The Creativity Block

 "I can't sing on tune." "I don't have a sense of rhythm." "If only I could (paint, sing, write, dance, you name it.)" 

Given the absence of a rare neurological dysfunction, none of those common statements can possibly be true. Singing is an inherent ability. Humans sang before they learned to talk. If our lungs weren't breathing and our hearts not beating rhythmically, we'd be in deep trouble. Sound waves, ocean waves, the entire universe is rhythmic. A child happily paints on walls with his mother's lipstick. Another tells fabulous stories about the monster that lives under her bed. They bang their spoons on the table, dance until they're dizzy.

If we are all born creative, how do some of us become convinced that we're not?  We have to be taught.    By parents who see lipsticked walls as destructive, or "the monster did it" to be a lie. By teachers who find a student's Shakespearean sonnet about a pimple inappropriate for the school magazine. By laws that necessarily require us to obey stop signs.

Some of us are fortunate enough to discover that creativity is a state of being that can be a refuge. We hide it, and ourselves inside it, and continue to grow. But others, who have been punished or ostracized for the new and the daring, lock it inside, forget where we put the key, and wonder why life is so dull.  

The creative spirit may lie dormant, but it never leaves us. It's waiting - maybe knocking once in a while - for that moment when we cast off the "shoulds" and "should nots" and open the door.

Imperfect Art

Murray Bail, in his novel, The Voyage, has a pompous art critic say that the power of art doesn’t come from perfection, but from the effort of creation. That we want imperfection because it’s closer to human understanding.

Even though the rest of the critic’s comment is idiotic, that first clause is true. The power of art does not come from perfection. “Perfect” is a word we can apply to an exam paper or to the threading on a screw. “Perfect” is an end word, the end of effort. We’re done when we hit perfect.

But we never say, standing before a Selma Burke sculpture, “That’s perfect.” Burke wasn’t done with that sculpture. She stopped working on it when it was as close to her truth as she could bring it. That’s what we want when we spend time with it, walk around to see it from every angle. Not perfection. Nor do we want imperfection, so we can understand it. What we want is a truth that we respond to on all levels, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

Nor does the power of art come from the effort of creation. Of course any activity requires effort - learning the craft, practicing it - but we fully respond to art only if it appears to be easy. So easy, so effortless, that we could do it ourselves. If we leave a concert in a state of awe at the technique of the guitarist, we have been listening to a craftsman. If we leave humming and strumming an air guitar, we’ve been listening to an artist.

What we do admire in artists is not effort, but the risks they take in presenting us with imperfect art. When they say, “I’m giving you the very best I can at this moment.” 

Freeing Creativity

Vick's comment led me to think about how some creative projects seem have a life of their own. I've had a dread of anthropomorphism since the 80s, when the fad among academic sociologists was to study animal behavior in order to understand human behavior. The apogee, for me, was a paper about the sexual behavior of wild ducks. The author, whose name I've mercifully forgotten, and his associates had spent untold hours lying in the cold swamps of the northwest watching ducks mate, and had come to the conclusion that rape was involved. An idea so ridiculous that I planned, for a time, to write a novel, "The Rape of the Mallard Duck." Thankfully, that project died as others became more interesting.

However, when I first began to teach voice, one of my students was away for two months on a business trip. Although she had not been able to practice during that time, her voice had grown so much that I was shocked. Shocked and, at first, disheartened. If she had improved so much without me, why was I teaching?

But I have encountered that phenomenon again and again. I have come to believe, although fearfully, because I have no scientific proof and I do have anthropomorphic dread, that the voice has a mind, or a will, of its own. "Oh," it says, "if you're going to free me, then I will fly free."

Humans are creative beings. Any culture that has the means of survival - food and shelter - will sing and dance, decorate their cooking pots and the walls of their caves. What if any creative impulse - the stories we're writing, as well as the songs we're singing - were continuously at work in the subconscious, waiting to be set free?

    

Telling Ourselves Stories

We are constantly telling ourselves stories. That’s what consciousness is. That’s who we are. Storytelling beings, made up of the stories we tell.

The material from which we create our stories, and our selves, originates outside the body from sensory stimuli. We’re bombarded by our senses every second, sorting out at a physical or subconscious level those most necessary to our survival and bringing those to consciousness. That some of our stories never reach the conscious level doesn’t mean that our subconscious or our bodies are not telling, often acting upon, their own stories.

I am not, at this moment, conscious of the pressure of my hips on the chair seat or of my feet on the floor, the weight of my coffee cup, or the taste of the coffee. Nor of the sounds of the refrigerator or the air conditioner. I do, however, notice when something unexpectedly crosses my line of vision. My body tenses a bit. Oh, just a fly. My body relaxes because it has had enough experience with house flies to know that they’re not a threat. I didn’t have to think through, make a decision about that process.     

Ordinarily a fly would not become part of my storytelling, but having brought it to consciousness by writing about it, I am now involved in memories of a particular fly family, black flies. Memories of the job that required in-depth research of black flies for a real-estate venture. Memories of my boss, who he was during the five years I worked for him as his personal assistant.

One of my tasks was to protect him from the media. No photos, no interviews. But I’ve recently seen a photo of him at a gala with a new wife. I’ve seen an interview that mentions an affair with a celebrity, political alignments that I wouldn’t have thought possible. I’ve had to re-cast and re-interpret memories in order to understand how he became a man I don’t recognize. And I’ve had to retell myself the story of five years of my own life, who I was then and who I am now.

We all tell ourselves stories so that we can bring some sense of order and meaning into the randomness of life. New stimuli require new stories as we continue to create ourselves.