I WISH to propose a theory and to make some remarks about it, arising largely out of my contacts and discussions with artists and poets. The theory is: Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.
Cézanne sees a tree. He sees it in a way no one else has ever seen it. He experiences, as he no doubt would have said, “being grasped by the tree.” The arching grandeur of the tree, the mothering spread, the delicate balance as the tree grips the earth—all these and many more characteristics of the tree are absorbed into his perception and are felt throughout his nervous structure. These are part of the vision he experiences. This vision involves an omission of some aspects of the scene and a greater emphasis on other aspects and the ensuing rearrangement of the whole; but it is more than the sum of all these. Primarily it is a vision that is now not tree, but Tree; the concrete tree Cézanne looked at is formed into the essence of tree. However original and unrepeatable his vision is, it is still a vision of all trees triggered by his encounter with this particular one.
The painting that issues out of this encounter between a human being, Cézanne, and an objective reality, the tree, is literally new, unique and original. Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before—which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get. Thereafter everyone who looks at the painting with intensity of awareness and lets it speak to him or her will see the tree with the unique powerful movement, the intimacy between the tree and the landscape, and the architectural beauty which literally did not exist in our relation with trees until Cézanne experienced and painted them. I can say without exaggeration that I never really saw a tree until I had seen and absorbed Cézanne’s paintings of them.
The very fact that the creative act is such an encounter between two poles is what makes it so hard to study. It is easy enough to find the subjective pole, the person, but it is much harder to define the objective pole, the “world” or “reality.” Since my emphasis here is on the encounter itself, I shall not worry too much at the moment about such definitions. In his book Poetry and Experience, Archibald MacLeish uses the most universal terms possible for the two poles of the encounter: “Being and Non-being.” He quotes a Chinese poet: “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being. We knock upon silence for an answering music.” 1
“Consider what this means,” MacLeish ruminates. “The ‘Being’ which the poem is to contain derives from ‘Non-being,’ not from the poet. And the ‘music’ which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the silence; comes in answer to our knock. The verbs are eloquent: ‘struggle,’ ‘force,’ ‘knock.’ The poet’s labor is to struggle with the meaninglessness and silence of the world until he can force it to mean; until he can make the silence answer and the Non-being be. It is a labor which undertakes to ‘know’ the world not by exegesis or demonstration or proofs but directly, as a man knows apple in the mouth.” 2 This is a beautifully expressed antidote to our common assumption that the subjective projection is all that occurs in the creative act, and a reminder of the inescapable mystery that surrounds the creative process.
The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be non-being until the poet’s struggle brings forth an answering meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist’s or the poet’s vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.
Here we must guard against one of the most serious errors in the psychoanalytic interpretation of creativity. This is the attempt to find something within the individual which is then projected onto the work of art, or some early experience which is transferred to the canvas or written into the poem. Obviously, early experiences play exceedingly important roles in determining how artists will encounter their world. But these subjective data can never explain the encounter itself.
Even in the cases of abstract artists, where the process of painting seems most subjective, the relationship between being and non-being is certainly present and may be sparked by the artist’s encountering the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. Painters have described the excitement of this moment: it seems like a re-enactment of the creation story, with being suddenly becoming alive and possessing a vitality of its own. Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey’s studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter.
The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist’s holding him or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak. Such receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one’s self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge. It is the opposite of the authoritarian demands impelled by “will power.” I am quite aware of all the jokes that appear in The New Yorker and elsewhere showing the artist sitting disconsolately in front of the easel, brush in passive hand, waiting for the inspiration to come. But an artist’s “waiting,” funny as it may look in cartoons, is not to be confused with laziness or passivity. It requires a high degree of attention, as when a diver is poised on the end of the springboard, not jumping but holding his or her muscles in sensitive balance for the right second. It is an active listening, keyed to hear the answer, alert to see whatever can be glimpsed when the vision or the words do come. It is a waiting for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect these periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation.
A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely open with each other. Lord often made notes directly after the posing session of what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this valuable monograph about the experience of encounter that occurs in creativity.
He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting, Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting. When he did bring himself to get into the painting, the anxiety became overt. At one point, writes Lord, Giacometti started gasping and stamping his foot:
“Your head is going away!” he exclaimed. “It’s going away completely!”
“It will come back again,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Maybe the canvas will become completely empty. And then what will become of me? I’ll die of it!” …
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, stared at it for a moment, as though he didn’t know what it was, then with a moan threw it onto the floor. Suddenly he shouted very loudly, “I shriek! I scream!”3
Lord goes on at another point:
To talk to his model while he is working distracts him, I think, from the constant anxiety which is a result of his conviction that he cannot hope to represent on the canvas what he sees before him. This anxiety often bursts forth in the form of melan choly gasps, furious expletives, and occasional loud cries of rage and/or distress. He suffers. There is no doubt about it….
Giacometti is committed to his work in a particularly intense and total way. The creative compulsion is never wholly absent from him, never leaves him a moment of complete peace.4
So intense is the encounter that he often identifies the painting on the easel with the actual flesh-and-blood person posing. One day his foot accidentally struck the catch that holds the easel shelf at the proper level, which caused the canvas to fall abruptly for a foot or two.
“Oh, excuse me!” he said. I laughed and observed that he’d excused himself as though he’d caused me to fall instead of the painting. “That’s exactly what I did feel,” he answered.5
In Giacometti this anxiety was associated, as it was in his revered Cézanne, with a great deal of self-doubt.
In order to go on, to hope, to believe that there is some chance of his actually creating what he ideally visualizes, he is obliged to feel that it is necessary to start his entire career over again every day, as it were, from scratch. … he often feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happens to be working at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality.6
Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences:
This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience. Even as “happy” an artist as Renoir was not immune to it.7
What meant something, what alone existed with a life of its own was his [Giacometti’s] indefatigable, interminable struggle via the act of painting to express in visual terms a perception of reality that had happened to coincide momentarily with my head [which Giacometti was then trying to paint]. To achieve this was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence. But he was committed, he was, in fact condemned to the attempt, which at times seemed rather like the task of Sisyphus.8
One day Lord happened to see Giacometti in a café.
And, indeed, miserable was what he did seem to be. This, I thought, was the true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration and recognition of the world, staring into a void from which no solace could come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. What consolation was it that the newspapers of many countries spoke of him, that museums everywhere exhibited his works, that people he would never know knew and admired him. None. None at all.9
When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of “adjusting” people, making people “happy,” or training out of them by simple behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety. How hard for humankind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!—to see that “success” and “applause” are the bitch goddesses we always secretly knew they were. To see that the purpose of human existence in a man like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free adjustment.
Giacometti was rather devoted—“condemned,” to use Lord’s fitting term—to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the world around him through his own vision of being human. He knew there was no other alternative for him. This challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a world of reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time you concentrate on it. How absurd are the rationalistic assumptions that all one has to do is to remove from the world its curtains of superstition and ignorance and there suddenly will be reality, pristine and pure!
Giacometti sought to see reality through his ideal vision. He sought to find the ground forms, the basic structure of reality, below the strewn surface of the arena where bitch goddesses cavort. He could not escape devoting himself unstintingly to the question: Is there some place where reality speaks our language, where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics? He knew the rest of us would be no more successful than he was in finding the answer; but we have his contribution to work with, and thus we are helped.
Out of the encounter is born the work of art. This is true not only of painting, but of poetry and other forms of creativity. W. H. Auden once remarked to me in private conversation: “The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.” How active this makes language in the creation of a poem! It is not that language is merely a tool of communication, or that we only use language to express our ideas; it is just as true that language uses us. Language is the symbolic repository of the meaningful experience of ourselves and our fellow human beings down through history, and, as such, it reaches out to grasp us in the creating of a poem. We must not forget that the original Greek and Hebrew words meaning “to know” meant also “to have sexual relations.” One reads in the Bible “Abraham knew his wife and she conceived.” The etymology of the term demonstrates the prototypical fact that knowledge itself—as well as poetry, art, and other creative products—arises out of the dynamic encounter between subjective and objective poles.
The sexual metaphor indeed expresses the importance of encounter. In sexual intercourse the two persons encounter each other; they withdraw partially to unite with each other again, experiencing every nuance of knowing, not knowing, in order to know each other again. The man becomes united with the woman and the woman with the man, and the partial withdrawal can be seen as the expedient by which both have the ectastatic experience of being filled again. Each is active and passive in his and her way. It is a demonstration that the process of knowing is what is important; if the male simply rests within the woman, nothing will happen beyond the prolonging of the wonder of the intimacy. It is the continuous experiencing of encounter and re-encounter that is the significant happening from the viewpoint of ultimate creativity. Sexual intercourse is the ultimate intimacy of two beings in the fullest and richest encounter possible. It is highly significant that this is the experience that is also the highest form of creativity in the respect that it can produce a new being.
The particular forms the offspring take in poems, drama, and the plastic arts are symbols and myths. Symbols (like Cézanne’s tree) or myths (like that of Oedipus) express the relationship between conscious and unconscious experience, between one’s individual present existence and human history. Symbol and myth are the living, immediate forms that emerge from encounter, and they consist of the dialectic interrelationship—the living, active, continuous mutual influence in which any change in one is bound to bring a change in the other—of subjective and objective poles. They are born out of the heightened consciousness of the encounter we are describing; and they have their power to grasp us because they require from us and give us an experience of heightened consciousness.
Thus in the history of culture artistic discovery precedes other forms. As Sir Herbert Read puts it, “On the basis of this [artistic] activity, a ‘symbolic discourse’ becomes possible, and religion, philosophy and science follow as consequent modes of thought.” This is not to say that reason is the more civilized form and art the more primitive one, in a pejorative sense—an egregious error unfortunately often found in our rationalistic Western culture. This is, rather, to say that the creative encounter in the art form is “total”—it expresses a wholeness of experience; and science and philosophy abstract partial aspects for their subsequent study.
One distinguishing characteristic of the encounter is the degree of intensity, or what I would call passion. I am not referring here to the quantity of emotion. I mean a quality of commitment, which may be present in little experiences—such as a brief glance out the window at a tree—that do not necessarily involve any great quantity of emotion. But these temporally brief experiences may have a considerable significance for the sensitive person, here viewed as the person with a capacity for passion. Hans Hofmann, venerable dean of abstract painters in this country and one of our most expert and experienced teachers, remarked that art students these days have a great deal of talent but that they lack passion or commitment. Hofmann went on to say, interestingly enough, that his men students get married early for reasons of security and become dependent on their wives, and that often it is only through their wives that he, as their teacher, can draw out their talent. The fact that talent is plentiful hut passion is lacking seems to me to be a fundamental facet of the problem of creativity in many fields today, and our ways of approaching creativity by evading the encounter have played directly into this trend. We worship technique—talent—as a way of evading the anxiety of the direct encounter.
Kierkegaard understood this so well! “The present writer …” he wrote about himself, “can easily foresee his fate in an age when passion has been obliterated in favor of learning, in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during the afternoon nap.”
At this point we see the inadequacy of the concept commonly used in psychoanalytic circles to explain creativity—“regression in the service of the ego.” In my own endeavors to understand creative people in psychoanalysis and to understand the creative act in general, I find this theory unsatisfactory. This is not only because of its negative character, but chiefly because it proposes a partial solution that diverts us from the center of the creative act and therefore away from any full understanding of creativity.
In supporting the theory of “regression in the service of the ego,” Ernest Kris cites the work of the minor poet A. E. Housman, who, in his autobiography, describes his way of writing poetry as follows. After a full morning of teaching classes in Latin at Oxford, Housman would have lunch, with which he would drink a pint of beer, and would then take a walk. And in this somnambulistic mood, his poems would come to him. Kris, in line with this theory, correlates passiveness and receptivity with creativity. It is true that most of us find an appeal in such lines of Housman:
Be still, my soul, be still;
the arms you bear are brittle …
And the appeal does call forth a nostalgic, regressive mood in us as readers as well as, ostensibly, in Housman himself.
I grant, thus, that creativity often seems to be a regressive phenomenon, and does bring out archaic, infantile, unconscious psychic contents in the artist. But is this not parallel to what Poincaré points out (see Chapter Three, pp. 64–65) when he discusses how his insights come in periods of rest after his great labors? He specifically cautions us not to assume that it is the rest that produces the creativity. The rest—or regression—only serves to release the person from his or her intense efforts and the accompanying inhibitions, so that the creative impulse can have free rein to express itself. When the archaic elements in a poem or a picture have genuine power to move others, and when they have a universality of meaning—that is, when they are genuine symbols—it is because some encounter is occurring on a more basic, comprehensive level.
If, however, we take as a contrast some lines from one of the major poets of our day, William Butler Yeats, we find a quite different mood. In “The Second Coming,” Yeats describes modern man’s condition:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …
He then tells us what he sees:
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image …
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs …
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What tremendous power in this last symbol! It is a new revelation, with beauty but with terrible meaning in relation to the situation in which we modern human beings find ourselves. The reason Yeats has such power is that he writes out of an intensity of consciousness that includes archaic elements because they are part of him, as they are of every person, and will emerge in any intensely aware moment. But the symbol has its power precisely from the fact that it is an encounter that also includes the most dedicated and passionate intellectual effort. In writing this poem Yeats was receptive, but by no stretch of the imagination passive. “The poet’s labor,” MacLeish tells us, is “not to wait until the cry gathers of itself in his own throat.”10
Obviously, poetic and creative insights of all sorts come to us in moments of relaxation. They come not haphazardly, however, but come only in those areas in which we are intensively committed and on which we concentrate in our waking, conscious experience. It may be, as we have said, that the insights can break through only in moments of relaxation: but to say this is to describe how they come rather than to explain their genesis. My poet friends tell me that if you want to write poetry, or even read it, the hour after a full lunch and a pint of beer is just the time not to pick. Choose rather the moments in which you are capable of your highest, most intense consciousness. If you write poetry during your afternoon nap, it will be perused that way.
The issue here is not simply which poets you happen to like. It is much more basic—namely, the nature of the symbols and myths that are born in the creative act. Symbol and myth do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads, unconscious longings, and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. But they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative. It is a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur so well states. It is a road to universals beyond discrete personal experience. It is this progressive aspect of symbols and myths that is almost completely omitted in the traditional Freudian psychoanalytic approach.
This heightened consciousness, which we have identified as characteristic of the encounter, the state in which the dichotomy between subjective experience and objective reality is overcome and symbols which reveal new meaning are born, is historically termed ecstasy. Like passion, ecstasy is a quality of emotion (or, more accurately, a quality of relationship one side of which is emotional) rather than a quantity. Ecstasy is a temporary transcending of the subject-object dichotomy. It is interesting that in psychology we dodge that problem, Maslow’s work on the peak experience being a notable exception. Or, when we do speak of ecstasy we are implicitly pejorative or assume that it is neurotic.
The experience of encounter also brings with it anxiety. I need not remind you, after our discussion of Giacometti’s experience, of the “fear and trembling” of artists and creative people in their moments of creative encounter. The myth of Prometheus is the classical expression of this anxiety. W. H. Auden once remarked that he always experiences anxiety when he writes poetry except when he is “playing.” Playing may be defined as encounter in which anxiety is temporarily bracketed. But in mature creativity, anxiety must be confronted if the artist (and the rest of us who benefit from his work later on) is to experience the joy in the creative work.
I am impressed by Frank Barron’s studies of creative persons in art and science,11 for he shows them dirctly confronting their anxiety. Barron designated his “creative persons” as those who were recognized by their peers as having made distinguished contributions to their field. He showed them as well as a control group of “normal” people a series of Rorschachlike cards, some of which had orderly, systematic designs on them and others disorderly, unsymmetrical, and chaotic designs. The “normal” people selected the orderly, symmetrical cards as the designs they liked the most—they liked their universe to be “in shape.” But the creative persons selected the chaotic, disorderly cards—they found these more challenging and interesting. They could be like God in the Book of Genesis, creating order out of chaos. They chose the “broken” universe; they got joy out of encountering it and forming it into order. They could accept the anxiety and use it in molding their disorderly universe “closer to the heart’s desire.”
According to the theory proposed here, anxiety is understandably a concomitant of the shaking of the self-world relationship that occurs in the encounter. Our sense of identity is threatened; the world is not as we experienced it before, and since self and world are always correlated, we no longer are what we were before. Past, present, and future form a new Gestalt. Obviously this is only rarely true in a complete sense (Gauguin going to the South Sea Islands, or Van Gogh becoming psychotic), but it is true that the creative encounter does change to some degree the self-world relationship. The anxiety we feel is temporary rootlessness, disorientation; it is the anxiety of nothingness.
Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.*
*Since I have come out in support of meditation earlier (Chapter One), I feel it necessary to state my disagreement with a claim of one kind of relaxation, namely transcendental meditation, that it is the “science of creative intelligence” and stimulates creative thinking. True, it does further one aspect of creativity—namely spontaneity, intuitively “feeling one’s self into the universe,” and similar things associated with the “comfort” Maharishi talks about so often. These are the aspects of creativity associated with children’s play. But TM completely omits the element of encounter which is essential for mature creativity. The aspects of struggle, of tension, of constructive stress—the emotions that Giacometti was experiencing in Lord’s account—are forgotten in TM.
I have discussed this matter with Frank Barron, psychologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz and, in my judgment, the foremost authority on the psychology of creativity in this country. Barron, like myself, has addressed regional conferences of TM. The card test mentioned above has been given to some groups of transcendental meditators. The results (not yet published) were negative—that is, the meditators tended to choose the cards with orderly and symmetrical forms. This is the opposite to Barron’s results with especially creative persons. Also Gary Swartz studied teachers of transcendental meditation and found that on tests of creativity they scored worse or only as well as control groups. (See Psychology Today, July, 1975, p. 50).
When I am engaged in writing something important to me, I find that if I engage in the customary twenty-minute meditation period before writing, my universe has become too straightened out, too orderly. Then I have nothing to write about. My encounter has vanished into thin air. My “problems” are all solved. I feel bliss, to be sure; but I cannot write.
I prefer, therefore, to endure the chaos, to face “complexity and perplexity,” as Barron puts it. Then I am impelled by this chaos to seek order, to struggle with it until I can find a deeper, underlying form. I believe I am then engaged in what MacLeish describes as struggling with the meaninglessness and silence of the world until I can force it to mean, until I can make the silence answer and the non-being be. After the morning’s period of writing, I can then use meditation for its authentic purpose—namely a deep relaxation of mind and body.
It is unfortunate for the movement—in that it presages a strong reaction against the movement sometime in the future—that its leaders are not more open to the limitations of TM and of Maharishi. All descriptions I have seen of TM blandly assume that Maharishi’s gospel has no limitations at all. To those who wish a more complete picture, I recommend the article by Constance Holden, “Maharishi International University: ‘Science of Creative Intelligence,’” Science, Vol. 187 (March 28, 1975), 1176.