Blood and Bones 8: Creativity, Inspiration and Genius
Skidmore is indubitably the most annoying person I’ve ever met. Apart from his habit of trying to borrow money off me, he is nearing the end of a part time creative writing course at Bournemouth University so he imagines that it behoves him to question every aspect of my life as a writer. The annoying thing is that sometimes he entangles me into that sort of wrangle that gets under my skin and has me lying awake at two o’clock in the morning trying to justify my existence. The even more annoying thing being that at that time he is probably just getting into his stride at the poker table and couldn’t give a toss for what I’m worrying about.
“What’s the big deal about being an writer, then? This whole writing thing is a piece of cake. Why have I just spent all this dosh just to find out that any Tom Dick or Harriet can be a genius?” He says with a dismissive wave and disappears to meet up with his current floozy in some bar or other.
This is my answer to him. Of course, it would have been better if he’d been there to hear it.
Over the past forty years I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of people who would be referred to nowadays as “Creatives” and a few have been Geniuses. I’m not sure I care for either term but hey… Creativity as I see it, is part of every human’s makeup and Everybody is blessed with genius. OK let me see if I can justify that assertion. Creativity is the natural inclination we all have to gather a few bits and pieces and make something that wasn’t there before. Those bits and pieces may be words or pencil marks or pebbles or something altogether grander and more robust making use of tonnes of concrete, timber, steel or aluminium. The results may be pleasing or useful to ourselves and, possibly, to others. The creation itself may have explosive qualities, it may save a life or serve some other function or it may just exist. It is the finding of a solution to a problem. It can be clever or mundane. It may just be a marker to say “I was here.” In other words, creativity is the innate spark that motivates pretty well everything we do or think or make anew. So, I have to admit it, Skidders, there is nothing magical or out of the ordinary about creativity. It is the ability to cobble things or ideas together that, given the right conditions, we all have. Children are always mucking about with stuff and everything they do or make is entirely new to them. Give a child a muddy puddle and some twigs and leaves and they will create a whole world. Creativity is one of the basic tools in the mental workshop of being human.
The idea behind genius is a bit trickier but no less basic. Originally Genius referred to the attendant spirit that is allocated to everyone at birth. I’m not going to get into the nature versus nurture debate as to where it actually comes from but suffice it to say that originally it meant an actual God or angel who presided over our destiny in life. Later it became regarded as a tutelary spirit. A guide or teacher. The word itself is associated with the Arabic Jinn or Genie (of which more later). From this is derived the idea of one’s individual character or tendency apart from one’s innate abilities. Thus A person is not A genius but possesses a genius or has genius within them. That genius can be looked on as unusual and remarkable or it can comprise some perfectly natural ability or inclination that is generally taken for granted I am not trying to measure or value one manifestation of genius against another. Einstein (why do we always use Einstein when talking about genius?) had a particular genius for visualising problems but he did not (as far as I know) have a genius for baking (I bet somebody lambasts me on Twitter for not knowing about Einstein’s special theory of Black Forest Gateau) You may have a genius for personal relationships, caring for someone or fixing shelves. Or in Skidmore’s case for rubbing me up the wrong way.
The trick, of course, is recognising your personal genius and using it and, certainly, practising it so that it grows and develops.
I think We actually do musicians or architects or cooks a severe disservice when we call them geniuses. This implies that they are celebrities that have merely been gifted with a weird ability. It's as though their skill and craft is something they have no control over. But our genius in itself achieves nothing. The fact is, people we may describe as geniuses have taken the genius that is within them and worked hard with it to create a conduit for their particular style of creativity, a vehicle for the novel Idea that we all applaud. Genius may be particular to the individual and is the product of their self awareness and practice of it. . It may, indeed, be hidden from the possessor and the world around until it is discovered later in life but, sorry Skidders, we all have it.
The other two terms I would consider in this context are Improvisation and inspiration. They are the ways in which our creative genius manifests itself. They are the instrumental in creating or exhibiting our genius And they work closely together to prod our conscious mind into solving problems.
But first, let us talk about the thing itself, the artwork, the piece of architecture, the scientific discovery, the new way of thinking. In the same way a baby is created by the coming together of two cells, the new invention or idea is formed by the coming together of two previous ideas. The baby has characteristics utterly unique but which derive from both parents. And in the same way that a baby is the product of its parent cells. The new idea is never completely novel but derived from generations of ideas stretching back through the centuries. And the more distant the original ideas from each other the stronger and more powerful the progeny. This is in some way analogous to the natural world in which, if two distant plant species can be encouraged to breed together, the outcome can exhibit an extraordinary strength called hybrid vigour.
The success or failure of this creative flow of tender hybrid ideas is the ability of the gardener to discriminate, to pick out those plants which will have this hybrid vigour and which will produce the most pleasing or useful result. This ability to discriminate is crucial. It is the exercise of choice which gives value to a creation. The human services thinker John O’Brien says “Choice defines and expresses individual identity”. The process we call art is the exercise of choice and it is, again, open to everyone. The choices we make define us as people and what we are as people defines the choices we make.
Art is choice. Every artwork is the result of a series of choices made by the artist. These choices range far beyond what particular colour a painter uses on his or her palette. What aspect of the subject do they choose, what mood, what does she include and what does she leave out? Why does she make a mark just here and not over there? And so on with every other form of artistic endeavour. In a play, what particular moments in a narrative does the writer select to dramatise? What characters and what characteristics do they exhibit that makes them part of the story? What do we put in, what do we leave out? The artist is consciously or subconsciously making choices continually. They are asking the questions who? where? what? how? why? And the finished work is the unique result of those choices. That is why no artwork can be like any other because the myriad of choices can only lead to what's known as "a deterministic chaos pattern" - the butterfly effect.
Often we cannot consciously account for the choices we make. These unconscious choice makers we call “inspiration”.. It’s a bit of a let off for the lexicographer to be able to define “inspiration” as “a breath from God” but your choices both as an artist and as a person are at the heart of what makes you an individual and different from the rest of the seven and a bit billion on the planet and whatever subconscious drivers these inspirations may derive from, they are still valid. The choices we make are seen by the outside world as our style Style and choice are inextricably intertwined. It is our unique style that enables us to make the choices we do and the choices we make define our style. For me, this mysterious breath is indeed a marker of who I am as an artist. I can judge it from that point when I am writing a play and the characters I have created suddenly take on a life of their own and head off in directions I could never have forecast. When inspiration rushes by all I can do is to hang on to my hat and follow it wherever it leads me
But I don’t think I’ve dealt properly with Skidmore’s original quibble yet. In the next episode I’m going to take this a bit further If creativity, genius and inspiration are already there within us, is it possible to hurry this process, to make it work for us, to turn it to our advantage? Can we encourage the discriminatory powers without becoming self-conscious and maybe self-parodying? Can we indeed uncork the bottle and let the genie of our unselfconscious creativity out upon the world?
