EVERYONE uses from time to time such expressions as, “a thought pops up,” an idea comes “from the blue” or “dawns” or “comes as though out of a dream,” or “it suddenly hit me.” These are various ways of describing a common experience: the breakthrough of ideas from some depth below the level of awareness. I shall call this realm “the unconscious” as a catchall for the subconscious, preconscious, and other dimensions below awareness.
When I use the phrase “the unconscious,” I, of course, mean it as a shorthand. There is no such thing as “the unconscious”; it is, rather, unconscious dimensions (or aspects or sources) of experience. I define this unconscious as the potentialities for awareness or action which the individual cannot or will not actualize. These potentialities are the source of what can be called “free creativity.” The exploration of unconscious phenomena has a fascinating relationship to creativity. What are the nature and characteristics of the creativity that has its source in these unconscious depths of personality?
I wish to begin our exploration of this topic by relating an incident from my own experience. When I was a graduate student doing research on The Meaning of Anxiety, I studied anxiety in a group of unmarried mothers—i.e., pregnant young women in their late teens and early twenties in a shelter home in New York City.1 I had a good, sound hypothesis on anxiety, approved by my professors and approved by me—that the predisposition toward anxiety in individuals would be proportionate to the degree to which they had been rejected by their mothers. In psychoanalysis and psychology this had been a generally accepted hypothesis. I assumed the anxiety of people like these young women would be cued off by the anxiety-creating situation of being unwed and pregnant, and I could then study more openly the original source of their anxiety—namely the maternal rejection.
Now I discovered that half the young women fitted my hypothesis beautifully. But the other half did not fit it at all. This latter group included young women from Harlem and the Lower East Side who had been radically rejected by their mothers. One of them, whom I shall call Helen, was from a family of twelve children whose mother drove them out of the house on the first day of summer to stay with their father, the caretaker of a barge that went up and down the Hudson River. Helen was pregnant by her father. At the time she was in the shelter, he was in Sing Sing on a charge of rape by Helen’s older sister. Like the other young women of this group, Helen would say to me, “We have troubles, but we don’t worry.”
This was a very curious thing to me and I had a hard time believing the data. But the facts seemed clear. As far as I could tell by the Rorschach, TAT, and other tests I used, these radically rejected young women did not carry any unusual degree of anxiety. Forced out of the house by their mothers, they simply made their friends among other youngsters on the street. Hence, there was not the predisposition to anxiety we would have expected according to what we know in psychology.
How could this be? Had the rejected young women who had not experienced anxiety become hardened, apathetic, so that they did not feel the rejection? The answer to that seemed clearly no. Were they psychopathic or sociopathic types, who also don’t experience anxiety? Again, no. I felt myself caught by an insoluble problem.
Late one day, putting aside my books and papers in the little office I used in that shelter house, I walked down the street toward the subway. I was tired. I tried to put the whole troublesome business out of my mind. About fifty feet away from the entrance to the Eighth Street station, it suddenly struck me “out of the blue,” as the not-unfitting expression goes, that those young women who didn’t fit my hypothesis were all from the proletarian class. And as quickly as that idea struck me, other ideas poured out. I think I had not taken another step on the sidewalk when a whole new hypothesis broke loose in my mind. I realized my entire theory would have to be changed. I saw at that instant that it is not rejection by the mother that is the original trauma which is the source of anxiety; it is rather rejection that is lied about.
The proletarian mothers rejected their children, but they never made any bones about it. The children knew they were rejected; they went out on the streets and found other companions. There was never any subterfuge about their situation. They knew their world—bad or good—and they could orient themselves to it. But the middle-class young women were always lied to in their families. They were rejected by mothers who pretended they loved them. This was really the source of their anxiety, not the sheer rejection. I saw, in that instantaneous way that characterizes insights from these deeper sources, that anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence. I was convinced there, on the street—and later thought and experience only convinced me the more—that this is a better, more accurate, and more elegant theory, than my first.
What was going on at the moment when this breakthrough occurred? Taking this experience of mine as a start, we notice, first of all, that the insight broke into my conscious mind against what I had been trying to think rationally. I had a good, sound thesis and I had been working very hard trying to prove it. The unconscious, so to speak, broke through in opposition to the conscious belief to which I was clinging.
Carl Jung often made the point that there is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness. He believed the relationship was compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality. The compensation also works on specific problems: if I consciously bend too far one way on some issue, my unconscious will lean the other way. This is, of course, the reason why the more we are unconsciously smitten with doubts about an idea, the more dogmatically we fight for it in our conscious arguments. This is also why persons as different as Saint Paul on the Damascus road and the alcoholic in the Bowery go through such radical conversions—the repressed unconscious side of the dialectic erupts and takes over the personality. The unconscious seems to take delight (if I may so express it) in breaking through—and breaking up—exactly what we cling to most rigidly in our conscious thinking.
What occurs in this breakthrough is not simply growth; it is much more dynamic. It is not a mere expansion of awareness; it is rather a kind of battle. 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.
The guilt that is present when this breakthrough occurs has its source in the fact that the insight must destroy something. My insight destroyed my other hypothesis and would destroy what a number of my professors believed, a fact that caused me some concern. Whenever there is a breakthrough of a significant idea in science or a significant new form in art, the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual and spiritual world. This is the source of guilt in genuine creative work. As Picasso remarked, “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”
The breakthrough carries with it also an element of anxiety. For it not only broke down my previous hypothesis, it shook my self-world relationship. At such a time I find myself having to seek a new foundation, the existence of which I as yet don’t know. This is the source of the anxious feeling that comes at the moment of the breakthrough; it is not possible that there be a genuinely new idea without this shake up occurring to some degree.
But beyond guilt and anxiety, as I said above, the main feeling that comes with the breakthrough is one of gratification. We have seen something new. We have the joy of participating in what the physicists and other natural scientists call an experience of “elegance.”
A second thing that occurred in the breakthrough of this insight is that everything around me became suddenly vivid. I can remember that on the particular street down which I walked the houses were painted an ugly shade of green that I normally would prefer to forget immediately. But by virtue of the vividness of this experience, the colors all around were sharpened and were imbedded in my experience, and that ugly green still exists in my memory. The moment the insight broke through, there was a special translucence that enveloped the world, and my vision was given a special clarity. I am convinced that this is the usual accompaniment of the breakthrough of unconscious experience into consciousness. Here is again part of the reason the experience scares us so much: the world, both inwardly and outwardly, takes on an intensity that may be momentarily overwhelming. This is one aspect of what is called ecstasy—the uniting of unconscious experience with consciousness, a union that is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion.
I want to emphasize that I did not get my insight as though I were dreaming, with the world and myself opaque and cloudy. It is a popular misconception that perception is dull when one is experiencing this state of insight. I believe that perception is actually sharper. True, one aspect of it resembles a dream in that self and world may become kaleidoscopic; but another aspect of the experience is a sharpened perception, a vividness, a translucence of relationship to the things around us. The world becomes vivid and unforgettable. Thus the breakthrough of material from unconscious dimensions involves a heightening of sensory experience.
We could, indeed, define the whole experience that we are talking about as a state of heightened consciousness. Unconsciousness is the depth dimension of consciousness, and when it surges up into consciousness in this kind of polar struggle the result is an intensification of consciousness. It heightens not only the capacity to think, but also the sensory processes; and it certainly intensifies memory.
There is a third thing we observe when such insights occur—that is, the insight never comes hit or miss, but in accordance with a pattern of which one essential element is our own commitment. The breakthrough does not come by just “taking it easy,” by “letting the unconscious do it.” The insight, rather, is born from unconscious levels exactly in the areas in which we are most intensively consciously committed. The insight came to me on that problem to which, up till the moment I put my books and papers away in the little office that I occupied, I had devoted my best and most energetic conscious thought. The idea, the new form which suddenly becomes present, came in order to complete an incomplete Gestalt with which I was struggling in conscious awareness. One can quite accurately speak of this incomplete Gestalt, this unfinished pattern, this unformed form, as constituting the “call” that was answered by the unconscious.
The fourth characteristic of this experience is that the insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation. It comes at a break in periods of voluntary effort. My breakthrough came when I had put away my books and was walking toward the subway, my mind far away from that problem. It is as though intense application to the problem—thinking about it, struggling with it—starts and keeps the work process going; but some part of the pattern that is different from what I am trying to work out is struggling to be born. Hence the tension that is involved in creative activity. 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. But the insight often cannot be born until the conscious tension, the conscious application, is relaxed. Hence the well-known phenomenon that the unconscious breakthrough requires the alternation of intense, conscious work and relaxation, with the unconscious insight often occurring, as in my case, at the moment of the shift.
Albert Einstein once asked a friend of mine in Princeton, “Why is it I get my best ideas in the morning while I’m shaving?” My friend answered, as I have been trying to say here, that often the mind needs the relaxation of inner controls—needs to be freed in reverie or day dreaming—for the unaccustomed ideas to emerge.
Let us now consider the experience, more complex and richer than mine, of one of the great mathematicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jules Henri Poincaré. In his autobiography, Poincaré tells us with admirable clarity how his new insights and new theories came to him, and he describes vividly the circumstances surrounding the occurrence of one “breakthrough.”
For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.2
Still a young man, he was then called into the military service, and for some months nothing happened in his thinking. One day in a town in southern France he was getting on a bus and talking with another soldier. As he was about to put his foot on the step—he pinpoints the moment that exactly—there broke into his mind the answer to how these new mathematical functions that he had discovered were related to the conventional mathematics he had been working on before. When I read Poincaré’s experience—which was after the above incident in my own life—I was struck by how similar it was in this special precision and vividness. He got up on the step, entered the bus, continued without pause his conversation with his friend, but was completely and instaneously convinced of the way these functions were related to general mathematics.
To continue with a later portion of his autobiography, when he returned from army service:
Then I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions apparently without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with my preceding researches. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.3
Poincaré, turning psychologist for the moment, asks himself the question we posed above: What is going on in the mind that these ideas should break through at this moment? This is what he proposes in answer to his question:
Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident. Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness.4
Is the appearance of the illumination due to the relief from fatigue—i.e., simply taking a rest? No, he answers:
It is more probable that this rest has been filled out with unconscious work and that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself to the geometer just as in the cases I have cited; only the revelation, instead of coming daring a walk or a journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form.5
He then continues with another penetrating comment on the practical aspects of the breakthrough:
There is another remark to be made about the conditions of this unconscious work: it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing.6
Let us summarize some of the most significant points so far in Poincaré’s testimony. He sees the characteristics of the experience as follows: (1) the suddenness of the illumination; (2) that the insight may occur, and to some extent must occur, against what one has clung to consciously in one’s theories; (3) the vividness of the incident and the whole scene that surrounds it; (4) the brevity and consciseness of the insight, along with the experience of immediate certainty. Continuing with the practical conditions which he cites as necessary for this experience are (5) hard work on the topic prior to the breakthrough; (6) a rest, in which the “unconscious work” has been given a chance to proceed on its own and after which the breakthrough may occur (which is a special case of the more general point); (7) the necessity of alternating work and relaxation, with the insight often coming at the moment of the break between the two, or at least within the break.
This last point is particularly interesting. It is probably something everyone has learned: professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally alternate the classroom with the beach; authors will write better when, as Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved.
I propose that in our day this alternation of the market place and mountain requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be able to retire from a world that is “too much with us,” that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in us. It is a characteristic of our time that many people are afraid of solitude: to be alone is a sign one is a social failure, for no one would be alone if he or she could help it. It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV, subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether of the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly difficult to let insights from unconscious depths break through. Of course, when an individual is afraid of the irrational—that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience—he tries to keep busiest, tries to keep most “noise” going on about him. The avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant agitated diversion is what Kierkegaard, in a nice simile, likened to the settlers in the early days of America who used to beat on pots and pans at night to make enough din to keep the wolves away. Obviously if we are to experience insights from our unconscious, we need to be able to give ourselves to solitude.
Poincaré finally asks: What determines why a given idea comes through from the unconscious? Why this particular insight and not one of a dozen others? Is it because a particular insight is the answer which is empirically most accurate? No, he answers. Is it because it is the insight which will pragmatically work best? Again, no. What Poincaré proposes as the selective factor resulting in this given insight seems to me to be in some ways the most important and gripping point in his whole analysis:
The useful combinations [that come through from the unconscious] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know, but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile at it.
… Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are also without effect upon the esthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful. They will be capable of touching this special sensibility of the geometer of which I have just spoken, and which, once aroused, will call our attention to them, and thus give them occasion to become conscious.7
This is why the mathematicians and physicists talk about the “elegance” of a theory. The utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches one’s sensibilities—these are significant factors determining why a given idea emerges. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights reveals the same phenomenon—that insights emerge not chiefly because they are “rationally true” or even helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes an incomplete Gestalt.
When this breakthrough of a creative insight into consciousness occurs, we have the subjective conviction that the form should be this way and no other way. It is characteristic of the creative experience that it strikes us as true—with the “immediate certainty” of Poincaré. And we think, nothing else could have been true in that situation, and we wonder why we were so stupid as not to have seen it earlier. The reason, of course, is that we were not psychologically ready to see it. We could not yet intend the new truth or creative form in art or scientific theory. We were not yet open on the level of intentionality. But the “truth” itself is simply there. This reminds us of what the Zen Buddhists keep saying—that at these moments is reflected and revealed a reality of the universe that does not depend merely on our own subjectivity, but is as though we only had our eyes closed and suddenly we open them and there it is, as simple as can be. The new reality has a kind of immutable, eternal quality. The experience that “this is the way reality is and isn’t it strange we didn’t see it sooner” may have a religious quality with artists. This is why many artists feel that something holy is going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious revelation.
We now consider some dilemmas which arise from the relation of the unconscious to techniques and machines. No discussion of creativity and the unconscious in our society can possibly avoid these difficult and important problems.
We live in a world that has become mechanized to an amazingly high degree. Irrational unconscious phenomena are always a threat to this mechanization. Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line. Mechanization requires uniformity, predictability, and orderliness; and the very fact that unconscious phenomena are original and irrational is already an inevitable threat to bourgeois order and uniformity.
This is one reason people in our modern Western civilization have been afraid of unconscious and irrational experience. For the potentialities that surge up in them from deeper mental wells simply don’t fit the technology which has become so essential for our world. What people today do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious world. This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or techniques or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then tools become defense mechanisms—specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness that we call the unconscious. Our mechanisms and technology then make us “uncertain in the impulses of the spirit,” as the physicist Heisenberg puts it.8
Western civilization since the Renaissance has centrally emphasized techniques and mechanics. Thus it is understandable that the creative impulses of ourselves and our forefathers, again since the Renaissance, should have been channeled into the making of technical things—creativity directed toward the advance and application of science. Such channeling of creativity into technical pursuits is appropriate on one level but serves as a psychological defense on a deeper level. This means that technology will be clung to, believed in, and depended on far beyond its legitimate sphere, since it also serves as a defense against our fears of irrational phenomena. Thus the very success of technological creativity—and that its success is magnificent does not need to be heralded by me—is a threat to its own existence. For if we are not open to the unconscious, irrational, and transrational aspects of creativity, then our science and technology have helped to block us off from what I shall call “creativity of the spirit.” By this I mean creativity that has nothing to do with technical use; I mean creativity in art, poetry, music, and other areas that exist for our delight and the deepening and enlarging of meaning in our lives rather than for making money or for increasing technical power.
To the extent that we lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific creativity. Scientists themselves, particularly the physicists, have told us that the creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the free, pure sense. In modern physics it is very clear that the discoveries that later become utilized for our technological gains are generally made in the first place because a physicist lets his imagination go and discovers something simply for the joy of discovery. But this always runs the risk of radically upsetting our previously nicely worked-out theories, as it did when Einstein introduced his theory of relativity, and Heisenberg introduced his principle of indeterminacy. My point here is more than the conventional distinction between “pure” and “applied” science. The creativity of the spirit does and must threaten the structure and presuppositions of our rational, orderly society and way of life. Unconscious, irrational urges are bound by their very nature to be a threat to our rationality, and the anxiety we experience thereupon is inescapable.
I am proposing that the creativity coming from the pre-conscious and unconscious is not only important for art and poetry and music; but is essential in the long run also for our science. To shrink from the anxiety this entails, and block off the threatening new insights and forms this engenders, is not only to render our society banal and progressively more empty, but also to cut off as well the headwaters in the rough and rocky mountains of the stream that later becomes the river of creativity in our science. The new physicists and mathematicians, for fairly obvious reasons, have been furthest ahead in realizing this interrelation between unconscious, irrational illumination and scientific discovery.
Let me now give an illustration of the problem we face. In the several times I have been on television, I have been struck by two different feelings. One was wonder at the fact that my words, spoken in the studio, could be delivered instantaneously into the living rooms of half a million people. The other was that whenever I got an original idea, whenever in these programs I began to struggle with some unformed, new concept, whenever I had an original thought that might cross some frontier of the discussion, at that point I was cut off. I have no resentment against emcees who do this; they know their business, and they realize that if what goes on in the program does not fit in the world of listeners all the way from Georgia to Wyoming, the viewers will get up, go to the kitchen, get a beer, come back, and switch on a Western.
When you have the potentialities for tremendous mass communication, you inevitably tend to communicate on the level of the half-million people who are listening. What you say must have some place in their world, must at least be partly known to them. Inevitably, then, originality, the breaking of frontiers, the radical newness of ideas and images are at best dubious and at worst totally unacceptable. Mass communication—wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued—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.
Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.
We have had powerful and poignant demonstrations of this in Soviet Russia. It appeared chiefly in the prosecution and purge of artists and writers under Stalin, who was pathologically anxious when faced with the threat that the creative unconscious posed to his political system. Indeed, some students believe that the present situation in Russia shows an ongoing struggle between rationality and what we have been calling “free creativity.” George Reavey, in his introduction to the work of the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes:
There is something about the poet and his poetic utterance that has a terrifying effect on some Russians, and especially on the Authorities, be they Tzarist or Soviet. It is as though poetry were an irrational force which must be bridled and subjugated and even destroyed.9
Reavey cites the tragic fate that has befallen so many Russian poets, and suggests that “it is as though Russia were frightened by the expanding image of its culture and, feeling threatened by the possible loss of its own simple theoretical identity, must needs shatter anything more complex as something alien to itself.” He feels that this “may be due to an inherent strain of puritanism. Or to the reaction of an archaic form of despotic paternalism.” Or to the present painful effects of a too sudden transition from serfdom to industrialization. I would also raise the question as to whether there is among Russians less cultural and psychological defense against irrational elements in themselves and their society than among people of other nations. Don’t Russians, in fact, live closer to irrational elements than the older European countries, and, therefore, being more threatened by untamed irrationality, have to make a greater effort to control it by regulation?
Could not the same question be fruitfully raised about the United States—that is, are not our emphasis on pragmatic rationalism, our practical controls, and our behavioristic ways of thinking defenses against the irrational elements that were present on the frontiers of our society only a hundred years ago? These irrational elements are always bursting out—often to our considerable embarrassment—in the prairie fires of revival movements of the nineteenth century, in the Ku Klux Klan, and in McCarthyism, to name mainly negative examples.
But there is a special point I’d like to make here about preoccupation in the United States with “behavior.” The sciences of man in America are called “behavioral sciences,” the American Psychological Association’s national television program was called “Accent on Behavior,” and our chief original and only extensive contribution to psychological schools is behaviorism, in contrast to the many European schools—psychoanalysis, Gestalt structuralism, existential psychology, etc. Practically all of us as children have heard: “Behave yourself! Behave! Behave!” The relation between moralistic puritanism and this preoccupation with behavior is by no means entirely fictitious or accidental. Is not our emphasis on behavior a carry-over of our “inherent strain of puritanism,” as Reavey suggests may be the case in Russia? I am, of course, entirely aware of the argument that we have to study behavior because that’s the only thing that can be studied with any kind of objectivity. But this could well be—and I propose it is—a parochial prejudice raised to the level of a scientific principle. If we accept it as a presupposition, does it not lead to the greatest mistake of all, from the point of view of this chapter—namely, a denial by fiat of the significance of irrational, subjective activity by subsuming it under the guise of its external results?
In any case, Reavey states that even though Stalin is dead, the situation of the poet in Russia is still precarious because the younger poets and some of the hitherto muzzled older poets have become more determined to express their real feelings and to interpret the truth as they see it. These poets have not only been condemning the corrupt substitution of falsehood for truth in Russia, but are trying to rejuvenate the language of Russian poetry by clearing it of political clichés and “father images.” During Stalinism this was condemned as “ideological co-existence” with the “bourgeois world,” and the poet was cut down for anything that “seemed to endanger the closed, exclusive system of Soviet Realism.” The only trouble is, any kind of “closed, exclusive system” destroys poetry as it does all art. Reavey continues:
In a speech pronounced in 1921, Alexander Blok, the great Russian poet, had argued that “tranquility and freedom” were “essential to the poet in order to set harmony free.” But he went on to say, “the Soviet authorities also take away our tranquility and freedom. Not outward but creative tranquility. Not the childish do-as-you-will, not the freedom to play the liberal, but the creative will—the secret freedom. And the poet is dying, because there is no longer anything to breathe; life has lost its meaning from him.” 10
This is a powerful statement of my thesis—namely, that a sine qua non of creativity is the freedom of artists to give all the elements within themselves free play in order to open up the possibility of what Blok excellently calls “the creative will,” 11 The negative part of Blok’s statement is true of poetry in Stalin’s regime, and was in this country during the McCarthy period. This “creative tranquility” and this “secret freedom” are precisely what the dogmatists cannot tolerate. Stanley Kunitz believes the poet is inevitably the adversary of the state. The poet, he says, is a witness to the possibility of revelation. This the politically rigid cannot stand.
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. The dogmatists then try to take over the artist. The church, in certain periods, harnessed him to prescribed subjects and methods. Capitalism tries to take over the artist by buying him. And Soviet realism tried to do so by social proscription. The result, by the very nature of the creative impulse, is fatal to art. If it were possible to control the artist—and I do not believe it is—it would mean the death of art.