by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
After a disjointed hour-long conversation, I did not need to tell myself I was lucky, nor that I was grateful. When the right two meet, you only need sign the dotted line. I let him talk himself into a frenzy, only interjecting here and there, adding where appropriate, so he knew I was following his every thought. He even paid me for this informal interview – can you imagine that?
A day later, he asked me to write up everything we had spoken on. Fine. Finishing this, I sent it off. Another day passed and to my surprise he was unhappy with me. He said: my mind does not function in the way you write and I cannot make sense of your notes. I said of course, how would you like them?
I never heard from him again.
Over many years, he had imagined to himself that he could lay-out and solve a great issue. The idea of creativity, not just in the mind, but had conceived that creativity is the driving force of the universe – all in a book. That is why our conversation was all over the place. He had spoken about unmoved-moving, generation, Romantic Imagination, mythology & religion, quantum physics… here is an intelligent man with a multi-coloured coat.
He had diagrams, too, many diagrams explaining each movement of the idea creativity – outlining abstract ‘movements’ which the force creativity utilises. He had quotes, ‘sudden illuminations forming complete thoughts’, ‘divine simplicity’, and on and on. He had it all mapped out, layer upon layer building the idea creativity. The ‘why’ of creativity, what it is, the force that drives these strange symmetries was left by the way as unknowable, and rightly so.
As we get closer to the source, our words fail, our concepts take comfort on the threshold and refuse to budge. After that, all we get is what the wind blows back in our faces, as much as our imagination would like to dare us over. It would be upsetting if all my thoughts turned out to be true, that I was a knower. Then I’d have to pitch up my tent and make good with reality, stop my games.
Luckily, this is not so. I do not even know how intimate I am with it, yet we are married. That is all very normal. The only positive of reality is that you can be sure it will not run off with another lover, even though sometimes you really wish it would, if only for a little holiday. As Philip K. Dick said: ‘reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’.
Here, the senses begin to become confused. For already, creativity, imagination and belief, have all been brought together. They all seemed to be linked in a certain uncertain way. He was using theories of creativity as applied to a human creative act which cannot be separated from imagination, which cannot be separated from belief.
Any chance reading of psychiatry will show you the fatal ingenuity of the mind. In the latter half of the 19th century, the French neurologist Jules Cotard described a psychological abnormality which now takes his name, ‘Cotard’s Syndrome’. Here the individual either believes they are already dead (or are putrefying within, have lost internal organs) or that they are immortal (which can amount to the same thing). This is an extreme form of imagination that it turns into disbelief of self. Anyone who has thought about it for perhaps too long will become selfishly aware that the line between imagination and reality is drawn on the sand. We have to add to that absurd saying: and the tide is sure to come in.
One’s ideas and moods sit all day directing here and there until something crashes in through the front door and surprise surprise finds you sitting there gawking at it in disbelief. This perpetual play between reality and the imagination is the grifter’s playground: the power of belief, the forceful power that changes the day, that makes you resent your unquestioned limitations, so they say. It is also an honest playground and these voices tell you to meet it again and again. It is, it seems, the only playground.
It is either too flippant or too vague to say this individual is suffering from the creativity of their imagination, even it is true. Mainly for the two words’ more modern connotations does it make it flippant, and it is too vague for the obvious reason that it gets us no closer as to why this individual’s mind imagines their life so.
And it only gets increasingly complex. For example, the word ‘image’ does little to help with imagination for imagination encompassed something more, a method, a power, a rehearsal for living. It appears as weak form of perception but, then again, it can make perception weak. Imagination seems to be the emissary between states of consciousness, being fed unconsciously by the day, just like the dream finding its uses from our hurried perception. Perhaps, we can say, the dream is the creative expression of the imagined day.
Imagination throws you up into the heights of being, and, as Cotard and countless others have seen, can fling you into the depths of un-being. It enlightens your work, it takes you work away from you. It is serendipitous. The rigorous imaginative day-dream takes hold of us unaware and fatigues us as if we were truly living it, or it slips off into the background slumbering somewhere in the shadows.
Creativity is imagination put to use. I faltered on saying put to good use because this is not true. It is why the word ‘creation’ had long been tied to God, only the unknowable wisdom that the deity possesses could fathom what ‘good’ creation is; we cannot tell what is good or bad because we cannot comprehend fate.
It is here we are first brought the idea linking creativity with nature. My would’ve-been client must have creativity understood in the minutiae, every single transmission of the incomprehensible must be divided to its integral parts; the parts must be tracked, compounded, all the time taking into account some strangeness of motion that makes it so – if, he dreams, of necessity, at this time and place, I could predict through the creative process what would be at a second time, then I would have it captured. The physical manifestation would be the force writ large and that is all you need to know so far as natural processes are involved.
For us: illumination of the mind’s preoccupations, for nature: process. Neither seem to be able to see into the other. Does this admit to a similarity? An illumination is usually followed by a great work, or a great sense of being – is that what for nature is a process? Ought we to recall the strange statement that we too are nature?
Theologians and poets once had the answer already alluded to in the deity. It was, at one point, that imagination was the thing precisely linked to the deity-mind. That is how things could be squared. God thinks thoughts and thus creates, we share the power in our constructions, albeit on a lesser scale. Creativity of mind and of nature is tentatively bound. An enamouring thought.
It is here perhaps that some of the hangover lies. Is it a memory of a religious bias that causes the cynical take when I hear a theory of creativity? Even the word creativity. Something in it seems a contradiction, or a mere ream of paper dedicated to the fact that it appears to happen to those who are able to use their imagination well; or, a fact that things seem to fall together so. Both of which we cannot tell what the ultimate outcome will be. It is really so many words around the ‘why of it’ question. A sincere method of distancing.
The Zen Buddhist has an illumination, or Satori, precisely because they stop using their imagination, or the imagination is discarded in an unimaginable way, and then their life is one ‘creative’ act. We don’t have to wonder so much as to that serene smile that attended the first transmission of the Buddha-mind, although we cannot help feel arrested by it. The idea is forgone, its fervent imagining has come to a full stop and yet life begins, fully aware that to entertain any idea seriously soon finds paradox and many self-made constipations of the mind, and finally may laugh saying: things become meaningful only when they become meaningless.
The desire to answer questions often, to the detriment of the mind, forgets that a good thought asks a good question, leaving the riddle intact. We don’t want to get too focused on the forms of things and forget their internal incomprehensibility. Something can only grow by first being useless because a useless thing is free from exploitation of any kind. It is the useless that leaves room for the imagination, gives space for time to use.
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The Carl Kruse Blog Homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include: Some More BS, Interpretations in Literature, and Sophisticated Despair.
Also find Carl Kruse over on Arizona State University’s Number Fields Project as part of the BOINC distributed computing project.