Thoughts on Creativity

"What we airily label creativity typically blends so many features: risk-taking, perseverance, problem-solving, openness to experience, the need to share one's inner universe, empathy, detailed mastery of a craft, resourcefulness, disciplined spontaneity, a mind of large general knowledge and strength that can momentarily be drawn to a particular, ample joy when surprised, intense focus, the useful application of obsession, the innocent wonder of a child available to a learned adult, passion, a tenuous (or at least flexible) grasp on reality, mysticism (though not necessarily theology), a reaction against the status quo (and preference for unique creations), and usually the support of at least one person-- among many other ingredients.

In the throes of creativity, a lively brain tussles with a mass of memories and rich stores of knowledge, attacking them both sub rosa and with the mind wide open.  Some it incubates offstage until a fully fledged insight wings into view.  The rest it consciously rigs, rotates, kneads, and otherwise plays with until a novel solution emerges.  Only by fumbling with countless bits of knowledge, and then ignoring most of it, does a creative mind craft something original.  For that, far more than the language areas are involved.  Hand-me-down ideas won't do.  So conventions must be flouted, risks taken, possibilities freely spigoted, ideas elaborated, problems redefined, daydreaming encouraged, curiosity followed down zigzagging alleyways.  And sort of unconsidered trifle may be fair game.  It's child's play.  Literally.  Not a gift given to an elect few, but a widespread, natural, human way of knowing the world."
~Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love, p. 245 


Ackerman's next sentence (which I didn't want to include in the quote above, but which I think is true and needs to be said) reads: "With the best intentions, our schools and society bash most of it out of us.  Fortunately, it's so strong in some of us that it endures."

O Parakeet of the Lissome Star

"...(W)ho can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard?  Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.  They're never total fits or misfits.  In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-- a cult of two with fallible gods.  All couples play kissy games they don't want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, sine, though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults.  We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.  Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship.  If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words."

~Diane Ackerman writing about her relationship with husband Paul West in her memoir, One Hundred Names for Love.

Yay, yay, yay!  I found this book at the library the other day (indeed, it jumped off the shelf at me!) and I'm so excited to read it.  I first heard about it from an interview with Ackerman on NPR.  The book tells of her writer-husband's stroke which left him completely incapacitated and more significantly, without any vocabulary at all.  She nurses him back to health, and somehow, rather miraculously, coaxes his brain into remembering it's former glory.  The title refers to the names that West gives Ackerman as terms of endearments.  While most people would simply call their beloved something along the lines of "honey-pie," his poor addled (yet still creative) brain christens her with monikers such as, "O Parakeet of the Lissome Star," and "Delicious Pie of the Alternate Sheepfold."