Creative spirits

    There's a youtube "Ted Talks" lecture on creativity by author Elizabeth Gilbert, famous for "Eat, Pray, Love".  Elizabeth deligthfully spoke of how the idea of  "tormented artists undone by their own gifts" came to be.

     Ancient Greeks and Romans, she said, used to view creativity as something also outside themselves: a mysterious interaction with a divine attendant spirit of creativity.  The Romans called this sort of spirit "genius". This perspective meant a protective distance between the artist and the entire responsibility for and results of their work.  In the age of rationalism, however, people made themselves the center of all things.  Including creativity.  As a result, the entire burden for making art was placed on the artist.

    Elizabeth then told of her conversations with aged American poet Ruth Stone.  Ruth told her that growing up in rural Virginia she'd be in the fields when she felt and heard a poem coming over the landscape toward her.  Ruth ran home as fast as she could to paper and pen before the poem thundered through her.  Sometimes she wasn't fast enough and the poem passed her by.  If she was just a little late, she'd grab the pen in one hand and reach for the poem in the air with the other, pulling it back into her. 

    Ms. Gilbert then told the audience straightfaced, "It's uncanny, because that's just how I create".  To chuckles, she went on to say she's actually more of a mule most of the time, getting up the same time each day, plodding away at her writing.  But, she concluded, she's also seeing and experiencing creativity more now as a wondrous collaboration between what's me and not quite me.  This working from a source that we can't quite identify.  Relating to that source so we don't lose our minds but are, in fact, kept sane by it.

If you want to write

    One of my favorite books on creativity is called "If you want to Write" by writer/teacher Brenda Ueland.  I'm returning to it again in snippets, trying not to underline every sentence, telling myself I own the whole book and can read any of it wheneeeevvvvver I want to.

    In the beginning she talks about Van Gogh and his simple, poignant letters on art to his younger brother.  Here are some quotes from those letters:

    "My only anxiety is what I can do...could I not be of use and good for something?...And in a picture I wish to say something that would console as music does."

     "The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not to please a certain tendancy in art but to express sincere human feeling."

     Brenda writes further of Van Gogh," He loved something - say the sky.  He loved human beings.  He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was.  So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it."   And this, " By painting the sky, Van Gogh was really able to see it and adore it better than if he had just looked at it.  In the same way, as I would tell my class, you will never know what your husband looks like unless you try to draw him, and you will never understand him unless you try to write his story."