesthetic intuition and nurturing maternalism but was unique to each individual. It was both a return and a moving forward at the same time, and it could be attained only through art, through the artful formation of the self.

Logically enough, some of the best tales deal with the artist’s attempts to attain this fulfillment of his life.

While I make no claim to be an “artist,” I faced some of the same dilemmas while pursuing my master’s degree and thinking about getting a PHD. I spent three summers getting my masters degree in literature, three years I missed spending time with my children, time that could never be recaptured. I sometimes referred to myself as a “print-orientated bastard,” inspired by John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. I finally decided that despite the economic advantages, and the sheer joy I got from reading and taking classes, I would not pursue a PHD because it simply demanded more time than I was willing to be away from my kids.

“The Poet” tells the tale of a man who sacrifices his marriage for his art. It seems typical of these stories and serves as a good introduction to the book as a whole. As the story begins the young Chinese poet Han Fook is attending the festival of the lights. As he is about to cross the river to join the festivities, he has a prophetic vision:

The young man’s heart pounded while he stood there as a lonely spectator, and he became enraptured by all this beauty. Yet as much as he longed to cross the river and become part of everything, to be near his bride and his friends and enjoy the festivities, he also desired just as passionately to absorb all of this as a keen observer and to capture it in a totally perfect poem: the blue of the night and the play of light on the water, as well as the enjoyment of the people and the yearning of the silent onlooker leaning against the trunk of the tree on the bank. He sensed that there would never be a festive occasion or any pleasure in the world that would make him feel entirely at ease and cheerful. Even in the midst of life he would remain solitary and, to a certain degree, a spectator and stranger.

Pondering this vision, Han Fook decides that “true happiness and deep fulfillment could be his only if he were to succeed one time in capturing the world so perfectly in his poems that he would possess the world itself, purified and eternalized, in these images.”

Immediately after this, Han Fook meets the “Master of the Perfect Word" and he feels like he has been “cut off from the cheerful people who teased him for being in love.” He tells his father that he wants to put off his wedding and sets off to find the Master. When he finds the Master, he settles down to learn the art of poetry. Time passes almost magically and “Two years later, the young man felt an intense longing to see his parents, his bride, and his native land, and he asked the Master for permission to travel home.”

Han Fook returns home only to discover that “home” is no longer “home” and that he has made the right choice in foregoing everyday life to become an artist:

When he compared all that he was now seeing with the picture that he had painted of it in his homesickness, he realized that he was very much destined to become a poet, and he saw that the dreams of a poet contain a beauty and charm that are sought in vain in the real things of the world. And he climbed down from the tree and fled from the garden across the bridge and out of his native city.

When Han Fook returns to the Master, “the Master recited two verses about the blessings of art, and the student’s eyes filled with tears upon hearing such profundity and harmony.”

Han Fook works many years on his art, throwing away piece after piece of poetry until:

And when people heard his words, it was not only the sun, the play of fish, or the whispering of the willow that they depicted. It seemed that heaven and earth chimed together for one moment in perfect harmony, and the listeners would think with pleasure or pain about something that they loved or hated-the boy about his games, the young man about his lover, and the old man about death.

In his pursuit of his art Han Fook finally loses sight of any life outside his art, and lives only to become a Master himself:

Han Fook lost track of the years that he spent with the Master at the source of the Great River. It often seemed to him as though it had been only yesterday that he had entered the valley and been received by the old man playing the lute. It also seemed as if all the times and ages of humankind had faded and become unreal.

Finally, though, Han Fook becomes the Master of the Perfect Word.

Returning home for a last time, Han Fook

… looked into the river where the reflections of the thousand lanterns were floating, and just as he could no longer distinguish between the reflections and the real lanterns, so he found in his soul no difference between this festival and the first one, when he had stood there as a young man and had first heard the words of the strange Master.

Depending on your viewpoint, Han Fook’s victory is either a triumph or a tragedy. Either you see it as a small price to pay to become a master artist, or you see it as a victory bought at the price of all that is precious in life.

Either way, the tale is a fascinating and thought-provoking look into the mind of an artist who has been recognized as one of the pivotal writers of the twentieth century.

The book is one that no fan of Hermann Hesse will want to miss.

And then there is Jack Kerouac — Oops, Ray Smith

The pivotal character in The Dharma Bums is really the narrator, Ray Smith, Kerouac’s alter ego. Unlike the idealized Japhy Rider, the narrator is all too human, as we learn early in the story:

I reminded myself of the line in the Diamond Sutra that says, Practice charity without holding in mind any conceptions about charity, for charity after all is just a word." I was very devout in those days and was practicing my religious devotions almost to perfection. Since then I’ve become a little hypocritical about my lip-service and a little tired and cynical. Because now I am grown so old and neutral. . . . But then I really believed in the reality of- charity and kindness and humility and zeal and neutral tranquillity and wisdom and ecstasy, and I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world (usually the immense triangular are of New York to Mexico City to San Francisco) in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise.

Kerouac may have chosen the name Smith for the narrator precisely because he represents the common man, a "religious wanderer." Smith, like most of us, starts out with the best of intentions.

Smith’s inability to meet his expectations are shown early in the novel. When Smith is following Japhy up the Matterhorn, an obvious symbol of his spiritual climb, we see Smith at his best:

I thought, "What a strange thing is man . . . like in the Bible it says, Who knoweth the spirit of man that looketh upward? This poor kid ten years younger than I am is making me look like a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn’t got any money: he doesn’t need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this. And what gouty millionaire could get up this rock anyhow? It took us all day to climb." And I promised myself that I would begin a new life. "All over the West, and the mountains in the East, and the desert, I’ll tramp with a rucksack and make it the pure way."

Some of us can’t help but admire Smith’s desire to live "the pure way." Unfortunately, Smith is unable to keep up with Japhy and reach the top, perhaps not too surprising considering that he has never climbed a mountain before. Instead of seeing this as a challenge he needs to prepare better for, he just seems to give up.

"Now there’s the karma of these three men, here: Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountaintop and makes it, I almost make it and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all is that poet’s poet lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, goddammit they’ll never get me up here again."

Throughout the novel Smith certainly is shown as the protagonist, not as a hero. His travails follow the common-man-as-victim theme which dominates so much of modern fiction.

Raised in North Carolina, Smith seems to hold the traditional, conservative American values that have perhaps served those well who have been willing to settle down, marry the girl next door, and spend their lives earning a living for their family.

At his best, in fact, Smith even seems more compassionate than the enlightened Japhy. His Christian background seems reflected in the compassion he feels for nearly everyone he meets:

At nine o’clock I was stomping with full pack across my mother’s yard and there she was at the white tiled sink in the kitchen, washing her dishes, with a rueful expression waiting for me (I was late), worried I’d never even make it and probably thinking, "Poor Raymond, why does he always have to hitchhike and worry me to death, why isn’t he like other men?" And I thought of Japhy as I stood there in the cold yard looking at her: "Why is he so mad about white tiled sinks and ‘kitchen machinery’ he calls it? People have good hearts whether or not they live like Dharma Bums. Compassion is the heart of Buddhism."
Although Smith may seek the ultimate freedom that comes from being on the road and meditating instead of working, he is unable to entirely escape the guilt caused by the work ethic that he has been raised with:
I wasn’t exactly unconscious of the fact that I had a good warm fire to return to after these midnight meditations, provided kindly for me by my brother-in-law, who was getting a little sick and tired of my hanging around not working. Once I told him a line from something, about how one grows through suffering, he said: "If you grow through suffering by this time I oughta be as big as the side of the house."

Having been raised with a strong work ethic, it must have been nearly impossible not to feel guilty about living off others.

Smith’s sexual mores also come in direct conflict with the life style he encounters in California. Although he obviously envies Japhy Rider’s sexual freedom and sexual exhibitions, he is unable to participate himself without a tremendous sense of guilt.


"Take your clothes off and join in, Smith!" But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I’d also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel.
"Pretty girls make graves," was my saying, whenever I’d had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the incomparable pretties of Indian Mexico. And the absence of active lust in me had also given me a new peaceful life that I was enjoying a great deal. But this was too much. I was still afraid to take my clothes off; also I never liked to do that in front of more than one person, especially with men around.

He seems unable to comprehend that no matter how much you may seem to want something, it is self-destructive to do something you know is wrong before you do it. Either change your head, or change your actions. It may well be, as some existentialists argue, that nothing is right or wrong, but thinking makes it so. At the very least, if you THINK it is wrong to have sex with every girl you meet, it IS wrong. Duh. How could an enlightened man think otherwise?

At the deepest level, Smith only seems able to confront the Great Void:

I meditated and prayed. There just isn’t any kind of night’s sleep in the world that can compare with the night’s sleep you get in the desert winter night, providing you’re good and warm in a duck-down bag. The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identify with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth. I wished I could explain it to those I loved, to my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren’t any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was the question probably asked to beetlebrowed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.

Confronting the Void may well be an important step toward enlightenment, the equivalent of the Dark Night of the Soul, but few are able to survive the constant awareness of that Void without finding something to bridge it.

Unfortunately, the only thing Smith seems able to find to help fill that Void is alcohol. As Japhy tells him:

"You’re just drinking too much all the time, I don’t see how you’re even going to gain enlightenment and manage to stay out in the mountains, you’ll always be coming down the hill spending your bean money on wine and finally you’ll end up lying in the street in the rain, dead drunk, and then they’ll take you away and you’ll have to be reborn a teetotalin bartender to atone for your karma." He was really sad about it, and worried about me, but I just went on drinking.

Personally, I find it difficult to get enthusiastic for a novel where the protagonist’s solution to his problems is to drink himself into oblivion. I know that real life can be this depressing, but I refuse to believe it has to be. If we can’t be Japhy, at least we can be the best Smith we can be, and that is all we need to be.

Even Kerouac seems to realize this and tries to end the novel on a happier note:

It was Japhy who had advised me to come here and now though he was seven thousand miles away in Japan answering the meditation bell (a little bell he later sent to my mother in the mail, just because she was my mother, a gift to please her) he seemed to be standing on Desolation Peak by the gnarled old rocky trees certifying and justifying all that was here. "Japhy," I said out loud, "I don’t know when we’ll meet again or what’ll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I’ve grown two months older and there’s all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, 0 ever youthful, 0 ever weeping." Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said "God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other."

Unfortunately, the ironic title Desolation Peak doesn’t seem ironic here. This escape from despair seems at best temporary, though, for Smith, like all of us, has to test what he has learned on the mountain with the cold reality of everyday life.

Remember to balance these observations against my earlier post on Japhy. I’m still ambivalent about the novel, but I’m glad I finally took the time to read it. If you think I’m being too tough on Kerouac, see the review of another of his books here: Amazon.com: buying info: Some of the Dharma.