Friday, January 17, 2020
being creatively of creative being
I assume that my conversive title seems facile. But idealizing a highly flourishing way of life (of others, at least—as learning never ends) is
to me anticipating an intimacy of creativity with such a way of life.
Over the years, I’ve made brief notes from time to time about what I felt creativity is, which now aggregates into a rich textual tapestry.
I always thought of such improvisation as precursory to really understanding creativity via researchers specializing in the study of this. But the leading research (which I’ve accumulated over the years, too, without yet dwelling with it) is disappointing, now that I’ve read through a lot of it, because they’re seeking some general structuring of significant novelty as such, which tends to undermine the topic, the more specific one is.
So, the validly consensual result for research becomes mainly about process. Components of process involve notions of unusual individuation which imply widely varying notions of that. How the actual on-task activity goes is relative to the kind of activity or the kind of audience anticipated. What’s “creative” implies evaluative standards which widely vary, involving degrees (from what children do through some market significance to canonical lastingness dependent on academic genre values).
So, a lot can be said about process, like a lot can be said about designing houses well, but that doesn’t capture what is a good home, and conceptions of authentic creativity don’t as such promote authentic creative activity. Teaching creativity is possible only because its enabling stays open to what’s unanticipated by the teaching.
Ultimately, the most engaged creativity implies its own conception of what it’s doing. A poet’s implied sense of sojourn belongs to the poetry, such that a poetics of it follows from the wayfaring, not as an instantiation of a poetics. (The latter may become a retrojective conception of the existing poetry, as if that derivative abstraction derived the poetry).
That kind of self-reflectivity is wholly missing from psychologists’ endeavors to be empirically confident (which is good for tenure).
So, as I endeavor to derive a comprehensive sense of research on creativity (which is feasible, given the convergences of research over recent decades), I’m disappointed—or better: I’m really enthused by my own notes, my wayfaring, which is entwined with my projects. IMHO, I’m much more interesting than the research. The singularity of a creative life should be richer than general scaffolds of architexturing. And the higher the creativity, the more singularity of the Work.
I’m not going to detail my cherished set of notes on creativity now, but doing so later will be major fun. It’s all well organized and can easily accommodate empirical researchers’ notions as supplementary, like protocols about mapping can easily be incorporated into actual landscaping.
