Creativity is for Everyone
Meditating on a Physicist's Definition of Creativity
This is Art and Survival, a weekly-ish newsletter documenting one theatre-loving boy’s attempt to build a secure life filled with creative acts. You can find out more in the introductory post here.
This week: a reflection On Creativity, a book of essays by physicist David Bohm.
Two nights ago, some neighbors gathered in the hallway of the building for an unplanned fourth floor conference. Sam had just had an experience which needed to be talked about to be processed, so she began to talk about it.
While Sam was on her bike, she had an encounter with an aggressive stranger in a car. He punched her with words like “you fag,” and then followed her, repeating the refrain. Realizing she was being pursued, Sam turned toward a narrow throughway, where only bikes could go – and before she passed between the buildings, she turned to the man and said, “I’m sorry that your life is like this.”
Talking to the neighbors later, Sam said the experience – the verbal assault – seeped into her skin like the afterburn of a slap.
After she told the neighbors about this encounter – about her deep consideration of that person’s sad life – they turned the conversation towards the general state of the city, and the increasing feeling of disconnection within the city. Everything coveted is hyper-expensive; green space isn’t a right.
The neighbors and Sam commiserated. What could they do? Move to another place? One Canadian in the group mentioned moving there, that vibes were good there. Here there’s a fraught American election. There there’s not.
As Sam told her story, and the neighbors commiserated, her eyes linked the gaggle gathered in the hall. For a moment, the neighbors were suspended in space with one another. Her eyes kept theirs checked in, connected. Their interaction – that moment of being together with one another – that was part of the conversation. As the neighbors shook their fists at the sky, they shook their fists together. They were united, an exasperated little mob.
In times of increasing disconnection, what’s needed most is the creativity that enables or incites more awareness of wholeness. That truly original creativity – subtle, engaging creativity that works to append the whole of experience in a total and harmonious way – is needed in all fields in order for humanity to continue to evolve as a race and discover a means for continued survival.
Being clearly aware of the difference between the creative and the mechanical character of human responses goes far beyond limited fields such as art, science and so forth… what is needed is a generally creative quality of living in all areas of human activity.
[David Bohm, On the relationship of science and art.]
In the Plum Village community in the south of France, founded by the Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, there is practiced a form of meditation which takes an approach that believes that change ripples throughout the world when individuals practice subtle and compassionate awareness. It is only from a place of awareness that anything can begin to change, so this is the essential starting place. When an individual is “true to themself,” and there is harmony between their beliefs and actions, their is the potential for healing beliefs to heal the external world. This capacity towards harmony is described by the Buddhist tenets of “right speech” and “right action,” behaviors which “offer the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm” (Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Talents). Through right speech and right action, the Plum Village practitioners act to partner with the planet, caring for its well-being.
May I know how to look at myself and others with the eyes of understanding and compassion.
In an essay published in On Creativity, physicist David Bohm tells a story about his first time riding a horse.
The man from whom [the horse] was being hired told me, ‘you must think faster than the horse or else you will go where the horse wants to go.’ This made a deep impression on me, because it contained an important truth: that a given process can be ordered only by the intentions of a faster, finer, more subtle order of process.
Before the horse begins to move in a specific direction, a rider can make tiny pulls at the reins to change the direction of the horse. Bohm goes on to use this as an analogy for describing the function of creativity in the mind: while the mind has mechanical reactions and responses, the creative action of the mind can “see where the mechanism is going long before [it] begins to gain an overwhelming momentum in that direction.”
Bohm’s horse anecdote cuts towards his definition of creativity as a sensitive and aware faculty that can be applied to all areas of human activity. No really creative transformation of the world is possible without our being in the creative state of mind that’s sensitive to the differences between our perceived world and preconceived ideas. Without awareness of the actual nature of what’s going on, there’s no way to steer the horse before it’s too late.
When each [individual]… acts in a particular and independently determined order, how can it be otherwise that these orders will generally be in a state of clash and conflict? (Recall, for example, the clash of traffic at an intersection without a signal, or the destruction of an organism in which is a growing a cancer, whose cells multiply without regard for the order of the organism as a whole.)
In the face of increasing fragmentation and feelings of disconnection from the world and from each other, there’s a path that’s total and harmonious that exists, and can be imagined. For it to be imagined, or perceived at all, a creative and original frame of reference is needed.
Looking this way, one might see things as they are, and begin to gently pull on the reins of this “general mess,” this spiderweb of chaos, and guide it towards a path that’s balanced, solid, and free.
Amazing writing and content!